transforming it from a “Mediterranean”caravela latina,withlateensails, to
an “Atlantic”caravela redonda,with square sails. The war had given Atlantic
explorers their vehicle.
Technical innovation, so often a by-product of war, was important, but
what really shaped the Spanish and Portuguese empires for centuries was
wind. In the age of sailing ships, the wind pattern of the Atlantic governed
where and how fast ships could sail. Columbus was lucky. Had he been
sailing on behalf of Portugal, to whose king he first applied for patronage,
he would have had to sail from the Azores, into a headwind. From the
Azores, the Portuguese had to go south; but from the Canaries, the
Spaniards could go west. Columbus—who had lived in the Azores, where
he was married to the daughter of a sugar planter, and had sailed for the
Portuguese—must have known this. He almost certainly would have seen
flotsam, coming from somewhere to the west, washed up on the shores of
the Azores, and as an experienced sailor, he could not have missed sensing
the prevailing winds.
Geographical knowledge and information on winds and currents had
slowly accumulated in the two centuries before Columbus sailed. For the
Mediterranean, the Black Sea, and the Atlantic coast, pilots’ instructions—
routiersorportolani—began to be assembled around the thirteenth century
into a single guide known as the Compasso da Navigare.TheCompassois
the ancestor of such modern guides as the British Admiralty Sailing
Directions.Some of the portolaniwere put into visual form as charts drawn
on ox hides by Italian craftsmen. But none existed for the Atlantic.
The Atlantic posed challenges quite different from the Mediterranean.
In the vast and relatively empty ocean, sailors could not check their posi-
tion by observing islands and coasts. Once out of sight of land, as noted
above, they “lost their east”; they became “disoriented.” Sailing south, as
the Portuguese were doing, posed a different risk, losing the North Star by
dipping below the equator. So in Portuguese to lose one’s bearings was
expressed not as losing the east but as being “unnorthed,”desnorteado.
Being disoriented or desnorteadowas a concern of ship captains, but
armchair navigators were governed less by what pilots told them than by car-
tographers’ speculations and the inherited wisdom of Greek and Arab scien-
tists. For them navigation was not a practice but an art. And the first task was
26 THE BIRTH OF AMERICA