this post was submitted on 26 May 2024
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A sunken Roman Galleon was found in the Caribbean.
Gonna need a source for that one.
I can't find anything. The only articles I'm finding are about a Spanish Galleon that had $17bil in gold/silver that sunk off the coast of Colombia. I also find that claim incredibly suspicious as a Roman Galleon wouldn't be able to cross deep water oceans. Mediteranian sea, sure. Suez canal and Red Sea, if the thing had been built, but I'm pretty sure they just carried ships across land to the Red Sea/ Gulf of Suez
There was a book I read in my school's library when I was 8 or so on the Bermuda triangle that claimed (or at least implied?) that a roman ship was sunk there.
Though the book was for children and presumably completely unreliable, I have seen it written before, so maybe that's where they saw it too?
I'm not the one making the claim, but found something that this tall tale might be based on: https://www.grunge.com/756660/the-mysterious-bay-of-jars-explained/
Tldr: Brazilian entrepreneur throws some amphorae into a bay to grow barnacles on them for aesthetic reasons. Disreputable sea treasure hunter finds some of those, makes a flurry of wild claims, gets banned from Brazil for theft of actual antiquities from another wreck and he goes silent when people start asking more questions.
So the closest I came when looking for a source, was 20th century amphorae in a Brazilian bay, nothing about a roman shipwreck in the Carribean. But since the claim was a roman "galleon", a claim for it to be in the Carribean also means little.
Source on that one? That'd be almost a millennium before Norsemen arrived in Greenland, which was a pretty huge journey at that time. Getting to the Caribbean—without coming across via Greenland & Canada, for which there would surely be evidence, would be a much larger step than anything else going on at the time.
Finding a shipwreck doesn't necessarily mean the boat was sailed there, it might have been abandoned and drifted with the currents.
That's how Japanese ships ended up in America as well.
Doesn't make the Caribbean known to the Romans.
How about an attempt at sailing an Egyptian papyrus boat to the americas
https://www.history.com/this-day-in-history/heyerdahl-sails-papyrus-boat