we know best, but he was just one of many who freighted sugar from the
Atlantic islands to western Europe.
Of the Atlantic islands, the most important were the Canaries, the
Azores, Madeira, and, farther down the African coast, São Tomé. By 1480,
Madeira was loading about sixty or seventy ships a year with sugar for
Spain and Portugal. No longer a rare luxury item, sugar had become an
important commodity. Producing it had become the major commercial
enterprise of the time. In the Azores, one of the leading figures in produc-
tion and trade was a naturalized Italian by the name of Bartolomeo
Perestrelo for whom Columbus worked for several years and whose daugh-
ter he married.
The Azores were not Columbus’s only taste of the Atlantic. It is proba-
ble that he sailed with the Portuguese south to São Tomé and the Gold
Coast. But on any beach in the Azores, he could have seen evidence of the
far Atlantic. Flotsam that washed up on the shores could have inspired him
to wonder what lay beyond the “Ocean Sea.” Still, although flotsam may
have been Columbus’s inspiration, the winds that carry it eastward across
the Atlantic to the Azores are also headwinds impeding ships trying to sail
westward. From the Azores, Columbus would probably never have reached
America. Atlantic winds dictated that the springboard for a westward quest
had to be located farther south in the Canaries.
The Canaries had two important roles in the Europeans’ discovery and
conquest of the New World. Situated about a third of the way across the
Atlantic from the Spanish coast, they afforded Columbus’s little ships
water, food, and an opportunity to repair damage. From them, the “wester-
lies” made sailing “downwind” across the Atlantic toward the Caribbean
relatively easy and rapid. They would be the staging base for most wind-
powered ships for the next two centuries. That was the first and most obvi-
ous role of the Canaries.
The second role of the Canaries in American history is no less impor-
tant. It was there (as mentioned in chapter 1) that the Spaniards first encoun-
tered a “colonial” people. The Canaries had been settled in the distant past
by peoples from North Africa. These people, known as the Guanche, are
thought to have been of Berber origin. Their existence was known to the
Romans and to medieval Muslim travelers, but, cut off from the great events
42 THE BIRTH OF AMERICA