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Could Columbus have made it to China (if it was all ocean)?

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Nerva

Nerva

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The advisors to Ferdinand and Isabella turned out to be correct that Columbus had miscalculated the size of the Earth. But I'm curious, was it even possible for Columbus to carry enough supplies to make it all the way to China if it was all one big ocean? Was he forced to bet on his calculations being correct, or was it just overconfidence on his part that he didn't carry more supplies?
 
I think if he had know the distance they could have planed accordingly and make it if we assume there are still islands in and between.
Now wind and weather certainly make this task not easier. Interestign question tho and I asked this myself already.

@Abdul Goatherd knows for sure.
 
Nerva said:
The advisors to Ferdinand and Isabella turned out to be correct that Columbus had miscalculated the size of the Earth. But I'm curious, was it even possible for Columbus to carry enough supplies to make it all the way to China if it was all one big ocean? Was he forced to bet on his calculations being correct, or was it just overconfidence on his part that he didn't carry more supplies?
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Can't say for sure. It seems technically feasible with contemporary technology.

Assuming it is all pure ocean, it is about 10,000 miles from shore to shore.

A good contemporary ocean-going ship could certainly do 5,000 miles without stopping for repair or replenishment. Vasco da Gama did a continuous stretch of 4,300 miles with no stop in 1497, others right after him went routinely longer before their first stop (c.5,000 miles). But they were all in the throes of scurvy by the end of the stretch.

Doing back of envelope calcs, 5,000 miles took nearly two-three months at sea at the time. So 10,000 miles would mean a continuous journey of approximately four-six months (depending on winds & currents). It is perfectly feasible to fill a single ship with enough supplies for six months - indeed it was quite common at the time (a typical "India Run" in the early 1500s carried at least that in supplies).

The main question is whether the ship could hold together for 10,000 miles without breaking apart at the seams. That's a very long stretch to go without repair, so it has to be well-built. Ships of the time typically did not travel even a fraction as long without stopping for repair, recaulking, repainting the hull, etc., so they weren't built for that. You certainly shouldn't just pick up any clunker ship you find from some used ship dealer. But it is certainly possible with contemporary technology to build a sufficiently good one that would hold together for a journey of that length. They might have to be purpose-built and would be expensive.

Your trajectory also matters a bit. If you sail too close to the equator, you risk getting trapped in "doldrums", i.e. zones with no wind. And that can be easily become a killer. In doldrums, you don't sail at all, but just drift slowly, and can remain immobile for very long periods ("As idle as a painted ship, upon a painted ocean."). It can easily add an extra month or two, to your journey, ensuring you run out of supplies quicker. More troubling, your very immobility will destroy your ship - barnacles and marine life love attaching themselves to still ships and will eat holes through your wooden hull.

So assuming (1) your ship is well-built, (2) you don't get into serious nautical obstacles (e.g. doldrums), then yes, it is technically feasible for the time.

But there still remains (3) scurvy. And scurvy is almost guaranteed to hit your crews, on such a long journey. It'll start hitting at around three months after you leave port, and accelerates thereafter. That, alas, contemporaries did not quite have (or realize) the cure for. So a 10,000 mile journey would almost definitely have a rather appalling sickness and mortality rate. So you must hope to find some islands of some kind along the way for crews to go ashore and recover. Otherwise, you will not have enough crewmen left standing to complete the journey.

So it is certainly possible to do, it is not very probable.

THAT SAID, Columbus's miscalculations were even worse than that. That is because even if you get earth-size calculation correct, that still doesn't tell you how long it will take, because you still have to calculate how far east the Asian continent stretches (astronomical science won't help you here - you have to estimate Asian land distances from travelogues of Marco Polo types - very unreliable). And everyone (the best scientific minds of Europe) significantly overestimated the length of the Asian landmass. So the best scientific opinion of the time said the length of the trip was around 5,000 miles, and they still regarded that as highly risky. Columbus's earth-size miscalculation cut that by half to 2,500 miles. So even if he carried supplies according to the "best" scientific calcs, he would still be dead half-way across the water.
 
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He would have been beheaded and eaten by his crew before even reaching Midway :)
 
The underlying issue is that the diameter of the Earth was known to within about 5%, otherwise navigation by instruments wouldn't have worked. Columbus' guesstimate of the diameter at a mere 4000 miles (half of what everyone else used for navigation purposes) was based almost entirely on "wishful thinking", so he probably didn't provision the ship for a 10,000 mile voyage, but only for a 2000-5000 mile trip. Unless he lucked out and discovered islands along the way where he could replenish supplies and conduct needed repairs, the voyage would almost certainly have ended in disaster.

To illustrate the sheer stupidity of Columbus' reasoning, he expected to have to travel 2000-5000 miles, ran into land in well under 2000 miles, and then, since the native tribesmen on the island didn't speak a work of Chinese, assumed that he had OVERSHOT his mark by more than a thousand miles and reached India. If that was true, then one could probably see Korea from Ireland. To compound this insanity, he then attempted to teach one of the natives Chinese, under the illusion that learning to speak Chinese would automatically give the man the knowledge of where China was.

Of course, Columbus wasn't the first to discover the New World by any means, and may not have been the second or third either. The ancient Phoenicians were noted seafarers, and had set up tin mines in the British Isles thousands of years ago, but long since abandoned. The South American temples are strangely reminiscent not of the Egyptian pyramids, but of the Babylonian and Sumerian ziggurats. It's entirely possible that Phoenician sailors discovered the Americas, but were unable to return due to the one-way ocean currents at that latitude. It's even possible that limited trade was established, but ended when Phoenicia collapsed as an empire and fragmented into independent city-states such as Carthage. Thousands of years later, Leif Eriksson is claimed to have discovered North America, and set up short-lived colonies. Climate change pushed the temperatures down, which caused crop failures, and that plus incursions by native tribes led to the abandonment of the Greenland colonies from which those expeditions were launched. The colonies beyond were also abandoned or wiped out by the natives.

The REAL discovery of Columbus, which led to the settlement of the New World instead of another shipwrecked crew being stranded in a strange place, was the circular ocean currents which allowed him to return at a different latitude than where he crossed over to the New World. That made a round trip possible.

Ultimately, the Columbus Day holiday which we celebrate in the US illustrates the fact that anyone can make a mistake, but if you make a truly monumental blunder that changes the course of human history, you can get a day named after yourself.
 
Kovax said:
The underlying issue is that the diameter of the Earth was known to within about 5%, otherwise navigation by instruments wouldn't have worked. Columbus' guesstimate of the diameter at a mere 4000 miles (half of what everyone else used for navigation purposes) was based almost entirely on "wishful thinking", so he probably didn't provision the ship for a 10,000 mile voyage, but only for a 2000-5000 mile trip. Unless he lucked out and discovered islands along the way where he could replenish supplies and conduct needed repairs, the voyage would almost certainly have ended in disaster.

To illustrate the sheer stupidity of Columbus' reasoning, he expected to have to travel 2000-5000 miles, ran into land in well under 2000 miles, and then, since the native tribesmen on the island didn't speak a work of Chinese, assumed that he had OVERSHOT his mark by more than a thousand miles and reached India. If that was true, then one could probably see Korea from Ireland. To compound this insanity, he then attempted to teach one of the natives Chinese, under the illusion that learning to speak Chinese would automatically give the man the knowledge of where China was.

Of course, Columbus wasn't the first to discover the New World by any means, and may not have been the second or third either. The ancient Phoenicians were noted seafarers, and had set up tin mines in the British Isles thousands of years ago, but long since abandoned. The South American temples are strangely reminiscent not of the Egyptian pyramids, but of the Babylonian and Sumerian ziggurats. It's entirely possible that Phoenician sailors discovered the Americas, but were unable to return due to the one-way ocean currents at that latitude. It's even possible that limited trade was established, but ended when Phoenicia collapsed as an empire and fragmented into independent city-states such as Carthage. Thousands of years later, Leif Eriksson is claimed to have discovered North America, and set up short-lived colonies. Climate change pushed the temperatures down, which caused crop failures, and that plus incursions by native tribes led to the abandonment of the Greenland colonies from which those expeditions were launched. The colonies beyond were also abandoned or wiped out by the natives.

The REAL discovery of Columbus, which led to the settlement of the New World instead of another shipwrecked crew being stranded in a strange place, was the circular ocean currents which allowed him to return at a different latitude than where he crossed over to the New World. That made a round trip possible.

Ultimately, the Columbus Day holiday which we celebrate in the US illustrates the fact that anyone can make a mistake, but if you make a truly monumental blunder that changes the course of human history, you can get a day named after yourself.
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Since Portuguese used the Oceanic Gyre more and more themselves (and during the Tordesillas treaty they claimed an empty place in the middle of the ocean which will be known later as Brazil) it was development of shipbuilding which made Columbus discovery durable. Using XV. century ships and navigation technologies it was pretty much inevitable.
 
bz249 said:
Since Portuguese used the Oceanic Gyre more and more themselves (and during the Tordesillas treaty they claimed an empty place in the middle of the ocean which will be known later as Brazil) it was development of shipbuilding which made Columbus discovery durable. Using XV. century ships and navigation technologies it was pretty much inevitable.
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Just because it's pretty much inevitable doesn't make being the first a lesser achievement.
 
Columbus didn’t go with less supply. He brought the max the ships can bring, and plan for 30 days to go West before returning. If America is further than this then he will need for a better ship.

Fortunately Spain happened to have the most westward island base, Azores, and the best ocean-going ship of the time, caravel. And Columbus know the then secret of the trade winds.
 
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Cavalry said:
Columbus didn’t go with less supply. He brought the max the ships can bring, and plan for 30 days to go West before returning. If America is further than this then he will need for a better ship.

Fortunately Spain happened to have the most westward island base, Azores, and the best ocean-going ship of the time, caravel. And Columbus know the then secret of the trade winds.
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Columbus has really small ships, even by the standards of his own era. He really didn’t have enough supplies to make it to China even though his ships were filled up pretty thoroughly. This is one of the reasons that his requests to fund his proposed expedition were rejected by pretty much everyone. They knew how big the earth was (because they were scientifically literate unlike Columbus) and they could count, so they realized that Columbus and his whole crew would starve to death before they could complete their proposed trip.

Columbus and his crew were saved from starvation by hitting Hispaniola.

later expeditions and even many earlier ones were much better prepared than Columbus was for his. Columbus was lucky, but he was really really stupid. He was basically saved by being incredibly boneheadedly stubborn. He was nearly killed by his own crews partway through the voyage when they did the math for themselves and realized they would starve to death before reaching their intended destination. Columbus only held off that mutiny (one of several attempts) by promising to turn back after a certain number of days to avoid starvation.
 
The answer its a plain "no".

They could not even transport enough supplies without them rotting half-travel and becoming a disgusting pile of worms. Six months its just too much time.
 
Kazanov said:
The answer its a plain "no".

They could not even transport enough supplies without them rotting half-travel and becoming a disgusting pile of worms. Six months its just too much time.
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Nah, packing food for longer than six months was quite customary. India Runs had to pack food for at least six months, and many packed for over a year. Typical food supplies taken on ships don't rot - staples like ship-biscuit are good for many years, theoretically indefinitely. They only spoil if they are poorly stored (e.g. get wet). Which is why ships of this time usually made sure to always have coopers aboard to maintain stores dry and intact.

Granted the longer you are at sea, the greater the probability of a storage accident which might lead to spoilage. But even so, it is quite easy to get rid of worms before you eat. Food quality may be disgusting, but it was not an obstacle.

Except scurvy, of course. Long-lasting ship foods like biscuit are bereft of vitamins, and the longer you depend on it, the likelier you are to develop scurvy. Worms can be scraped off, but scurvy cannot.
 
Were there even able to manage scurvy properly at Columbus time ?
 
Didn't they use to take Sauerkraut to avoid scurvy? Also, worms may be a source of protein :)
There could be also some livestock taken aboard, but that's rather not an efficient way to feed the crew...
 
Kazanov said:
The answer its a plain "no".

They could not even transport enough supplies without them rotting half-travel and becoming a disgusting pile of worms. Six months its just too much time.
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Salted meat and dry biscuit stay good for many years, and were the standard provisions for Sailors in that era. This definitely wasn’t a problem.
 
Graf Zeppelin said:
Were there even able to manage scurvy properly at Columbus time ?
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No - it wasn’t understood properly as a medical condition. They had no idea what caused it or what might be done about it except in the general sense that sailers at sea for too long got it, and getting them ashore and eating fresh food fixed it.
 
gagenater said:
No - it wasn’t understood properly as a medical condition. They had no idea what caused it or what might be done about it except in the general sense that sailers at sea for too long got it, and getting them ashore and eating fresh food fixed it.
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Exactly. It took a long time before they connected the dots.

One of the ironic aspects of scurvy problem is that they often had the remedy on board and didn't know it. Many spices, notably cloves, are very high in vitamins. They were collapsing sick on deck, and didn't think to try munching on some of the spices they were carrying in the cargo hold.

The differential impact between classes was also a clue - officers and well-to-do passengers tended to eat better aboard, having access to little luxuries like jams and preserves, and typically didn't get sick.
 
Yes it could have been done with the technology that existed at the time but it would have been incredible dangerous to travel over such wide ocean and require much better preparation and still it would have been too risky, even if there was an big ocean directly between Europé to Asia, I doubt anyone would risk it.
 
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