The Santa Maria carried a crew of seventy, together with artillery and stores enough for one year. In addition she had a large amount of merchandise, which she could barter with the natives. Her displacement has been estimated as about 200 tons, and some modern writers have suggested that this was all too small a ship to cross the Atlantic. Columbus, however, thought otherwise; for on his second voyage he had demanded smaller vessels, his reason being that those of his first expedition, on account of their size and draught, had caused him so much anxiety. As to the canvas which the Santa Maria carried, this matter is instantly settled by reference to Columbus’s own log. If we refer to his entry dated Wednesday, October 24, we find that: “I remained thus with little wind until the afternoon, when it began to blow fresh. I set all the sails in the ship, the mainsail with two bonnets, the foresail, spritsail, mizzen, maintopsail, and the boat’s sail on the poop.” (The bonnets were additional pieces of canvas laced on to the foot of the sail)[45].
The time on board was evidently kept by hour-glasses of half or a whole hour. Thus under date of Tuesday, January 22, when homeward bound, his log reads: “They made 8 miles an hour during five glasses ... afterwards they went N.E. by N. for six glasses.... Then during four glasses of the second watch N.E. at six miles an hour.” But the reader must be cautious not to accept the speed given as conclusive. One of the greatest drawbacks to navigation in those days was the absence of any instrument which would record the speed through the water. The log had yet to be invented, and the mariner could only make a conjectural estimate of the ship’s speed by looking over the side and noting the time it took the bubbles to come aft from the bow, or by throwing a piece of wood overboard from the bows and noticing how long it took for the stern to be abreast of that object. Many a steamship traveller gambling on the ship’s speed does the same thing to-day; many a fore-and-aft sailorman with no patent log still employs a similar method.
Columbus’s journal shows the kind of helmsman which he had to put up with. On September 9, when the ship’s course was west, the narrator on board wrote: “The sailors steered badly, letting the ship fall off to N.E., and even more; respecting which the Admiral complained many times.” On September 13 Columbus observed a variation in the compass. “On this day, at the commencement of the night, the needles turned a half point to N.W., and in the morning they turned somewhat more N.W.” For up till then no one had observed the variation of the needle.
Fifteenth-Century Caravel.
Drawn from a woodcut after a delineation by Columbus in the Latin translation of his letter dated March 1, 1493, to Don Raphael de Sanxis (Treasurer of the King of Spain), in the Library at Milano.
(See [next plate].)
No navigator could have been more careful than Columbus. Ever on the alert, he was far too anxious about the safety of his fleet to neglect one single precaution. As they voyaged, the difference in the saltness of the sea was noted; and though for eleven days the wind blew steadily from aft so that the sails required no trimming, yet all the while Columbus was busy with astrolabe and sounding lead endeavouring to fix his position in regard to the land which they had long since left. From Wednesday, February 13, till the following Saturday, he never slept a wink, being far too anxious to leave the navigation to others. The pilots of the Nina and Pinta on the voyage out used to work out their positions for themselves. On September 19 the Nina made the Canaries to be 440 leagues astern, the Pinta estimated the distance as 420, but on board Columbus’s ship the reckoning was 400 leagues, and this was the most correct of the three. (It should be added that Columbus used Italian miles, reckoning four Italian miles to one league.) He compared notes with the pilots under him, and manœuvred his ship so that the captain of the Pinta was able to pass his chart on board the Santa Maria at the end of a line. Columbus, after conferring with his own pilots and mariners, plotted on the chart the position of the ship. Here and there all the way through Columbus’s journal, both in those lines written by his own hand and in those in another handwriting, there rises up, quite clearly, evidence of the knowledge which this man had been collecting before setting out. “The admiral was aware,” says the Journal, “that most of the islands held by the Portuguese were discovered by the flight of birds.” Just as the Viking seamen had discovered land in exactly the reverse manner—by letting loose birds from the ship.
Nor are there lacking plenty of references to the seamanship of these times—the kind of seamanship, we may not unjustly assume, that was employed alike by the Spanish traders who crossed the Bay of Biscay, and sailed up the English Channel to Flanders, and those who went exploring to the southward. No one better than these medieval and Elizabethan sailormen appreciated the importance of having a ship that would heave-to in bad weather or at night. You will remember that dramatic incident at the end of Columbus’s first voyage across the Atlantic, when the distant light, as of a candle going up and down in the hand of someone proceeding from one house to another, indicated that at last the new land had been found. “At two hours after midnight,” says the log, “the land was sighted.” Then (continues the narrative), “they shortened sail, and lay by under mainsail without the bonnets. The vessels were hove-to waiting for daylight.”
And again, when on the homeward voyage after the loss of the Santa Maria the Nina was caught in a heavy gale of wind, we find from her log that she stowed canvas, but “carried the mainsail very closely reefed, so as just to give her steerage-way, and proceeded thus for three hours, making 20 miles.” During that same dreadful night, when they all but foundered, Columbus kept showing lanterns to the Pinta, which answered back by the same method. “The want of ballast increased the danger of the ship, which had become light owing to the consumption of provisions and water,” so they filled with sea water the barrels which had contained wine and drinking water, and employed these to steady the vessel. “Afterwards,” continues the same narrative, “in the showers and squalls, the wind veered to the west, and they went before it, with only the foresail, in a very confused sea for five hours. They made 2½ leagues N.E. They had taken in the reefed mainsail, for fear some wave of the sea should carry all away.” And when the weather presently moderated, Columbus “added the bonnet to the mainsail.”