An Ocean of Air (15 page)

Apart from the islands of the Azores, discovered a few decades earlier by Portuguese sailing ships, the Iberian peninsula marked the western edge of the world. Beyond was the stuff of legend: Some spoke of a fabled island called Antilla, supposedly discovered by the Carthaginians; others of fragments of Atlantis, which had somehow escaped inundation, or of a gigantic and beautiful island bearing seven great cities, each more splendid than the last. Many had tried to explore these lands, but until now all had been beaten back by a fierce headwind that whipped up the seas to a fury.
The wind blew from exactly the wrong direction: the west, and no sailing ship could pass.

But Columbus had a plan. In years past, when he was earning his sailing spurs, he had made several voyages down the African coast. And whenever he passed the Canary Islands, especially in winter, his ship had been buffeted gently but steadily from the east.

This was the wind that Columbus had resolved to try to catch, the one that he hoped would carry him at least some of the way over the western ocean. When his three ships left Palos they headed not west, but south.

***

The journey to the Canaries was difficult, the wind fitful and contrary. Life on board settled down into its routines. Crew and captain both were deeply religious. Each turning of the hourglass was accompanied by a boy singing out a blessing. The days began with hymns to Mary, and finished with evening prayers. Only the captain had a tiny wooden cabin. Since hammocks had not yet been discovered (they were waiting in the Caribbean), the rest of the crew had to find berthing where they could on deck, tying themselves in against a sudden rolling of the ship.

Columbus was fretful. He wondered constantly if the easterly winds that he sought would even exist, and if so, how far west they would take him. (By exasperating convention, meteorologists label a wind by where it's coming from, not where it's going to. So an "easterly" blows from the east toward the west, and was just what Columbus needed.) The small fleet reached the Canaries three weeks after the start of their voyage. They reprovisioned, and then, on September 6, the ships weighed anchor and turned full west.

For the whole of the next day, the ocean held its breath. And then, on Saturday, September 8, up rose a wind from the east and Columbus found himself where he had always wanted to be: in uncharted waters.

The new easterly wind was beyond anything Columbus had dared to hope for. Over the next two weeks, it blew the fleet steadily farther and farther westward toward their goal. The sailing was magnificent. The
weather, Columbus noted in his journal, was like Andalusia in spring. "The mornings are most delightful, wanting nothing but the melody of nightingales," he wrote, and a few days later: "The sea is smooth as a river, and [there is] the finest air in the world." The speed of the small fleet was astounding. On their best day's run they covered 182 miles, at an average speed of eight full knots. And the wind never stopped coming.

Columbus had no idea what he had found, but this ultra-reliable easterly would prove to be every bit as important a discovery as the New World to which it carried him. For it was one of two giant belts of winds that stretch around the globe in the tropics, one north and one south of the equator. They are so steady and diligent that they would come to be known as the "trades," for the safe trading routes that they made possible. (They may even have been used by humans before Columbus. Norwegian archeologist Thor Heyerdahl has shown that the trade winds could blow a simple sailing vessel made of reeds from Europe all the way to the Caribbean, and suggested that the idea of building pyramids could have reached Central America by ancient Egyptians who took this route. Though if the ancient Egyptians did reach the Americas with tales of their pyramidal technologies, you'd think that they would also have mentioned the wheel.)

For Columbus, though, the trades were beginning to become too much of a good thing. They were so steady, and so unabating, that his crew began to grow nervous. He'd had enough difficulty finding sailors willing to make their way into the unknown, to equip their ships with a year's provisions at a time when even the most daring voyage lasted only a few weeks. Now, as the fleet sped its way west, murmurs of unease started to spread. This wind that was blowing them with such speed and efficiency never seemed to die down. Columbus noted grimly in his diary that his crew had "grown much alarmed, dreading that they never should meet in these seas with a fair wind to return to Spain."

Columbus did his best to distract his crew from their fears. He pointed out any scrap of evidence, however dubious, that made them seem close to land, and recorded each one in his journal. The "signs" could be almost anything: "It drizzled without wind," or "a great mass of dark, heavy clouds appeared in the north," or "saw a whale, an indication of land, as
they always keep near the coast." He even announced false distances when announcing the day's progress, on the dubious principle that this might help. ("Sailed this day nineteen leagues, and determined to count less than the true number, that the crew might not be dismayed," he wrote on Sunday, September ninth; and again on the tenth: "This day and night sailed sixty leagues ... reckoned only forty-eight leagues, that the men might not be terrified.")

What he really needed was land. And this he found, famously, in the early morning of Friday, October 12. Seaman Rodrigo de Triana, lookout on the
Pinta,
was the first to spot the cliffs of San Salvador and cried out, "Tierra! Tierra!" Like every other crewman, he was hoping for the reward of ten thousand maravedis—a decent annual salary for an able seaman—which the queen had promised in perpetuity to the first to sight new lands. Columbus, however, maintained that he had seen a light "like a wax candle moving up and down" some hours earlier, and claimed the reward for himself.

With the morning light, Columbus and his companions became the first Europeans to step onto a new world. Although nothing he saw on land bore any resemblance to Marco Polo's descriptions, Columbus always believed that he had found the Indies. But he had to revise his ideas of sophisticated treasures, focusing on the aspects of the world that were riper for exploitation: the cotton, the wood, the spices, and the surprisingly gentle people. These seemed almost as if they came from Eden before the fall. They were naked, open, curious, and—so Columbus noted in his diary—had so little idea of weapons that when he showed them a sword, they picked it up by the blade and cut their hands on it. "It appears to me that the people are ingenious, and would be good servants," he wrote, "and I am of the opinion that they would very readily become Christians."

Still in search of riches to justify his voyage, on October 23, Columbus decided to head for an island the natives called Cuba, where he hoped at least to find "much profit ... in spices." Cuba did indeed yield plants that would provide people in the future with great profit. The natives there had the peculiar habit of rolling up herbs inside dried leaves and setting them alight, which turned out to be more pleasurable than it looked. Las
Casas, Columbus's friend and the transcriber of his journal, wrote his own account of this practice: "[The herbs] are dry, and fixed in a leaf also dry, after the manner of those paper tubes which the boys in Spain use at Whitsuntide: having lighted one end they draw the smoke by sucking at the other, this causes a drowsiness and sort of intoxication, and according to their accounts relieves them from the sensation of fatigue." Prefiguring later attitudes to this newfound weed, Las Casas himself was censorious, adding sternly: "I do not see what relish or benefit they could find in it."

By early January, Columbus decided he had enough gold artifacts, and specimens of exotic spices and woods—not to mention natives—to impress his royal patrons, and he decided he should head for home. His ship, the
Santa María,
had accidentally run aground, so Columbus decided to leave her and a handful of men, to begin a colony. He claimed the
Niña
for himself, and on Wednesday, January 16, the two caravels began for Spain.

Immediately they faced the problem that had been so feared by Columbus's crew on the outward journey. The winds that had taken them so steadily to the "Indies" were now blowing in their faces. Against these headwinds, how would they ever get home?

The
Pinta
and
Niña
were forced to beat against the prevailing trades, creeping ever northward so they could edge their way east. Farther and farther north they crept until, out of nowhere, came a miracle. On January 31, the wind swung. Suddenly a gale filled the sails of the two caravels and pointed their prows toward Europe. The ships found themselves running before a wind that seemed to be urging them homeward, hour after hour, day after day, their sails taut, racing over the ocean at giddy speeds: nine, ten, even eleven knots.

Once again, Columbus had made a discovery to rival that of the Americas. For this new wind was another part of the global conveyer belt, and the natural complement to the easterly wind that had borne him there. He had stumbled across the mighty Earth-encircling westerlies. Like the trades, they, too, appear in each hemisphere. The southern ones are responsible for the famous "roaring forties" around 40 degrees latitude, and the infamous storms that have long plagued sailors around Cape Horn.

The northern ones have also claimed plenty of victims, for the westerlies are nothing like the gentle steady trade winds. They are fierce and furious. At first, Columbus's ships gamely weathered their buffeting, their crews thrilled to be moving so rapidly homeward. But on February 14, the winds let rip. They worked themselves up to a frenzy, whipping up the water and slamming it into the leaking wooden hulls of the two small ships. "The sea was terrible," Columbus wrote, "the waves crossing and dashing against one another, so that the vessel was overwhelmed."

The crew did the only thing left to them: They prayed. And among their prayers they made many vows, private and public, as to what they would do if saved. Some of the promises were extraordinarily specific. They cast lots using a hat filled with dried peas, one for each crew member, to decide who should swear to make a pilgrimage to St. Mary of Guadalupe carrying a wax candle five pounds in weight. Columbus himself drew the pea clumsily marked with a cross, and immediately made his vow. There were more lots, more pilgrimages promised, and every crew member swore to go in procession, "clothed in penitential garments," to the first church dedicated to Our Lady that they should encounter.

Columbus's preparations were practical as well as metaphysical. Fearing that should they perish, all record of their journey would be lost, he braced himself against the lurching ship long enough to write a secret account of his adventures, to be delivered, if found, to the king of Spain. This he rolled in a wax cloth and placed inside a wooden cask before hurling it into the sea, an act that his crew took to be another, albeit bizarre, sign of devotion.

In the end, of course, the westerlies had mercy. After a few more hours of horrors, the storm finally abated and Columbus limped back to Spain. The tales he took with him were to change both Europe and America immeasurably, though not many of the people who had made this first contact would benefit from it. Separated from the
Niña
by this great February storm, the treacherous captain of the
Pinta
tried to race Columbus to the king and queen, to be the first with the news. But he arrived just too late. He took immediately to his bed, crushed with disappointment, and died within the month. Columbus fared a little better—his is the name that
survives in the history books and memorial days. But even he didn't long hold onto the titles and wealth with which the monarchs showered him; his unsuccessful attempts to govern the people he had discovered would turn the Spanish crown against him, and his final return from the "Indies" two voyages later would be in chains. The gentle natives he had encountered, meanwhile, would gradually learn the true horrors to be found at the hands of these men whom they thought had come from Heaven.

But while Columbus's New World changed through its contact with the old, the gentle trades and boisterous westerlies that had carried him blew steadily on. They still do so today, and, as long as Earth has air to feed them, they always will. And as they do so, they transform our world.

Nobody in Columbus's time had the slightest notion how far-reaching the winds he had stumbled across would prove to be. It would be some time before mariners even realized that they encircled the globe, and longer still before the first tentative suggestions emerged for why they should exist. But the full explanation of their powers would have to wait four hundred years, for a shy farm-boy genius, scratching out a living in the dirt of the continent that Columbus once claimed for Spain.

***

SPRING
1831
BERKELEY COUNTY, WEST VIRGINIA

In many ways the farm was a good thing. William Ferrel's father had bought it two years ago, and life there was more settled than the erratic lumber trade. Also, there was plenty of space for the young Ferrel to slip away and think. In his boisterous family of six brothers and two sisters, he could easily remain unnoticed, the quiet one in the corner, lost in his own thoughts.

The problem was that there was nothing for him to read. Ferrel was fourteen. For the past two years he had picked up what he could of reading, writing, counting, and grammar, huddled together with the other farm children in the freezing school hut. Perhaps it would have been pleasant in the summer, but then the daylight hours were too long and precious
to be wasted on learning, when even the youngest children were needed in the fields. Studying was for the winter, when an icy wind slipped beneath the white oil paper that was tacked over the windows in place of glass, and crept through the gaps in the cabin's rough-hewn logs.

The cold hadn't bothered Ferrel much. What he minded more was that school was now over for him. It was time to get on with the farm. And yet his mind wouldn't stop working. He was desperate for something, anything, to read. The family received a tiny local newspaper, the
Virginia Republican,
which was published every week in the nearby town of Martinsburg. Ferrel pounced on this the moment it arrived, scouring it in search of some rare article that might let his mind work.