Suppose you’re a crown appointed governor, or an ambassador, or the like. Or perhaps that you’re a first-class paying passenger or some sort of wealthy tourist. You must cross the Atlantic ocean from an origin point in Europe to any point in the Americas, and your ship at least must make a round-trip. At which point in history did this transport become safe and efficient?
What were the most significant advances that made this possible? Navigation, shipbuilding, food safety? I’m assuming the vessel will not be carrying much precious metal, nor will it be travelling in wartime - obviously piracy and the like claimed lives, but I’m curious about technological barriers rather than security.
Well, “safe” and “efficient” are of course relative terms. Pretty much as soon as you have any regular trade between Europe and North America, there are obviously transport links which are sufficiently safe and efficient to make trade attractive, and profitable. This was certainly so by the late sixteenth century. Improvements in navigation were what made this possible; techniques of food preservation (e.g. salting) had already been developed.
Obviously, but use a little common sense here. I think the OP is interested in the approximate year or period when transatlantic travel switched from being a “floating deathtrap” trip to being a “somewhat risky, but you’ll probably be ok” trip.
Are there year by year or at least decade by decade statistics on survival of transatlantic voyages? Maybe something like “In the 1630’s, the survival rate was 45%, in the 1640’s it improved to 55%, then in the 1650’s it was 80%, and by 1660 it approached a plateau around 95% rate for a hundred years, after which it jumped up to 99% after the introduction of the Johnson Safety Valve.”
I’m not sure there was a sharp dividing line when “if you return” became “when you return”. Certainly in Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels, the plot device of Gulliver being shipwrecked (more than once) is the least implausible part of the stories. Possibly a big step was the perfection of the ship’s chronometer to accurately measure latitude. This made it easier both to map and avoid hazards like rocks and shoals. Later, the introduction of steam made ships less vulnerable to bad weather.
Well, the OP asks about crown-appointed governors. How many colonial governors did in fact die on the passage out? I don’t know, but I suspect the answer is not very many. Can we think of any examples? Any at all?
I don’t have any figures, but I’d be astonished if survival rates were ever as poor as 45%. From the early days of colonisation, the challenge was not suriving the journey out; it was surviving once you got there. The voyage was the safest part of the journey. Out of about 150 people on the Mayflower, two people died on the voyage - and that was seen as a hard voyage - but nearly 70 had died within a year of arrival.
The Spaniards and the Portuguese had serious colonial enterprises going on from the mid-sixteenth century. That means settlers going out, administrators and officials going back and forth, regular sailings to carry orders and arms one way and gold and silver the other. And all that would have been impossible if surviving a transatlantic voyage had been an even-money bet, or anything remotely close to that. Apart from the reluctance of passengers or crew to sail under such circumstances, shipowners would never have committed their vessels to transatlantic voyages, given such odds.
I’d say it was at the point where the following developments were in place:
1/ Steamships… [sailing vessels are just too vulnerable to the possibilities of a lee shore. For as long as the wrong wind at the wrong time could wreck a ship with no means of escape, I wouldn’t call it safe.]
2/ that were large enough to cope with basically any moderate to large storm…
3/ using a screw propeller rather than paddles, the former being far better in heavy weather.
If you want to put a date on when the nails began to be put into the coffin* of unsafe open ocean sea travel I’d go for 1845 when the “Great Britain” had her maiden voyage: the first very large (by the day’s standards) steam screw driven ship.
Of course it was a good few years before the wrinkles in this sort of ship were ironed out and things got truly routine, but I think there is an argument that 1845 is a good starting point for the beginning of the end.
Arguably you would also throw into the mix the time when weather forecasting reached the point when storms bad enough to sink even a large ship were known about well before and could be avoided.
I can totally see this being taken out of context and morphing into a ‘known fact.’ It will probably show up on undergraduate term papers with this board as a citation.
