A ship from 1450 survives! The 3 1/i - f oot Matar6 ship, built to hang in a church , includes complete interior framing built by a skilled shipwright. Carpaccio painted more developed threemasted ships (like the Santa Maria but a bit bigger) in 1495. Drawn from life , these ships show lively lines and strong cargocarrying and seakeeping abilities. They are the naos that bind Europe together by sea, and their successors will bind Europe to the Americas and the Far East in coming decades.
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sailing ships before, which moved with billowing sails, traveling with the wind as the clouds did. From the outset it 's clear that they both feared these intruders from another world and wanted to know more about them. They called their island Guanahani, for the iguana, a creature now extinct in the islands. Columbus christened the island San Salvador, or "Holy Savior," for the Christ in whose service he sailed. What Sort of Man, What Kind of Voyage? Despite abundant testimony from court scribes, historians of the day, and men who sailed with him, including an affectionate biography by his son Fernando, there seem to be continuing confusions about just what sort of person Columbus was. Who, then, was this proud, mission-driven man who by the fact of his discovery assumed-as duly contracted with his sovereigns-the proudly unique title "Admiral of the Ocean Sea"? From the day of his landing on that small island in the Bahamas, some 300 miles east of the tip of Florida, with a company of people which included a Hebrew scholar (who was expected, somehow, to serve as translator in dealing with the Chinese), the history of all native peoples in the Americas was changed, as was the history of the Europeans and indeed the worldwide community of mankind. The importance of the voyage is not obscured by the generally recognized fact that someone, if not Columbus, was bound to come on the Americas in this era of European expansion. It 's true that contact had been made in the far north 500 years earlier, and while that Viking effort faded away, other efforts were opening up the African coast and the island clusters of the Atlantic. But it took an extraordinary effort for the Europeans to break out into the Dark Ocean-as the Atlantic had been known-against the dominating west winds which all too frequently, even in the comparatively mild summer seasons, turned into raging gales that tried ships and men to their limit. And it took an extraordinary person to lead that effort successfully, where, as the record shows, able captains before him had failed. No, Columbus did not become the first to master the wild ocean by accident. Looking at the record, we would conclude ratherthat it was by the man 's hard-earned seafaring skills, his assiduous pursuit of knowledge, and, above all, his overarching sense of mission that he became the discoverer of the Americas. He would say, I believe, it was his destiny. However you want to look at it, you need to scrape away encrusted layers of non-fact to get at the true metal of Columbus's achievement. Consider The New Yark Times reminding us all, in a Thanksgiving editorial on turkeys in 1992 (soon after the October anniversary of Columbus 's landing in the Americas), that Columbus did not know where he was when he stumbled on America. And, the editorialist added, he hadn ' t a clue where Turkey was either! The Times was kind enough to publish a letter I wrote them to correct these egregious misstatements. But Columbus as explorer should need no defense. As no other person of his time, he had achieved a full and wellfounded picture of the Atlantic world. By the time of his SEA HISTORY 78, SUMMER 1996
voyage of 1492 he had come to know all the principal sea routes of awakening Europe-beginning with the Genoese traffic to their outpost in the island of Chios, which the conquering Ottomans had left open in the midst of their new empire of Turkey (ahem!) to encourage that valuable Italian connection. And on his third voyage to the Americas, toward the end of his seaborne career, Columbus announced that he had discovered "Another World," in the shape of a great new continent-the continent we call South America. He knew very well where it was, and what it was. That he also thought that the Caribbean islands were part of Japan, and that China lay somewhere just around the comer, was not because he was a geographic illiterate. His world picture corresponds closely with Martin Behaim ' s famous globe of 1492, which showed only one big, island-speckled ocean separating Europe from Asia, an ocean about as wide as the Atlantic. Behaim 's map embodied the best thinking of the time, with the world shown somewhat smaller than we now know it to be, and the extent of Asia vastly exaggerated. No one that we know of in the West had been to easternmost Asia by sea. The famous Venetian traveler Marco Polo, like traveling missionaries before his time, had crossed Asia by circuitous land routes which made impossible any accurate idea of the distance traversed, and the path of his return from China, part of the way by sea, did nothing to improve his picture. The all-too-fashionable case for Columbus's geographic boobery rests solely on his adopting the prevailing literate geographer's picture of the ocean world-a picture he departed from only to announce the real, and totally unsuspected, presence of the great continent of South America. Looking at world maps of the day does more to make all this clear than reams of paper argument. The prevailing picture in these contemporary maps continues to show China's Gobi Desert right next to Greenland, even after additional voyages besides Columbus 's four American voyages had been made, and indeed after his own earthly voyage ended in 1506. But 9