"Columbus had wrested from the windswept Atlantic the great secret that its wind patterns form a tremendous circle . ... " sailing to the north and west, against head winds, from the Guinea coast of Africa, could have fallen off or been driven off to the westward far enough to fetch one of the islands in the Lesser Antilles chain which Columbus was to land on. Columbus went on to voyage to Guinea, where the Portuguese had established a major fortified post for their growing African trade, so he experienced the Guinea tack through the North East Trades. And he learned the trade in gold and slaves. These trades had existed long before the Portuguese came on the scene, with slavery flourishing as a black-on-black phenomenon. It was also a white-on-white phenomenon, with the Genoese dealing in Russian slaves captured or bought in their Black Sea trips to the south shore of Russia. The Portuguese incursion-not by armed invasion, but in mainly peaceful trade with the local African kingdoms-undoubtedly provided a powerful economic stimulus to the existing traffic in slaves. That traffic was to reach unparalleled volume in coming centuries as African slave labor was shipped first to the Caribbean islands, and later the American mainland, via the infamous "Middle Passage," in hideously overcrowded slave ships, under conditions of unspeakable brutality. Lighting the pathways of the Dark Ocean turned out, like most human achievements, to bring its own dark shadows in its train. Columbus's Achievement Challenges Us Today Columbus had been dreaming of the westward passage to the Far East, and in 1484 he presented his scheme to the able but ruthless King John II of Portugal. The court recorder noted him as Genoese-and that his scheme was fantastic. The Portuguese had sponsored at least seven voyages (that we know of) to the westward in the past. These had quite logically made their departure from the westernmost Azores, giving them a thousand-mile start on the crossing. None had succeeded in reaching the far shore, and at least one had gone missing altogether. Ships of the day were simply not up to driving dead to windward against prevailing west winds, which pretty frequently, even in summer, rose to gale ferocity. It was another century or two before ships began making that straight westward passage on a regular basis, and it will not have escaped the attentive reader that in this century, sailing the tough ocean-racing yawl Bloodhound, we went south by Columbus's Trade Wind route rather than bash our way westward through spring gales to our destination, New York. The point, which many historians seem to miss, is that Columbus, by immersing himself in all the available literature and in the Atlantic sea trades of the time, had wrested from the windswept Atlantic the great secret that its wind patterns form a tremendous circle, with northeast and easterly winds in the Trades above the equator, and then southerly and southwesterly winds up along the North American coast, followed by the shouting westerlies that give a fair wind to Europe from New England ports, with an erratic back-eddy in the far north, where the Vikings found seasonal winds that served their long ocean hops from Norway to Iceland and on to Greenland and North America. There is no doubt that Columbus found this pattern, and when in 1485 he quit Portugal to seek the sponsorship of Ferdinand of Aragon and Isabella of Castile, which he secured after an epic campaign of seven years , this was greatly to his benefit since it gave him the Canary Islands as his jumping-off point, on the northern fringe of the Northeast Trades. On the return passage from the islands he'd explored, the SEA HISTORY 78, SUMMER 1996
southern Bahamas and north coasts of Cuba and Haiti, he headed mostly north, making what easting he could, until he saw that the Pole Star was at the height it was at Cape St. Vincent, as he noted in his journal.Then, catching a westerly slant of wind, he bore off to the east. Driving before a savage succession of gales, he put in at Lisbon, where he refitted, after carefully going to pay his respects to King John. The fleet had lost its flagship Santa Maria on the north coast of Haiti, so it was in the Nina alone that Columbus returned to his original departure point in Palos, in southern Spain. The Pinta, which came in soon after, had parted company in the stormy return passage. Recognition of the importance of the voyage was almost instantaneous and universal, sped by the working of Europe's recently invented printing presses. But no recognition could have meant more to Columbus than his sovereigns ' , who summoned him to court to report on his voyage, saluting him by the title he had now surely earned, "Admiral of the Ocean Sea." Columbus's next three voyages brought heavy disappointments to him and his sponsors. The visionary and gifted navigator proved to be a poor administrator of the islands he was now to rule as governor; his problems were greatly magnified because he was recognizably Genoese, attempting to rule ambitious young Spanish gentry and landless nobility eager to make their names and fortunes in the New World. Slavery and the abuse of native peoples darkened the record, while European diseases killed off whole villages and demoralized the native survivors who felt their gods had turned against them. The whole burdensome story of European colonialism in the Americas was well underway before Columbus quit sailing. Columbus played his role in these evils, but he did not regard native Americans as no better than beasts. He made prized friendships among them, and when he found on his second voyage that the men he'd left behind to found a city had all been killed by the Indians, he listened to the Indian version of what had happened, and believed it. No Indian was punished for this killing, which Columbus understood the colonists had brought upon themselves by rape and looting. He retired a wealthy man, but disappointed thathe had been superseded as governor of the Indies (the West Indies, as they were soon called) and that he had not reached his goal, the East Indies, which had been reached by sea in the meantime by the Portuguese. Querulously he insisted that the true Indies were just around the corner. His admiring son and biographer Fernando shared his father ' s awe at Seneca's centuries-old prophecy, "An age will come after many years when the Ocean will loose the chains of things, and a huge land lie revealed .... " To this passage he added his own marginal comment: "This prophecy was fulfilled by my father the Admiral, in the year 1492."
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In the age we are now living in, rather than work off our disappointments in the progress of humanity by denigrating the achievement of Columbus in opening the ocean gateway to the world, we might think a little more of what we have made of that great opportunity formankind which came with the loosening of the Ocean's chains-and what we ourselves are doing about that opportu.t nity in our own time.