Photo of the caravel shows the lateen sails, which improved the handling of the ship. Some caravels had a square-rigged sail. (Musee de la Marine, Paris)
Now here is a little history with Cool Runnings Catamaran cruises. But here we are more interested in the type of ship used by Columbus to navigate and reach the shores of the Caribbean.
The ships used were called caravels, which had been developed by the Portuguese to explore the rugged coastline of West Africa.
They could weigh from 50 to 60 tons and carried one to three masts.
They were from 12 and 18 m (40 to 60 feet) and, best part about them, was that they were easy to handle and could sail ‘close to the wind’, which will be understood by anyone who knows anything about sailing.
Columbus set out on his first trip to discover the passage to India going west in the Santa Maria, which was a 100 ton carrack or nau, the flagship and two smaller vessels, were caravel: the Pinto (the Painted) and the Nina (the Girl), which were 15 to 20 m long, and we learned about the size of a modern cruising yacht.
This voyage took five weeks to complete as the ships sailed driven before the winds of the ‘westerlies’ from the Canary Islands to what is now the Bahamas.
The Santa Maria, however, was doomed to run aground off what is now Haiti on 24 December 1492.
Discover with Cool Runnings Catamaran Cruises
Discover with Cool Runnings Catamaran cruises can tell you that Christopher Columbus arrived on the shores of Jamaica during his second trip to the Caribbean, always in search of a westward passage to India.
He arrived on the north shore of Jamaica, called Xaymaca, on 5 May 1494. He had heard about this ‘land of blessed gold’ from those he had met in what is now Cuba.He was said to have landed in the region of Saint Ann’s Bay.
Explore with Cool Runnings Catamaran Cruises
Painting of Christopher Columbus on the deck of the Santa Maria in 1492
Finally, you can explore around Ocho Rios, with Cool Runnings Catamaran cruises and find out more about Jamaica than even Columbus could have dreamed was possible.
Christopher Columbus made four trips to the New World. During his forth voyage Columbus was stranded in Jamaica in 1503 and was marooned with his crew for a year, until Diego Mendez, one of his captains, who had gone to Hispaniola in a canoe in the company of Arawak to seek.
Finally he returned to save Columbus and the remaining crew … but that, my friends, is another story.
