There aren’t a lot of fish in the open ocean. They might have let out a line behind them while traveling, but wouldn’t have spent any time dedicated to fishing. Once they got to the Americas, they probably did more trading for fish with the locals rather than fishing themselves.
There’s a good book called “Sea Life in Nelson’s Time”, which, although written 400 years later than Columbus, probably gives a good view of life on a sailing ship.
It tells of all the aspects of sailing life, and doesn’t shy away from the stuff TV omits.
What happened when Europeans “discovered” the “New World” was inevitable; a more advanced society, bereft of enlightenment, callously indifferent to “heathen savages,” encounters a less advanced society, and exploits it.
Columbus and his expedition foundering at sea before discovering anything more than that water is wet would not have appreciably changed the world today as we know it, with the possible exception that instead of celebrating Columbus Day, we may instead be celebrating Magellan Day. Or Cortes Day. Or whatever.
I wonder how much in ship designed changed between 1490 and 1815.
Moderating
Let’s not get into the results of Columbus’s voyage, which is a side issue as far as this thread is concerned.
Colibri
General Questions Moderator
Did some googling and it may have been “The Ship”
Interesting; I hadn’t heard of that one before. I wonder if the participants, the navigators and such, had much practical experience before the trip or were they mostly academics. It’s one thing to know how a sextant works, but it takes practice to use one, especially on board a ship.
There was another series I know of, but haven’t seen, called Tallship Chronicles; it was Canadian and made about the same time as The Ship.
The crew may not have been as numerate as you assume. The ones who took a cast of the log could write down how many knots the ship was doing at the time, but that doesn’t mean they could make the necessary calculations. I personally teach people who have had the advantage of free education for the past eight to ten years and yet would still be completely unable to grasp that you multiply the speed in knots by 24, by 7, by how many weeks you’ve been sailing, much less work out the actual numbers without being able to write it down (or even with). What price a 15th-century sailor with no book learning whatever?
US submarine crews usually do six on, twelve off, with a few fortunate people doing six and eighteen and a few doing port and starboard. (I often did twelve and twelve.) And a couple of people actually have a day-night rotation.
Not really relevant to the current topic, but comms stations ashore often had four watch sections doing “two, two, two, and eighty”: 0800-1600 for two days, 0001-0800 the next two, back that evening for the first of two 1600-2400 watches, and then 80 hours off before starting the cycle again.
You’ve got it right. Jack often felt like a hypocrite when he read from the Bible, so he often just read the Articles of War instead. That’s why he was so pleased to have Mr. Martin come aboard as an assistant surgeon - generally, sailors (including Jack) aren’t happy having a parson aboard, but an assistant surgeon (trained by Dr. Maturin no less) who just happened to be a parson as well was the best of both worlds.
Which he could whip your leg off or bury you right, as needed.
Plus IIRC, Martin is also – to Stephen’s delight – as obsessed a natural-history geek as Stephen is himself. Altogether, an asset to the ship’s company.
Yep, though he kept getting clawed/bitten/otherwise injured by the animals he was observing, since he couldn’t keep his hands off them - “Mr. Martin, I believe you are the only one of our friends to have been bitten by a night ape.”
I’m afraid everything I know about sailing ships comes from O’Brian, Forester, et al., but in those books one of the jobs of the captain is to instruct the midshipmen–sort of NCOs–in trigonometry and the other math required to fix a position using a sextant. Ordinary sailors may have been numerate, but mostly probably not, they didn’t have to be.
I’m no expert, but my impression is that 1815 ships were probably better in many ways (bigger, stronger, faster, could sail closer to the wind), but not in any real revolutionary, dramatically-different ways – standard sails might be differently shaped, and standard rigging might be a bit different, but a 1490 sailor could probably understand everything on an 1815 ship (as opposed to the changes from 1815 to 1915, where steam power, steel hulls, armor and long-range explosive shells made everything unrecognizably different)
In 1815 navigation was close to dramatically better (reliable longitude!). And British sailors, at least, had mostly licked scurvy in 1815 (though not the communicable diseases), which was a fairly big deal for long voyages.
Probably not, that’d be liable to fuck up his valuable hands and besides, tugging at ropes and scrubbing the deck is low-brow manual labour fit for the unwashed ; whereas goldsmithing was more of a bourgeois trade and social stratas were less permeable in those days.
But assuming the man did any productive labour (as opposed to just carving stuff to pass the time and/or make some rum money) he probably fixed up pots and pans or even navigational tools, sharpened knives, made tools etc… I mean, if you know goldsmithing you must know at least the basics of plain old smithing, right ?
Most people nowadays aren’t aware that one of the leading causes of death for sailors in the 17th century was constipation (along with scurvy). One of the best ways for them to fight it was by physical exertion.
I read an account from a colonist aboard the Mayflower who complained that the lack of exercise made the situation much worse for the passengers who often simply walked around the deck as much as possible to stay active and hopefully be able to move their bowels. The crew, being constantly active, wasn’t bothered as much as the passengers, even though they all ate the same food.
So any kind of “make work” that kept the men physically active was actually helping to keep them alive.
This Augustus Earle painting depicts midshipmen on a British frigate in the 1820s or 30s keeping themselves occupied below deck. The guy in the foreground is an example of studying maths for navigation. Other pursuits are a bit less serious.
That damn’d German flute!
I’m curious, can you provide a source for constipation as an actual leading cause of death? Sure, some kind of dysentery could be deadly, and there were plenty of other communicable diseases being picked up from exotic tropical ports and spread around the navy, but, I’m unaware of constipation killing people in large numbers. Unpleasant, sure, but you know, that kind of thing generally works itself out sooner or later in most cases, doesn’t it?