Ancient World Sailors and The Sea

How Far and Where?

Scholars have speculated for years over to what extent ancient seafarers were able to navigate the oceans and sail to distant lands. Recent discoveries, not only with respect to seafaring but to land travel as well, suggest that trade was very extensive and that voyages to far distant lands were not uncommon. The proliferation of objects, chiefly Minoan and Egyptian, which occur all over the Mediterranean shores and even into Britain is visible evidence of at least some visitation. Most of our information regarding ancient seafaring is the result of scholarly study, often by people who have not sailed the seas and who have little if any practical knowledge of the sea or a feel for seamanship. As a result, I believe we have a somewhat distorted image of our seafaring past. Ancient world sailors are often portrayed as skittish fellows who feared the water and ran to the safety of land. I think the reality is quite to the contrary.

One of the main aspects of seafaring is that knowledge, even in times when writing was common, was always closely held and kept verbal and privileged. It is known that one Phoenician ship captain when followed by other ships in an attempt to discover his sailing routes, purposely put his vessel on the rocks. His employers re-imbursed him totally as a reward for not divulging his secrets - and their sources of profits. Given this, it is not surprising that we know very little of ancient seafaring; where they went and how.

A common belief is that ship captains sailed from cape to cape (called "caping") always keeping at least on headland in sight so as not to become disoriented. While this is no doubt feasible for short-passage coastwise work in small vessels, this would not have been possible if trade across the Mediterranean was a common occurrence, which apparently it was. Ships traveling from Phoenicia to Sicily or Caralis (now Cagliari) on Sardinia or up the Lavinian coast to Latium, would have to spend much time out of the sight of land or take literally forever to make the journey. In the sailing season, April to October, the winds blow from the northwest. This means that a ship traveling west across the Mediterranean from Phoenicia or Crete would be bucking headwinds the whole way. And those old ships, even with the most optimistic theories about their sailing qualities and skill of their masters, would be working hard to make westing in any significant way. The most efficient, and really the only feasible route, was to sail a long tack down to the southwest to the North African coast and then another long tack up past Sicily and into the Tyrrhenian Sea and then up the Lavinian coast or southwest to Caralis. If the winds shifted around to the west or north, the sailing time could be extended considerably. The trip home would be wonderful with the wind from the stern or stern quarter all the way. Another negative aspect of caping is that when hugging the shore, the potential for winding up on a hidden reef is greater. Also, the possibility encountering a storm and being driven ashore is greater. Sailing ships need "sea room", the safety of the deep sea and the ability to be blown around harmlessly, but only sailors understand this. To a sailor, the vast sea is home, the land is where danger lurks.

The point I am trying to make is that this type of sailing would require the ship to be out of the sight of land nearly the whole time, but I believe it was done and done routinely. As an example, I site the voyages of Christopher Columbus. Columbus, working at the turn of the 16th century, had only one instrument that the ancients did not, the compass. And the usefulness of this instrument should not be overrated. Compasses suffer from two problems: variation, the fact that magnetic north may not be true north; and deviation, the possibility that some local magnetic field is causing the needle to point in a completely different direction than north. The latter defect can be the most serious and disorienting, but the fact is the compass can not be entirely relied upon and may in the end not be substantially better than one’s senses, particularly if the senses are well trained. Of course, on a cloudy day the compass is very useful, but it is not indispensable. So independent of instruments was Columbus that on his transatlantic crossings he took his latitude by watching the pole star at night and judging the altitude by eye alone. The little ship pitched so violently he could not even use his astrolabe to measure the equatorial angle. During the day he used his trained senses to hold the course west and not drift north or south. Such senses were very important to a master mariner who had no computerized Loran radio navigator, or even a sextant and chronometer; and Columbus was acknowledged as being a master navigator. He relied heavily, as I believe ancient mariners did, on his senses and I believe that the ancients developed these to a remarkable degree, perhaps beyond what we can conveniently appreciate. As far as a paralyzing fear of sea monsters are concerned, that is total rubbish as well. Sailors would love to make people believe how fearless they were and what great risks they took - and they enjoyed telling stories, particularly to gullible land lubbers.

Did a lot of sailors die on voyages due to wreck and storms? Yes, certainly so. But the world then was a dangerous place altogether. Life was unbelievably difficult compared with today and it is difficult for us to understand how hard things were. Starvation was commonplace, as was abduction into slavery, invasion, and mass murder. Dying at sea was just another hazard, but the potential profits were huge. A chance to die and a chance to get rich, or life under a whip at the edge of starvation; the choice for me would be easy.

In my opinion, the modern academic image of ancient world sailors as timid creatures who ran back to land at the first sign of a storm or fearful of losing sight of land or fearful of monsters is simply not a logical one. I believe they sailed all over the Mediterranean and up the coast of Spain and even into the English Channel. Beyond that, I do not care to speculate, but there may be things even beyond that.

Seamanship and Technology

The Iliad and Odyssey as well as The Voyage of the Argo, not to mention the Aeneid, make comments about seafaring practices which I think have given scholars the wrong impression of the realities of ancient seafaring. First of all, there is this business about beaching their ships and cooking meals or staying ashore at night. This is really not possible if one is sailing in any vessel over thirty feet long. You just don't take a twenty ton ship and drag it up on shore and then drag it off again as if it were a rowboat, particularly if the crew consists of four people. Homer may portray his "ships" as little craft, "hollow ships", he calls them for they are deckless; but even so, any war galley worth taking to Ilium would be at least fifty feet long and weigh fifteen or twenty tons. Homer makes other mistakes. He does not understand chariot warfare and how it operates, and there are other inconsistencies in the Iliad; the preposterousness of a ten year siege war are all acknowledged by modern scholars as, well, highly questionable to say the least - six months might be more like it. So, why not admit that his discussion of ships might be equally incorrect or at least fanciful. And lets face it, how can anyone really get lost for ten years in the Aegean Sea. It’s like getting lost in your bathtub; there just isn’t enough real estate to get lost in, even if you wander out into the area of Thrinacia (Sicily) and play chicken with moving rocks and become entranced with siren songs. It’s a story, a beautiful and wondrous story, but only a story.

In the Voyage of the Argo, the crew, at one point, pick up the ship and carry it off on their backs a distance of ninety miles or so. But other parts of the story are completely preposterous as well. They sail up rivers which are not navigable and rivers connect with each other that in reality don’t. Scholars can’t even agree what the course was, and this was Apollonius of Rhodes in the third century BC, not a 500 BC Homer, and Vergil’s Aeneid of 20 BC is still full of impossibilities. It was the style of the time, just like the paintings which almost always portray oversize men in too small boats, something which persisted even into the Middle Ages. Think of Batman or Superman or Wonder Woman or any of the other improbable super heroes and their escapades and you can understand the exaggerations and absurdities of ancient literature.

There are also questions about the gear the ancients used and the type of sails they had and even if they could sail against the wind. First of all, much of our information regarding ancient sailing comes from Egypt, and this is due to the fact that Egypt is a our largest and oldest source of documents, not that the Egyptians were good sailors. (Did you know that fully one half of all papyrus documents which survive from ancient Egypt are copies of or commentaries on the Iliad and Odyssey?) In fact, the Egyptians were particularly poor sailors, voyages to Punt notwithstanding. They were a people who admired tradition and stability more than anything and resisted change. The Nile was their inland sea. They floated downstream and the ever-present north wind pushed them gently back upstream. The fact that they never sailed against the wind is an artifact of their culture and physical world, not a lack of intelligence. The Mediterraneans, however, were faced with a different set of problems and had to sail all over the place and in every direction. I have no doubt that they used every kind sail, both square and fore and aft and rapidly learned to sail up wind. Leave an intelligent and motivated adolescent (they are rumored to exist) who has never sailed a boat alone on a lake in the morning and when you come back in the afternoon he or she’ll be sailing up and down and around like a veteran - it’s happened. The ancient peoples were fully as intelligent as we and there is no reason to assume that they could not figure out how to sail against the wind, even if they understood nothing about physics. I think if the truth were known, we would find blocks and pulleys as well, but this is very much open to speculation. The Egyptians never used them, but that means relatively little inasmuch as they were so resistant innovation.

I am convinced that the reality of ancient sea farers was that they stayed at sea all night, did not drag their ships up on land, and anchored off shore and unloaded their cargoes on raft-like barges or even sidled up to quays and docks, just like we do today. And in the universal and perennial pursuit of the almighty drachma they sailed against the wind and charted brave courses across the broad and glittering seas and spread civilization and culture to every corner of the known and even unknown world. Working in this most hostile and unnatural element, they were the most innovative, daring and amazing of people.