Vision rolls to see landmarks at sea

[Rupert]

Originally Posted by Michael Thayne

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I'm not sure water is necessarily an issue if all you want to do is cross a stretch of sea that's a bit bigger than what you can cross in a 12 hour day—say a hundred miles or so. Surely even war galleys had room for a couple of gallons of water per person? Though even if you are trying to transport soldiers, you're probably under sail most of the time anyway because rowers gotta rest at some point.

Even using US gallons, that's 16+ pounds of water per person. A trireme had about 170 oarsmen. That's over a ton of water right there.

A trireme on a long journey at speed would rest one or two banks of oarsmen at a time, with then sitting at their oars but the oars drawn in.

Yeah—and I've never heard of ancient sailors eating hard tack or salt pork. But if you're crossing a stretch of the Mediterranean that's just a bit on the long side (say 100 miles as I suggested above), maybe carrying pre-cooked loaves of bread isn't such a big deal?

ISTR that a trireme in a tearing hurry as a courier had the oarsmen being fed bread soaked in wine while they were at the oars, because they couldn't afford the time to stop and rest and cook ashore.

[Michael Thayne]

Originally Posted by RGTraynor

Nope. Take the Med, take Indonesia, take the Red Sea, take the Persian Gulf: they didn't HAVE to cross long stretches without landfalls, and went to some trouble to avoid doing so. Lots of islands means lots of island hopping.

Read the paper. Not every piece of land has a port with a market—and in hostile territory, you might not be able to just stroll in to said market! They still would have eaten the food on land unless they were in a real hurry, as Rupert mentions. In that post, I was just talking about cargo room.

That said, while I don't know that military ships relying on oar power ever did this, merchant sailors must have sometimes found it worthwhile to chance travel over one of the (admittedly few) parts of the Mediterranean with no convenient islands for stopovers. For example, if you are sailing from Crete to North Africa, it's certainly possible to go Crete -> Karpathos -> Rhodes -> southern Anatolia -> the Levantine coast -> wherever you originally wanted to go, but you can potentially save time going more or less straight south. (A less extreme case would be going from the Greek mainland to Syracuse—though in that case, crossing to Italy near the peninsula's "heel" wouldn't have been such a bad detour.)

[Fred Brackin]

Originally Posted by Rupert

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ISTR that a trireme in a tearing hurry as a courier had the oarsmen being fed bread soaked in wine while they were at the oars, because they couldn't afford the time to stop and rest and cook ashore.

Even if you have developed hard tack (which requires longer baking than regular bread and hence more fuel spent) you have to soak it in liquid before it can be eaten.