chapter 2
The Fearsome Atlantic
L
ooking west, the people of the gentle Mediterranean saw
the Atlantic as the great unknown, obscured by storm
clouds, without welcoming shores, and given to violence. Their ships were
too light to withstand its waves; their navigation instruments were baffled
by its immensity; their experience stopped short of its rocks and reefs. So
fearful were they of losing touch with land that they coined for us the con-
cept of being “disoriented”—to have lost one’s east, the European shore, in
the watery wastes of the western sea.
Columbus inherited a long tradition of the search for the far reaches of
this apparently limitless sea. We do not know about most of his predeces-
sors, because many were drowned, marooned, murdered, or eaten by
sharks or cannibals; but at least as early as the time of the great Greek trav-
eler and gossip Herodotus, we know that sailors were already venturing out
into the ocean and had visited at least the Azores and Canaries. In the fifth
century B.C.E., a Phoenician navigator wrote a sailing guide for Africa,
later translated into Greek, that must have been based on experience. Two
centuries before Columbus, a group of Genoese set sail, bound for India.
They disappeared into the sunset, never to return.
Also shrouded in mystery are the Portuguese expeditions in the genera-
tion before Columbus sailed. Fearing rivals, the Portuguese treated their
records as state secrets; but, in their time, the secrets “leaked.” Hearing of the
successes of the Portuguese with sugar, slaves, and gold, the Spanish wanted
to break into their monopoly. Partly because of this, Portugal and Castile
fought a bitter four-year war which ended just thirteen years before
Columbus sailed. The key provision of the peace treaty, judged by its impor-
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