Indeed this subject has sometimes been heated. You might be aware of The God-kings & Titans by James Bailey. He argues trans-Atlantic commerce in pre-Columbian times including possibly during the Bronze Age.
I contacted Scott Wolter (forensic geologist - ???) - America Unearthed (History Channel) - a few years ago when he documented extensive ancient tin mines in the Great Lakes region to investigate Bailey's claims that there was not enough tin available to the European - Levant - Mesopotamian region and their prolific use of Bronze implements without considering the Great Lakes source.
Wolter seemed more interested in disproving the divinity of Jesus Christ. We may never get a positive answer 'yes' or 'no'.
Of course Bailey's theory is controversial. I tend to think that the validity of his theory is inescapable - but needs much more research to establish any sort of proof.
Scott Wolter is a TV personality who also has some training that is inappropriate for the stuff he purports to do. He thought the lead crosses in NM were ancient, and they aren't. MOre generally, he never cites or even seems to look at, or even be aware of, earlier work on anomalous artifacts done by others. OTOH, he's often entertaining, and he manages to get video of artifacts/inscriptions/fakes that I'd previously only read about. His "templar cross" crap gets on my nerves -- like a lot of fringe authors, he's an example of "when your only tool is a hammer, every problem looks like a nail." :^)
I don't doubt that the oceans and seas have ever been seen as anything but a transportation system and source of food, going back a long, long way. During certain eras (and probably dependent on the climate conditions as well as economic ones) there was probably a considerable amount of seagoing commerce.
It's not as if there's a newspaper morgue for the Roman Empire or ancient Greece, in part because they had no newspapers, and in part because of the fragmentary nature of whatever documentation there was. Copies of military reports sent to HQ have been found and read from a site along Hadrian's Wall, basically the only such collection. They wrote such things on perishable materials. Even surviving ancient histories are generally incomplete (or almost completely lost).
The Romans occupied the Danish peninsula and apparently bottled up shipping to and from the Baltic -- a Roman cemetery was found during a rescue dig in Copenhagen around ten years ago. The fiction of "the battle that stopped Rome" was already invalid, but it really looks foolish now.
The Bay of Jars in Brazil has a deep wreck that is apparently Roman in date. Some nimrod from Italy claimed that he'd salted the bay with amphora, but unless he has a time machine, he'd have had no way to do it early enough to result in the naming of the bay more than 150 years ago. IOW, he may have decided to put a few in there, but the only extensive experience with the wreck was Robert Marx', who noted that most of the jars are in deep water, due to the wreck having broken in two, leaving only part of the former cargo in an area feasible for diving.
That kind of good-sized cargo didn't get there as a one-off -- ancient ships loaded with cargo sank surprisingly rarely, and didn't stray 8-10 thousand miles from home unless there was trade to be had.