Christopher Columbus's Boats

The replica's of the Nina and the Pinta came to Tennessee for a few days and I saw them and went aboard both while they were in Knoxville. Some 65' with a 18' beam the Nina and larger Pinta were not noted for comfort. The crew always sleeped on deck without any cover and the lower decks were for living food and filled with animals of all sorts. The only area with a cover was the tiller area and the tiller was about 12' long. They must have used block and tackle to move it side to side. For 25 men to set out in one of these to find the new world and knowing the world was flat and that they could sail off the edge into the unknown must have taken great courage. These replica's have made voyages up to 5,200 miles in displaying themselfs to the world. The Nina logged over 25,000 miles under Columbus' command.
YOU would never have gotten me aboard. Great Ships--Brave Men.

 

Great ships and great courage, but Columbus didn't think that the world was flat, he had been to Norway and heard about Vinland west of Iceland and Greenland, discovered by Leivur Eiriksson 500 years earlier

 

By todays standards, lousy ships, crazy/desperate men.
But it is amazing what they did with those vessels. They were not state of the art back then.

They had no idea where they were going, how long or what was out there.
Just feeding the people was a major accomplishment.

 

Columbus may not have believed the world was flat, but the crew of convincts was a supersticious bunch. It took a strong leader to keep them going.

 

It had long since been known that the world was round, or at least very curved, since the heyday of the Greeks. I suspect the crew saw a sign at the end of the dock, that said free beer for life, if they went, so they did.

 

Nothing has changed - sounds like a lot of my boating friends.

 

Archimedes measured the distance from the earth to the sun very accurately, as well as the diameter of the earth, which he needed to measure how far the sun is from the earth.

The issue in Columbus' day was how big the earth was, not whether it was flat or not (that is a later fabrication). He believed the earth was smaller than it was, and was going to prove it by going to India by sailing west, that was why he called the natives "Indians" in North Amearica.

It turns out he proved himself wrong and in doing so introduced the New World to Europe (though he was not the first, he was an important milestone in the settlement of the west).

Historians say is was one of the most successful failures in history. He proved his theory wrong, but became famous for doing it.

May we all be so lucky with our failures.

 

Frankly, it was all about money. Spain wanted a quick route to the orient. The sent Columbus to find it. Instead he found a place that was then plundered for tons of gold and silver, even then worth millions.

Yes it took courage, and his crew almost mutinied, the very day they spotted land. I agree I wouldn't do it in those boats now, but back then, that was what they had. Saint Brendan did it in far smaller boats.