Posted: Dec 06, 2016 5:33 am
Weaver wrote:Here's a comparison between the Mediterranean Sea and the central Pacific Ocean for scale - the blue line represents the linear distance, West to East, across the Med (the greatest possible expanse of "open sea" journey for someone travelling from the British Isles to Syria).
The program corrects for projection distortions, so scaling is accurate.
http://mapfrappe.com/?show=44651
Note that the Med distance barely accounts for the travel distance from New Guinea to Micronesia - and is between 1/2 and 1/3 the distance needed to get to Hawaii.
No, it is certainly not easier to travel over the open ocean.
It's always amazed me how far they were traveling, especially the first ones to make it somewhere. The article discusses reading the waves and the wind etc, to navigate and know where islands are that might be 100s of miles away even though they had never been anywhere near the area before. That 100s of miles is from other things I've read, I don't think the article got that specific. The article sounds kind of mystical, and such art is almost mystical.