Atlantic: A Vast Ocean of a Million Stories. Simon Winchester

should history regard this entire Nordic Atlantic venture, when compared with the ocean crossing much more famously undertaken five centuries later, by Christopher Columbus?

      It certainly seems true, so far as archaeology and literature indicate, that no other sailor crossed the ocean with success¹⁴ in the nearly five centuries between the Erikssons’ ventures over the Labrador Sea in 1001 and the self-styled Admiral of the Ocean Sea’s six-week journey from Andalusia to San Salvador island in the late summer of 1492. But even though these expeditions had precisely the same initial outcome, that of firmly placing European men onto American shores, there are many differences between the two voyages.

      It is 4,500 miles from Bergen to Newfoundland, but Leif Eriksson did not have to travel nearly so far, because he first came to Newfoundland only from Greenland, less than a thousand miles away. Not that this short journey was exactly a picnic. In winter, though the sea does not freeze, the weather is dire, the sea thick with ice, packs and bergs and the much more dangerous half-submerged chunks known unimaginatively as bergy bits. The winds Eriksson encountered were exceptionally fierce and almost always came from the west, or the northwest, contrary to the Norsemen’s intended direction. These gales were so fierce the tiny knarrer would have had to lie to for hours, sometimes for days at a time. Masts broke, sails ripped, everyone aboard was drenched, chill and miserable. Even in summertime matters were little better: drenching fogs and the endless high-latitude daylight - which mightily complicated sleep - made for unhappy navigation.

      When the party finally reached land -which was pocketed with settlements of the Dorset people -they made bases for themselves, peaceably and with a recognised veneer of civilised behaviour (these were Norsemen, remember - not Vikings). They brought women with them on the comparatively short voyage across the Labrador Sea; they settled into routines of amiable domesticity; and they got on reasonably well, so far as one can tell, with the local peoples, even though their word, skraelinger, described them as barbarians (mainly since the natives wore animals’ skins, not clothes of woven wool, as did the Europeans). The Norsemen refused to give the skraelinger any weapons: the sagas say they bartered with them, employing as trade goods not beads or useless trinkets, but milk, which the Eskimos appeared to like.

      All told, the Norsemen’s brief stay in America seems to have been motivated by curiosity, marked by maritime courage, and sustained with a degree of apparent civility. The much better-known voyage of Columbus, by contrast, was motivated by a combination of commercial ambition, a growing Spanish exasperation at the blockage of land trade routes to the east by the Ottoman Turks (and the thought that this East could be reached instead by heading west and sailing halfway around the world), and the evangelical yearnings of the Church. It turned out to be a voyage carried out in comparative nautical comfort, and it never actually reached the North American mainland, with Columbus to his death believing he had reached the East - the Indies - and in all probability, Japan.

      His three small carracks, the Niña, the Pinta and the Santa María, were cleverly routed to the south of the Canaries (for no one would dispute that Columbus was an exceptionally canny navigator). He then turned right, due west - for he supposed that China and Japan, the cities Marco Polo knew, and the islands where the spices grew were all on the same latitude as the Canaries — and he led his tiny squadron and his ninety crewmen on a relatively pleasant sojourn through sunny seas pressed only by gentle easterly trade winds which sped the vessels toward their destination without significant incident. It was to be a far longer sea voyage without stops than any hitherto known - and since no navigator knew the extent of the sea into which they were heading, it must have been frightening: would they fall off the edge of the world, would they reach an area of impossible storms, were there sea monsters, whirlpools, angry gods?

      But by great good fortune the three tiny vessels sashayed their way over the waves quite easily, their logs sometimes recording passages of more than 150 miles a day, cruising at up to eight knots. They did so until that heart-stopping predawn, moonlit moment - on the long-remembered date, 12, October, 1492 — when the Pinta’s lookout, Rodrigo de Triana, spotted a line of white cliffs directly ahead. It was the sudden vision of a new world — or the New World, as it would soon be realised.

      This first piece of territory seen was almost certainly one of the outer cays of what are now the Bahamas, most probably the low and sandy windward outpost now known as Watling’s Island. Columbus had his flagship’s longboat convey him ashore under the banner of Castile, then kissed the ground, wept grateful tears, annexed the place - as Isabella had given him the contractual right to do — and named it for the Holy Savior, or in Spanish, San Salvador. Rodrigo de Triana was given five thousand maravedis¹⁵ for being so adept a lookout.

      Had this one journey been all, the reputation and worth of Columbus might have remained intact. But of course, his assumptions were wrong: So great a shame that the spice islands were never to be found so close! So great a pity that a jungle-covered landmass - yet still a part of the Indies, the Admiral continued to insist — had somehow so inconveniently settled itself down, blocking easy passage!

      But Columbus was not content with this single journey-there were to be three more ventures, all bent on the acquisition of land for Spain, and for periods of annexation and governorship that were marked for their cruelty, tyranny, greed, vindictive-ness, and racism. Columbus favoured slavery; he had a long record of cruelty towards the native peoples; and he condemned his own followers for various infractions, having their tongues cut out, their noses and ears sliced away, the women given the vilest of public humiliations. On his second voyage he brought a cargo of pigs, which he set free and which bred and provided succeeding seamen-explorers with food (but may also have brought with them some of the diseases that helped decimate the native populations). His third voyage, in 1498, brought him to the American mainland, in Venezuela, where he found the Orinoco and assumed it to be one of the rivers mentioned in Genesis; his fourth, in 1502 - made while he was still clinging stubbornly to the belief that all his discoveries were unfound parts of the Indies, such that on this particular voyage he might well find the Strait of Malacca - brought him to Honduras. And it was here that he heard whispers of an isthmus, and of a short land passage to another, mysterious ocean.

      But the penny never dropped - and the notion that America was a continent, and that the body of water that separated his native home from the lands he was conquering was an ocean, separate from the waters of the east, just never occurred to him. The sea he had crossed was called the Atlantic, true; but in Columbus’s mind, the Atlantic was an ocean cunningly joined to the Pacific, quite as seamlessly as if the two seas had long been one.

      Christopher Columbus, though he was a courageous and highly skilled sailor, was not the first to cross the Atlantic Ocean. While his voyages introduced Europe to the existence of an entirely new universe across the seas, he himself never reached North America. And in the prosecution of his aims and his duties he behaved not infrequently as a tyrant and a bully, as a slaver, an unrepentant imperialist and a man of immense avarice and self-promotion.

      And yet for all of this Americans have adopted and proudly sport as central to their identity the name Columbus, in Columbia; the District of Columbia; the Columbia River; Columbia, South Carolina; Columbia University; Columbus, Ohio - and Columbus Day. For the United States the reputation of the man remains intact despite the best efforts of enlightened teachers. The troubling details of his life, if known, appear in fact to trouble very few.

      The calendar still bends before his brand. Ever since 1792, when New Yorkers marked the three hundredth anniversary of his first landing; ever since 1869, when the Italians in the newly founded San Francisco held a similar celebration; ever since 1892, when President Benjamin Harrison urged all Americans to celebrate the four hundredth anniversary; ever since FDR made 12 October a holiday; and ever since 1972, when President Nixon shifted its observance to the second Monday in October, Americans have taken formal and honoured notice of Christopher Columbus, with the establishment of a great national holiday in his name. And even if he was somewhat more violent and avaricious than was perhaps necessary, history generally treats him well. By contrast, Leif Eriksson, who almost certainly was the first man to cross the ocean, who probably