"Admiral of the Ocean Sea"
In 1492, Columbus had no idea where he was going. And then he got there.
Imagine that it’s around three in the morning on September 9, 1492 and that you are on a small wooden ship several hundred miles out at sea on a dark ocean. In your entire world there is no tobacco, bourbon, penicillin, insect repellent, kerosene, rubber or canned food. There is no ice, no radio. Pizza and electricity have not been invented and nobody even knows how to determine longitude. There won’t be any clocks for another 165 years, there is no cook stove or refrigerator onboard and you really have only the vaguest notion of where you’re going.
Imagine that you are Christopher Columbus, standing on the deck of the little ship you have commanded since leaving Grand Canary Island a few days ago. There is no radar, no Coast Guard, the barometer is 152 years in the future and you don’t know that it’s hurricane season in the Atlantic.
However you’re hoping that you get to “the Indies” or maybe China or maybe Japan, all of which are way back behind you to the east. But, wait, you’re headed west, not east. What’s up with this?
Everybody knew the way to get to China or India was by going east. They didn’t call it “the far east” for nothing. Marco Polo went there on foot 221 years before Columbus shipped out. But that was no way to succeed in business.
Ships were the only way to reap the riches of the spice-and-gold rich Orient and the Portuguese were already doing that by sailing all the way around Africa. Columbus was convinced he could find a short cut by going in the other direction.
But before he could command an expedition he would have to convince the Royal Court of Spain that his short cut would actually work. He’d have to show it to be of such great benefit to the Crown that it would be worth the expense of funding it. That was a tall order.
Columbus was poor and Spain needed money. He had exhausted most of what little money he had trudging around Spain trying to put his expedition together. His clothes were shabby but his arguments were persuading. The Queen saw that his plan had promise. She gave him an audience. She also bought him some new clothes.
Despite the nay-saying of various committees opposed to his project and after years and months of petitioning, pleading and presenting, Columbus won over the Queen. Isabella was convinced that if what he said was true, funding his expedition would be a bargain.
And so Columbus and his 90 sailors at last hauled anchor aboard three swift caravelles in the harbor of Palos de la Frontera, Spain and set out southward to load supplies in the Canary Islands. It was August 3, 1492.
At Grand Canary Island they repaired the “Pinta” —- damaged because the crew had staged a spiteful revolt against the expedition three days out. They refused to believe the ships could make it all the way to China, had become fearful and took out their frustration on the ship.
I don’t know the degree to which Columbus understood winds and currents moving across the Atlantic but sailing from the Canaries was fortunate. That assured him of fair winds moving to the west. Had he headed west directly from Spain he would have run smack into winds coursing eastward which, by the way, he took advantage of on the return voyage.
The problem was that Columbus made a huge mistake calculating the distance to his supposed “Indies”. In 240 BC, the Greek geographer, Eratosthenes, calculated the circumference of the earth to within one percent of its actual girth. He figured that one degree was 59.5 miles.
But Columbus preferred the figures of the Persian geographer, Alfraganus. whose degree was only 56.67 miles. That’s not a trifling error when you’re trying to get to China from Spain!
Columbus calculated the distance from Spain to the “Indies” to be 3,080 nautical miles so he assumed he could sail there easily before running out of food and water. It was an error of several orders of magnitude and it left out the north American landmass and the entire expanse of the Pacific Ocean. It didn’t matter. He made landfall just about the time he expected, making Columbus probably the luckiest ocean navigator in history.
It’s as if you planned to go from New York City to Los Angeles but was certain it was only 1,217 miles distant instead of 2,451 miles and wound up in Kansas City, thinking it was Los Angeles and asking the natives how to get to Hollywood.
Don’t think Columbus was a lousy navigator, however. He made each landfall across large expanses of water by dead reckoning, an amazing feat. That involves starting at a known position and then using a ship’s compass heading, the ship’s speed and the estimated time spent on each heading and at each speed to figure out where you are.
On August 12, 1492, Columbus and his restive crew dropped anchor at a Bahamian island (no one knows which one but the consensus has it as San Salvador). He would go on to “discover” much of the Caribbean and Central America in a total of four separate voyages, none of them at all pleasant and some replete with cruelty and treachery. If you are interested in any of this, I highly recommend “Admiral of the Ocean Sea” by Samuel Eliot Morrison. That title was given to Columbus by none other than Queen Isabella upon completion of his first voyage.
Food on the ocean in a wooden hulled ship without refrigeration goes bad on you very quickly. Columbus supplied his expeditions with mold-resistant foods such as dried or salt-brined meats and fish along with dried vegetables nuts, chick peas and rice.
They had no galley (kitchen) and no stove. To cook food they built a fire up on the open deck on a bed of sand, shielded from the wind by boards. Yes. A fire! On the deck!
You can create an imagined crew’s supper aboard one of Columbus’ ships using just the ingredients those fellows were likely to have on hand. It may not be haute cuisine but it’s hearty and an instructive lesson for young people. It will also provide you with a neat platform for some story-telling. And you can do it in your own kitchen, not on an open deck heaving through big waves on the ocean.
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