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Table of Contents

Early Navigation—The Dead Reckoning of Christopher Columbus—Ships and Rigging—Fore Castles and Square Yards—Astrolabes and Cross Staffs—The Santa Maria on Toronto Bay—Jacques Cartier’s Ships—Sailing and Tacking—The Fisheries of the Banks—A Hundred Silent Years

It was not for five centuries after the coming of the Norsemen that the great age of American discovery began. In its earlier phases the voyages were purely expeditions of discovery, of search for treasure which was not there and for countries eight thousand miles further on. We have to remember also that at this date maritime navigation was still a strange, haphazard business. Science was not yet ready for it. Galileo’s telescopes and Newton’s mathematics belong in the sixteen hundreds. Celestial navigation was still in its infancy. The ordinary Spanish and Portuguese pilots knew nothing of it and even Christopher Columbus next to nothing. Today an Alberta high school boy who never saw salt water can learn from his manual of physics that the altitude of the polar star, as seen from any particular place, shows the latitude of that place. At the pole the polar star is, practically, right over the spectator’s head; at the equator, at his feet. The same boy will realize that one can always tell when it is noon because then the sun is at its highest for the day and every shadow at its shortest. If one has a watch set for Greenwich time one can tell by a comparison of twelve o’clock by the sun and by the watch how much difference in time there is between Greenwich and the place where one stands. This indicates its longitude, since obviously there are fifteen degrees for each hour to make twenty-four a full circle of 360 degrees.

But these principles can have no application without a set of delicate instruments to apply them. Columbus had been dead two hundred years before any one invented a watch that would keep time at sea. Such instruments as were available were so crude as to be of little worth—except on land where they at least stayed still. In Columbus’s day there was a rudimentary appliance called an astrolabe. It was like a flat plate hung up by a string through a hole in the edge. A pointer was pivoted in the centre. The observer squinted along the pointer at a star and the slant of the pointer showed the height of the star. Champlain, who was well ahead of his time in all work of survey and navigation, used an astrolabe in his inland exploration of Canada, used one and lost it up on the Ottawa where it was found some three centuries later.

Columbus was not in that class. He had an astrolabe [1] S. Morison, “Admiral of the Ocean Sea,” 1942 with him on his first voyage but he couldn’t use it^[1]. Later on the navigators found that instead of an astrolabe shaped like a whole plate a quarter of a plate would do. It swung on one corner and had a plumb line hanging across it. It was tilted till one could see a star through eyelets along one edge when the plumb line would indicate the angle of the star’s elevation. There were the equally simple devices of the “cross staff” and the “back-staff.” Familiar pictures show Christopher Columbus in a heroic pose “shooting the North Star” with a cross staff. The truth is, as the latest and greatest of his biographers tells us, that he never saw a cross staff.

Indeed the navigation of the “admiral of the ocean sea” would, but for its venerable aspect, appear almost comic. He steered by “dead reckoning.” To know how fast his ship was going he threw something over the side and took a guess. To know in which direction it was going he shook up his compass—a circular card, pivoted in a bowl, rocking and jamming with the motion of the ship—and took another guess. This second guess was doubly uncertain because Columbus and his fellow pilots knew that the compass varied from place to place but didn’t know how much it varied in [2] E. Keble Chatterton, “Ships and Ways of Other Days,” 1913 any one particular place^[2]. The days of tables and nautical almanacs were still to come. As to longitude it was hopeless. Pendulums couldn’t swing at sea. Ship’s time was calculated by an ampolleta, or glass of dry sand that took half an hour to run out. Theoretically these half hours added up day by day and compared with the ship’s noon would give degrees west of his starting point; practically they wouldn’t; somebody had forgotten to turn the sand. Even on shore in America longitude west from Europe was for a long time just a guess. A scientific attempt to “locate” Mexico City by calculating the Mexico hour of day of an eclipse, as compared with the Spanish time of the eclipse, got Mexico correct “within 1,340 miles.”

One might well say that under these circumstances the wonder is that Columbus ever got anywhere. The answer is that he never did. He was steering for Japan and landed in the West Indies. The story is well known that, to prevent his sailors from taking alarm at their increasing distance from home, Columbus gave out each day a false reckoning and kept the true one to himself. In reality his false reckoning was much the closer.

It appears further that Christopher Columbus as he grew old took on all the easy and pardonable vanity of old age and would speak of navigation as a “mystery,” and talk of “taking the sun,” a thing he couldn’t do. Luckily for him it was impossible to miss hitting America. It blocks the way from the frozen Arctic clear down the globe to the almost unpassable Cape Horn. Europe was slow in appreciating this simple but amazing geographical fact. For the two centuries between Columbus’s “Indies” and La Salle’s “La Chine,” explorers butted at the continent to find a way round it or through it, as football players buck the line. Practically all the early voyages to what we now call Canadian waters originated from this impulse.

Columbus and those who followed him for a hundred years were impeded not only by their lack of celestial navigation but by the short-comings of the poor tubs they called their ships. We know those of Columbus best because various models and drawings have been made of them, in particular those made, or intended, as exact duplicates for the World’s Fair at Chicago in 1893. These floated for many years in a lagoon at Jackson Park in Chicago: the Santa Maria still floats, precariously: the Pinta, foundering in 1918, and the Nina burnt to the lagoon’s edge in 1919, have joined the vanished ships of yesterday. But the ship of Cabot and those of Cartier, Frobisher, Davis, Hudson and Baffin and of all the earlier discoverers of our coast were of this Jackson Park pattern. Authorities dispute the correctness of the carvels of 1893 but, taking them as made, we find that the Santa Maria was of two hundred tons: was sixty feet long on the keel with a full length of hull of ninety-three feet. But the ungainly superstructure that she carried—the box-like “fore castle” that rose high and stuck out in front and the “after castle,” equally clumsy, which lingered behind, brought the total length of the Santa Maria to one hundred [3] William Wood, “All Afloat,” 1914 and twenty-eight feet^[3]. She had three masts of which the centre one far exceeded the others and carried an enormously wide main yard. All ships of this class had relatively far more beam than Viking ships and fighting galleys. In the ancient days of Greece and Rome all ships fell into two general classes, “long ships” for fighting, and “round ships” for cargo. The Santa Maria represented the full and most matronly development of the round ship. Tubby and top-heavy, she rocked, rolled and pitched in any sea. On the homeward voyage she ran gently one night on to a coral reef—waking nobody—opened at the seams and went down.

Such were the deficiences and the disadvantages of Christopher Columbus. But after all he did discover America. Civilized Europe had had two thousand years to find it and hadn’t done so. Such small facts as that Columbus couldn’t navigate, or that Lord Nelson was habitually sea-sick may be left among the little ironies of maritime history.

The Santa Maria, not the original but her Chicago Exposition duplicate or ghost of 1893, floated once in Canadian waters—as she ascended the Lakes. Some of us can still remember her at anchor on a still summer evening in Toronto Bay, a flock of row boats around her and the Spanish sailors—the genuine article—they had sailed her out—looking down from the high aftercastle and standing about in the waist. It recalls Longfellow’s memorable verses that tell of,

The Spanish sailors with bearded lips

And the mystery and beauty of the ships and the magic of the sea.

But for these particular Spanish sailors the sea had lost its magic. They had been too much rocked in the cradle of the deep by the sea-saw Santa Maria.

All the ships of the period were of this general class, commonly called carvels. Cabot’s ship, the Matthew, as far as is known, was a carvel but much smaller than the Santa Maria since eighteen men made her full crew. She is placed at fifty tons. Jacques Cartier’s largest ship the Grande Hermine, a vessel of over a hundred tons, was of the same type as the Santa Maria but carried only two masts, a square-rigged mainmast and a foremast. With these was a bowsprit, set, after the current fashion, at an angle of forty-five degrees and itself carrying a little mast and sail. Of the same type were the ships of the explorers of the north, Frobisher, Davis, Henry Hudson and Baffin.

But with the beginning of the sixteen hundreds a great and continuous improvement can be seen both in the art of navigation and in the building and rigging of ships, an improvement that is continuous from the days of the Tudors, when improvement was beginning, until the middle nineteenth century when the sailing ship reached its acme of beauty and efficiency just when its days were numbered. One realized the advance best by taking it in one single leap from the clumsy carvel Santa Maria to the clipper ship Lightning marking its record of 436 nautical miles in 24 hours, and the beautiful yachts, all aslant in the wind and sailing into it at “four points,” or forty-five degrees. This sailing into the wind or “tacking” was unknown in Columbus’s time. Ships that used oars—vikings and galleys—never needed it. Tacking came in as oars went out. It is commonly said to have first come into use as “invented” in England in Queen Elizabeth’s time. No doubt it came, like much else, half by accident as a consequence of deeper draft and better-cut sails. Gradually of course it transformed both the rigging and the hulls of ships, bringing in fore-and-aft sails, square yards that could be set all of a slant, and hulls with a clear run that would drag as little water as possible when heeled over. But all this was still centuries on.

All these early voyages to the coast of what is now the Dominion of Canada during the hundred years from John Cabot (1497) to Sir Humphrey Gilbert (1583), came to nothing as far as their immediate purpose was concerned but had amazing results in other directions. John Cabot was looking for Asia, and understood that he had found it. But the main consequence of his voyage was the opening up of the cod fisheries of the Grand Banks of Newfoundland and of the Gulf of the St. Lawrence. These banks are the “continental shelf” that runs out into a submerged plateau of half a million square miles, before the real ocean begins. This upper layer of these shallow waters is thick with “plankton,” the rudimentary form of animal life in water, such as floats as scum on ponds, a natural food of fish. Hence there were found in Cabot’s day inconceivable codfish to be taken out by the basketful without nets, food enough for the Fridays and fast days of all the pious Christians of western [4] H. A. Innes, “The Cod Fisheries,” 1940 Europe^[4]. The codfish on the older grounds round Iceland were as nothing.

Cabot’s voyage in 1497 and his discovery of the fisheries of the coast and the second fruitless voyage of 1498, in which he reached Baffin Island (lat. 66 north), came to nothing, we say, as far as the discovery of a route to Asia was concerned. But they had great consequences. Word went around about the marvellous draught of fishes to be had off the coast—the “New Isle,” they called it, and in French “Terre Neuve.” At this time the fishing fleets of northern and western Europe used to fish in the North Sea and around Iceland. The attraction of the new ground brought at once a flock of fishing vessels, at first French from the Channel ports and Basques and Spaniards from the Bay of Biscay. But presently, in the Stuart times, the English fleet, mostly out of the British Channel and Devon, was the largest of all.

It was a strange unrecorded traffic. No one wrote it up. Lescarbot, Champlain’s merry associate of 1604 and our earliest historian, who woke the first laughter out of the morose silence of an Indian continent, tells us that he knew an old fisherman who had made eighty-four crossings of the North Atlantic, forty-two round trips. But it all left no trace, no record. Even the names of places fell on them as from Heaven—Cape Breton, the Harbour of St. John and so on.

The fisheries went on thus for nearly half a century before they led to wider exploration. The fishermen neither wandered nor wintered. They landed only to get bait and cure fish. With the boats full they drove home on the north west wind. In the course of time they made their way from the Atlantic into the Cabot Strait and by the northern passage of the Strait of Belle Isle. But the fish were less plentiful there especially as the water got less salt. The bleakness of the North Shore (Cartier decided that God had reserved it for the murderer Cain), and the fierce winds and currents of the Gulf near Anticosti forbid further penetration towards the West. But there must have been the legend of a river. The Indians knew all about it. The current proved it. Every river is a mystery. One thinks of the unknown Nile, the mysterious Niger; so on our continent the legendary “River of Canada,” and, already discovered at the time of which we speak, the Mississippi. Hernando De Soto had gone inland (1541) through the sands and swamps of Florida, beyond all reckoning, and there came to a great flood of water moving south, from somewhere. He never lived to get out. But some of his men went on down the river and in time came to the sea and followed the coast and came to Mexico. But where the rivers came from no one knew. Old-time explorers must indeed have often wondered where they were. Nor could Indians tell them. Our Canadian Indians of “Canada,” questioned by Champlain, ran out of information beyond Lake Huron; one or two talked vaguely of a salt sea up the Ottawa river. For Vérendrye’s Indians of the Assiniboine (1738) the world ended somewhere round South Dakota. The South Dakota Indians knew there was a sea beyond the mountain.

Such was the background and such was the legend which led Jacques Cartier to his immortal discovery of the Saint Lawrence. It is characteristic of the period that he passed a large French ship from the Port of Rochelle as he went in through Belle Isle Strait. He thought nothing of it: no doubt there were plenty. Contrary winds and the Anticosti currents drove him away in 1534 but he came again in 1535, ascended the River to “Canada” and clear past it to Hochelaga and began therewith our Canadian history. Religious wars at home, the first call upon a religious people, kept the French away for half a century more. Then came Champlain and the definite foundation of New France.