rationalskepticism.org

The_Piper wrote:

jamest wrote:

The_Piper wrote:

jamest wrote:
You appear to be severely underestimating how dangerous those waters were [and still are], particularly for 18th century seamen.

Not at all, I took issue with your use of the term extreme weather. There are big storms but not persistent extreme cold like you seemed to imply,

I have at no time said that it's always cold around Newfoundland. It doesn't have to be in order that ice be a danger. Again, look at what happened to The Titanic in the month of April.

If 4000 people died in a hurricane in 1775, that even further suggests that it was already quite populated at that time, which it was.

There was close to a thousand men on some ships, so your comment isn't merited.

Guessing the large death toll in 1775 was due to the complete lack of storm forecasting. Their weather is not an outlier for the east coast of North America. Someone sailing from Western Europe or down from Greenland/Labrador/up from North Carolina would be in dangerous waters for most of the trip. The ocean is dangerous.

Why does this detract from the possibility that something bad happened near Newfoundland sufficient for a ship's crew to make nearest landfall?

this is the post that I replied to

Yes, but I'm talking about explorers who might have wanted to explore further north and west from Europe who may have encountered difficulties with ice during these longer ventures. Knowing little if anything of the extreme weather in those realms, they may well have needed to adapt their ships to proceed or even escape. Constructing a metal ram or protective plate for the hull seems like a very possible scenario, imo. It's very easy for a ship to succumb to the ice, as anyone familiar with Shackleton's expedition to Antartica in 1914 will know.

You mention Ice, Antarctica, and earlier in post # 48 said that the area is treeless (which it's not).
Basically, I thought you had Newfoundland confused with a place more like Greenland. You can admit that mentioning extreme weather of Newfoundland and an expedition to Antarctica in the same paragraph was unclear, at least?

I haven't presented a theory here, Piper. I'm just developing my initial objection to the researchers' claim that metallurgy = vikings = champagne. It's an ongoing discussion so I accept that my thoughts may come across as being unclear. That objection was formerly about ice, yes, but there are other reasons why ships could encounter difficulties in that region (storms and war, for instance).

The bottom-line for me is that for all the difficulties a ship can encounter at sea, it's not difficult to envisage one of them being forced to land on the southern tip of Newfoundland to make repairs or to [perhaps] construct something to deal with the ice. I've also had another idea, though am not sure how daft it is: perhaps a warship needed to construct more cannonballs because it had ran out and its supply was cut off, or going back to Europe was not an option (running out of ammo seems like a plausible scenario to me, but feel free to laugh).

The main objection to my idea would be where the men got their supply of iron ore from, but I could ask the same question in reference to any Vikings who may have settled there. Anyway, as I said, I'm just playing devil's advocate. If my ideas can be entirely ruled-out, then fair enough.