REDISCOVERING COLUMBUS IV: Romping Across the Atlantic way across the trackless ocean. He had compasses aboard , of course, and paid carefu l attention to the courses steered, re proving the crew several ti mes (by his own account) on the firs t days out because the he lm smen, under direction of the sail ing master, kept letting the ship ramp up to the north of the due west course he'd set. It was all too easy to let the ship run up thi s way in quartering wind and sea, but Columbus rightl y fought to keep the course steered as close as possible to what he' d laid outfor he had only the crudest means of determining his latitude, perhaps onl y by "eyeball ing" the height of the Pole Star above the horizon at night, or the sun at noon. Further on in the voyage, his two attempts to get the he ight of the Pole Star by observation through an astrolabe were disastrous fl ops, putting him at about the latitude of the future Boston rather than the Bahamas which lay across his path . The astro labe was vi rtuall y impossible to use fro m the heaving decks of a ship under way at sea. Mori son fee ls that Columbus' s only notion of where he was deri ved fro m the compass course steered, with hi s estimate of how far along the course he'd come each day. Thi s is the bas ic, traditional way of keeping track of where you are at sea, called "dead reckoning" by Engli sh-speaking sailors. The nav igator and Columbus scholar Robert Fuson differs with Morison. He be lieves Columbus had some way of determining his latitude approx imately-and I agree. It' s simpl y too much to believe he could find hi s way back home or for that matter out to the Americas again to pick up where he left off, without thi s knowledge. The Polynes ians in the wide Pacific watched fo r a star ri sing or dipping beneath the horizon to get on the latitude of the island they were headed fo r. And closer to home the Norse nav igator for hundreds of years had fo und hi s way back to home port along the long north-south coast of Scandinav ia by holding up a notched stick and sailing north or south until the Pole Star or the sun at noon (at a specified season) matched the notch on his stick. Then he had only to run east along that latitude to arri ve home from the reaches of the Western Ocean. Columbus believed he was sailing through a sea pretty thickl y sown with islands. He knew the Azores, Made ira and the Canaries-and Martin Bahaim 's globe showed to the westward beyond this the mythical St. Brendan 's Island (I am calling the island mythical here, not the saint who lived around SOOAD). Brendan 's Island wandered up and down the broad Atl antic reaches until finally removed fro m Briti sh Admiralty charts in the mid- l 800s. And there was Antill ia, equally mythical, though not of such ancient origin, where seven Portuguese bishops were said to have fl ed from the invading Moors about 700 AD. People were quite sure of the shape of Antillia, as it was copied from map to map. Martin Alonso Pinzon actually wanted to turn aside to the northward to land on one of these islands. Columbus said no, he wanted to get on to Cipangu, the last great island in the ocean sea before Cathay, or China. Cipangu, our modern Japan , had a real ex istence of course. The western Pac ific is indeed crowded with big islands-Japan, Okinawa, the Phil ippines, Borneo, the Celebes, New Guinea, etc., etc.,-as Columbus knew from reading Marco Polo ' s account of his res idence in China with the Grand Khan . But everyone (not just Columbus, as is too often said) vastl y underestimated the extent of the Pacific, and there seems to have been no inkling 18
in the European mind of the Americas, " islands" big enough to be cl assed as continents--or as a new world . Columbus himself fin all y understood he had come upon "another world" when he saw a branch of the mighty Orinoco Ri ver pouring eno ugh water out of the heart of the mainland mass of South America to make a freshwater lake of the Gulf of Paria, behind Trididad, through which hi s ships were sailing, on an occasion years after thi s first voyage. The fac t that the Americas first offered to the European ex plorers a fringe of island s not unlike the islands of the China seas confirmed the oceanic picture Columbus had in hi s head. Thi s was the same picture, it might be added, that prac ticall y every educated person had in hi s or her head; most learned persons and others thought the ocean wider than Columbu s did , but all gross ly underestimated the di stance to China through the prevalent exaggeration of the size of the Asian land mass-so that China was thought to be not much beyond where the Americas actually are. So what Columbus first thought was the East Indies became settled in hi s mind as the West Indies, in other words the fringe of the Indies you reached by go ing west across the Atlantic. Antil lia, which had such a strong grip on people's minds, came down to earth as the Antilles, the name given the island chain Columbus explored. And the name St. Brendan was fin ally ass igned to a rock in Nova Scoti a. You reall y have to get a picture of thi s coag ulation of dream and fa ntasy into the geographical realities as they came to light in the European mind, if you want to give Columbu s a fa ir shake as a navi gator and explorer. The pi cture of a gold-crazed boob bumbling about the ocean and bumping into islands by mistake doesn ' t bear any relation to reality at all. Well ,if we've cleared the decks a bit, it' s back to sea with our imperfect but dedicated nav igator. He knew what he was doing, sailing west. Robert Fuson reconstructs an entry in Columbus's Diario upon hi s arrival in the Canaries, which he chose as a jumping-off point to catch the prevailing fair winds, as follow s: "These winds blow steadil y from the east or NE eve ry day of the year,... We will return from the Indies with the westerly winds, which I have o bserved firsthand in the winter along the coast of Portugal and Galicia. When I sailed to England with the Portuguese some years ago, I learned that the westerlies blow year-round in the higher latitudes and are as dependable as the easterlies, but in the opposite direction ." Here we have a clear statement of the wind system that was to determine the patterns of the North Atlantic crossings under sail for centuries to come. The standard abstract of the Diario by Las Casas, the nearest thing to the original, does not include the very interesting reference to the westerlies that blow in the more northerly latitudes. Fuson added that from a comment by Columbus recorded by his son Ferdinand in his biography of his father. The westerly winds do prevail to the north, of course; that's why the Portuguese expeditions sent out from the latitude of the Azores had been beaten back without finding anything. But as Atlantic sailors know well , the westerlies, though strong and prevalent, are nowhere near as steady as the Northeast Trades. As one who has spent a dark, wet day hove to in midAtl antic facing a full gale how ling and spitting out of the east, spang in the middle of the westerlies belt, I can attest to thi s! SEA HISTORY 56, WINTER 1990