
Did Ancient Greeks Sail to Canada? - sohkamyung
https://www.hakaimagazine.com/news/did-ancient-greeks-sail-to-canada/
======
azeotropic
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%...](http://www.perseus.tufts.edu/hopper/text?doc=Perseus%3Atext%3A2008.01.0357%3Asection%3D26)

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.

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

~~~
distances
They can, just risk being lost to the ocean

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dalbasal
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.

~~~
jcranmer
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.

------
1024core
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._

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

~~~
rocky1138
Plus it's just plain fun to think about.

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ninjamayo
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/](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 :)

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jerry40
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".

~~~
simonh
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.

~~~
jerry40
Perhaps... By the way, could he mean longitude instead of latitude? I find it
more logical to mention Volga river delta in this case.

~~~
HelloNurse
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.

~~~
Iv
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.

~~~
ubernostrum
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.

------
abecedarius
Considering that
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pytheas](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.

------
aaron-lebo
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...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pre-Columbian_trans-
oceanic_contact_theories)

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

~~~
api_or_ipa
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...](http://www.yachtingworld.com/extraordinary-
boats/undaunted-the-42-inch-yacht-still-hoping-to-become-the-smallest-boat-
ever-to-cross-the-atlantic-107559)

~~~
aaron-lebo
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.

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

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Arnt
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.

~~~
mannykannot
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](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trireme)

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

------
maze-le
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...](http://www.livius.org/sources/content/herodotus/herodotus-on-the-first-
circumnavigation-of-africa/)

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

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

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

~~~
olavk
It's fake though.

~~~
dogma1138
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](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/L%27Anse_aux_Meadows)

~~~
olavk
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.

~~~
dogma1138
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.

~~~
jcranmer
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.

~~~
dogma1138
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...](https://niku.no/2017/11/funn-mystisk-runeinnskrift-bispeborgen-
oslo/)

------
Hoasi
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.

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linkmotif
> “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.

------
based2
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Theory_of_Phoenician_discovery...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Theory_of_Phoenician_discovery_of_the_Americas)

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audio1001
Of course they did, where else could the gyros have come from.

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yakitori
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.

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SideburnsOfDoom
Betteridge's law of headlines:
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Betteridge%27s_law_of_headline...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Betteridge%27s_law_of_headlines)

------
tzfld
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Betteridge%27s_law_of_headline...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Betteridge%27s_law_of_headlines)

~~~
enb
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.

------
dylanhassinger
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](https://www.google.com/search?q=vikings+south+america)

~~~
aaron-lebo
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.

