The Age of Sailing in Europe

Sailing began long before ships were capable of crossing entire oceans. Phoenicians are known to have sailed from the area of present-day Lebanon and Israel to the Atlantic Ocean and down the west coast of Africa over two thousand years ago. But the Phoenicians’ boats (as well as those of other early Mediterranean sailors) were primitive in design and difficult to sail. These early galley ships had one mast and a single square sail, which meant they could sail well only downwind. Early sailors also lacked any reliable means of navigation on open seas. Once out of sight of land, sailors had nothing but the stars to guide them home, and without accurate timepieces and navigational tools, navigating by the night sky was a daunting and uncertain prospect. At that time, almost all travel by sea was within a single biogeographic province: from one end of the Mediterranean Sea to the other, or around the Baltic Sea, or from one South Pacific island to the next.

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“Blue water sailors”- -those willing to sail out of sight of land- -had to wait for several major developments in sailing technology before they could make open ocean voyages with any reasonable expectation of being able to return home. European sailors received an important tool when the compass (a Chinese invention) became available, probably in the tenth century A.D. Together with maps, the t compass allowed sailors to break away from coastal routes and set out across the open ocean without losing track of where home lay. But if they were to make long voyages safely and regularly, sailors also needed boats they could control in contrary winds. Single-masted boats with square sails hanging perpendicular to the boat cannot sail upwind efficiently because the sail cannot be adjusted over a wide range of angles to the wind. Technical improvements that began to address this problem included arranging the sail fore-and-aft (that is, with the sail parallel to the length of the ship) and using several sails on several masts or a triangular sail at the front of the boat. Replacement of the ancient steering oar at the rear of the ship with a much larger and more easily controllable rudder board also helped provide better control. Once these crucial innovations had been made around 1300 A.D., ship design evolved rapidly and sailors began to set their sights on more distant shores.

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But even with compasses and improved ships, sailors still needed a working knowledge of the wind patterns that would carry them across the oceans- and back home. Between the 1330s and the 1520s, Portuguese and Spanish sailors discovered and mapped broad circles of wind that provided reliable routes across the Atlantic and back. A Portuguese sailor found the Canary Islands off the northwest coast of Africa in 1336 by following the northeast trade winds southwest from the Iberian Peninsula. Luck and insight eventually led the Portuguese to discover that the easiest way back was not to sail slowly and painfully against the wind up the African coast, but to sail west out to sea until they hit the westerlies, another group of winds that carried them northeast back to Europe. Other Portuguese and Spanish sailors mapped most of the rest of the great circulatory patterns of winds by the end of the sixteenth century, making possible the first controlled movement of large numbers of people and cargo back and forth between Eurasia (the combined continental landmass of Europe and Asia) and the Americas.

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Several elements conspired to make Europe the place where this long series of inventions and discoveries- -compasses and star charts, ships that could sail into the wind, and knowledge of wind patterns- came together to create a power that could sail around the world. Europe’s physical position on the globe was as critical a factor in its transoceanic explorations as were its technologically advanced ships. Compared to the Pacific, the Atlantic was a manageably sized ocean to cross on a regular basis, and the Americas (once discovered) were a much more profitable destination than the scattering of islands in the Pacific or the emptiness south of the Indian subcontinent. Perhaps even more important, the social and religious values that characterized many European cultures both impelled their transoceanic voyages and fueled the innovation that made these voyages possible.

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