Dr. Bret Devereaux

Maybe it's not, but you're pointing a gun at him.

Exactly.

And you'd be like, you know, your ship is now moving troops.

And so you would pull up your merchant marine.

And this is part of why the English, the Dutch, the Portuguese, the Spanish, right, had powerful navies and like France didn't.

Do you have access to a large number of merchant ships that are just hanging around that are doing merchanty stuff in order to move an army?

Even then, the amount of army that you can move over such vast distances might be relatively small.

Listeners who are familiar with their sort of American Revolutionary War might notice that the armies that Britain sends to try and put down the American Revolution are a few thousand here, a few thousand there.

They seem absolutely paltry compared to either the armies you see in something like the Seven Years' War that comes before the revolution in Europe, what the continental powers can deploy there, or, of course, something like the Civil War later, where the armies are an order of magnitude larger.

And, you know, part of this is obviously like the 13 colonies themselves don't have that many people in them yet.

But two, the amount of military force that you can actually project across the Atlantic, which is sort of the distances we should be thinking of, right?

Because Numenor is way on the other side of the sea, is relatively small.

You can't do shuttle runs.

You have to send these guys all at once.

They have to be loaded with enough provisions to make a journey that might last weeks, months.

So you're limited to how many guys you can put on a given ship.

Some of those need to be warships to escort the force.

They're loaded with cannon and sailors to manage the cannon and so on and so forth.

And so your sort of army throughput gets really small, really fast.

And so the Numenoreans seem to have a sense, given that when they arrived, they arrived with an army that is incredibly large and strong.