I tend to view the long standing bias to be a mix of the usual intellectual inbreeding of professional academia as well as a large dose of “presentism”.
The way I see it, a voyage of the sort under discussion here would be nearly impossible, as well as intolerably uncomfortable for grad students and their professors, therefore it could never have been done by anyone.
Plus, before the wonderful scientific Arab Moslems, no one ever had dared sail out of sight of the land. /s