Christopher Columbus Voyages

The days when a ship navigation officer had to use more difficult tools and ways to plan and navigate a voyage at sea are long gone. Today a ship officer has vast amount of marine navigation equipment which makes his life a lot simpler, thanks to the advancement in technology. Modern day sailors are trained to know the functioning and operation of all modern day navigational equipment. Tools used by early popular sea voyages were very complex and required people of very high intelligence to use the devices. I am going to talk about and compare some of the devices. Some of the tools used on Christopher Columbus adventures were the quadrant, sextant, and astrolabe. “These tools were most prominent navigation tools used by Columbus and sailors

At the end of the day, a compass may be roughly 1800 years old but we still use compasses today. If Christopher Columbus had some of of the tech that we had today then his trip would gone a lot faster. Another piece of tech that would have helped Christopher Columbus were boat lights and night lights as a part of the navigation systems. This system was introduced in the year 1838 by the United States and then was followed by the United Kingdom in 1849. In the year 1889, the International Maritime Conference was established by the United States to establish proper guidelines to prevent marine accidents. In the year 1897, these rules were officially adopted internationally. Christopher columbus did not have a VDR or (voyage data recorder). A VDR is a instrument safely installed on a ship to continuously record vital information related to the operation of a vessel. It contains a voice recording system for a period of at least last 12 hours.It would have probably made his trip go a lot faster because Columbus most likely backtracked a bunch and went in circles. With this device it would have recorded where he has been so if it showed that it had been at that location before he would know not to go back there.AIS- “is a system which helps to pinpoint the location and other navigational statistics of ships. “AIS uses VHF radio channels as transmitters and receivers to send and receive messages between ships..” If Columbus had this device he could have sent out a smaller ship to go and report what was out in front of them. He could have also used the device to send out lots of ships and tell them to look for land and then report back to him about what he saw. Also if Christopher columbus had a Marine Radar “which is are usually short range radars that are used by ships to pinpoint locations about other ships and land in the area. The Marine Insights said “The frequencies with which these