Romping Across the Unknown Atlantic With this great change accomplished, and the Pinta' s injuri es made good , the fleet sai led on to Gomera, where Columbus at last met Dofia Beatri z. Re liable report has it that a strong attraction was felt between these two imperious people. But now the fa ir winds ca ll ed and the mariners had to be off. There had not been one desertion among them, a remarkable record for Jack shore in such idyllic surroundings . Before daybreak on September 6, Columbus heard mass at the Church of the Assumption and went aboard hi s ship. Anchors were weighed, we may ass ume, with the usual song and ribaldry, and the fl eet set sail.
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The first days out were difficult and uncomfortable, as is so often the case at the start of an ocean passage. First, there was no wind, and the fleet bobbed abo ut in the lee of the Canaries for several days. Then Columbus reported the Santa Maria shipping water forward , in the jumbled sea formed by the ocean currents that sw irl around the underwater mountain range whose tops are the steep, rocky islands. She can't have put her huge bow under-she would be in parlous state indeed to do that!-but perhaps the sea shoved her down forward enough to submerge the lap-straked pl anking that ships of thi s era used to fair the ungainly fo'c'sle structure into the hull proper. Lap-strake (overlapping) planks can ' t be caulked properl y (the pressure of tight caulking merel y forces them apart), so here, perhaps, is where the problem lay. But it was an annoyance, rather than a threatening problem, and Columbus ' s great biographer, Samuel Eliot Morison , feels Columbus got rid of it by stowing cargo further aft to lift the ungainly vessel ' s bow hi gher out of the water. It 's a mi serable spot, downwind of these islands, south and west the way you have to go to pick up the reliable Northeast Trades. One fine day I watched a sunri se there, aboard a 61foot ocean racing yawl, admiring the way the montainous seas heaped up with their occasional snowslides of foam g littering in icy greens and pinks in the making light- until one slid aboard and momentarily overwhelmed the vessel ' s slender hull as she dawdled along in the fitful breeze that was blowing. The doghouse hatch was open , so the owner' s wife, sleeping below in the after cabin , jumped out of her bunk into wate r knee-deep over the cabin sole, and bounded up on deck to find my watchmate and me sprawled in ludricrous poses abo ut the deck where the receding flood had left us. Fortunately we were wearing lifelines or we would have been splashing about in the ocean. At three in the morning of Saturday, September 8, Columbus records with ev ident relief, " it began to blow from the northeast." By evening of the next day, Sunday, Columbus records the fleet making 7 1/2 knots-not a bad tum of speed for a modern yacht of similar size under crui sing canvas in these conditions. But Columbus understated hi s day 's run to the crew, "so that the men would not be frightened if the voyage were long. " Throughout the voyage before them, Columbus was to keep up this difference between what he judged to be the actual distance run and what he told the crew. By the end of the voyage, the di screpancy between what he thought he 'd done and what he gave out to his people amo unted to some 9 percent of the total distance. But he was over estimating his days ' runs. The distances he gave out were just about the di s ta n c~s the ships were actually covering. This raises the whole question of how Columbus found hi s SEA HISTORY 56, WINTER 1990
A new Santa Maria ventures out in the broad Atlantic this past summer, on a day like those Atlantic days of which Columbus said, "the savor of the mornings was a great delight. " After his voyage of 1492 , indeed, the Dark Ocean was dark no more. Photo courtesy Spain ' 92 Foundation.
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