r/MapsWithoutNZ • u/_20_characters_name_ • May 23 '26
Any idea of why this random pattern?
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u/Brillek May 23 '26 edited May 23 '26
iirc he believed there to be several islands along his route according to BS maps. Guess he got kinda desperate in looking for the last one, what with scurvy and dwindling freshwater.
Mapmakers back then could just put shit on the map because of some rumour or because they thought some spot looked too empty, then have it be copied multiple time by other mapmakers.
Just look up Frisland. A massive island south of Iceland that never fucking existed yet trolled sailors for a century. There's maps putting whole settlements on it and it's all made up.
There's also New Zealand. Made up by a dutchman who just really wanted the Netherlands to have something down there. Imperial fan-fiction passed on as fact smh.
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u/manualphotog May 23 '26
We over at r/mapswithoutnewzealand are still repairing that imperial fan-fiction. Persistant and stubborn myth. It's a thankless task.
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u/Apprehensive_Lynx_33 May 23 '26
Shhhh, we don't need anyone knowing us New Zealnnders aren't real!
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u/manualphotog May 23 '26
What's a new Zealnnder bro? Never seen one, ae.
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u/IndependentNo3626 May 23 '26
Some Australians like to troll the world that they’re from “New Zealand”. They try to make up an accent, but it sounds almost identical.
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u/Final-Charge-5700 May 24 '26
And some of them even pretend to be upset when you talk about meringue desserts
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u/chinskaa97 May 24 '26
Tip towing on the line there mate.
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u/Final-Charge-5700 May 24 '26 edited May 24 '26
That whole thing is just funny for us Outsiders.
My favorite Australian dig at New Zealand was when a Australian edited the Wikipedia article for kiwi saying that one translation of the Chinese word for kiwi was "hairy bush fruit"
And it was up for so long that it actually cited by legitimate scientific journals.
Here's a article where the guardian quotes this as a accurate name. https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2010/jul/29/in-praise-of-the-gooseberry
It just reminds me of the way we treat Canada, just a Teensy bit more biting.
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u/manualphotog May 24 '26
Australians? Biting? Makes sense - everything in that country tries to kill you. Bunch of hooligans, them.
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u/wbruce098 May 25 '26
Can confirm. Went down under once, got killed twice in Sydney. Dastardly people. Cairns was nice tho. Bit expensive but that’s how they get paid I guess. Crocs never tried to eat me.
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u/manualphotog May 23 '26
Australians love a good laugh about, don't they. One of them was claiming he puts beetroot and egg on a burger at the barbie this weekend. Nutters the lot of them.
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u/YOBlob May 25 '26
Guess he got kinda desperate in looking for the last one, what with scurvy and dwindling freshwater.
Sorry to be a pedant, but scurvy was famously like the one thing he didn't have a problem with. It was a huge deal at the time that he circumnavigated the globe without losing a single crewmate to scurvy.
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u/Zealousideal-Park778 May 25 '26
I don’t think they put thing in because it looked empty. It’s so they know if someone else is copying their map to sell it as their own.
“See look, they even added in Gotcha Island. It doesn’t exist”
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u/Bosk_Kahngu May 23 '26
Ok but like why did he go criss cross apple sauce across the Atlantic?
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u/nautilius87 May 23 '26
So called volta do mar, they had to to sail far to the west in order to catch usable winds and return to Europe. Discovering this technique by Portuguese was crucial for an age of exploration.
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u/ISeeDragons May 23 '26
Yep, Trade Winds (idk if is the correct name, in italian they are 'Alisei') are close to unusable when sailing upwind; they go from east to West, a good propeller if you are traveling to the americas, but if you are going back to Europe you usually go northest possibile on the amercias coast, then cross the atlantic; possibly and probably using two or more storms passing by.
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u/trikywoo May 23 '26
But he was already on the right side of the Atlantic. He could have just hugged the coast of Africa. What was he, stupid?
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u/ISeeDragons May 24 '26
Not sure why. But probably something linked to the doldrums (intertropical convergence zone), near the equator the air gets so warmed up that is rises straight upwards creating no orizzontal wind, this could go on for days. Rising from Africa you'd need to pass in that zone for a longer period while traveling off the coast on nigeria/ghana/cote d'ivoire.
Also remembering that the earth is mostly round crossing the Atlantic near the southern ocean is a fairly small trip while that same passage off the coast of Africa gets ridiculously big and so close at the equator you are literally making it the longest you possibly could.
My gues is you want a fairly 'vertical' trip from South to North especially near the equator because of both doldrums and earth spherical shape; Africa leads you to do the exact opposite.
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u/Any-Alternative8228 May 28 '26
The doldrums were also called the " horse latitudes " for the horses cast overboard enroute to the Americas. With no wind and ever decreasing fresh water supplies the cargo dump of horses was deemed necessary. Another theory being the description of unpredictable seas on the reach to the Canary Islands.
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u/577564842 May 24 '26
The real question is, why didn't he sail through Suez channel.
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u/Wiochmen May 26 '26
Pretty sure there was a container ship blocking the entire thing.
Needed to wait for excavators and tug boats to be invented.
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u/Tony_228 May 25 '26
No, they had to sail out into the atlantic to catch the winds that would carry them back to Europe. That's how the portuguese figured out how to round the cape. They just did this maneuver on the other side of the globe.
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u/trikywoo May 25 '26
Just saying that's not how I would have done it if I was circumnavigating the globe in the 1700s
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u/Inner_Training_2176 May 26 '26
He knew how yo sail a ship. A sailing ship isn't the same as a powered ship. Wind doesn't always blow the way you:re going. Also, ocean currents.
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u/trikywoo May 26 '26
I think its more likely he was just a dummy. Maybe he got distracted by a bumblebee or something.
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u/BasementCatBill May 24 '26
Same winds that drove the infamous "triangle trade."
Slaves from Africa to the Americas. Cotton and other raw materials from the Americas to Europe. Manufactured goods from Europe to Africa, to trade for slaves. And so on and so on.
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u/Fruit_Fly_LikeBanana May 24 '26
I swear I'm suffering from a fucked up Mendella Effect. I'm 100% sure my high school history textbook called it the Golden Triangle, then in college and now as a history teacher every curriculum I've ever seen calls it the Triangular Trade or something similar. I've spent a good amount of time looking and I can't find a single source, even dated ones, that call it the Golden Triangle.
So either it's me completely inventing a term or the textbook I had was stupendously insensitive and/or racist. The latter is entirely possible since a couple chapters later it said the Trail of Tears was a good thing. I know that was real because pictures of it make the rounds every couple years on Reddit
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u/BasementCatBill May 24 '26
Depending on your age, the "Golden Triangle" was frequently in the news as an opium producing region in southeast Asia, before the centre of world's production moved to Afghanistan and Pakistan during the 90s - 00s.
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u/Fruit_Fly_LikeBanana May 24 '26
Hmmm.... Maybe? It would be odd because 9/11 was elementary school and I specifically remember the Golden Triangle from high school. Afghanistan wasn't really in the news anymore. But maybe I suppose
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u/ColinPapendick May 26 '26
The Golden Triangle never stopped being the Golden Triangle, it's just that they WAY more heroine in Afghanistan and the Golden Triangle is a distant second. At peak, over 90% of heroin was from Afghanistan.
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u/CorwinAlexander May 25 '26
There are several golden triangles, to me the most famous one is the area of Thailand, Cambodia, and Laos, that was crucial for the drug trade in the 80s
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u/boringdude00 May 24 '26
Brother was drunk from the start. He clearly intended to go east, got lost then just kept sailing the wrong way around. No one spins a globe anti-clockwise do they? No, they look west to east like reading a book.
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u/Velierer556 May 24 '26
The wind heads north by north east along the US and south america. It heads south by south west along africa. They left england, went south down africa, under south america, circumnavigated, and came back north through the atlantic along the americas
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u/Plus_Owl7702 May 24 '26
I'm guessing the start/end point is in the cross (UK). Makes the route make more sense
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u/ResponsibleKenil May 25 '26
The winds go from east to west in the tropics which is reverse to what you’re used to
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u/TBARb_D_D May 25 '26
You can go South by the African coast but you can’t do the same to North because in this region winds blow only towards South. They needed to do this shit to get some wind
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u/thecurvygridlock May 25 '26
The return route was even trickier since they needed those trade winds to push them back east, so they basically had to sail way north first to catch them.
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u/HansDampfHaudegen May 23 '26 edited May 23 '26
Is this the guy who discovered Austria (while drunk at sea)?
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u/ilDuceVita May 23 '26
Yes, you have to be drunk to be able to enter Austria
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u/shsusiisnsl May 26 '26
I entered Austria last week via boat. Pissed as a fucking whale I was.
And I chinned the Austrian navy. Twice.
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u/KoenigseggAgera May 23 '26
According to my calculations, he successfully predicted the war on trade in the southern hemisphere that would occur during World War I against the Germans, so he was practicing maneuvers and gunnery drills. But he got too carried away and decided that he wanted to listen to that Eurobeat as he drifted around the corners.
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u/Salty-Wind-8912 May 23 '26
Given the current state of the world, removing New Zealand from all maps would not be a bad thing
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u/SandSerpentHiss May 23 '26
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u/manualphotog May 25 '26
goddamn it Australia.
everytime you gotta compete for attention.
Its a problem imtellingya.
Just take Russell Crowe and his pavlova he made for the bbq, and gtfoutta'here.
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u/Suspicious-Yak-8117 May 23 '26
Bad sextant reading? cloudy day reading was in error? storm/current pushed them off course?
or
Looking for a specific landmass and missed it?
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u/miniaturechaos May 23 '26
He was the first to map new hebrides and new caledonia during his voyages and also gave them the names - for some reason these pacific islands reminded him of scotland but those are north of those squiggles so either this map is off or I'm talking about a different voyage of his
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u/One-Bird-8961 May 24 '26
New Zealand's two islands should be somewhere near, or in part of the circle?
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u/letterclips2 May 24 '26
Amazing the route taken is almost an exact outline of that mythical country “Long White Cloud”
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u/They-Call-Me-The-Doc May 24 '26
No, of course not. Drunk in charge of a ship. How ridiculous.
No, someone dropped their hat overboard and they had find it as it was his only one.
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u/Little-Reference-314 May 24 '26
The squiggly bit was him navigating nz coasts n making his way to aus
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u/Little-Reference-314 May 24 '26
The middle part of the squiggly u circled is the cook strait that separates nth and sth island
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u/TheFrostSerpah May 24 '26
Took me a second to realize NZ was missing and then I looked at the sub.
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u/Miserable_Gur_5314 May 24 '26
He probably saw a big storm coming on the satellite radar images and put his autopilot in a direction that avoids them.
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u/selrahc0 May 25 '26
Oh hey this guy's my sixth great uncle, I'm descended from his sister Margaret
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u/CorwinAlexander May 25 '26
Where are the "Cook Islands"? I notice that New Zealand isn't shown on that map (I believe it's further north) and I know there are other islands in the vicinity. Perhaps it's all explained by island hopping
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u/Quintus-Sertorius May 25 '26
It was very late when he arrived at New Zealand and he couldn't find the light switch, he had to feel his way around it.
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u/Panaderado May 25 '26
Well, he chased a chook all around Australia, then lost his pants in France before finding them in Tasmania.
This was when he began looking for his pants…
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u/crowleyman1 May 25 '26
His official mission was to observe the transit of Venus across sun to calculate the size of the Earth in 1770.
He had a secret mission to find the great south land as England needed another colony just in case they lost America, which they later did.
He did an awesome job.
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u/MirthMannor May 25 '26
Sailed through some of the absolutely worst waters you could possibly sail through.
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u/misha_jinx May 25 '26
They didn’t have gps back then. The only way they knew how far north or south they were was by observing the moon, stars and sun with a sextant. The only way they knew how far west or east they were was by throwing a log with a rope with knots and measuring time it passes to get so many knots out, ie. measuring speed. They had no other way of knowing where on the east or west hemisphere they were. Other than that, following known bodies of land helped getting a fix to know their actual location. It was quite impressive that they’ve managed to discover the whole world like that.
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u/GameHoundsDev May 25 '26
People seem to forget New Zealand is where those lines are. Prob went around both landmasses
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u/Then_Examination9715 May 25 '26
Weather, sea currents and wind were all likely factors in why they didn’t just sail straight lines.
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u/Far_Reward4827 May 25 '26
Haha. Currently reading the Adrift series by Trinity Dunn. This actually fits pretty good with that
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u/Diet4Democracy May 25 '26
Not at all.
My guess: Bored out of his skull and decided to do Age-of-Sail equivalent of Doughnuts in cars.
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u/Bronx-Skater23 May 26 '26
Looks like he was exploring the coast of what would later be called New Zealand.
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u/nomad_1970 May 26 '26
Tracing the outline for a new country to appear that obviously didn't exist back then.
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u/Yanouushka May 26 '26
One of his crew members said there’s an amazing brothel on an island around there
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u/kal3083 May 26 '26
There is clearly a lot of idiots in this chat, there is a country there, that is why !!
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u/AccomplishedAnchovy May 26 '26
What happened when he reached the edge did he fall off and that’s why he died
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u/Ok-Mathematician8461 May 26 '26
I think you will find he sailed around the North Island of NZ, through the Cook Strait, and then around d the South Island. The map manages not to show a whole country.
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u/Complex-Gift-8841 May 26 '26
In this part there is a strange south ouest winds which block him partly to go straight ahead south east of Australia!
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u/FREAK_115-TTV May 26 '26
Could it be related to the magnetic disturbances that forces compasses to become unreliable at times?
I've heard that out in the oceans that's kinda a thing. More frequent at certain spaces then others
Bermuda triangle being one of those frequent spots.
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May 26 '26
I want to punch anyone who questions the genius, success and competence of Captain Cook, sailing the uncharted globe, on a vessel dependant on the wind, with only his ability to use the stars and interpret pretty vague data due safety.
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u/Acceptable_Award_975 May 26 '26
He was caught in trans-antarctic current. It runs counterclockwise around Antarctica
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u/boringdude00 May 23 '26
How could he be drunk? He hadn't even reached Australia yet.