Oh, but come on, we're talking hundreds of light-years. The ship would've had to be
near the edge to begin with in order to get blown across it. Again, you're missing the point, which is that if it were that easy for a more primitive ship 200 years earlier to get to the edge, then it doesn't make sense that nobody
else got there before the
Enterprise. The question is not just how the
Valiant got there; the question is,
if they got there so long before, why did nobody else?