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Late 12th Century Northern Cog. Ships built in the ancient period were too feeble to routinely take to the sea in any but fair weather. Longships—rowed galleys—were the state-of-the-art ships-of-war of the day, but they could not venture far. The classic Mediterranean galley had a freeboard too low to test even a moderate sea, and […]

Only in the fifteenth century did a combination of scientific and technological advances—the magnetic compass and the astrolabe, better maps, commercially available navigational charts, and ships of stronger construction, superior design, and improved rigs—allow mariners to challenge, though by no means to conquer, the seas. Only then did open ocean navigation become a regular, practical, […]