100 Years of ships

Visualization of 18th and 19th-century shipping routes. More info and discussion of the underlying data at http://sappingattention.blogspot.com/.... This uses ship's logbooks from http://www.ucm.es/info/cliwoc/ digitized for climate purposes.

• Category

  Education

[bryceguy72]

How could the people who made this map possibly know every zig and zag of every ship's path? There's no way! They can know the point of origin and destination and estimate the general path, but not the precise path as depicted in the map. For example, stop the video at 0:17 and look at the ship going north from South America. How is it known that this ship made those exact zig zags?

[Ben Schmidt]

Every day, a ship writes its exact location (along with some other information, like the weather) in a logbook. Those have been digitized to try to reconstruct climate records, but we can also see with really surprising precision the routes that different ships take based on those hand-entered historical records.

[Janet Bruesselbach]

Apparently this is just available data, meant to show seasonal trade routes, and the Dutch did not dominate 19th century shipping. They just kept more records.

[jdbeachsecond]

Hello, fascinating job. Would it be possible to contact u to have this ideo in good format ? thank you

[TheAAbck]

u forgot the suez canal

[Dinglebopper97]

It maps things out nicely - I can see where everyone stops at St Helena - but there are also many, many things missing.

[culwin]

Portugese didn't back up their data.

[Scott Carle]

Troll!

Common usage for more than a century is American to reference citizens of the United States. While technically American could apply to anyone born on, or a citizen of a nation; in the North or South American continents, it isn't used that way. If You ask a Canadian what they are they will say Canadian. If you ask a Mexican what they are they will tell you Mexican. Ask a Canadian if they are American and they will probably correct you and say no I am Canadian.

[faith9chang]

I think wars, trade from India and possibly China and of course the Atlantic Slave Trade.

[bryceguy72]

The records exist of course, but a couple hundred years ago there was no GPS or any other precise way to know exactly where you are. There were stars, visual land marks, dead reckoning, and navigation maps & moon charts, which themselves were inaccurate. That's all sea captains had to go by. Whatever records they made about their current position, they were approximate. There's really no way to verify that what they wrote down matched their true position.

[Ben Schmidt]

For some reason, Portuguese records didn't get digitized in any great number by this EU-sponsored project. (Neither did French or American.) It's too bad, I would have liked to see them.

[Ben Schmidt]

It's unfortunately not even that precise--there is some exploration on the map (Capt Cook's second voyage around 2:56, for example), and lots of shipping is missing. (The whole British East India company, I think). Plus, there's a lot of military action too. It's interesting for what it shows, but there's a lot it doesn't.