Christopher Columbus: East is West

A light breeze filled the sails of the three tiny wooden-hulled ships and gently wafted them out of the bustling port of Palos, on Spain's southern coast. The date was Friday, August 3, 1492.

There was more than a little apprehension among the 87 men on board. This was to be a voyage of discovery - beyond the horizon of the known world. Ahead lay the Atlantic Ocean, mighty and mysterious.

But for one man watching the coast slipping slowly out of sight from the 70-foot-long flagship Santa Maria, the thought of sailing into the unknown held no terror.

Captain Christopher Columbus - born in about 1445 Cristoforo Columbo, the son of a Genoese cloth maker - was a proud, stubborn, ambitious mariner who dreamed of opening up a new sea route from Spain to the rich spice isles of the East Indies. For years, while sailing the shipping lanes around Portugal and Spain and down the coast of Africa to the Canary Islands, he had been planning an Atlantic crossing.

Columbus was convinced the world was round, an unpopular theory in his day, but one that was gaining support. He believed the eastern coast of Asia and the gold-rich lands of the Orient lay west of Europe, within easy sailing distance.

Now at last he was on his way, under the patronage of Spain's King Ferdinand and Queen Isabella. (His first projected attempt had been turned down eight years before by Portugal's John II.) He was about to make perhaps the biggest blunder of any explorer - but, in doing so, he was also to make the greatest discovery.

He headed his ships for San Sebastian in the Canaries, then, on September 6, eager not to miss the prevailing easterly winds, he turned the small fleet west into the open Atlantic. The square-rigged ships made good progress in the following wind. But by the middle of the month, with land still not in sight, his men became worried. They feared they might never be able to return to Spain.

Columbus, too, must have begun to doubt his estimate of the distance to the Indies. On September 19, he began to keep a false log, in which he sought to allay the fears of his crew by underestimating the miles he was sailing.

Together the Santa Maria, with her attendant vessels, the Pinta and Nina, rode out the perils of the Sargasso Sea, sometimes battered by high seas, at other times becalmed for days. Columbus, desperate for his expedition to succeed and mindful of the rewards that would be heaped on him by a grateful king and queen, clutched at any evidence that they were nearing land. Hopes were often raised and dashed.

Then, at two o'clock on the morning of October 2, just 37 days after they had left the Canaries, a seaman on board the Pint a raised the cry: ' Land!' Later that day, the small fleet hove to off an island which Columbus named San Salvador.

Columbus wrote in his log that day: 'There we soon saw naked natives. . . A landscape was revealed to our eyes with lush green trees, many streams and fruits of various types.' The next day he wrote: 'I saw that some of the men had pierced their noses and had put a piece of gold through it , . . By signs, I could understand that we had to go to the south to meet a king who had great vessels of gold.'

On October 17 he noted: 'On all these days I have been in India it has rained more or less… ' He still firmly believed that he had made his landfall on the eastern coast of Asia.

Columbus set about exploring, and sailed among the Caribbean islands to the north coast of Cuba, and on to Hispaniola. He was much impressed by what he saw and in his log of October 28, while off the Cuban coast, he wrote: 'I dare to suppose that the mighty ships of the Grand Khan come here and that from here to the mainland is a journey of only ten days.'

After eight months at sea, Columbus returned in triumph to Spain where he was made' Admiral of the ocean sea and governor of the islands newly discovered in the Indies', He made four voyages of discovery to Central America in the next ten years, and only towards the end of his explorations did he begin to doubt whether he had in fact found the eastern coast of Asia.

It was on his third voyage to the New World, in 1498, that he began to reflect on the possibility that he had found a new continent. A more southerly course across the Atlantic had led him to the island of Trinidad, and, while exploring in the nearby Gulf of Paria, he came to the place where the mighty Orinoco River of South America flows into the sea. In his log of August 14, 1498, he wrote: ‘ I believe that this is a very large continent which until now has remained unknown.'

In the next few years, Italian adventurer Amerigo Vespucci and others were to confirm his suspicions. Vespucci explored much of Brazil's coastline, and it was the accounts of his discoveries that eventually won him the honor of having the great new continent named after him.

But in 1502, when Columbus set out on his fourth voyage, he still believed that the islands he had discovered on his first two voyages were off the eastern coast of Asia. He reasoned that a passage through to Asia must exist between these islands and the great new land to the south. So he set out to find it. And for the second time he stumbled across America without really knowing it.

For nine months, in grueling weather, he explored along the coasts of Honduras, Costa Rica and Panama. Then, in May 1503, with his storm battered ships worm-eaten, leaking and in danger of sinking, he struck north in a desperate bid to reach the new Spanish settlement of Santo Domingo, on the island of Hispaniola. He failed, and spent 12 months as a castaway on Jamaica before being rescued with his crew and taken back to Spain.

Columbus died on May 20, 1506. He was never to know that the land he had discovered was in fact the vast continent of America.

References:-

1) http://www1.minn.net/~keithp/cctl.htm
2) http://www.caribbean-connection.com/christopher-columbus/ and many more