Columbus_ The Four Voyages - Laurence Bergreen [57]
More birds appeared, including petrels, and still more seaweed, “but not so many fishes, because the water was colder.” Yet there was no sign of land, and he had scant idea of his whereabouts in the Ocean Sea or in relation to his outgoing voyage. Amid the unease, the wind died down the following day, and with nothing better to do, the ship’s Indian passengers went swimming in the briny deep, as their more cautious European keepers looked on from the deck of the Niña.
That night, a revived but variable wind teased Niña to life, but Columbus and his crew resisted the temptation to proceed. They were waiting for Pinta to catch up, yet she appeared crippled. “She sailed badly close-hauled,” Columbus noted, “because she had little help from the mizzen owing to the mast not being sound.” For that lapse, the Admiral blamed his subversive rival. “If her captain, Martín Alonso Pinzón, had taken as much care to provide a good mast to the Indies,” he scolded, “where there were so many and of that sort, as he was greedy in leaving them, thinking to fill the ship with them, he would have done well.”
Columbus took comfort in the fact that the ocean remained “always very smooth as in a river,” for which he thanked God, who apparently still favored him above all others.
So it went for the remainder of January and into the middle of February 1493. One day, the seamen “killed a porpoise and a tremendous shark.” By night, the water, “very smooth,” slid silently past the ship’s hull, shattering the celestial illumination into glistening fragments.
On the evening of Sunday, February 3, Columbus tried his luck with the astrolabe and the quadrant, instruments on which navigators in many parts of the world had relied for centuries. In its simplest form, an astrolabe consists of a disk marked in degrees, together with a pointer. It is used to make astronomical measurements, especially the altitudes of celestial bodies, and to calculate latitude. Columbus’s instrument was rudimentary, and he was by no means expert with it. The quadrant, the other traditional instrument for celestial navigation, consisted of a graduated quarter circle and a sight. This was designed to take angular measurements of altitude in astronomy, and was usually made of wood or brass.
Columbus hoped to take the altitude of the North Star to ascertain his location, but failed. He blamed rough water, or, as he put it, “the rolling wouldn’t permit it.” Yet his previous sentence notes that the sea was “very smooth.” More likely, he was frustrated by his lack of skill in handling the devices, even in calm weather. A sophisticated dead-reckoning navigator who could read currents and clouds and wind with uncanny precision, Columbus lacked mastery of these instruments. In due course he gave up on the quadrant and astrolabe, and relied on his senses, especially his keen eyesight. For all his visionary qualities, Columbus remained the pragmatic Genoese sea captain, impatient with the latest navigational technology.
The trades rapidly bore Niña along, and she covered two hundred nautical miles during a twenty-four-hour period beginning on February 6. The pilot, Vicente Yáñez, assisted by a seaman, Bartolomé Roldán, persuaded themselves, and their captain, that they were approaching the Azores, the westernmost projection of European influence into the Atlantic. They convinced themselves that they spied Flores Island, discovered less than twenty years earlier, and then Madeira Island. But on this occasion Columbus’s dead reckoning misled him about the position of the two islands and the position of Niña. He believed himself seventy-five leagues south of Flores, when he was actually six hundred miles to the east and two hundred miles to the south of his presumed location, yet he remained convinced of his interpretation, and sought confirmation in the appearance of clumps of seaweed that the sailors associated with the Azores.