Oceans are both barriers and bridges!
As soon as coastal peoples learned to tie logs together, they started to venture across the water. The original Paleolithic out-of-Africa migrations included crossings of the Red Sea. Ancient people made many over-the-horizon crossings to reach Australia 40,000 years ago. Seafaring voyagers and traders have reached outward for a long, long time.
Polynesian Voyagers
At least 3,500 years ago, ancestral Polynesian people began voyaging from the island that eventually became Taiwan using a technology toolkit that included outrigger canoes loaded with small livestock and crops. Over a period of millennia they spread their culture to almost every island in the vast Pacific.
Ancient Polynesian voyagers crossed thousands of miles of trackless ocean in open boats for millennia at a time when western cultures like the Egyptians and Greeks could barely leave the sight of land in the Mediterranean. They developed amazing navigational skills involving comprehensive knowledge of the stars as well as waves and winds and birds to find their way to remote islands requiring many months of travel.
Polynesian culture adapted to fit a diverse array of physical settings from tiny sea level atolls with hardly any fresh water to enormous volcanic mountains with mighty rivers and lush forests like Hawaii and Tahiti. Crops and livestock as well as fishing supported far-flung variants that lost touch with other islands for centuries and then re-established contact and trade.
The Monsoon Marketplace
Predictable large-scale winds and currents across the Indian Ocean and Arabian Sea allowed Arabian, Indian, and East African sailors to reach far beyond their coasts for exploration and trade thousands of years ago. The seasonal monsoon was reliable enough for ships to leave East Africa in May or June with near certainty of arriving in India before the winds reversed. Westbound sailors could depart India in October and be pretty sure to arrive in Arabia or Africa by January.
The reliability of reversing seasonal winds, plus the development of rudders to allow boats to sail across the wind, fostered the development of vigorous maritime trade across the region. Grain and oil from Egypt were traded for precious scents and perfumes from the Arabian peninsula, wood and ivory from Africa and spices from India.
In the Third Century BCE, the invasions of Alexander the Great introduced the societies of Ancient Greece, Egypt, Persia, Central Asia, and India to one another. Successor states built upon the ancient Monsoon Marketplace to enhance maritime commercial links.
After the Romans under Octavian/Augustus Caesar conquered Cleopatra's Egypt in 31 BCE, the Roman Empire inherited the trade routes from the Red Sea through the Arabian Sea and Indian Ocean. The Romans built overland routes through the deserts of eastern Egypt to huge ports on the Red Sea. Over the next couple of centuries they established a flourishing maritime trade that linked India, Persia, Africa, and Europe in affluence.
A widely-distributed 1st Century CE Greek manuscript called "Periplus of the Erythrean Sea" served as both a travel guide and practical sailors' manual for navigating the region. The book described ports, trade goods, and accommodations on three continents and listed optimum departure and arrival dates to make best use of the monsoon winds.
By the 3rd Century CE, 35% of the revenue of the Roman Empire derived from taxes collected on trade with India. Enormous hoards of Roman coins have been found from East Africa to India and beyond. After the Western Roman Empire collapsed in the 5th Century CE, the Indian Ocean trade continued under the influence of the Arabs, Persians, and Indians.
Scandinavian Voyagers on the Open Atlantic
Sailors from Northern Europe ventured into the frigid waters of the North Atlantic in the Middle Ages, linking societies in Scandinavia, Britain, Germany, and the Low Countries. Vikings and their relatives became adept at building and navigating ships that could weather all manner of storms. Using their mastery off the seas, they colonized distant lands including parts of Spain, France, Russia, Ukraine, Bulgaria, Sicily, Iceland, Greenland, and even what is now Canada.
Arabian and Islamic Traders
Gold from west Africa was traded across the Sahara to the Mediterranean by camel caravans, and a steady flow of pilgrims journeyed from tropical Africa to Mecca to fulfill their religious duties.
Enslaved people were captured and traded both across the Sahara and by sea from major East African ports to Arabia and India for nearly 1000 years. At least 20 million enslaved people were sold across the Indian Ocean during this period.
Chinese Treasure Ships of the Ming Dynasty
In the early 15th Century, the Chinese Admiral Zheng He conducted an incredible series of missions to establish commercial trade and cultural exchange on behalf of the Ming Dynasty. His armada included 28,000 sailors in more than 200 ships, some of which were well over 400 feet long. The enormous ships introduced Chinese trade goods across the Indian Ocean, taking advantage of the old Monsoon Marketplace from China throughout Southeast Asia to India, Arabia, and East Africa.
But after 1433, the Ming Emperor ordered the voyages stopped and the treasure ships destroyed. To some degree, this decision reflected the recent trauma of the Mongol (Yuan Dynasty) conquest of China in the 14th Century, which led to a great inward turn of Chinese cultural values and subsequent disengagement with the wider world.
As history unfolded, the retrenchment from world affairs under Ming China turned out to be disastrous in the longer term. This was precisely the period in which European navigators began venturing across the open oceans to establish first trade and later military dominance.
Early Modern Portuguese Traders and Explorers
By the 15th Century, Portuguese traders were well aware of enormous sources of Arabian gold in tropical west Africa. Under Henry the Navigator, exploratory missions established direct trade with the Gold Coast (now Ghana) to cut out the trans-Saharan middlemen. Once they could successfully navigate the open Atlantic and its changing wind patterns, Portuguese explorers continued further south. Vasco de Gama led an expedition that rounded the Cape of Good Hope in 1497 and reached India in 1498.
Spice Wars
For many centuries, Europeans had traded for pepper, nutmeg, cloves, and other exotic spices which were incredibly valuable luxury goods at the time. These goods were known to be produced in the far east, but supplies had to be imported through Islamic empires who tightly controlled access. Nearly all European trade with the Islamic East came through the Byzantine capital Constantinople (now Istanbul) and Venice. Once Portuguese traders reached India, they sought to capture the spice monopoly from Venice.
Italian sailor Christopher Columbus sailed on behalf of newly-united Spain across the Atlantic in the 1490s, and Spain aggressively colonized Central and South America. His ships and crews were tiny by comparison to those of Zheng He's mighty Ming armada generations before, but the Europeans were on a roll.
The 16th Century saw a tremendous struggle for maritime hegemony between Portugal and Spain to find the near-legendary Spice Islands of Molucca, in what is now Indonesia. Spain pioneered routes across the Atlantic and later the Pacific to reach the Moluccas just after the Portuguese. At the time, the islands were under the control of an Islamic Sultanate. Portugal conquered the city-state of Malacca in 1511.
Modern Era of "Exploration," Conquest, and Slave Trade
European nations fighting against one another at home discovered that they could gain competitive advantage over one another by sending naval vessels to conquer distant lands and extract their resources and wealth. This led to fierce competition among Portugal, Spain, the Netherlands, and eventually England for overseas colonies.
The European "discovery" of vast continents in the Western Hemisphere led to the collapse of Indigenous populations through epidemic disease and military conquest. European Powers were left with a lot of land in the Americas but a paucity of labor with which to exploit them.
Portuguese traders first sold African captives into slavery in Brazil in 1526. Over the following centuries the Transatlantic Slave Trade exploded, reaching a peak in the 18th Century. By the time the slave trade was abolished in the 19th Century, at least 14 million Africans had been forcibly abducted and sold into slavery to perform had labor in European colonies.
Navigation and the Determination of Longitude
Sailors have been able to determine their latitude at sea since at least 600 BCE by carefully measuring the position of stars by night or the Sun at noon. Longitude is much more difficult to determine because the stars wheel overhead as the Earth rotates and so their exact position in the sky depends on the precise time of day or night.
Determination of longitude at sea requires keeping track of the exact time. Clocks based on the calibrated burning of candles or falling water could only run for a short time. Pendulum clocks used on land were unreliable at sea due to the rocking motion of ships. In the Early Modern period, European powers were desperate to develop precise and reliable clocks that could keep time for many months at sea because they recognized that this was the key to precise navigation.
Monarchies in Portugal, Spain, and the Netherlands offered royal prizes for the determination of longitude in the 16th Century. In the 17th Century precise timekeeping using telescope observations of the orbits of the moons of the planet Jupiter became fairly reliable, but it was impossible to do this from the deck of a moving ship.
In 1707, a fleet of British Naval ships crashed into the Scilly Islands in the Atlantic, killing more than 2000 sailors. In response, Britain created the Board of Longitude in 1714 to reward inventors who could reliably determine longitude from ships at sea. In practical terms, this was a government incentive to develop reliable clocks. The story of the Longitude Prize is amazing, and has been told in a wonderful book by Dava Sobel. John Harrison was eventually awarded the prize in 1773 after toiling on clocks for 40 years.
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