Journey info Wonder

Six days after the three-caravel fleet eased west from the Canary Islands, the scientific mysteries of a strange watery world began to crop up. On Sept. 13 the compass needles pointed 3 1/2DEG west of the North Star. Christopher Columbus and his jittery mariners had never before seen this westerly shift. But Columbus guessed an explanation: the North Star moves.* This was a notable contribution to the science of navigation and it was the expedition's first triumph over the mysteries that dogged the voyage.

Columbus sailed 458 years ago into more new things than a New World. In the current issue of Natural History magazine, Professor Norman J. Berrill of McGill University tells how the Admiral of the Ocean Sea was led and misled over 6,000 miles of uncharted seas by phenomena not understood in the 15th Century.

Hopeful Signs. When lookouts spotted a tern and a boatswain bird zipping overhead, hope of sighting land ran high. "These birds," Columbus noted in his log on the seventh day out, "never go more than 25 leagues [about 100 miles] from land." But the nearest islands at that point were the Azores, 600 miles to the north. A few days later the Santa Maria, Nina and Pinta ran into an oceanful of good omen. Soft breezes, another boatswain bird and a sea of floating weed with a live crab still enmeshed in it pleased everyone, and "the best sailors went ahead to sight land first." Actually, the lonely little formation had not yet reached mid-Atlantic: boatswain birds wander hundreds of miles from land and the seaweed was the Sargasso Sea.

Fortunately, says Historian Berrill, Columbus did not know all that modern natural historians know. He sailed on & on, believing that each dawn would light a distant rock. Each misread sign gave his fractious sailors a new shot of hope too. On their tenth day out of San Sebastian, they had more water before them than behind.

More than 1,500 miles from landfall at San Salvador, the caravels came upon smooth seas, drizzling rains and a whale. Whales had always been seen close to shore for the same good reason boatswain birds had: men had never sailed far enough to see them elsewhere. On Sept. 25, after sandpipers and a dove--supposedly sure harbingers of land--were reported, an island was "sighted" and Columbus knelt down and gave thanks to the Lord. The "island" was a cloud on the horizon.

Beacon Lights. Two hours before midnight on Oct. 11, Columbus saw from the poop of his Santa Maria a far-off light waxing & waning in the dark. Searching for an explanation, Berrill points out that the light could not have come from San Salvador. That island was too far off (about 50 miles) when Columbus sang out. Nor could it have come from a native canoe. Berrill thinks it came from a colony of 1-2 in. sea worms which live among the rocky reefs of the Bahamas and shed their eggs near the sea's surface with an intensely phosphorescent slime.

Perhaps the strangest sight Columbus saw was off the coast of Hispaniola on his way back to Spain. Looming out of the Caribbean Sea were three manatees--sea cows. These warm-blooded mammals looked half human as they raised their heads and chests and clasped their young in their arms to suckle them. Columbus found them disappointing mermaids. He confided in his log: "They are . . . not so beautiful as they are painted."

*Columbus was not entirely right. While the North Star does rotate, compass needles point not to it, as sailors had thought for centuries, but to the North Magnetic Pole, which was discovered in 1831. Latest calculations put this shifting spot on an island off the coast of northern Canada, at about 73DEG N., 100DEG W.

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