The age of sail, visualized | Hacker News Reader

The age of sail, visualized

blog.revolutionanalytics.com

96 pointsjohndcook32 comments

Why not link to the original (much more descriptive) article? http://sappingattention.blogspot.com/2012/04/visualizing-oce...

Observations/questions:

1. There are quite a few lines that terminate in the middle of the Atlantic. Are those ships that went down?

2. I'm surprised how much traffic to North America falls off after the 18th Century. Is that real, or is this data biased toward sources that weren't involved much in the North American trade?

3. Most of the routes from Europe around Africa to Asia seem to swing much closer to South America than I would have expected. Are there favorable currents or weather or something that makes it faster or safer to take this longer route?

1. Those are ships that stopped at islands in the Atlantic. Since the data was copied from ships' logs I doubt there is data on ships that went down.

2. It seems that the person that entered the data just entered a limited data set. So no this does not represent all shipping.

3. I am pretty sure this is related to islands the ships are stopping in as well. (Probably Georgetown and St Helena).

Regarding 3. The shortest distance between two points when sailing rarely is a straight line. For example, if you are in the UK and want to sail to the caribbean you should sail down the portuguese coast, then sail to the Madeira archipelago, wait there for the trade winds to start (sometime in October or November) and only then cross the atlantic (there are variations on this theme but you get the idea). This is because it is much harder and unconfortable to sail close to the wind (that is at a small angle to the wind, say 45 degrees) than it is to sail downwind (with the wind behind you) or reaching (with the wind from the side of the boat). This is still true to this day and it is interesting to see that we still do the same routes today.

WRT #1, I suspect it was lost data, not lost ships. If the ship was lost, it is quite likely the log (and all hands) would be lost with the ship.

The weird ones are the circles, typically in the Atlantic between Africa and South America. Caught in a storm? It seems like too much distance and time to be drifting in the doldrums.

If they were caught in a storm it would be very unlikely that they could get their exact location and put it in the ship's log. They are probably sailing back and forth between different islands.

Or whaling?

1. google Azores and some other islands (or Açores in portuguese) 2. steam engines? I would think so, but not sure about that. 3. that's pretty well known, the coast of the southern-west part of Africa is too "calm" for sailing and ships go "around" and try to avoid it. Some say that was the reason south-america was discovered (Brazil) by the Portuguese and they kept a secret from the world (and specially the spaniards), https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Treaty_of_Tordesillas https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Treaty_of_Zaragoza_%281529%29

Why were they sailing way down south and then to the east when going around Africa? Predominant winds or currents?

  |    ______
  |   /      \__
  |  |          \
  |   \___       \_
  |       \       /
  |       |      /
  |       |     /
  V       |    |
  |        \__/
  +--->------------

* if you pardon my ascii art

Simple: they were following prevailing winds and currents. If you follow modern ocean sailing races, they follow the same routes. Note that as boats approaches the cape of good hope from the east, they often zig zag, fighting the oncoming winds and currents around the cape. Once they round the cape, its a straight shot for the north atlantic. Another interesting route: from the east coast of india to the west - they had to loop way down south in the indian ocean to find favorable winds. Going the other way, its a straight shot.

In the north atlantic, wind and currents generally follow a clockwise rotation. In the south atlantic, generally counter-clockwise. Same for the pacific.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cape_of_Good_Hope

So what's the answer to the gp's question?

That little detour is because that is there.

This is very interesting - YT link for those who prefer to download and watch at a faster speed: http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=t...

"Ben Schmidt used the R language and data recorded in by hand in ship logs[] to create the animation above. Like all good data visualizations, it's not just fascinating to look at, it draws the viewer in to inspect the details and wonder. For example, at around 3:25 check out the flotilla of Spanish ships leaving the east and west coasts of South America in the early 1778 and converging on Europe in the summer. I'm no history buff[*] and a little Googling didn't reveal what this was all about -- does anyone know? Ben points out other historical events, such as Captain Cook's exploration of the south Pacific in 1772-1775.

In sailing, the weather certainly was a factor, which leads to another cool detail: that bouncing month indicator isn't just there for show. The month is positioned at location of the sun at noon in Africa - when it's near the the south it indicates summer in the southern hemisphere, and summer in the North when it's near Egypt. Ben has also created a seasonal version of the chart, showing all of the voyages of the period by month. You can see that animation, plus much more detail and commentary from Ben about the shipping data themselves, at the link below."

This is sort of cool but I think it's a bit too easy for people to be misled on what this is. This is just a sampling of route data for a tiny fraction of all ship voyages at any given time. This means that you cannot make any conclusions about, say, overall traffic levels or anything of that sort, this is like looking at sail traffic through a straw, this is not in any sense a complete survey.

I'm wondering whether the early Spanish data was deliberately excluded from the visualization or whether it was actually missing from the data set.

This is data collated by the US Navy (and later discovered by Matthew Maury), but the linked articles doesn't state where the Navy sourced the earlier shipping logs from. Since the US Navy was "officialy" established in 1775, the earlier data cannot have been collected by the US Navy? The visualizations start off in 1750, 25 years before the US Navy existed.

Maybe the Spanish data wasn't available because it wasn't openly shared at the time. Remember at this time such missions were highly secret - a race for resources and distant lands.

I would be interested to know the answer to this. Even if it is just a sample, it is indeed a fascinating look back into a brave new world of exploration and colonialization by Europeans across the globe.

http://sappingattention.blogspot.de/2012/04/visualizing-ocea... http://trends.wordpress.com/2009/11/23/ships-and-tools/ http://www.ucm.es/info/cliwoc/cliwoc15.htm http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Matthew_Fontaine_Maury http://blog.revolutionanalytics.com/2012/04/the-age-of-sail-...

It does give you an excellent indication of where the ships went. Yes, Spanish shipping is not shown much, but when it does pop up, it goes to Spanish areas. Like Dutch shipping going to Curacao or the Dutch East Indies. I was surprised at how far out from west africa shipping went when it was going to India.

Sorta kinda. You don't see stuff like the triangle trade represented well, or at all. You also don't see things like fishing, whaling, or military actions, which were a big part of sailing at the time.

Obviously "English channel" centric.

You can draw more ships just taking the Spanish and Portuguese routes 200 years before saved for instance in the "Archivo general de Indias" in Seville.

I was kind of wondering how the "age of sail" got its goal posts moved to 1750, doing away with the first endeavours to get to the Cape of Good Hope in Africa, North and South America, India and China out of the data set reframes it has "1750 to 1855 in heavy boating". Either way, through the youtube channel it really is instructive to look at all the british corsairs almost randomly sailing for loot in the furthest of places.

Sorry but this not the age of sail ... The age of sail started around 1350~1450. 1700 was age of maritime trades at least.

The continent discoveries, for instances: 1492 of America and Brazil 1500, or the discovery of maritime way to India in 1498. These fits better in the concept of "Age of Sail".

You play too much civilization and read less about history :)

The age of sail started in the 15th century (when ships rugged enough to cross large seas the Atlantic in one piece became commonplace) and ended in the 19th. Trade was a major activity across the entire duration of the age of sail. Exploration, colonization and settlement was, for natural reasons, more common in the beginning.

It's true. My comment it's an old feud that I have with civilization or even Sid Meyer... I love the game, but I am portuguese and in games like colonization the portuguese are not included and is a major history failure in colonization scope. Spain and Portugal, arrogantly divided the new world in 1494, the beginning of colonization...

So how can you refer to Age of Sail and you don't mention Portugal?!??!

Believe me it's not nationalism, it's history...

This is a great idea for a visualization. It needs to start WAY earlier, and it needs to begin when there's almost no long-range sailing.

I'm seeing much less Africa <-> Caribbean traffic than I would have expected due to the slave trade. Was the sampling random?

Yes, I expected voyages from the "Triangular Trade":

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Triangular_trade

Europe -> Africa -> Caribbean -> Europe with manufactured goods, slaves, and sugar/cotton/tobacco, respectively.

You can see what looks like round trips between Europe and the Caribbean, which probably were about sugar/cotton/tobacco.

Since longitude couldn't be measured accurately until the late 18th century, it would be interesting to see if there's any change in the quality of the data around that time.

It's a shame Portugal is missing there. Portugal was once the biggest empire thanks to sailing and colonization. But oh well all we've left is a debt crisis to solve now :)

How typically Euro-centric.

Yeah, I hate it when someone takes data someone else has curated in their native tongue and then makes nifty visualizations with it. Clearly, he should have gone and tracked down, translated, cleaned and digitized the relevant shipping logs from China, Vietnam, Korea, Japan, India and Russia and whomever else before compiling and releasing any visualization. What a racist white nerd.

I don't think so, Portuguese and Spanish data seems to be almost removed from it, it cherry picks the age of sail past 1750 when the African Cape of Good Hope had been passed around 1448. Brasil, South America and India first endeavours don't even show up. Either the authors had restricted data sets or this is simply a partial representation that is clueless of the age of sail it wants to portray.

slave and sugar trading visualised. i'm sadder than i was 5 mins ago.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com