List of crossings of the Atlantic Ocean

Add the first crossing of the Atlantic Ocean on a raft. Henri Beaudout and his crew of four did this in 1956, See Wikipedia entry on L'Egare ll.

L'Égaré II

This is a list of notable crossings of the Atlantic Ocean.

Post-1492 crossings

15th to 18th centuries

* In May 1497, Italian explorer John Cabot set sail from Bristol, England, in service of King Henry VII, arriving in what is believed to be Newfoundland, Labrador or Cape Breton, Canada in June of that year. Believing it to be Asia, he surveyed the coastline before sailing back to England. He made a second voyage the year after but never returned.
* In April 1563, Nicolas Barre and 20 other stranded Huguenots were the first to build a (crude) boat in the Americas and sail across the Atlantic. They sailed from Charlesfort, South Carolina to just off the coast of England where they were rescued by an English ship. Though they resorted to cannibalism, seven men survived the voyage, including Barre.
* English soldier and courtier Sir Humphrey Gilbert sailed across the Atlantic in 1583, landing in what is now St. John's, Canada and claiming the land for England. His ship sank somewhere off the Azores during the return voyage and he drowned.
* On 16 September 1620 (New Style), the sailing ship Mayflower, carrying English and Dutch Pilgrims onboard, set sail from England to North America, reaching New England on 21 November (New Style) the same year.

19th century

* In 1870, the small ''City of Ragusa'' of Liverpool became the first small lifeboat to cross the Atlantic from Queenstown, County Cork to Boston with two crew, John Charles Buckley and Nikola Primorac (di Costa).

20th century

* On 15 April 1912 the RMS ''Titanic'' sank after hitting an iceberg with a loss of more than 1,500 lives.
* 1939–1945, during World War II, the Battle of the Atlantic resulted in nearly 3,700 ships sunk and 783 U-boats destroyed.
* In 1952, Ann Davison was the first woman to single-handedly sail the Atlantic Ocean.
* In 1965, Robert Manry crossed the Atlantic from the U.S. to England non-stop in a sailboat named ''Tinkerbelle''. Several others also crossed the Atlantic in very small sailboats in the 1960s, none of them non-stop, though.
* In 1969 and 1970 Thor Heyerdahl launched expeditions to cross the Atlantic in boats built from papyrus. He succeeded in crossing the Atlantic from Morocco to Barbados after a two-month voyage of 6,100 km with ''Ra II'' in 1970, thus conclusively proving that boats such as the Ra could have sailed with the Canary Current across the Atlantic in prehistoric times.
* In 1984, five Argentines sail in a 10-meter-long raft made from tree trunks named ''Atlantis'' from Canary Islands and after 52 days journey arrived to Venezuela in an attempt to prove travellers from Africa may have crossed the Atlantic before Christopher Columbus.
* In 1985, Freeport, New York based boatbuilder and marina owner, Al Grovers, Sr., began a voyage which set the Guinness World Record for the first outboard crossing of the Atlantic.

21st century

* In August 2019, the Swedish climate activist Greta Thunberg, her father and three crew members made a crossing of the Atlantic from Plymouth to New York in 15 days onboard the Malizia II. The voyage generated all of its power during the crossing using solar power and an under-water turbine.

See also

* História trágico-marítima
* Portuguese India Armadas

References

{{Reflist

History of the Atlantic Ocean
Transatlantic relations
Transport in the Atlantic Ocean