Ferdinand Columbus, the explorer’s 14-year-old son, reported on the conditions on Columbus’s fourth voyage to the Americas. Yet tooth-breaking, dry biscuits were still preferable to those that had been spoiled by exposure to water in their storage barrel. 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. 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. It was a lighter and faster ship than the much wider Santa Maria, but little is known about the Pinta. On its first voyage across the Atlantic, the Pinta was captained by Martín Alonso Pinzón. 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 Niña and Pinta were smaller than the Santa Maria, weighing between 50 and 75 tons, with a deck length of 50 to 60 feet. For food to last at sea, it needed to be dry. 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. Hammocks weren’t yet in use on ships in the 15th century, says Nucup.įood Aboard Ships Was Dry and Often Filled With MaggotsĪnd then there was the food. 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. “Cathedrals, castles and ships-those were the most complicated things that humans had built up until that time,” says Nucup. 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. Work was relentless on any 15th-century ship. “You’re trying to stay out of the way of the sailors who are working. Starting in 1492, Columbus made four voyages across the Atlantic Ocean to the New World over a twelve year period, sailing over 25,000 miles. Click here for the current port schedule. “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. In Fall of 2017, the Niña and Pinta will be making port and will be open for tours in Michigan, Indiana, Illinois, Missouri, Tennessee, Arkansas, and Oklahoma. 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. The versatile caravel could speed south along the coast and easily return to shore against the wind. The lateen-rigged caravels were critical in the Portuguese voyages to sub-Saharan African, where strong coastal winds blow north to south. “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.” “Lateen sails are almost like wings,” says Castro. 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. 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.
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