I have to admit that I just received Stephanie Grisham’s book, “I’ll Take Your Questions Now: What I Saw in the Trump White House.” Stephanie Grisham started at the White House when Trump was inaugurated in January 2021. She served as White House press secretary and communications director from 2019 to 2020. She also worked as communications director and chief of staff to First Lady Melania Trump. She resigned her position on January 6th, 2021 after witnessing the insurrection at the Capitol. I don’t normally read ‘tell all’ books like this but I decided to make an exception in this case just because she was in the midst of everything that was going on at the White House and I thought it might provide an interesting perspective. It will be a quick read. I am already about a third of the way through it and am sure I will finish it this weekend. I will be ready to report out by Monday for sure.
Since Monday is Columbus Day, or Indigenous People Day, depending upon where you are, I thought I would share a fun little, totally non-political, article I came across about Columbus’s voyage that is full of all kinds of interesting factoids.1 We have all been taught the Christopher Columbus story from grade school – at least the romanticized version of the Nina, the Pinta and the Santa Maria and Columbus’s quest to find a western route to Asia. This article provides a more realistic picture of what this adventure must have been like on these tiny ships for the 86 intrepid sailors who made this voyage. Enjoy – and I certainly hope there aren’t any worms in your biscuits today!
“Columbus hadn’t found a western route to India, of course, but his success in crossing the Atlantic was due in large part to the ships he chose for the perilous voyage, particularly the diminutive Niña and Pinta, which were a speedy type of ship called a caravel.
When the royal decree went out in 1492 from Queen Isabella of Spain to fund Columbus’s first voyage, it read, “By these presents, we dispatch the noble man Christoforus Colón with three equipped caravels over the Ocean Seas toward the regions of India for certain reasons and purposes.
Though only two of Columbus’s ships ended up being caravels, Isabella’s decree speaks to the popularity of the vessel during the 15th-century “Age of Discovery.” Starting with Portuguese explorations of the African coast in the mid-1400s, caravels were prized for their sleek, lightweight hull and their uncanny ability to sail into the wind.Luis Filipe Viera de Castro, a nautical archeologist at Texas A&M University, says that the earlier Portuguese caravels, known as the caravela latina, were rigged with lateen (triangular) sails that hung at 45-degree angle to the deck.
“Lateen sails are […] almost like wings,” says Castro. “You can point the bow of the caravel with an angle of just 20 degrees off the wind and still get enough lift on the outer edge of the sail to propel forward.”
The lateen-rigged caravels were critical in the Portuguese voyages to sub-Saharan African, where strong coastal winds blow north to south. The versatile caravel could speed south along the coast and easily return to shore against the wind.
For Columbus’s maiden journey, he used a Spanish update to the caravel known as the caravela redonda, a three-masted ship where the first two masts were rigged with conventional square sails for open-ocean speed, and a third was rigged with a lateen sail for coastal maneuverability. That rigging combination made ships like the Niña and the Pinta some of the best sailing vessels of their time.
In addition to their versatile rigging options, 15th-century caravels moved the rudder to the rear center of the ship. In the 14th-century caravels popular in the Mediterranean, the rudder was still on the side, says Castro, like Viking ships. The new position allowed for far greater control.
Small caravels like the Niña and Pinta could only carry between 40 and 50 tons and were crewed by fewer than 30 sailors each. Their lightweight design and rounded bottom meant that they rode high in the water. This proved critical when Columbus needed to navigate the shallow island coastlines near modern-day Cuba.
The bulkier Santa Maria, which was a 110-ton cargo ship called a nau, ran aground on Christmas Day 1492 and had to be abandoned.
Yet the main advantage of the Spanish caravel, namely its compact size, was also its greatest disadvantage. Life aboard a short ship like the Niña or Pinta would have been absurdly crowded and uncomfortable. https://www.history.com/player/21113327?autoplay=false Unlike the Santa Maria, which at least had tiny cabins where sailors could sleep between eight-hour shifts, the Niña and Pinta had a single small deck at the rear of the ship with only one cramped cabin reserved for the captain.
“If you’re a sailor on a caravel, you’re living on the deck and sleeping on the deck,” says Marc Nucup, public historian at The Mariners’ Museum in Newport News, Virginia. “You’re trying to stay out of the way of the sailors who are working. There’s almost no private space.”
Work was relentless on any 15th-century ship. The 20 sailors on the Niña and the 26 crewing the Pinta would have been constantly engaged with adjusting the rigging, trimming the sails, inspecting for leaks and plugging them with spongy scraps of old rope called oakum.
“Cathedrals, castles and ships—those were the most complicated things that humans had built up until that time,” says Nucup. “There was always something to do.”
The round-the-clock workload meant that even if you were off-duty, good luck trying to sleep on the deck while the other sailors stomped around you. Hammocks weren’t yet in use on ships in the 15th century, says Nucup.
And then there was the food. Columbus stocked a full year’s worth of food for the journey, not knowing how long it would be before they could return to Spain. For food to last at sea, it needed to be dry. Staples included dried and salted anchovies and cod, pickled or salted beef and pork, dried grains like chickpeas, lentils and beans, and, of course, hardtack biscuits.
The word biscuit comes from the Latin bis coctus for “twice-baked.” The hardtack biscuits “enjoyed” by Columbus’s crew would have been prepared by baking a hockey puck of flour and water multiple times, then crushing it into tiny pieces, reconstituting it with water and baking it again. Hardtack biscuits were so rock solid that they could only be eaten if softened with water or dipped in the communal slurry served every meal in a large wooden trough.
Yet tooth-breaking, dry biscuits were still preferable to those that had been spoiled by exposure to water in their storage barrel. Ferdinand Columbus, the explorer’s 14-year-old son, reported on the conditions on Columbus’s fourth voyage to the Americas.
“What with the heat and dampness, our ship biscuit had become so wormy that, God help me, I saw many who waited for darkness to eat porridge made of it, that they might not see the maggots,” wrote young Ferdinand, “and others were so used to eating them that they didn’t even trouble to pick them out because they might lose their supper had they been so fastidious.”
BY
Dave Roos is a freelance writer based in the United States and Mexico. A longtime contributor to HowStuffWorks, Dave has also been published in The New York Times, the Los Angeles Times and Newsweek.
No longer wondering why years later the British had to shanghai folks to slave on their ships. Eew. Hmm, what’s for breakfast now ?
I’ve actually wondered on occasion about ship conditions those earlier days – as I recently watched “Captain and Commander” – maybe a wee bit better in that movie since a later time, but still – no refrigeration – so thanks!