Did Ancient Greeks Sail to Canada? | Hacker News Reader

Did Ancient Greeks Sail to Canada?

hakaimagazine.com

73 pointssohkamyung48 comments

This is so obviously silly. If the Greeks made such a voyage, it certainly wasn't in s trireme. Triremes are warships optimized for battle near shore.

One reason triremes didn't sail far from shore is that there is no room on board for the crew to do anything other than row. There are no bunks, there are no holds. If you want to eat or sleep, you need to get off the boat.

Another is that because of the wood used to construct them, triremes needed to be beached overnight to dry out. Leaving the ship in the water continuously would lead to the timbers becoming waterlogged, making the ship too heavy and slow to row.

At any rate, Plutarch's text doesn't say anything about triremes, only that the crew rowed to these islands. You can read an English translation here: http://www.perseus.tufts.edu/hopper/text?doc=Perseus%3Atext%...

It seems to me that Plutarch doesn't necessarily believe this account, seeing as its related by an interlocutor as a myth.

At any rate, the directions are inconsistent, since rowing 5 days west from Britain to 'Ogygia,' then northwest (the direction of the setting summer sun) an equal distance to these 3 islands, can't bring you south to the latitude of the Caspian Sea. The account of the short day in winter also doesn't square with that latitude.

Everyone knows Triremes can't end their turn a square away from shore!

They can, just risk being lost to the ocean

Evidence is evidence and until it's found, we don't really know much.

That said... ancestors of Polynesians, melanesians and Micronesians were navigating to remote islands 2-3kya. They found nearly all of them, essentially surveying the entire Pacific. Their wider language group ranges from Indonesia to Easter island, Hawaii & Madagascar!

That is evidence of feats that "western civilization" did not master until the 1700s, in Darwin or Cook's days using industrial era technology.

I think it's very likely that ancient voyages contacted south America, Australia & Africa & asia at least to some degree.

Doesn't say much about the particulars, but ancient long distance ocean travel happened. Eric the red is (now almost certainly) real. This suggests (imo) the stories of the St Brendan voyage west and North American voyages to Europe are totally plausible.

Even Plato's Atlantis (10kya) is back on the table, especially considering the finds we now have from these very early periods.

It takes certain developments in shipbuilding to cross oceans reliably, particularly the need to build ships that can take storms and high waves well. Crossing the North Atlantic without a keeled ship is a good way to guarantee shipwreck.

There's no habitation of intermediate island hopping points that one might expect from transoceanic-capable cultures before European exploration: islands like the Falklands, Bermuda, Azores, Iceland. It's plausible that isolated, shipwrecked people drifted to land via oceanic currents, but that's not the kind of contact posited.

Viking precolumbian contact is confirmed. Polynesian contact is suspected, but the only evidence for this is the sweet potato, and there is a maddening lack of cultural, linguistic, or archaeological evidence to back this up. Pretty much every other hypothesis tends to be rooted in individual misunderstanding of evidence, very loose artistic correspondence ("this image from <insert culture here> totally looks like <insert other culture here>. CONTACT CONFIRMED!"), nationalistic priority claims (particularly of the discovery of Grand Banks, and Chinese claims to have gotten to the Americas before Columbus), or outright fraud.

FTA:

To be clear, there is no firm evidence of the ancient Greeks’ purported voyages. There are no known physical remains of these historic Greek settlements in North America, nor are there first-hand descriptions of such journeys in anything but one account from antiquity.

Further FTA:

> Greek historians and maritime archaeologists are wary, however. Several people contacted for this story say Liritzis’s claims are unfounded, and unlikely at best.

On the plus side, this article gives us another data point supporting Betteridge's law.

Plus it's just plain fun to think about.

I find it hard to see how this kind of voyage could be done with a trireme however in Hellenistic times they were building much larger ships like the Tesseraconter http://www.naval-encyclopedia.com/hellenistic-ships/ . Personally I don't discount the possibility that some Hellenistic ship reached North America but unless proven it is hard to accept all this. I have seen a lot of theories over the years mainly because of the Pytheas journey mentioned below but without evidence they are just theories.

PS: Who knows maybe I do have some ancient ancestry in Canada :)

It is very strange to address some place in America with Volga river delta. Like "Have you been to Ohio? Yes, that Ohio which more or less lines up with Astrakhan".

That’s not particularly fantastical. They certainly knew how to measure latitude pretty accurately back then, and clearly he knew the latitude of the Volga delta. Some maps of the era gave latitude measurements for notable places. It’s pretty coincidental that the mouth of the St. Lawrence happens to line up so closely, but I’m sure it is just a coincidence. There’s no island of Ogygia 5 days sailing west of Britain either.

Perhaps... By the way, could he mean longitude instead of latitude? I find it more logical to mention Volga river delta in this case.

Longitude measurements, for obvious physical reasons, are terribly difficult and they become decent only in modern times with high quality mechanical clocks. No chance of confusion.

For people who may not know of these obvious reasons: measuring latitude can be done by looking at the sun's elevation when it is the highest in the sky or by looking at the position of the northern star at night.

Longitude requires to compare the difference between the solar time and a reference time, kept with a clock. Good clocks that stay accurate even on a moving boat took a lot more time to be invented.

You can get longitude without a clock, via lunar distances. It's just not an easy method, and didn't really become practical until the Nautical Almanac provided the requisite tables, not long before the first proper marine chronometers came into use.

But people often forget how much mathematical training was needed to navigate in the age of sail.

Considering that https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pytheas centuries earlier sailed far enough north to encounter drift ice, it doesn't seem crazy to think they could. OTOH it's harder to believe in regular voyages without more records.

I think every old world civilization has attempted at one point or another to claim they were first. Outside of the natives and the Norse and maybe the Polynesians in SA, it's usually psuedohistory relying on circumstantial evidence.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pre-Columbian_trans-oceanic_co...

It's weird how much we want it to be true though.

But we know Columbus wasn't the first. The surprising thing is that the Atlantic is less difficult to cross than you'd think. It's somewhat common for people to ride the current to the New World in just a few metres of boat[0].

The hard, and scary, part is planning to bring enough supplies when you don't know when you'll see land.

0 http://www.yachtingworld.com/extraordinary-boats/undaunted-t...

Accidental contact probably happened a lot. Those are the stories that would be fascinating, but we'll never know about them. Planned colonization and/or trading missions are the more dubious claims.

Unfortunately not enough to condition natives to the diseases brought from the old world.

this should be the accepted common sense answer

> but we'll never know about them

unless Meso-american religion told us about white Gods with beards coming from the East

> The hard, and scary, part is planning to bring enough supplies when you don't know when you'll see land.

That's today. Back then, they wouldn't know whether there is even land. Imagine what it means to sail without maps or equipment in time when what we considered basic general knowledge about physics was not even there.

It would take as much courage as sending a manned mission to the Outer Solar system today.

Vikings and Polynesians were considered pseudohistory not long ago.

Mark Kurlansky's rather fascinating book "Cod: A Biography of the Fish That Changed the World" asserts Basque fisherman were working the banks off North America possibly even before Vikings began their exploration. https://www.smithsonianmag.com/arts-culture/review-of-cod-a-...

Maybe a trireme could reach Newfoundland. But not along the course shown in that article: North to Svalbard, west to Greenland, south along the coast of Greenland. The stars may line up nicely but the sea west of Svalbard is anything but friendly.

Indeed, and triremes were lightly built - from Wikipedia [1]: "Triremes required a great deal of upkeep in order to stay afloat, as references to the replacement of ropes, sails, rudders, oars and masts in the middle of campaigns suggest. They also would become waterlogged if left in the sea for too long. In order to prevent this from happening, ships would have to be pulled from the water during the night. The use of lightwoods meant that the ship could be carried ashore by as few as 140 men." Then there is the issue of provisioning hundreds of oarsmen. If a Greek transatlantic crossing was made at all, I would have thought a trading ship would have been much more suitable.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trireme

It's very liberating to be open to the idea they could. I'm not convinced they did, but that's a different story.

There is also the story that phoenicians circumnavigated Africa [0]. As well as people that actually circumnavigated Africa with 3rd century BC shipbuilding technology[1]. Its an intereting thought, but I would treat it as speculation unless actual remains of phoenician ships are found far enough south.

[0]: http://www.livius.org/sources/content/herodotus/herodotus-on...

[1]: https://themediterraneantraveller.com/phoenician-ship-expedi...

The Vikings who visited Minnesota in 1362 had the foresight to leave an inscribed marker [1].

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kensington_Runestone

It's fake though.

It has never been proven either way.

And we have much more accepted and well researched proof of pre-Colombian voyages specifically Viking.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/L%27Anse_aux_Meadows

Yes Vikings visited North America - but the Kensington Stone is fake. Both language and the runes used shows it is written much more recent than the Viking age.

That isn’t factually true it was never confirmed to be fake nor was it confirmed to be genuine the status of it is disputed.

It is not confirmed to be fake in that the hoax perpetrator never admitted to it. But there is no historian who believes it to be true.

So if I find one would that be correct? Again I'm not saying that it's genuine but there is still debate on the authenticity of it, especially some of the modern analysis which shown that some of the previous points of contention like the AVM scribbling was actually using sigla which is correct for medieval norse, fairly recent medieval runic discoveries from Norway also shown that the runic Alphabet on the stone might have been used in Medieval times or at least that there has been a larger variance in runic scribing than once was thought (something between really bad handwriting and really poor spelling)

https://niku.no/2017/11/funn-mystisk-runeinnskrift-bispeborg...

Even if it wasn't fake the viking age ended before 1100 after Norway had been christened.

I haven't said that the origin of the Kensington runestone was Viking, I said that L'Anse aux Meadows which is an undisputed Viking settlement in Newfoundland is proof of Pre-Columbian trans atlantic contact specifically Viking.

Hypothetical at best. So this theory says they made recurrent trips every 30 years. But no physical remains of these historic Greek settlements in North America exists. That pretty much settles it until an actual discovery takes place.

> “Our intention is to prove, with modern science, that it was possible for this trip to be made,”

> To be clear, there is no firm evidence of the ancient Greeks’ purported voyages. There are no known physical remains of these historic Greek settlements in North America, nor are there first-hand descriptions of such journeys in anything but one account from antiquity.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Theory_of_Phoenician_discovery...

Of course they did, where else could the gyros have come from.

The long answer. Nope. The short answer. No. Wish they would work to find the evidence first rather than asking History Channel style of clickbait questions.

Betteridge's law of headlines: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Betteridge%27s_law_of_headline...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Betteridge%27s_law_of_headline...

I posit a new law: betteridges's law will always be invoked with a link to its wiki, whenever an article is posted with a headline that ends with a question mark.

Good stuff. Seems plausible to me

Another interesting question is if the vikings made it to South America?

https://www.google.com/search?q=vikings+south+america

That second Google link appears to be a neo-nazi site, which makes me wonder how much credence to give the theory. Lots of the racial theorists in the 1880s were trying to tie together the Israelites/British/New Worlders. It's kind of a racial fantasy.

The top link reads like a conspiracy theory. You grab lots of interesting phenomena and say "we don't have an answer, therefore x" where x is Vikings, aliens, the New World Order, lizards.

It's genuinely an interesting question, the sources are scary though.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com