Alternative History

@farmerman,

European Carracks Caravelles, GAlleons and Hulks were fairly sloppy sailing boats and weve got an ample supply of them on the sea bottom. Bill confuses "bulk" with technology.
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I am sure a lot of ships of all kinds ended up on the bottom and still does for that matter. as using the oceans have it level of risk to this day.

Bulk mean the ability to transport large amount of cargo to start with, kind of an important factor if your are setting up and supporting colonies thousands of miles from home.

Second please take note it was European ships and European crews that ended up sailing the south Pacific and no wonder Polynesain ships ever sail into European waters or did deeds like sailing around the world.

The results show without question that it was Europeans technology that master world wide ocean travel.

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BillRM says: "Second please take note it was European ships and European crews that ended up sailing the south Pacific ". And when they got there, who did they find? Polynesians. On Easter Island, Polynesians. In Hawaii, Polynesians. In New Zealand, Polynesians. Same ancestral stock, same technology, same non-indigenous food crops and trees, same domestic animals. Just because they're called different names, like Maori in New Zealand, doesn't mean they weren't all Polynesian. They were. They didn't evolve from apes on those islands. They came from Asia. And their model of colonization was based on many small boats mnaking many trips, each carrying a family or two and what they needed to start living on a new island, rather than the European model of a much bigger ship carrying a lot of people (and often woefully unprepared for the conditions they would actually meet). There are often a bunch of different ways to accomplish the same thing. Columbus's wasn't the onlyu way. And he was pretty late in doing it anyway.

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@MontereyJack,

Off course/lost ships drifting/finding landfall in the same manner as seed pods drifting in the wind is not my idea of settlements or setting up settlements or colonization.

Yes you do end up with people spread across a lot of area however it is not colonization in any normal sense of the meaning of the term and as in the west coast of the now US that already had a population such shiploads would have either been kill off or taken into the culture of the area and disappear from view.

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@BillRM,

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The results show without question that it was Europeans technology that master world wide ocean travel.

How unEurocentric of you. You have obviously been snookered by this belief. the very first sailing technology in Europe was centuries behind that of Polynesia. The develoment of most all later boats was baswed upon the sailing craft of Arabia and North Africa.
Europe was missing all the flavors and fragrances that the East offered. SO they spent sevral centuries trying to develop blue water commerce. When they finally succeeded, thanks to sail designs of the Arabs , the Viking boats had a similar path as the Polynesian sailors in that they settled and left few marks on the topography. Their crafts were sleek and robust for deep water travel.The Polynesians had the same types of craft with the exception that they independently developed the ama and aka tech. The multiple hull tech allowed them to sil with as much houswehold goods and livestock on strips that were laid on the aka platforms. The cats could sail 40 or 50 people for colonization and , from the indications of the widespread culture of Polynesia nd Melanesia, they succeeded.

By the time the Europeans even got to the Pacific, the place was already settled by indigenous seafarers who taught the Eurpoeans many tricks of boat construction and navigation.

It wasnt until the 1790's when Josh Humphreys developed a sailing boat that was stable enough to sail in rough water without dangerous flexing.

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@farmerman,

How unEurocentric of you. You have obviously been snookered by this belief. the very first sailing technology in Europe was centuries behind that of Polynesia. The develoment of most all later boats was baswed upon the sailing craft of Arabia and North Africa.
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LOL and I do man LOL as once more it was this behind the time technology that allow travel across the world oceans.

It surely was not a group of Polynesia who sail around the planet, or place settlements in Europe or the new world for that matter.

I mean how silly of you in order to be PC you would denial history, facts and logic.

Hell why do you not also claim that the Polynesia was the first to reach the moon after all if you are going to be this silly you might as well go for it.

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@BillRM,

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It surely was not a group of Polynesia who sail around the planet, or place settlements in Europe or the new world for that matter.

I mean how silly of you in order to be PC you would denial history, facts and logic.

You are making some very large, unwarranted assumptions, Bill. You are assuming that people everywhere had exactly the same ambitions as the Europeans have had for a couple of millenia -- let's go conquer whatever we find. Why didn't Polynesians sail into the waters of Europe? Well...er...why should they have? They didn't know of the existence of Europe and, had they known, might not have had much interest in it. No, it wasn't a group of Polynesians who sailed around the planet, you're quite right. But, again, why in the world would they want to do that? Their traveling was always done for a specific purpose. This island gettin g too crowded? Well, let's build a canoe, take our family, and see if we can find another, maybe bigger, island. That's how the Pacific was settled.

Your thinking, Bill, is so totally Euro-centered you're not even capable of imagining a culture where a burning desire to explore and to conquer new lands does not exist, where the people are actually quite content with what they've got. I don't know why you think that any of this has anything to do with PC on farmerman's part.

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@Merry Andrew,

They didn't know of the existence of Europe and, had they known, might not have had much interest in it.
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Well the old evil Europeans did no know ahead of time what they would find either and yet they went out looking anyway.

You are sitting in a chair using on a world wide computer network posting this nonsense and the only reason you are able to do so is because of the driven culture of Europe to explore the world in every aspect of the world.

The European culture is the proven master of technology in every way including ship building and navigation.
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you're not even capable of imagining a culture where a burning desire to explore and to conquer new lands
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Yes I am more then able to imagine such cultures as they sit in nice caves and never go beyond the next hill.

That does indeed work until a tribe with more drive come across that hill and take your women and property.

A culture like you seem to hold in high regards is just a culture waiting to be destroy when they come into contact with a more driven people.

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@BillRM,

jeezus are you normally this thick? When Europeans traveled "Around the world" It was the 16th century after the Polynesians had been sailing all over the PAcific for a thousand years.
AS far as why Europ sailed around the world. They needed resources, the Polynesians didnt. They were serching for lebensraum.
You are whollly confusewd when you fail to recognize the timelines involved.
If you wish to remain ignorant of world culture , you are on a good track.

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@farmerman,

I more then know the time line and once more the Polynesians never as far as is known went beyond the south pacific in all that time they had such wonderful ships and such a wonderful means of navigation!

Sorry their ships was not design/able to take such real long voyages and their navigations was not able to support such voyages.

Even in a lay back culture someone would had done so if the ships and means would had support it in the time period we are talking about.

How silly can you be?

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@BillRM,

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How silly can you be?

Yeah, exactly, that's what I'm wondering.

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@Merry Andrew,

I see you are at last seeing the light of reason.

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@farmerman,

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Polynesian boat building skills were , in most ways measurable, superior to European. boats.

Your love of the Polynesians knows no bounds. Their methods were stone age, something Europeans gave up long before.

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the Innuit would sail into the Bering Sea for their routine hunting.

The Innuit lived in Greenland until the Little Ice Age when they moved onto the ice flows. The Viking colonists of Greenland didnt and died out.

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The European way of boat building invests itself in a large pig of a boat while Polynesian craft are sleek and fast. The Polynesians first dioscovered the mathematical relationship of length and wetted surface = top speed .

Never heard of the Phonecians ? Perhaps the Greeks or the Romans ? No ? Try google.

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weve got an ample supply of them on the sea bottom

..and the reason we dont have Polynesian craft on the bottom is they didnt build them to last.
Why, when you display such a strong bias, do you pretend to be accurate as well ?

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@farmerman,

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the very first sailing technology in Europe was centuries behind that of Polynesia.

Perhaps you could put a date to this statement ?

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The develoment of most all later boats was baswed upon the sailing craft of Arabia and North Africa.

This is wrong. The Celts had been fishing in the Atlantic for centuries, about the same time as the early Phonecians. These were square sails as opposed to the latter lateen rigged arabs. The Vikings followed on and had square rigged. Up until the mid 1800's, square sails were the norm.

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By the time the Europeans even got to the Pacific, the place was already settled by indigenous seafarers who taught the Eurpoeans many tricks of boat construction and navigation.

Many tricks ? Name some....

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@Ionus,

The Polynesians were sailing their bi and tri hulls (or single hulls with amas and akas) over 2K years ago .

From your name you sound of Celtic origin and my data on this point is quite rigorous. The PHOENICIANS gace the Celts the ideas for the square rigged boats that they used to sail to the British islands ever since TIN was discovered there. The tin trade started the exchange of designs and the Celts adopted the design. SO much so that the Romans commented on how the Celtic boats were difficult to ram because they had a sturdier bow section and rode impacts relly well.

North Africa and Arabioa were the original points of development of all these boats and the Romans and Greeks adopted them for their own (Each culture modified the GAlley and whether the sails were Lateen or Square, the boats were very derivative of North African original designs.

Im presently building a curragh and the design history Im know of is rather recent. If you have any knowledge of the origin of curraghs Id love to know. Same thing with Finmans ans Selkies.

The design practice of computing a vessels top speed potential was an intuitive design base of Polynesian craft since they were long and sleek. The relationship of the boats length and wetted surface was only understood after contact with the Polynesians after the "voyages of Discovery" in the late 1500's. Thats why I stated that most European crafts were big tubs that hogged and "sideassed" in rough seas.
(Nothing is scarier than having a boat beneath you that is so badly designed so as to slip sideways down a big wave. Its a feeling of NO CONTROL) European vessesl were famous for that andcould easily roll over and sink in storms (and they did at a significant frequency)

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@farmerman,

The original "Body plan" for ancient seagoing ships that were taken up by European nations were from archeological evidence in Ancient Sumer. These hulls were seemingly based on a dhow and were apparently square rigged (no doubt because they sailed in the Med and not only in shallow bays).
The SUmerian ships were very similar to the Knarrs and Karvs used by the Norsemen.

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@farmerman,

I had a clip from a Blumenberg Site (they provide images to the publishing industry) . However they had a cc on their stuff so I couldnt post. The thing was that they had a nice file of Egyptian and Sumerian boats with SQUARE RIGGING. Square from Lateen wsnt a big jump. its an evolutionary thing to develop a big sail that works well with wind up your ass . Ultimately the multiple square sails allowed boats to sail closer to the wind and fore and aft (later) rigging allowed sailing even closer. I never denied the contributions to sailing by the European nations but Bill is so ignorant that he thinks evrything is dependent on =European technology when its a common fact of history that Europe was a mud hole while the rest of the planet was in cultural apogee.
Europeans adapted and , like many Asian countries of today, they took previously developed technology and developed it further.

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@farmerman,

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The Polynesians were sailing their bi and tri hulls (or single hulls with amas and akas) over 2K years ago .

Yes and they certainly werent alone. Prehistoric remains of australian aborigines have been found in South America. It would appear a later invasion of Asian/Indians wiped them out. How did they get there ?
But I think you credit the Sea Peoples of the Pacific with too much. That they achieved a great deal I think is beyond question but I draw the line at their influence on western ship design.

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The PHOENICIANS gace the Celts the ideas for the square rigged boats that they used to sail to the British islands ever since TIN was discovered there.

My understanding is the Tin trade was in southern England but would appreciate a reference pointing out the facts. Also the Celts never waited for anyone to show then how to build boats. Neo-lithic settlements are abundant with fish remains. I doubt the Curragh has evolved much since the Stone Age.

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North Africa and Arabioa were the original points of development of all these boats

This is incorrect. The Minoans became a Sea Empire having improved technology that seems to have come from the coast of Lebanon, later to be calle Phonecia. Then the Phonecians spread to North Africa. Arabia seems to have been more influenced by India.

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Im presently building a curragh and the design history Im know of is rather recent. If you have any knowledge of the origin of curraghs Id love to know. Same thing with Finmans ans Selkies.

Pleased to help. I will ask some friends and contact you privately if I think something worth your time.

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The relationship of the boats length and wetted surface was only understood after contact with the Polynesians after the "voyages of Discovery" in the late 1500's.

Prior to this the Venetians and the Turks had improved upon Roman designs. All these were long and close to the ratio used in modern warships - 12: 1 from memory ?

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Its a feeling of NO CONTROL

hehehehehe... yeah..for a sphincter factor of 11 out of 10 try the Great Southern Ocean with its rollers.

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sink in storms

Everything that floats can sink. Thor's first effort became waterlogged and sank.

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@Ionus,

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This is incorrect. The Minoans became a Sea Empire having improved technology that seems to have come from the coast of Lebanon, later to be calle Phonecia.

Ive not itemized individual civilizations because they were relatively close to each other. The ARabian peninsula, the near East, North Africa, are all relatively close to each other and free exchanges of technology were possible and probable. However, SUmer is the undisputed origin of seafaring technology, square rigging and deep water sailing
(Go visit a Blumenberg site of ancient s=vessles and archeo evidence, ).

Youve jumped in rather late and the original discussion (which has been lost by "modification") has been the insistance of "EUropean technology on the sea" by one individual. The individual is failing to recognize that the same feats that he feels that the Vikings engaged in HAd been done 1000 years earlier by circum Pacific sailing by the Polynesians and Melanesians. There is clear DNA evidence in South AMerica of foods that were derived from The ISlands around "Wallaces Line" as early as 2000 years ago. (Europe , outside of Rome, was a cultural backwater at that time)

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@farmerman,

Poor farmerman when someone with deep knowledge of the subject show up you look even more of a fool then you normally do<grin>.

Secret navigation technology indeed, ship designs taken from a backwater people that the Europeans did not come into contact with until their ships was more then able to do long journeys and technology was far along to being mature. Take note the clipper ships the end product of a thousand years or so of sailing ship design as somehow I am missing the double hull design on them.

Silliness pile onto silliness to try to support an anti-European base who culture you are a part of and who technologies in all field of human knowledge had never been seen before.

Love people that try to re-write history.

OH ONCE MORE WHERE IN THE HELL ARE THOSE LINKS TO YOUR DNA EVIDENCES OF THE PEOPLE AND THE FOODS THAT YOU HAD BEEN CLAIMING?

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@BillRM,

Go play with yerself Bill, you are an inarticulate douche bag who is unable to discuss anything with any degree of knowledge. As far as finding you links GO LOOK UP **** ON your own . There doesnt seem to be any disagreement from anyone other than you.

If you want to add anything from scholarship, please try to begin soon rather just keep repeating your mantra that Europe is responsible for everything cause thats total Bullshit..

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