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I'm skeptical. No matter how good the Phoenician sailors were, it seems unlikely to me that they could have blithely sailed past Cape Bojador[1] https://en.wiki

• progre 5y ago
  Why not? The Phoenicians had rowers and could just take down their sails. According to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trireme https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trireme they also beached their boats at night so they must have been quite comfortable traveling over shallows.
  • alan-crowe 5y ago
    Doesn't "rowing" imply having lots of hungry rowers to feed and therefore a limited range?
    • clint 5y ago
      Why do you think they were stopping every couple of months to sow a whole harvest of grain before moving on?
      • kencausey 5y ago
        "every couple of months" is clearly an exaggeration and they were stopping at most annually. That said, a large number of hands may have indeed explained the need for large quantities of food, or maybe just the passage of years of time and limited storage space or planning.
  • legitster 5y ago
    I think beaching the boats at night and having large rowing crews makes it less likely that they could have circumnavigated Africa. You'd double the amount of time it would take, 6x the amount of food and water needed, and infinitely increase the chance of a hostile encounter. Not saying it couldn't be done, but the logistics boggle the mind.
    • boomboomsubban 5y ago
      It took over two years and they stopped to plant crops according to the story. Add in hunting and foraging, the logistics don't seem difficult.
  • simonh 5y ago
    Passing Bojador is something the Phoenecians had no relevant experience for. It’s an extensive shallows extending well out to sea with subsurface channels that cause violent and unpredictable surges. The only way to do it is to sail far out into open ocean, well beyond sight of land, but the change in the winds drives you even further out to sea. Even in the early 1800s it was lethal, sinking as many as a handful of ships per year. Coast hugging just isn’t going to cut it.
  • fsckboy 5y ago
    the problem is freeboard https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Freeboard_(nautical) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Freeboard_(nautical) , i.e. the height of the "wall" of the sides of a ship to keep the splashy water out. Oars need to be relatively close to the surface of the water, and where there are oarlocks water can get into the ship. Open seas are heavy seas, meaning the waves are very very high; six foot seas are nothing in the ocean, but a bitch to bob around in. And, in heavy seas you need deep draft--the "height" of the boat under water--for stability. Also, the "powerplant" and "fuel" for oars takes up too much space limiting the freight capacity of a ship. This is basically why rowing technology was abandoned for sailing around the world or across oceans. Paddle steamers were used somewhat, but the paddles just don't have the purchase against the surrounding water to move a heavy deep draft ship.
• boomboomsubban 5y ago
  This mentions the main problem is a sudden shift in wind direction, but would that cause the same issues coming from the south?
• tastyfreeze 5y ago
  Footnotes are useful to not break the flow of a thought with text that isn't meant to be read. Also, because of the link included at the end of a sentence, you were not able to include the conventional full stop immediately after the last character of the sentence.
  • fsckboy 5y ago
    we're going off topic here, but i always feel like comments like yours assume that I'm a complete idiot and don't know anything and need to be told something obvious :) what you say is so obvious, I'd prefer that you read your comment first as representing the generally held wisdom I'm arguing against, and then interpret my comment as a riposte to that. My point was that, and this applies to printed books also, what breaks up flow for me is to go searching for footnotes which by their nature are any place but handy. I'm a detail oriented person, and I want the illumination that extra detailed footnotes provide, and it doesn't distract me at all from what I'm reading--and especially not distracting with regard to a highlighted link your comment about the missing full stop points out exactly what I'm talking about: you give primacy to the rules of punctuation over the interesting thoughts being conveyed, the unique, human, creative part. I'll bet you just love C's semicolons? (actually, I do love C's semicolons, because I speak C, but I use it as an example because the average person finds them infuriating... and in any case, I actually LOVE when inserting an URL into text frees me from having to add a full stop someplace, whose purpose adds nothing to the information, it's simply a notional convenience to separate one notion from another) <-- see, that R-paren frees me from having to include a period! <-- but the exclamation is required and I threw in an em-dash up there to show that I also find emdashes--like this--much less distracting than parentheses (parentheses really make the aside take over your train of thought) in terms of figuring out where you are in the original paragraph (omg, downvotes for the most interesting thing you've read all day, something that points out a number of things you never thought of before? pioneers always die of arrows in the back!)
    • tastyfreeze 5y ago
      I made no assumptions of your competency. What I said was obvious to me but, your comment indicated that you didn't understand why people use footnotes on HN. To effectively communicate ideas to the largest number of people it is necessary to follow conventions. Bucking convention reduces your possible audience size.
• eloff 5y ago
  Fascinating. A passable route was discovered in 1434 by the Portuguese. > Examining the Pilot Charts for this area, however, it becomes clear that the main concern lies in the changes in winds that occur at about the point at which Cape Bojador is passed in sailing down the coast. It is here that the winds start to blow strongly from the northeast at all seasons. Together with the half-knot set of current down the coast, these conditions would naturally alarm a medieval mariner used to sailing close to the land and having no knowledge of what lay ahead. In the end it was discovered that by sailing well out to sea—far out of sight of land—a more favorable wind could be picked up.
• estaseuropano 5y ago
  I'm currently reading Clive Pointing's 'World History - A new perspective'. >800 pages of well researched history with a large Eurasian focus (due to the availability of sources, not bias). He repeatedly makes the point that some technology that Europe 'discovered' in the 13-19hundreds was in fact known in china 1000+ years earlier. Most of recorded history Europe basically played no role whatsoever. A few examples that struck me, taken from his snapshot pages 'The world in xxxx' which are scattered throughout the book: 5000BCE * first smelting of copper in Anatolia and Elam 2000BCE * glass produced in south west asia * development of the chariot in southwest Asia and china 600BCE * first production of cast iron in china * iron working in west Africa 150CE * First use of paper in china * compass in use in china 600CE * 1200 mile long canal built in china * iron cables for suspension bridges in china * horse collar used in china * paper used in china and korea 750CE * first wood block printing in China 1000CE * vikings reach north America * first gunpowder weapons in china * paper money in china * horse collar used in europe 1200CE * multi-,colour printing in china * European ships adopt Chinese stern-rudder and compass ...
  • sthnblllII 5y ago
    With all these advantages, why did the industrial revolution happen in Europe instead of Asia?
    • Hemospectrum 5y ago
      The industrial revolution was as much a product of economics as technology. If wages for lower-class workers hadn't been nearly so high, the technology might have come and gone without making much of a ripple. In fact, there's an argument to be made that it once did exactly that. Steam-powered machines were known to the Romans, and seen as a stupid novelty. Disclaimer: I don't know English history well enough to put together a better explanation, but I'm sure this has been the subject of a number of PhD theses. Maybe someone can point to a source that goes into better detail.
      • kiba 5y ago
        The industrial revolution was as much a product of economics as technology. If wages for lower-class workers hadn't been nearly so high, the technology might have come and gone without making much of a ripple. The reason why the industrial revolution happened in the UK as it did is disputed by historians. I would argue that high wage, while important as an incentive for industrial development, isn't a fundamental reason why the industrial revolution happens. Why? Because the very idea of deliberate invention and continuous improvement must occur to a potential inventor. Otherwise, no invention will occur at all despite continual pressure and despite available low hanging fruits. Once we have the idea, we can now invent as a whole category of deliberate activity. Only then can incentive drives what gets invented and don't. Steam-powered machines were known to the Romans, and seen as a stupid novelty. Steam engine in the Hellenistic period were nothing but toys. They can't do useful work.
• jasonwatkinspdx 5y ago
  Not a particularly good assumption to make imo. For example, we now have multiple solid lines of evidence that ancient Polynesians were making it all the way from Oceana to Peru, and back, with some degree of regularity. We see this in human genetics on both sides, as well as the introduction of the potato to Oceana. The Polynesians had a very different approach to navigation than europeans, one based on amassing a great deal of knowledge about currents, bird and sea life behavior, as well as intuitive celestial navigation. It seems likely the first folks to make this trip were forced into it via a storm or such, but what's stunning is it's clear some of them were able to map the path well enough to be able to find their way back home later. There are still some people who use these navigation skills today. Look up the maps they make with sticks and twine. They're pretty interesting. In any case, my point is there's historically been a lot of variation in sailing techniques and technology. If you looked at an ancient Polynesian proa, you'd almost certainly assume it's impossible they could cross such a vast distance. But they did. No doubt many drowned, but we know as an empirical fact some made it, and made it back. The ancient Phoenicians were brilliant mariners. They invented the trireme, the keel, the amphora, etc. It's easy to think of these as crude technologies, especially based on hollywood portrays, but the reality is these were the NASA astronauts of their era. Coordinating large number of rowers that are stuck in the hull and blind to their surroundings is not as trivial as it might seem. As another comment points out, triremes and similar vessels usually beach at night. The sailors are capable of dragging the things considerably away from the water line. In fact they have to do so relatively often to let the boats dry out for some number of days. Likewise we know of several places around the med where ships were dragged considerable distances over standardized portage/ferrying routes routinely. This is very different from the ships the Portuguese were using in the 1400s. Their ships were bigger, with deeper draft, and with rock ballast in the lowest hold for stability. They'd have a limited capability to use poles/oars to push themselves through shallows where they were partially dragging, but covering longer distances on land with such ships is infeasible without far more people. Combine that with an aversion to sailing out of sight of the coastline, and you can see why they'd face more issues in this area. In any case, I'm no authority on these topics, just another curious person on the internet, but I find it entirely plausible the Phoenicians simply walked their boats past this obstacle. Modern humans have an unfortunate habit of projecting our own perspective on labor onto ancient peoples. Humans are capable of truly astounding things with nothing more than their bodies when focused on a common goal for a sustained time. The best example is neolithic architecture. There was no magic trick to building Stonehenge. They just used a ton of people over a long time to drag the rocks there, and then sea saw them into position.
• wazoox 5y ago
  Cape Bojador prevented travelling north to south for centuries, but south to north maybe not so much.
• w0de0 5y ago
  I'm trying to visualize the sailing conditions the Phoenicians would have faced at Bojador - and not really succeeding, because I don't know enough about their vessels. But I'm sure the challenge would be different, and potentially less scary, from Henry the Navigator's bane. The Portuguese were in high-freeboard open-ocean sailing carracks, with no effective recourse to rowing. And Bojador, coming from the north, presents a terrifying lee shore: the winds and current push vessels towards it, with shoals extending from the coast. Sailing close to a lee shore is a bit like walking on a slack line: one mistake and disaster is inevitable. You need to accurately predict your drift over the whole transit, you need hope the wind doesn't veer, and because there's a ferocious current too, the wind must not die. In short, it takes a skilled captain and navigator (and the much better strategy is just to sail offshore, which is what the Portuguese eventually did). Even a modern Bermudan yacht would be challenged attempting to transit Bojador southerly and close to shore. A Phoenician trireme-type-boat would not be able to sail upwind at all - rowing would have been required for this part of the journey. Maybe on a lull day they could out-row the current? In any case, the challenges were different - and they would have had the additional motivation of not being able to turn back for home. [0] Source: I'm a sailor! Footnotes so formatted are a shibboleth of this community, not a practicality.
  • w0de0 5y ago
    Also, Hanno the Navigator's journey is slightly better attested and includes traversing the cape north and south. Here is a commented translation of the account, from a Phoenician temple by way of Greek translators: https://www.livius.org/articles/person/hanno-1-the-navigator/hanno-1-the-navigator-2/ https://www.livius.org/articles/person/hanno-1-the-navigator...
  • koheripbal 5y ago
    I agree - I don't think it's as big of a challenge as the above commenter thinks. Phoenician boats would have been significantly shallower drafts, and more importantly, they would have been sailing with the wind and current, not against it, since they were coming north at that point, not going south.
• narag 5y ago
  'm skeptical. No matter how good the Phoenician sailors were, it seems unlikely to me that they could have blithely sailed past Cape Bojador You assume the coast was the same two milennia before. My hometown, a thousand km north, was in the coast two thousand years ago. Now it's 5 km inland.
• EdwardDiego 5y ago
  Just because the Europeans couldn't get past Bogador, doesn't mean the Phoenicians didn't.
• samatman 5y ago
  The Phoenician colonies were in the Mediterranean, but the Phoenicians were blue-water sailors. Much of the tin used to make the Bronze Age the Bronze Age came from Cornwall, and the Phoenicians had a monopoly on that trade.
• knolax 5y ago
  > not saying they were better sailors, but that 2000 years later maritime technology was a lot better. Isn't that saying the same thing?
• jeltz 5y ago
  Given how some people managed to circumnavigate Africa with a Phoenecian replica ship 2010 I would not rule it out. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phoenician_Ship_Expedition https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phoenician_Ship_Expedition
• tomasdore 5y ago
  I believe the account has them sailing the other way: down the Red Sea. They pass Bojador eventually, but in the opposite direction, which would be quite different, I would think (for encountering winds, etc).
• cryptonector 5y ago
  Herodotus gives us three important reasons to believe it happened: 1) he tells us that Africa is surrounded by water except at Sinai -- how would he know this if the trip hadn't happened? 2) he tells us the sailors saw the Sun to their North when South of the equator -- how would he know this if they hadn't at least gone that far?! (well, he could have posited it had he known the Earth is round, but then he'd probably have told us that too) 3) he tells us how long the voyage took and that the sailors had to grow their own food, which tells us how large Africa was and is (though I can't judge if three years was enough given their technology) -- how would he have known that Africa was that large?! Three correct details (Africa mostly surrounded by waters, Africa straddling the equator, Africa being very large) that would have been hard to make up out of sheer fantasy. Especially (2). Though the Egyptians almost certainly long had known by then that the Earth is round and it's possible that he made very educated guesses and told us a fantasy just cause, and pretended to not believe the bit about the Sun just to make his story more mythical to his contemporaries. But is that likely? Did he do a lot of that?