Hi. I am trying to figure out how much faster traveling by a non-modern wooden, wind powered ship would be, compared to covering approximately the same distance by horse and then compared to walking.
I realize that it would depend on the design of the ship, and how fast you rode the horse etc.
Just assume a normal pace and that the ship isn’t amazingly sleek or modern.
I just need a guess of the range of speeds and distances coverable over say, one week of travel.
Thanks!
Anything worthy of being called a ship would have a crew capable of keeping it moving 24/7, which on long trips gives a huge advantage over modes of transport that involve traveling only in daylight.
For rough numbers, figure a slow ship does 120 miles per day for as long as you like. At a guess, an average horse carrying a rider can perhaps do 50 miles per day for a week, and an average person on foot can probably manage 20 miles per day for that time.
120 miles per day is as good an estimate for ships as you are going to get with out narrowing things down. That is 5 mph 24/7. The trans Atlantic record from 1905 to 2002 was 11.8 miles per hour for the trip. This was a boat purpose built to make the trip fast with little concern for cargo or comfort and it was going from america to Europe and as such had favorable winds and currents.
20 miles per day is a pretty aggressive pace if you need to carry things like food and shelter. When I went backpacking as a fit young man we planned for 7 miles a day.
If you’re trying to get from Town A to Village B, traveling by horse & by foot will (probably) take the same route. Even if both are harbor towns, the ship will take a different route.
Route differences can be huge. From Gibralter to Tangier taking a ship *across *the mouth of the Med is gonna be a lot shorter than riding a horse *around *the Med through Turkey.
Conversely, getting from Barcelona to Santander (Both on the coast of Spain near the French border) is about 300 miles overland *through *the Pyrenees vs. about 1500 miles by sea *around *the entire Iberian penninsula.
Finally, wind-powered ships need to tack to go upwind. For boats with modern fore-and-aft rigs this can increase the distance traveled by about 1.5x. For old square-rigged ships, the difference can be 8 or 10x. In other words, sail 10 miles across the water to make one mile of progress upwind towards the destination.
All the above considerations don’t affect the actual speed of the mode of transport. But they sure affect what travelers *really *care about: How soon am I gonna get there?
Horses can trot 8-10 miles an hour, walk 4-5 miles an hour, and can continue at a mixed walk-trot pace all day for several days, assuming they are in good health, get rest and feed and water each day, are accustomed to such work, and that the footing is not rocky and reasonably level.
The crucial difference is uncertainty. Smaller vessels could try tacking, large square-rigged ships would stay at port until they have favourable wind. The type of ship would affect even more that the type of mount or person. But weather conditions would affect even more.
Well, the Cutty Sark once made it from Australia to Britain in 67 days, entirely under sail, and her best recorded daily speed (i.e., speed averaged over the course of one day) was 28 km/hr (that is about 17.4mph).
That was in the 19th century, but in sailing ship terms the Cutty Sark was indeed very “sleek and modern”, being one of the last sailing vessels built for commerce, and a record breaker, very much optimized for speed, so I don’t know if it is quite what you want.
The route from Barcelona to Santander would never go “through the Pyrinees” (unless you happened to have business in Lyon or Avignon), more like “up the Ebro River”, for a distance of some 450 miles. Longer, but actually walkable (and, in Roman times, you could sail upriver to thereabouts of Logroño, although you would stop at night - by the late Middle Ages this wasn’t doable any more).
the fastest sail vehicles can top 90 miles per hour but that’s with blades done on fozen lakes and rivers. 
Sleek she was, but she was built in 1869, and was thus a very long way from being among the last sailing vessels built for commerce. Much later examples include the Magdalene Vinnen II, built in 1921 (and still afloat as the Sedov), and the Padua, built in 1926 (now known as the Kruzenshtern).
OK, but the Cutty Sark was built for the Tea Races, and so speed was a much larger concern than average tons hauled per year, or per dollar. Later sailing ships might be built to take drastically more cargo at the expense of a little speed, or in order to be crewed by fewer hands. The Cutty Sark was as optimized for speed as a cargo ship could possibly be at the time.
But it fact later ships were not only larger but faster. Perhaps the outstanding example was the Pruessen (built in 1902) which managed as much as 426nm in 24 hours. The Cutty Sark’s best was 360nm (which is certainly far from bad).
No argument there. But it’s scarcely surprising that the start of the art improved over the next 50 years.