Even back "in the day" the routes weren't actually following those lines. Here's a neat animation of the routes many ships took (from their logbooks) starting i

Even back "in the day" the routes weren't actually following those lines. Here's a neat animation of the routes many ships took (from their logbooks) starting in the 1750's: http://sappingattention.blogspot.com/2012/04/visualizing-ocean-shipping.html http://sappingattention.blogspot.com/2012/04/visualizing-oce...