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Crazy, stupid or incredibly brave?


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6 replies to this topic

#1
Nikonite

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They used to sail from Spain to Florida in these things? Most time with less than 2 feet of freeboard! No wonder so many were never heard from again! Oh yeah . . ... the engineers and scientists of the day were telling the sailors as they left, "The world is flat if you sail out there you will fall off the edge of the world"!

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#2
Jesper

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What a spectacular vessel...hard to imagine what life must have been like on such a ship although i don't think they were crazy, stupid or even incredibly brave...They were just folks using the days technology, using the days terminology and subjected to the days beliefs. I would imagine in a thousand years people will judge us as being not to sharp...Hundreds of thousands are killed every year in traffic...people smoke cigarettes despite knowing the health issues, youngsters get hooked on drugs, many many people eat themselves to obesity plus a whole list of other not so clever practices...
No...they were no different from us really on a human level..certainly the same inventiveness and ingenuity. We've just gone through a few paradigm shifts since then with probably just as many to come in the future.



#3
Nikonite

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Well said and I agree to a certain point. After touring through "El Galeon" bravery without a doubt comes into play. I believe one has to be brave to take on an effort that one knows probably won't end well. The ships sailing from Spain to the "new world" did not have a good survival rate. In fact the odds were that once over the horizon they weren't coming back and NOT because they wanted to stay once they got to wherever. As a SCUBA diver I've dove on many of the pictured type ships that went down in a Hurricane. They did not go down in one piece. The Hurricane tore them to smithereens. There's no good way to go, but that has to be a horrible way to go.



#4
Jesper

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I think generally that life was much harder than anything we can imagine today. No electric, no central heating, no double glazing, no supermarkets, no clean water, no modern medicines etc. Child mortality was very high and god forbid you had to go to the doctor or dentist! .. Generally life must have been quite brutal for the majority of the people seen through modern eyes.
Many of the men that travelled on those ships could well have come from conditions that were much harsher than what they experienced on board. For many others it was their only chance of maybe seeking wealth, fame or adventure and the tons of gold and silver brought back from the america's bear strong testimony to the fact that many ships did in fact make it back.
Men and women the world over die every day on the job. Bus drivers, train drivers and taxi drivers for example die every day somewhere around the world yet do we consider them brave doing the job they do? In the future when private transport is computerised and the driver is taken out of the equation (it'll happen) and traffic accidents become as rare as plane crashes or rarer, people will probably start thinking that driving combustion engined death machines must have taken quite a bit of courage...especially when the figures  show the risk of accident was high............
I guess you can see where i'm going with this....Everything is relative and has to be understood in context. No doubt there were brave men onboard some of those ships but i don't think they had to be brave to sail on them.

Incidentally, i too am a diver. I'm  CMAS 2 star and enjoy a yearly visit to Norway to dive on the many wrecks that are found in the deep fjords and coastal areas. I'm not really that interested in technical diving with it's long long decompression times so i dive straight atmospheric and like to keep above 50 meters depth. That still gives me plenty of exciting and interesting dives though even if deco is still annoying sometimes....



#5
Nikonite

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Again I agree except for your assertion that "many ships did in fact make it back". Some made it back, but not many. With the way the ships were loaded it would have only taken one or two to make it back to richen Spain for centuries. I talked to the Captain of the El Galeon about this very thing. According to him the ratio was 7:1. Seven being launched and only one coming back. I have no idea as to the Captain's expertise or where he got the figure from. Obviously he was very knowledgeable about the El Galeon, but that alone does not make him knowledgeable about Spanish maritime history. However, I believe he's accurate. I've also talked to Mel Fisher about the shipwreck of the Atocha. According to Mel Spain never recovered from that loss even to present day.     



#6
Jesper

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I won't bore you to death with the details as you can easily find them yourself searching google...However, the bankruptcy of Spain during the middle and latter part of the 1500's was due to the Spanish using all the gold they plundered and murdered to acquire to subsidize an increasingly heavy imbalance of trade. It had absolutely nothing to do with any bullion ships they lost and everything to do with negligent and corrupt powers creating runaway inflation.
Some figures representing the amount of gold and silver brought back from the America's.
1531 = ½ ton gold and 200 kilo's silver.,,,By 1535 that had risen to 1.6 tons gold and 27.2 tons silver. From then until 1559 they averaged approx 15 tons of gold and over a 1000 tons of silver a year. All this wealth made it safely back to Spain and although finding figures for the percentage of ships that went down has proven difficult, anecdotal evidence suggests only about 1 in 25 ships never made it back.
Spain never really recovered from the bankruptcy their kings and queens shoved the country into and the folly of building the Spanish armada (130 war ships) which were all almost totally destroyed in 1588 by the British in their smaller quicker boats was the final straw.
I've condensed and sketched history to make it easily readable and of course the details are much more intricate than i have explained but don't let anyone fool you into believing that the demise of Spain had anything to do with losing a few bullion ships.......An interesting story no doubt but none the less incorrect.



#7
Nikonite

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I'm sure the El Galeon captain as well as Mel Fisher both spoke with more romance about the period than they did with accuracy. However, they were both correct in that back in the day sailing from and to Spain was not a proven science and was fraught with peril. I know about the time Juan Ponce Deleon was putting a Spanish flag into Florida beach sand and claiming the land in the name of Spain he got an arrow through his chest!