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Christopher Columbus

APRIL 5, 1992

 

So what was it like for Columbus when he set sail? What makes that question so sempiternally alluring is this: We’ll never know. One prominent historian shrewdly remarked that the quintessence of the heroism of Columbus wasn’t the prospect of endless days and nights at sea, the struggle with mutinous sentiments aboard or with wild savages on land. It lay in his simple act of weighing anchor in Gomera on that sixth day of September 1492.

The passage (Spain to the Canaries) was not a big deal in 1492 —the islands had been discovered at the turn of the century and were now being colonized. The dramatic moment came when Columbus pulled up his anchor and headed for the unknown.

It is hard to imagine that he felt about that apocalyptic event as prosaically as he wrote about it. What he set down in his journal was: “Shortly before noon I sailed from the harbor at Gomera and set my course to the west ... I sailed all day and night with very little wind; by morning I find myself between Gomera and Tenerife.” Those simple, declarative phrases hardly come in with the thunder and lightning one thinks of as appropriate to a launch that would discover a new world. Indeed, the New World.

What was it like?

A few friends and I who have sailed together in the past resolved to explore the point, with rigorous determination not to delude ourselves into presuming that we were undertaking anything like a re-creation of the historic crossing of the Admiral of the Ocean Seas, as Ferdinand and Isabella agreed Columbus should be titled upon completion of his mission (in the unlikely event that he did complete it).

On that November morning in 1990 setting out from Lisbon we were aboard a 71-foot ketch called Sealestial, chartered for this occasion as twice before we had chartered it to cross the Pacific, and to cross the Atlantic (eastward). There were six of us who did the sailing and the navigating, four who did the maintenance.

By contrast, Columbus had three well-founded boats ... eighty to ninety feet long (they were called caravels), each one carrying forty to fifty sailor-soldiers and provisions for three months at sea, with plenty of mirrors and beads for the natives. No charts, no radio, no loan, no GPS, no sextant (by modern standards), no chronometer.

Our vessel had everything on board designed to cope with every situation imaginable, except those situations we actually ran into (the sails and much of the rigging came apart, the electronics didn’t work, the water all but ran out); yet, by modern standards, ours was a routine passage, about as remarkable as a scenic bus ride, San Francisco to Los Angeles.

What made it otherwise special was the sensation that came to us inescapably within minutes of setting out. It was this, that although our vessel and its facilities were very different from the Santa María commanded by Christopher Columbus, all else was the same. That is authentic re-creation.

Nothing has happened in five hundred years that seriously affects the winds or the seas or the clouds or the stars that soothe and torment the sailor making his way across the Atlantic Ocean, following the trade winds. The speeds at which we traveled were comparable to his, except that when there were calms, we had the option to turn on a motor. Columbus could only sit. Patiently?

Don’t you see, in those days the nervous metabolism was very different. If today what we see on a television channel for fifty-six seconds bores us, we flick over to another channel, and after that to a third or fourth or fifth. Columbus didn’t know whether this afternoon’s calm would last for one hour, for one day or for four days. He and his crew sat, or paced the deck. For distraction, they ate and they chatted and they plotted and they prayed and they gambled.

We? We turned on the motor, activated the autopilot, and we moved along, playing chess and writing in our journals, reading books, watching movies, eating gourmet meals, and rat-tat-tatting occasional messages home with our “Comsat” units, stitching together torn sails, and listening to the BBC.

All of this so different—and yet we came away from it all with some idea of what it had been like for Columbus.

There were, for instance, the storms—we both had them. But also there were the prevailing westerly trade winds, on which Columbus successfully (and we, following his example) counted. He was exploring a route that would become the great superhighway of all ships heading from Europe to the Americas for the next three hundred years.

To follow the route you needed to travel about seven hundred miles to the Canaries, and from there three thousand miles south southwest to the easternmost islands of the Caribbean, and then another thousand miles to Florida. Between the Canaries and the Caribbean lies—nothing. We chose to put in at the closest spot of land, the island of Barbados. Columbus passed north of it, hitting one of three Bahamian islands (the question of exactly which one is hotly disputed) in the neighborhood of Salvador.

He arrived thirty-six days after leaving Gomera, and it is seriously surmised that if he had taken as much as one day more, he’d have lost his command to the mutineers. If we had been one day later, I’d have been thrown overboard, together with my sextants, my almanac, my tables, and my plotting sheets.

There isn’t any sense in which by undertaking such a passage you are playacting the vanity that you are a true son of Christopher Columbus.

Contrast the men and women who a generation ago set out aboard a raft of sorts called Kon Tiki, attempting more or less exactly to duplicate what they imagined to be the route and the circumstances of the aboriginals who traveled from South America to the Asian islands. Theirs was an exact effort at re-creating; their purpose, validate a (shaky) thesis, namely that the historical movement of human beings into Polynesia was counterclockwise, from Mainland Asia up to Alaska, down the North American continent to Peru or thereabouts, and then westward.

A sailing journey in a modern craft with up-to-date instruments from Europe to the Caribbean can be done without any sense of a shared adventure with the man who did it first, even as you don’t have to think about Lewis and Clark to take a trailer trip from St. Louis across the Continental Divide to the Pacific Ocean.

On the other hand, if you undertake a trans-Atlantic sail along Columbus’s route you will be tempted to say to yourself from time to time—looking out over the resolute blue-green seas, up at the playful clouds, flirtatious today, menacing tomorrow; plunging through nights sometimes so dark you could bump into a new continent without any warning, sometimes ambered by the moon, like sailing over a lit-up baseball stadium—you will say to yourself, “So it was for Columbus and his men. Just like this.”

In a word, you get some sense of the highs—and some of the lows—experienced by the men who did it for the first time. The good news is that, as with most human experiences, what sticks in the memory is the highs.

Here is how Columbus’s biographer described the good days experienced by Columbus. Samuel Eliot Morison was a professor at Harvard, an admiral in the Navy, the historian of our naval adventures in the Second World War, and a yachtsman who traced in his own vessel the voyage of Columbus shortly before the war, to write the book that would win a Pulitzer Prize, Admiral of the Ocean Sea. Thus he could write:

This leg [when he hit the trade winds] of the voyage must have been a most pure delight to the Admiral and his men. The fleet sped along, making an average day’s run of 183 miles. In the trades, vessels always roll a good deal, but the steady and favorable wind singing in the rigging, the sapphire white-capped sea, the rush of great waters alongside, and the endless succession of fat, puffy trade-wind clouds, lift up a seaman’s spirits and make him want to shout and sing. For days on end the sheets and braces needed no attention. On moonless nights the sails stand out black against the starstudded firmament; and as the ship makes her southing, every night new stars and constellations appear. Most of his men were new to southern waters, and one can imagine them, as in Hérédia’s sonnet, leaning entranced over the bulwarks of the white caravel and seeing in the phosphorescent sea an augury of the gold of the Indies.

We would have all those sensations, and one has to suppose that the skies today, and the seas, are as they were then; and, of course, the stars, those fixed coordinates of a restless world. We had all that, and we had also a storm which after thirty-six hours left us limp with misery, lost, exhausted, wet, demoralized; but then, at sea, when this happens you experience also the balm that comes after, as the sun shines, the wind rights itself, the gear is repaired, the stars relocate you, and soon the pleasures on board are full-throated.

It is a fine adventure, such a crossing under sail, even if it is not to be confused with the original. You must travel with people who a) know how to sail (at least four of them); b) how to navigate (at least two); c) how to cope with emergencies (one or two); and d) how to cope with each other (everyone).

Years ago the physicist Oppenheimer described the nuclear age, with America and the Soviet Union glaring at each other, as “two scorpions in a bottle.” It is common lore in the seafaring community of ocean racers that any latent disharmony tends to fester aboard a small boat, when one person’s innocent affectation can evolve as an affront at the end of the second week, an armed assault at the end of the third. Choose your companions with much attention to dispositional harmony, in good times and bad.

Bear in mind that it is more than modern man can easily do to learn to go from the rap-tempos of modern nonstop distractions to the unsubornable tempos of the sea and the tides and winds who know not the hysterical volatilities of contemporary life and can no more be manipulated to suit your fancy than grass can be got to grow more or less quickly, to indulge madame’s inclinations.

So ... make an effort. Bring along a VCR—hardly an extravagance in a venture as extravagant to begin with as chartering a sailboat to take you across the Atlantic Ocean. And though you’ll find that all of you are busier than ever you thought you’d be (sailboats require a lot of attention, for all that they gave the impression of autonomous passivity), subtly inquire whether your companions can also be happy reading a book.

Above all, know that you are setting out with men and women —it doesn’t matter how young (well, no, I’d say sixteen is minimum) or how old (well, not too old: burials at sea are inconvenient). But no one aboard should be so jaded as to be dulled to the feel of the seas, the smell of the wind, the divine festoonery of the clouds and the stars, because for most amateurs the experience is once in a lifetime. Columbus did it four times. But you see, Columbus is what we were quietly celebrating, never presuming to imitate him.