shorter, optimistically put at thirty to forty days east to west and about
twenty-four days west to east; so it was cheaper. It also had the advantage of
shielding the passengers from tropical diseases, but of course it was even
more susceptible to violent storms than most of the southern route.
As sailors’ tales portrayed them, storms could last for days or even
weeks during which time a ship would be nearly totally out of control and
would be blown far, and unpredictably, off course. Then, in the ominous
phrase of the sailors, the ship might be “cast away.” Sailors’ tales are filled
with accounts of what “cast away” really meant: broken to pieces and sunk
without a trace.
Even ships built for the Atlantic were clumsy and often unseaworthy.
Thefluyt,the mainstay of Dutch commerce, had been designed for the rel-
atively protected North Sea and shallow coasts of Holland; for economy, it
was very lightly built. Its timbers were ill matched to the Atlantic swells and
storms. But it became the most common ship of the seventeenth century
because about 1,000 fluytswere seized by England in its wars with Holland
and sold cheaply to English merchants. Opposite the little fluytwere the
relative huge Spanish galleons. Far heavier and more sturdy they were, but
their towering hulls and high rigging made an even better target for wind
and wave.
Light or heavy, humble or majestic,fluytor galleon, ships sailed nearly
blind. “Pilots” or “ruttiers,” the traditional logbooks in which for centuries
Mediterranean navigators had recorded their accumulated experience,
were only beginning to focus on the Atlantic. No maps yet showed coasts
with sufficient accuracy, much less the positions of reefs, rocks, or sand-
bars. Even if they had had sailing pilots and reasonably precise maps, navi-
gators could not have fixed their positions accurately with the crude
instruments, hardly changed from the Middle Ages, upon which they had
to rely. To calculate latitude they used the astrolabe, cross staff, and quad-
rant; but having no reliable clock, they had no means to do more than
roughly estimate longitude. The best they could do was to work out dead
reckonings with a compass, a sand glass, and a log line. Or, like the Vikings
and early Portuguese and Spanish sailors, they could watch birds and pick
up flotsam. Finding an exact position was not so critical in the open ocean,
but once ships got close to land, particularly during a fog or storm, they
34 THE BIRTH OF AMERICA