Columbus remarks on changes of temperature and aberrations of stars.
But this was not the only development which came from this ominous day in the mid Atlantic in that September of 1492. The fancy of Columbus was easily excited, and notions of a change of climate, and even aberrations of the stars were easily imagined by him amid the strange phenomena of that untracked waste.
While Columbus was suspecting that the north star was somewhat willfully shifting from the magnetic pole, now to a distance of 5° and then of 10°, the calculations of modern astronomers have gauged the polar distance existing in 1492 at 3° 28´, as against the 1° 20´ of to-day. The confusion of Columbus was very like his confounding an old world with a new, inasmuch as he supposed it was the pole star and not the needle which was shifting.
Imagines a protuberance on the earth.
He argued from what he saw, or thought he saw, that the line of no variation marked the beginning of a protuberance of the earth, up which he ascended as he sailed westerly, and that this was the reason of the cooler weather which he experienced. He never got over some notions of this kind, and believed he found confirmation of them in his later voyages.
The magnetic pole.
Even as early as the reign of Edward III. of England, Nicholas of Lynn, a voyager to the northern seas, is thought to have definitely fixed the magnetic pole in the Arctic regions, transmitting his views to Cnoyen, the master of the later Mercator, in respect to the four circumpolar islands, which in the sixteenth century made so constant a surrounding of the northern pole.
1492. September 14.