That also was the Atlantic which the Spanish flotaendured on the
return leg of its treasure-gathering trip to the Caribbean. But the Spanish
soldiers and colonists going out to the New World had an easier passage
than northern Europeans. Like Columbus, they sailed downwind first to
the Canaries. There, already a third of the way across the Atlantic, they
rested a few days and took on wine, fresh water, and gofia—a bread, made
of barley and goat milk, which the Bristol merchant Nicolas Thorne
described in 1526 as “exceedingly holesome.” Then, because they stopped
in the Caribbean or on the Florida coast, they missed the terror of Cape
Hatteras.
Because Europeans attempting to reach the northeastern shore of
America could not avoid the terror of Cape Hatteras, the southern route fell
out of favor in the eighteenth century. Thereafter, their ships tended to follow
what we know as the great circle course, northwest from the British Isles or
northern France nearly to Iceland, then southwest past Nova Scotia and
Newfoundland and south along the New England coast. That route more or
less followed the fishermen who in their little two-masted doggers or dog
boats had been chasing the codfish for centuries. The northern route was
The Fearsome Atlantic 33