When you then study history you find out that they had to leave their islands because they had simply burnt out all the timbers for cooking fuel including the building materials for cooking fuel

They had no choice but to go to sea

As the Long termers say
If you throw a bottle in the ocean it could circum-navigate the Earth and this is probably true

What is not known is
"How many lives were lost "Island hopping"

What I mean is
If one can turn $10,000 into $100,000 in a year
How many $10,000 year losses do we need to budget for?