3 ms·

That’s wrong. A single load of pepper was enough to pay for the successful voyage and multiple lost ships.

• qeternity 2y ago
  Yes, that single load took years. It required huge amounts of speculative capital, years of fruitless exploration, and as you say, multiple failed expeditions before it succeeded. That is my point.
  • pie420 2y ago
    each ship lost was maybe $10-20 million and years exploring were performed by a couple of ships operated by dozens of skilled workers with a very clear path to profitability and timeline (succesful journey to india/americas, and in under 2-3 years). That's orders of magnitude less than the thousands of employees and billions of dollars being deployed with no clear business model or profitability in sight.
    • n_ary 2y ago
      if we adjust for the inflation from sailing age and today ... it actually looks same to me.