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Ship building technology development is an important factor you didn't factor in. You'd need a ship that can survive crossing the pacific and also enough ration
by tpmx 6y ago
Ship building technology development is an important factor you didn't factor in. You'd need a ship that can survive crossing the pacific and also enough rations of food to survive the trip.
In this case they also used some desalination tech to survive those 14 months, per the article.
Edit: More details:
https://www.historylink.org/File/9065 https://www.historylink.org/File/9065
> The crew had an adequate food supply (rice from the cargo, supplemented with fish and an occasional seagull). They could collect rainwater for drinking. They probably had on board a device called a ranbiki, normally used to brew sake, which they could have used to desalinate water from the sea. They also could have distilled saltwater simply by boiling it. But they had no source of vitamin C. By the time the ship washed ashore near Cape Flattery on a wintery day in 1834, there were only three survivors. Most of their crewmates had died of scurvy.
(That essay seems to have a lot of other interesting details, by the way.)
- TedDoesntTalk 6y agoFrom the essay you linked: "Traces of Japan were not entirely unknown in the Northwest. More than 1,000 Japanese ships are estimated to have disappeared during the Exclusion Era (1633-1854). Most presumably sank in storms, but iron fittings and other remnants of some of those ships washed up on the Northwest coast over time. A few drifted to coastal areas farther south with survivors on board. According to historian Frederik L. Schodt, at least 34 Japanese sailors reached the shores of North America or Mexico on disabled ships between 1806 and 1852. One of the best known cases involved the Tokujomaru, which ran aground near Santa Barbara, California, in 1813, with three survivors out of a crew of 14. But until the Hojunmaru, there is no record of the presence of any Japanese, sailors or otherwise, in what is now the state of Washington."
- blacksmith_tb 6y agoAnd the iron was being reused to make tools, on a fairly large scale apparently[1] 1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metallurgy_in_pre-Columbian_America#Iron_in_the_Pacific_Northwest https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metallurgy_in_pre-Columbian_Am...
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- totetsu 6y agoI was reading an historical newspaper article from West coast America about a sole shipwreck survivor whos boat drifted from Japan after a storm in that time period.