However much he excited the navigators who followed him, Columbus
inadvertently terribly misled them. His own trip from the Canaries to the
Caribbean was virtually a pleasure cruise. With a following wind, at the right
season of the year, and not reaching the brutal latitudes along the North
American coast, he sailed steadily and serenely across a calm sea. What
most of those who followed him experienced can best be described as
horror. Even three centuries later, one of them told of the experience in
these words:
...terrible misery, stench, fumes, horror, vomiting, many kinds of sea-
sickness, fever dysentery, headache, heat constipation, boils, scurvy, can-
cer, mouthrot, and the like, all of which comes from old and sharply
salted food and meat, also from very bad and foul water, so that many die
miserably.That horror was what Spanish, French, and English voyagers in the six-
teenth and seventeenth centuries had to expect. As a contemporary poem
describes them, the fragile, miniature immigrant ships were “freighted with
fools.” To embark upon one, a person had to be desperate, a condemned
felon, a captive, mad—or perhaps just ignorant. Written accounts of the voy-
ages probably reached few, although as would-be travelers gathered in sea-
side inns, they overheard sailors’ accounts. These tales must have been so
lurid and arresting that they would have been told and retold often and
widely. But the sailors whose stories could be heard were the survivors. Many
others were not there to tell their tales.
Many ships simply disappeared. The death rate was appalling. When
the great Spanish treasure fleet, the flota,set out from Havana in 1591, it was
a convoy of seventy-seven ships. When the ships reached the latitude of Cape
Hatteras, as survivors later reported, they were beset by a violent wind and
high seas. The largest of their ships, with 500 men aboard, was lost; and a
few days later, hit by another storm, “five or sixe other of the biggest shippes
cast away with all their men, together with their Vice-Admirall.” The sur-
vivors kept sailing north to the Chesapeake, where they turned due east to
sail across the Atlantic to the westernmost islands of the Azores. There they
were hit by another storm. In that year only 25 ships of a total of 123 survived
28 THE BIRTH OF AMERICA