Sailing Into The Sea In The 1500's

In the 1500's, explorers traveled across the seas in large ships that carried crew members, goods, and wealth. These ships navigated the ocean by using toois like the compass, chip log, astrolabe, cross staff, and many more. With the compass, one of the explorers of the 1500's, Christopher Columbus, noticed that north on the compass was not actually true north. He used this to predict his arrival in America. A chip log was a circle of wood that was attached to a line on a reel, Knots were tied at intervals along the line, and this helped measure how fast the ship was travelling. There were many more methods of navigating, and these were just a few.
"Sailing into the wind" is a sailing expression that means a ship is able to move forward even when heading into the …show more content…
But it is possible. When the sail is positioned at a certain angle, the ship will move forward, because the centerline of the ship is pulled to the water. The force of the sail will balance out the force of the centerline. Even though people might not think it is possible, it is. That is how a ship can "sai into the wind" and still move forward.
A Spanish Galleon was a large ship that had multiple decks. They normally carried three or more masts, which used a sailing rig on the rear masts, and Square rigs on the foremast and mainmast. The Galleons were built by the Spanish and
Portuguese, mainly for trade overseas. On a Spanish Galleon, there would be the sailing crew and the commanders. That would be about eighty people. There would also be the soldiers and their officers, which would be about one-hundred twenty people, so the overail number of people on a Spanish Galleon would be about two-hundred people. Some Galleons were very large, such as Nuestra Sefiora de la Concepción. It was a one-hundred twenty ton Spanish Galleon that sailed the Panama trading route. It could carry two tons of cargo. Other Galleons would normally carry around fifty tons of