You spelled peasants incorrectly.
I think you’re correct that that route would work given square-rigged ships of sufficient size, durability, and range to keep the crews alive for however long that would take. Which would be a long time, much longer than CC’s ships could hack.
The basics of the large-scale wind patterns are driven by the rotation of the Earth and the temperature gradient between Equator & poles. The land just serves as the edges within which the resulting atmospheric gyres rotate. See here for more
Shit would be very different on a Pangea planet, whether the entire large landmass were concentrated along the equator or near a pole.
But assuming a landmass that runs, however irregularly, from near the Arctic circle to near the Antarctic Circle and one big more-or-less circular ocean everywhere else I expect the oceanic and atmospheric circulation to resemble that of the real Atlantic and Pacific, just much larger than either.
We do, but a good fraction of the Flat Earth Society is conspiracy-theorists, and in general I think the modern belief in a flat earth is new rather than continuous with medieval / Renaissance beliefs about the earth’s shape.
Not the most academic cite, but:
“In his excellent book Inventing the Flat Earth: Columbus and Modern Historians (Praeger, 1991), Jeffrey Burton Russell examines the origins, pervasiveness, and durability of this Columbus myth and finds that it arose as late as the 19th century…”
Mano Singham “Columbus and the Flat Earth Myth,” The Phi Delta Kappan 88:8 (Apr., 2007), 590–592, Columbus and the Flat Earth Myth on JSTOR
Okay, so taking the 19,600 km distance he would have traveled using his route that I cited above. For a sailing vessel, the Clipper ships are usually acknowledged as the fastest ones ever built. They could apparently hit 30 km/hr.
Speeding Up the Trade: Clippers and Steamships.
Now, let’s be generous and say he hits that speed for the entire journey. By my math, that voyage would take just over 27 days, which is comparable to the 5 weeks his actual journey required.
So under the best assumption possible, he’d still be facing the exact same supply and possible mutiny situation he actually faced.
Given a more realistic average speed, things just get worse from there. If he only makes half that 30 km/hr on average, he out runs his supplies for sure. And Wikipedia suggests that even half is optimistic:
The joint winner of the Great Tea Race of 1866 logged about 15,800 nautical miles on a 99-day trip. This gives an average speed slightly over 6.6 knots (12.2 km/h)
So, the best design for a sailing vessel we’ve ever had, in a race, so presumably with an above-average crew, still would have run out of supplies, most likely.
The world looks flat, and how would your average peasant know otherwise? It certainly wasnt taught from the pulpit. Few had even seen a map. Few could read.
Sure, most educated people knew otherwise, but few-outside the church- were educated.
No, since under that, scurvy would not be a thing and better food storage would be used.
A small dot in a very large mass of water. I wonder if their navigational skills extended to being able to deduce that there was an island just over the horizon.
The Polynesians used a whole bunch of indicators to determine they were somewhere near a landmass still too far away to see, but that came from deep knowledge and familiarity with the Pacific (which Columbus would never have seen before). They also had professional navigators who trained their entire lives on being able to guide their ships between different islands. Captain Cook took on Tupaia the navigator priest at Tahiti, who had knowledge of a big chunk of Polynesia down to which stars to follow, and how to correct for currents and winds.
Not if you live by the sea.
“Still” is used incorrectly. The conspiracists who think the world is flat are not lingering over from the 5th century. Knowledge of a spherical world was widespread in Greece after 240 BC.
The same way we do now.
The Straight Dope?
Right—so they weren’t getting the idea that the world was flat from maps.
I think the error is presuming that the default understanding of the shape of the earth by the ignorant. Why would this be so? You can see people disappear over the horizon where it’s very flat, including the seashore. Unless there’s some positive evidence that people thought the world was flat before the modern era, I’m calling folk belief rather than fact.
The internet? Pictures of a round earth from space? Sailors circumnavigating the globe?
Checking a globe, the trip from Spain to the Caribbean looks to be quite a bit further than the trip from Greenland to Eastern Siberia.
If you followed the edge of the ice cap around the top of the Earth, you’d probably have longer lasting supplies due to the colder temperatures and you could get fresh water by breaking and melting ice.
They probably could have done it, by Columbus’ time and before, if they had a sufficiently good map of everything.
I recall that there was a big effort by the British to create a reliable, ocean-going clock:
That opens the ability to accurately determine your longitude.
By the end of the 18th century, they should have been able to identify the shortest route, objectively. I strongly suspect that it wouldn’t have taken nearly that long, though.
You definitely wouldn’t want to get close enough to the ice to break off pieces. Your tiny little wooden ship would be dashed to bits against the iceberg.
Common knowledge, word of mouth? Books and hearing lectures? Are you arguing that the populous in the 5th century didn’t know the earth was round because they didn’t have the internet?
Maybe I’m wrong, but I don’t think Columbus had internet access either.
Well, that depends on the parameters of the OP. Are we assuming only improved ship technologies, or all the technology improvements made in the same period?
I would say the latter.
They couldnt read, they never left their villages to attend lectures. I do not think you understand how backward the peasants were back then. The middle class, the nobles? Sure some of them.
I was assuming food preservation as of the age of clipper ships.
Explorers would have followed the arctic route following the ice cap, turning back then traveling further with successive attempts until finally with larger and better ships reaching the Asian mainland. During this time extensive travel across the Indian ocean and into the Pacific would have ended any doubts about the shape of the planet and the distances involved spurring efforts to find a western route. Potentially ships starting in Asia travelling east along the arctic ice cap would meet up with ships traveling west from Europe to finally close the loop.
The search for a Northwest Passage started contemporaneously with Columbus. From https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Northwest_Passage:
The first recorded attempt to discover the Northwest Passage was the east–west voyage of John Cabot in 1497, sent by Henry VII in search of a direct route to the Orient.
Numerous expeditions failed over the centuries until the first route was discovered in 1850. However:
Until 2009, the Arctic pack ice prevented regular marine shipping throughout most of the year.
I think that, most likely, the vast majority of medieval peasants didn’t think that the world was round, and they also didn’t think it was flat. They just never gave the matter any thought at all. And I think that the same would still be true today, were it not for the fact that thinking the Earth is flat has become our standard shorthand example of ignorance.