How to hinder the development of sea travel until the industrial age?

Question

Instead of Earth as we know it, humans evolved on a slightly smaller, habitable earthlike planet with different geography. Due to the plot reasons, I would like to keep them confined to one (large) continent with no seafaring until they achieve late-19th century tech level, delaying the age of discovery (this world contains other significant lands, but they should not be discovered by mankind too early).

But how can I achieve this? I was thinking mostly about the geographical reasons so far, and came up with following:

• the sole inhabited continent should be remote from all others (pretty obvious)
• strong currents along coast making seafaring in small boats dangerous (and without mastering the small boats, large ships will not be developed)
• the coastline should be relatively simple, with no peninsulas and significant islands - pretty much like Africa in our world
• ideally, the coastline should be a barren wasteland with no trees and Atacama-like deserts, so humans will have little incentive to live there and experiment with boats (and no building material for boats in the first place)
• no big lakes to experiment with boats inland
• fertile lands, where human civilization developed, should be locked deep in the continent's interior, ideally separated from the coast by mountain ranges and deserts

Is it believable, that such conditions may prevent humans from becoming sailors and expanding to other continents? What else can I do?

Answer 1

Shipworms

Your planet has a very effective species similar to Teredo. They destroy any wooden hulls in a few days or weeks. You can adjust the description of the species to prevent ocean travel but not river/lake travel by making it a saltwater species.

• An iron or steel hull would be immune.
• If there is river travel, you have to explain why simple coppering is not effective.
  • The worms are tiny and get into cracks?
  • The worms can live out of the water for a short period and climb up the hull?

Answer 2

Release the Kraken

I believe this is self explanatory.

To add some variety, look at the Carta Marina, a map of the nordic lands from 1519. It contains a plethora of other sea monsters, such as these:

Because medieval waters were to sailors what current day Australia is to land dwellers.

Answer 3

I do not think you can prevent boat use on rivers and lakes. People will see broken trees floating on them, then tie them into rafts, then start shaping them.

You can limit coastal boating with severe seas (Iceland comes to mind). Or make water much more salty, making sea-food inedible.

Also based on Iceland, minimize or eliminate tall trees. Just have plains, marshes, moorland. No trees = no big boats. They can still make rafts from bundles of grass, but they fall apart in rough seas.

Make other continents small and locate them far from main continent. And have winds and currents that make it hard to reach them. So reaching other lands in sail ships is very hard, and finding them is harder, and getting back is nearly impossible. Since nobody ever returned with news of other lands, people just assume that there is nothing to explore.

Also make travel within the main continent easier. RL exploration started as an easier way to get to India (which was known, but hard to reach by land). SO: Lots of long wide rivers, few mountain ranges or deserts. You could also have internal seas or lakes, but that encourages big boats.

Answer 4

There are no trees suitable for shipbuilding

Wood was pretty much the only game in town for seafaring until metal ships became practical. Without proper wood, there would be no sea travel until about the industrial age.

This of course can cause problems in other areas where wood was crucial, but for most things there are suitable alternatives: buildings would be mostly earthen/stone/thatch, abundant coal could provide easy fuel, etc.

Answer 5

on a planet with a large nearby moon, tidal forces would be immense.

in such a situation, or perhaps a climate heating scenario inducing similar instability, hurricanes would be frequent, even constant, rendering coastal living unsustainable. as a result, the populace lives inland, away from the worst of the storms.

in such an environment, reliable sea-travel might have to be submarine, which would require a great deal of industrial/technical development before being developed.

seamanship could still be developed in inland lakes. a continent without water-shed in the form of rivers & lakes makes no sense.

Answer 6

There are two challenges posed by your question.

Early migration

The first relates to early human migration. Of course, we know that the European "age of discovery" involved very little discovery and that actually most places "discovered" by Europeans between the 15th to 19th centuries were already inhabited by homo sap communities. Therefore, you need to think about what stopped humans from spreading out across your world in its prehistory. Isolation of your inhabited continent won't do it: Polynesians and Melanesians used small outrigger canoes to settle islands thousands of kilometres apart, thousands of years ago.

Rather than looking for environmental or geographic reasons to impede seafaring, why don't you establish a culture that is, for some reason, historically averse to travelling over water, or exploration, and then an event in recent history which changes that?

Preconditions for industrial revolution

The second challenge relates to the implications for industrialisation if you remove seafaring. I am referring here to to mercantile capitalism and the global networks of exchange that emerged as European powers started to develop technologies such as square-rigging and establish themselves overseas; seizing new natural resources, exploiting new labour forces, creating new markets, etc.

The fundamental problem is whether the industrial revolution would even have been possible without this prior stage, and I would argue that it would not have.

Look at China, the empire of a thousand year dynasties that has more often than not been ahead of the pack throughout history. The Haijin policy of maritime isolationism following Admiral Zheng He's expedition to Africa in the Ming Dynasty inhibited China's participation in mercantile capitalism - and therefore the institutional (in terms of property rights, etc) and technological developments that laid the foundations for industrial revolution. Result is that China has only recently "caught up" with the countries that had their industrial revolutions earlier.

Think also of cotton, the driver of the industrial revolution across Europe. Cotton's story is inherently one of mercantile, globe-straddling war capitalism: labour ripped from West and Central Africa, transported across the ocean to the Americas to work as slaves growing high-quality cotton on fertile grounds seized by Europeans from native populations, all in order to undercut Indian growers, spinners and weavers and ensure the domination of merchants in London and Antwerp, and mills in Liverpool and Alsace-Lorraine.

The golden age of cotton was borne of seafaring, a triangular trade: finished cotton goods from English mills to African traders for slaves, slaves sold to the Americas where ships loaded raw cotton that was then transported to European centres of cotton production. Without seafaring, would the mechanised mills that powered the industrial revolution have come to pass?

I think this is a harder challenge to meet. To create a realistic, early-industrial world absent seafaring will require you to generate a material, political and technological history that meets the conditions of Earth's mercantile period but unfolds across one continent only.

Answer 7

If in doubt always go with Religion to explain reasons for the impossible.

Early Civilisation - Death by drowning sends your soul to hell or some other bad place and no one wants that or to even risk it.

Later Civilisation - Religion from Early Civilisation is cast down - someone learns mouth to mouth resuscitation.

Answer 8

Radioactive oceans

For some reason, your oceans are full of radioactive isotopes. No one can survive a sea voyage for very long, and people avoid the coast in general.

In the equivalent of the 1800s, experiments with sea water lead to useful shielding techniques, boats with no direct sailor exposure to the sea, and medical treatments (Iodine, etc).

Maybe the coasts have hundreds of kilometres of slightly radioactive marshes instead of deserts in some places.

Answer 9

Assuming that most of the population lives in the fertile centre of the continent, travel in the fertile areas is easy, there is next to no food on the coast, fishing is limited due to the currents, the coast is difficult to reach due to mountains, deserts, noxious gas fields, swamps, dense woods, ect. and the coast can't be seen from the fertile areas, I can think of two solutions:

Cultural/Religious fear of the coastline

You could have a cultural fear of coastal living and seafaring. After which an industrial revolution could also be tied with a cultural revolution which opens up the idea of seafaring. As an example lets say long ago a group of people left for the coast to and attempted to live there, they failed. Their failure became legend and what could have in reality been them running out of food in a minor rainstorm would become an apocalyptic flood. Since it is difficult to go to the coast in the first place paired with the now legendary events of the last attempt people would rarely attempt such a voyage to the coastline out of a mix of fear, impracticality and going to the coast being outside of the norm. Industrialization implies transportation improvement which in turn will make it easier to get to the coast and eventually it becomes practical to travel or live in coastal areas, the legends become outdated as more and more people are able to travel to and even live near the coastline. From the post industrial point where the legend has little to no weight in peoples lives and it is relatively easy in the first place to live on the coast, coastal life would likely resemble what it is like IOW.

What's there to do on the coastline (Logistical lack of settlement)

This is the most simple, it seems right now that it is very hard to get to the coast due say there was also highly limited food on the coast (few to no edible plans, sub par soil, fishing is too difficult due to the currents), to the point of any coastal settlement would be entirely dependent on the internal fertile area for food and basic goods to survive. In this scenario there is no real way of living near the coast itself, it becomes likely that people simply won't spend much time there. If there are no long term settlements then no maritime industries will develop, thus no real ability to make or launch ships capable of trans-continental travel. After industrialization settlements can be properly supplied due to advances in transportation technology. Since there are coastal settlements it becomes possible to have maritime industries, starting with coastal boats and eventually building ships capable of trans continental travel.

Long story short: It is still possible to live on the coast but is a very challenging life thus people tend to avoid it and those that do not are too busy surviving to attempt trans-continental travel.

Answer 10

MAKE THE SUN SLIGHTLY SMALLER

Assuming this earthlike habitable planet is slightly smaller than Earth, let's also assume the Sun may be smaller too, and according to this Tidal locking of habitable exoplanets paper, let's assume this smaller Earth is now tidally locked to this smaller Sun.

Also assume terrestrial life on this tidally locked planet is not located at the permanent terminator or twilight zone, but rather is it gathered at the only hot enough place, under the zenithal cap, on a massive single continental mass concentration born from some earlier planetary formation's major impact.

Most of this tidally locked Earth is covered by an ocean of ice, with a circular ice wall that circles the habitable landmass. The shore is a desertic frozen steppe, its vegetation gradually growing along temperature and sunlight.

Driven by convective forces, strong constant cold winds come from the ocean towards land, and raise to turn back at high altitude, building a constant donut shaped local wind pattern, happily disturbed by libration of the planet, helping life shaking and emulation, chemical soup mixtures, aerial transport.

Exploring against the wind towards this frozen ocean followed by a perpetual darkness is hard and may require fossil energy.

Answer 11

Doldrums

On your world, the ocean winds are too weak for anyone to develop sailing ships in the first place. (Maybe the open ocean does have sufficient winds, but they don't start until 20-50 miles from shore, so nobody even knows about them.)

As a result, ocean exploration doesn't become a thing until industrialization, and steam-powered engines, come along.

I don't know enough about geophysics to come up with a plausible reason for the lack of ocean winds. (My first thought was that perhaps there's no moon, but it sounds like that would make the weather worse.) But you could probably handwave it by saying it's something about the shape of the ocean floor and what that does to the major ocean currents.