Are we there yet? 17th Century Version.
November 25, 2013 2:33 PM   Subscribe

How long did it take to sail from the Americas to England in 1609? And vice versa?

What I'm really looking for a resource discussing how long in general the trips between the Americas and Europe/Africa took through time, beginning with the supposed discovery by Columbus until modern times. I'm frequently seeing references to people traveling back and forth, for example John Smith of Pocahantas fame "traveling back to England for medical care due to a gunshot wound" and I'm unable to picture how long that would take. Getting on a boat for several weeks (months?) to seek medical care seems likely to not work out too well.
posted by Big_B to Travel & Transportation (9 answers total) 3 users marked this as a favorite
 
From my college US history survey, I have vague memories that it was in the "weeks" range. Three weeks? Six weeks? Somewhere in there. Definitely not months.

It's possible that, in the case of medical care, it wasn't emergency medical care that was meant, but convalescence. Jamestown would be a remarkably shitty place to have a debilitating wound.

People definitely traveled back and forth, even in the early days.
posted by Sara C. at 2:37 PM on November 25, 2013


Best answer: FWIW the westward voyage of the 'Mayflower' took 65 days.

From my previous reading one characteristic of sailling boat voyages which might seem strange to us today is the variability in transit times. You set off to where you were going but had little idea of when you would arrive .
posted by southof40 at 2:54 PM on November 25, 2013


Best answer: Meant to say that the 'Mayflower' voyage was conducted in late Autumn when the North Atlantic is beginning to get quite bouncy . Hence the 65 days might have been at the upper end of the range. Columbus took five weeks to get from the Canary Islands to the Caribbean travelling in September/October on a crossing quite a bit further south than the 'Mayflower'.
posted by southof40 at 2:58 PM on November 25, 2013


Best answer: This is something I was thinking about over the weekend, given the impending sale of a copy of the Bay Psalm Book, which was printed in 1640 using a press and typefaces that were shipped over from England. (Almost all American printing until the late 1770s was done with fonts cast in Europe, including the Dunlap Broadside; the first book believed to be printed entirely with American type was a German-language bible using fraktur fonts, published by the Sauer family.)

So: in the 17th century, a good voyage would get you from England to the northeastern states in two to three months, depending on the type of ship and winds and tides. Longer if you were heading further down the coast, and if you hit poor winds, it could add weeks to the journey. The Jamestown fleet took five months to reach land; the Mayflower took 65 days. The return voyage was generally faster, thanks to the Gulf Stream, which applies today for both sea and air.

By the 1700s, there were more voyages, and a wider range of ships making the crossing, built specifically for what they were carrying, whether it was slaves or willing immigrants or cargo: news of the Declaration of Independence was carried on a packet ship, built for speed, but it still took five weeks to reach London.
posted by holgate at 3:00 PM on November 25, 2013 [5 favorites]


Best answer: Yeah the big deal is that folks just didn't know. You can find people's writings about their ocean voyages and it varies widely. Here's one representative narrative
When a passenger left London he could not say within many weeks how long he was to be on board the ship taking him to America. The ships were slow sailers, although they could go as fast as eight miles an hour when there was a fair wind and a smooth sea. But never was this rate kept up for even twenty-four hours.

Often four or five miles was all there was to show for a whole day. There were even times when they were further from their destination at the end of twenty-four hours than at the beginning. The length of the voyage could vary from 47 to 138 days. Sometimes ships that left London at the same time might arrive in America as much as eight or nine weeks apart.
posted by jessamyn at 3:01 PM on November 25, 2013 [1 favorite]


Best answer: Some eighteenth-century Moravian missionaries' diaries [JSTOR; paywall] describe crossings that could take anywhere from 7 weeks (London to Antigua) to 4 months (London to Jamaica). One factor beyond weather and currents was that in wartime, ships often traveled in convoys, which might take weeks to assemble.

Klas Rönnbäck, a Swedish economic historian, recently published a study of the transit times of slave ships crossing the Atlantic [free abstract; article is behind paywall]. His data show that there was a substantial increase in the speed of ships on the Middle Passage from the late 17th century to 1850: the speed of ships nearly doubled, from an average speed (measured against the direct route) of 2 knots to somewhat over 4. The data have a high standard deviation, though: some ships managed to go a lot faster, with the most favorable conditions; others were slower. He notes that slave ships might not be representative, since there was a premium in going fast given the high mortality on the Middle Passage, but concludes nonetheless that near the end of the age of sail, it was possible to cross the Atlantic in less than half the time it took in the seventeenth century.
posted by brianogilvie at 3:17 PM on November 25, 2013


Best answer: Sailor here. A typical speed for a medium-sized yacht in trade winds might be around 8 knots, now. From a quick look, it seems that Columbus's ships topped out around 8 knots, and averaged around half of that. The fastest clipper ships of the 1800s went roughly twice that fast.

The trip from Plymouth to Boston is about 2700 nautical miles, in a straight line, which sailing vessels rarely can do.

So in the 1500s you could expect it to take at least a month, with a good trip being a bit faster, and a slow trip taking anything longer than that. By the 1800s, if you were on a fast ship, it would probably shave a week or two off your voyage.

This ship set a record for fastest crossing (in the other direction, which has more favorable winds) in 1905 at just over 12 days.

This boat holds the current east-to-west record, at roughly 7 and a half days.
posted by tylerkaraszewski at 4:58 PM on November 25, 2013


Of relevence: Benajamin Franklin and the Gulf Stream.
posted by alms at 5:16 PM on November 25, 2013 [1 favorite]


Response by poster: Thanks everyone!
posted by Big_B at 3:57 PM on December 2, 2013


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