The trade lanes that recur most across the age of sail — each port's principal routes, activated in the decades that port ranked among the ten busiest, then ranked by staying power.
⚓ Structural, not empirical. The lanes are each port's genuine principal routes; but there is no historical record of ranked top-ten routes per port per decade. A route counts as "active" in a decade when its origin port sits in that decade's combined top ten (ship-count + tonnage + value) and the decade falls inside the lane's era. Max = 27 decades.
#
Route
Cargo
Decades active
Dec.
Span
Compiled for the Idle Sails project · a structural trade-lane synthesis over the per-decade combined top-10 ports · 27 ports · 165 distinct lanes from 1,818 port-decade route entries · data: research/route-persistence.csv & routes-by-decade.csv