Abundant debate surrounds the voyages of Christopher Columbus. Much of it is misdirected to the question of who was first to the new world. Therefore, most people misunderstand the primary accomplishments of the Admiral’s voyages. Without comprehension of what he did, the question of, “Who did it first?” is meaningless. I offer the following bit of corrective sea lore to patch this up.
Necessary Elements
The attached sketch shows the approximate route traveled by Christopher Columbus to reach the Americas and return. It illustrates what he accomplished and the secret to his success. Further, it shows why no previous attempt to establish transoceanic travel had succeeded. A practical sailor can recognize these secrets hidden in plain view on this chart. For those not yet discerning their revelation, allow me to explain.
Great innovations and technological leaps naturally occur when the necessary elements become concurrently available. Dependable Atlantic navigation required the right hulls, sails, and knowledge on how to use wind. At the time, only Christopher Columbus had access to the first two and savvy of how to access the third.
Columbus—with three little deep-bellied, rudder-steered ships carrying bulging canvas sails and a novel idea—departed Spain near Gibraltar and sailed south across the prevailing winds. Riding those winds, his naturally convex cloth sails not only pushed his tiny vessels along, but by virtue of their shape, also provided “lift” in the direction of travel, as if they were wings configured to pull horizontally instead of vertically. Knowledge of such aerodynamics had not yet advanced to the level of a science, but their application was established art.
Exploiting thrust from the sails, the deep keels and rudders of his vessels prevented them from merely skidding directly downwind as would a shallow draft barge no matter in what direction it was pointed. The deep keels and rudders held the ships in fore-to-aft lines of travel, allowing them to be pushed across the wind. This gave considerable freedom in choosing courses.
Westward Progress
Yet, even with all that, the Admiral’s ships could not achieve the significant westward progress required for a trans-Atlantic journey directly from Europe. At those latitudes, westerly winds prevailed. Hopes to establish routes sailing upwind against them were futile.
Legends and sketchy records of such direct northerly route expeditions asserted that Norsemen and other tenacious Europeans had clawed and scratched their way to remote unknown western lands by island hopping under sail and oars past Greenland to Newfoundland. The danger, difficulty, and meager potential rewards of such voyages apparently squelched enthusiasm for follow-on efforts. This challenging gauntlet was again taken up by others, including John Cabot, after Columbus had achieved the Americas, but to little success.
The genius of his voyages lay in the fact that Admiral Columbus simply bypassed all that. Through extensive travels, his sailor’s eye had discerned that the winds down among the Canary Islands off Africa blew consistently from the eastern quadrants, the reverse of winds in European latitudes, and ideal for sailing west. So, rather than initially setting out to struggle his way westward from Europe, he first navigated his little fleet to those islands. Not until he reached the Canaries did he turn aggressively westward. Nobody had previously recognized the potential for riding the conveniently consistent easterly winds from the Canaries to explore the Atlantic. But, under these winds, this little cluster of isles was destined to become a universal navigation point to the New World for centuries.
His success was splendid. The easterly breezes carried his expedition before them all the way to the Caribbean Sea, previously unknown to Europeans. Then, after cruising a few islands and claiming lands for his Spanish sponsors, he conducted the return legs of his journey by sailing northward and catching the well-known prevailing westerlies (e.g. blowing eastward) that he rode home.
Columbus had hit on a magical combination. European-style canvas sails and deep keel-with-rudder technology allowed him to travel neatly across the wind. By sailing south to catch the (as yet unnamed) Trade Winds, and then sailing north to return on the prevailing westerlies, he exploited these technologies to the fullest. Without all those, nobody could expect to establish round-trip routes across the Atlantic. Neither the legendary Vikings nor the ancient African empires were positioned for such a breakthrough. Asian junks or barges with their stiff, flat, bamboo sails, unwieldy hulls, and shallow drafts were hopelessly unfit to make such a leap from anywhere.
The New World
But once Columbus demonstrated how to make the voyage in a manner that was concrete and replicable, many had to have a go at it. The commercial profit potential was practically limitless, and accordingly, the motivation vast.1 Even though adventurous ship’s masters jealously guarded their navigation and piloting “rutter” book details for such voyages, regular transoceanic travel and trade were inevitable.
Yet, our geography, history, and economics teachers—being, as a rule, simple land lubbers—almost universally supposed that Christopher Columbus merely “discovered” America (thereby igniting heated debate ongoing to this day as to whether he was truly “the first”). That debate is moot, for what he gave us was much more important—the means of connecting all lands on this planet by riding dependably predictable winds, particularly the Trade Winds, thereby creating transoceanic travel and trade. Those were what Christopher Columbus actually discovered. He gave us the globe.
1. The voyage was of potentially vast value because the goal was to attain the source of precious spices, the location of which had been a mystery to Europeans for centuries. This source, although European explorers did not know it, was the spice islands of the Indonesian Archipelago. Decades later, European explorers finally located these islands. Until then, Arab traders distributed such treasured spices only at the most lavish prices, withholding the secret of their origin for centuries. Once the spice ports were directly accessed by European traders, the commercial impact was staggering. From their source, these highly coveted spices could be purchased and transported by the ton instead of only by the mere bushel, peck, or pound previously available from middle-man traders. Yet, on arriving in Europe, they could be vended in thousands of small, exquisitely expensive packets. The profit margin was stupendous.