This representation of the vessels of the early Spanish navigators is a fac-simile of a cut in Medina’s Arte de navegar, Valladolid, 1545, which was re-engraved in the Venice edition of 1555. Cf. Carter-Brown Catalogue, vol. i. nos. 137, 204; Ruge, Geschichte des Zeitalters der Entdeckungen, pp. 240, 241; Jurien de la Gravière’s Les marins du XVe et du XVIe siècle, vol. i. pp. 38, 151. In the variety of changes in methods of measurement it is not easy to find the equivalent in tonnage of the present day for the ships of Columbus’s time. Those constituting his little fleet seem to have been light and swift vessels of the class called caravels. One had a deck amidships, with high forecastle and poop, and two were without this deck, though high, and covered at the ends. Captain G. V. Fox has given what he supposes were the dimensions of the larger one,—a heavier craft and duller sailer than the others. He calculates for a hundred tons,—makes her sixty-three feet over all, fifty-one feet keel, twenty feet beam, and ten and a half feet draft of water. She carried the kind of gun termed lombards, and a crew of fifty men. U. S. Coast Survey Report, 1880, app. 18; Becher’s Landfall of Columbus; A. Jal’s Archéologie navale (Paris, 1840); Irving’s Columbus, app. xv.; H. H. Bancroft, Central America, i. 187; Das Ausland, 1867, p. 1. There are other views of the ships of Columbus’ time in the cuts in some of the early editions of his Letters on the discovery. See notes following this chapter.
And so, out of the harbor of Palos,[62] on the 3d of August, 1492, Columbus sailed with his three little vessels. The “Santa Maria,” which carried his flag, was the only one of the three which had a deck, while the other two, the “Niña” and the “Pinta,” were open caravels. The two Pinzons commanded these smaller ships,—Martin Alonzo the “Pinta”, and Vicente the “Niña.”
BUILDING A SHIP.
This follows a fac-simile, given in Ruge, Geschichte des Zeitalters der Entdeckungen p. 240, of a cut in Bernhardus de Breydenbach’s Peregrinationes, Mainz, 1486.
The voyage was uneventful, except that the expectancy of all quickened the eye, which sometimes saw over-much, and poised the mind, which was alert with hope and fear. It has been pointed out how a westerly course from Palos would have discouraged Columbus with head and variable winds. Running down to the Canaries (for Toscanelli put those islands in the latitude of Cipango), a westerly course thence would bring him within the continuous easterly trade-winds, whose favoring influence would inspirit his men,—as, indeed, was the case. Columbus, however, was very glad on the 22d of September to experience a west wind, just to convince his crew it was possible to have, now and then, the direction of it favorable to their return. He had proceeded, as he thought, some two hundred miles farther than the longitude in which he had conjectured Cipango to be, when the urging of Martin Alonzo Pinzon, and the flight of birds indicating land to be nearer in the southwest, induced him to change his course in that direction.[63]
COURSE OF COLUMBUS ON FIRST VOYAGE.