SC - Americans and corn (was: Food guessing game)

[Siegfried Heydrich]

    Yes - Romans did NOT like getting out of sight of land; it was this
attitude that resulted in some truly amazing mass wrecks as they piled into
things and got into situations that could have been avoided by going well
out to sea. Their fleets tended to anchor at night, which indicates to me a
real lack of confidence.
    The pilots who plied the Atlantic had a very high mortality rate,
especially in the bay of Biscay, where the currents were treacherous close
in, and the bottom changed its contour with damn near every tide. Had they
gone, say, 100 miles out, they would have been a lot safer, but that wasn't
how they saw it. If you can see land, you can swim to it . . .
    There no way a Trireme could have survived a north Atlantic crossing;
the first arctic gale would have sent it straight to the bottom. And there's
absolutely no way that it could have carried enough provisions (rowing is a
high energy process) to make any kind of southern crossing. Had there been
any kind of trade with the new world then, wayposts would have been
essential, and none have ever been found. Also, roman maps indicated a total
ignorance of anything northwest of the British isles, not that I blame them.
Nasty place for sun-loving Romans.

    Sieggy


> Wreckage can travel great distances underwater with submerged currents.
> Regardless of whether this was a hoax or an anomaly, what it was _not_
> was evidence of Roman trade with the [as yet undiscovered??] new world.
> As with later Viking longships that are suppsed to have gone to all
> kinds of interesting places, neither the longship nor the trireme is
> really designed for ocean travel, but for river use and coastal travel,
> but the design differences between the trireme and the kind of
> deep-draft, keeled vessel needed for semi-safe ocean travel are greater,
> I believe, than with the longship.  The odds against a trireme making an
> intentional and successful trip across the Atlantic, properly
> provisioned so that anybody survived at journey's end, are astronomical.