Sailing conditions for transatlantic voyages were far superior further south, in the latitudes explored by Columbus. Yet, as he said of his own crossing in 1492, his route was one never, ‘as far as we know’, sailed before and the presumption that he had been preceded by an ‘unknown pilot’, while often aired, has never been vindicated. Compared with documented attempts further north, Columbus’s originality lay in his daring to sail with the wind at his back, to the consternation of some of his crew, until he made a landfall, with no certainty that he would find a means of return. This alone accounts for his unprecedented success. The assumption that he knew the wind-system thoroughly in advance is tempting but unjustified: he was a restless experimenter, a tireless advocate of an empirical epistemology, who, in the course of four Atlantic crossings, tried three routes out to his discoveries and three routes back. On his first crossing he adopted what seemed logically the shortest route between two points by trying to sail due west. If, as his language suggests, he steered by the compass, this would have meant in practice a route somewhat south of west, owing to magnetic variation; he contemplated returning the same way and even began on a more southerly course before turning in search of the familiar westerlies of the north Atlantic. After further experiments, the routes of his second voyage, in 1493, were established as the best: outward in the path of the northeast trade winds, along a diagonal from the Canary Islands to the Antilles, and back by climbing almost to the latitude of the Azores before turning due east. Indeed, apart from modifications made to the return route as a result of the discovery of the Gulf Stream in 1513, Columbus established what became the most favoured routes between Europe and most of the New World throughout the age of sail.
His reason for wanting to cross the Atlantic in the first place is a subject of unresolved debate. He appears at different times during the formulation of his plans to have contemplated a number of different objectives: the discovery of new islands, a search for the Antipodes and a short route to Asia. All these, as we have seen, were matters of common speculation, discussed in academic geography and illustrated in cartography. By the time of his first crossing in 1492 Columbus’s focus had narrowed to the quest for a short route to Asia: this, at least, is the only objective mentioned in what survives of his own account of the voyage. Still, this was perhaps as much his patrons’ and backers’ choice as his own, and Columbus’s subsequent commitment to the view that his discoveries were indeed Asian, or close to Asia, should not be treated as evidence of what was in his mind earlier in his career. He seems to have been concerned not so much about what he would discover as whether, in a social sense, he would ‘arrive’. For Columbus, the geographical nature of his objective was negotiable; what he insisted on was the chance to make a voyage and, if he found something exploitable, no matter exactly what, to claim the rewards of wealth and ennoblement to which the hero of a seaborne romance was entitled. His true objective was identified by the potential mutineers, on his first crossing, who are said in an early narrative source to have grumbled at the risk posed to their lives by Columbus’s desire ‘to make himself a lord’.
There was nothing new in his methods or equipment. His methods of navigation, which he described as ‘like prophetic vision’, were a mixture of the traditional and the intuitive. He relied on primitive celestial navigation and, probably to a lesser extent, on dead reckoning (which consists in plotting one’s course by the compass and determining position by estimating speed). He resorted when necessary to such time-honoured expedients as following the flight of birds. He carried a quadrant or astrolabe, with which he impressed his men, but he never mastered the use of it. His fixings of latitude were made by timing the hours of sun and reading the corresponding latitude off a printed table. His attempts to calculate longitude on shore by timing eclipses were, from a scientific point of view, valueless. He had an uncanny way of interpreting the weather — unsurpassed, in a shipmate’s opinion, ‘since Genoa was Genoa’ — and an enviable facility in the haven-finding art in unfamiliar seas. He was genuinely, passionately interested in technical innovations; but his achievements relied on technology which had been available literally for centuries.
By the time his exploring career came to an end, he had accumulated a dazzling record. As well as his major achievement — the discovery of a transatlantic link — he had observed and described the whole of the coast and part of the interior of Hispaniola, and parts of the Bahamas, Cuba, Jamaica, Puerto Rico, the Virgin Islands, the Lesser Antilles and Trinidad. He had crossed the Caribbean and explored the mainland coast of the New World from the Bay of Honduras almost to the Gulf of Uraba and from the mouth of the Orinoco to Margarita. He had recognised South America as an ‘other world’ and ‘a very large continent, which hitherto has remained unknown’, though he misrepresented it as being close to or contiguous with Asia. He established an enduring transatlantic link, inaugurated a series of previously unimagined cultural contacts and initiated Spanish colonisation in the New World.
In terms strictly of exploration, he left little for other explorers to accomplish in the areas he touched. The terms of his royal commission granted him a monopoly of navigation to his discoveries; but, when he was out of favour at court from 1499 to 1502, imitators were authorised to follow his route from a small number of ports in and around the mouth of the Guadalquivir. They included collaborators and crew members of his own: Vicente Yanez Pinzon, fellow traveller and brother of Columbus’s co-commander on the first crossing, whose family, dominant in the shipping business of the port of Palos, had provided the ships and recruited men for Columbus; Alonso de Hojeda, on whom Columbus had relied heavily in the government of Hispaniola; Peralonso Nino and Juan de la Cosa, both of whom had accompanied at least one of Columbus’s expedition; Cristobal and Luis Guerra, who had supplied him with provisions; and Amerigo Vespucci, the business partner of one of Columbus’s backers. Of leaders of expeditions in this direction in these years, only Rodrigo de Bastidas, Diego de Lepe and Luis Velez de Mendoza came from outside Columbus’s circle.
Between them they extended Columbus’s achievement in two respects. Expeditions led by Hojeda and de la Cosa in 1499, Nino and the Guerra brothers in 1499—1500, and Bastidas and de la Cosa in 1501—2 followed the mainland coast of America along the section omitted by Columbus between Margarita and the Darien peninsula. Departing from Palos in November, 1499, Pinzon attempted a more original effect by aiming for a more southerly landfall than Columbus. Via the Cape Verde Islands, he crossed with the north-east trades on what was almost the most southward course possible, reaching the coast of what is now Brazil at a point he named Cabo de Consolacion late in January, 1500. He then followed the coast northwards across the mouth of the Amazon as far as the area already familiar from Columbus’s work. He can therefore be credited with the first recorded discovery of Brazil and a formidable addition to the information on the New World available at the Castilian court. In July, 1500, Vespucci recorded a claim to have preceded him to the mouth of the Amazon by approaching from the north on a detour from an expedition identifiable with Hojeda’s; but, like most of the claims made by Vespucci, or on his behalf and under his name, this cannot be independently verified.