How did ships in Columbus's time that crossed the Atlantic sail at night? They didn't know if and when they'd hit land.

by Chatoyant_Ethan

Would they anchor at night? I know that's what the crow's nest was for. Would they use giant lanterns as headlights?

davidAOP

Here are some basic things to take into consideration:

  • Ships during the Age of Sail (even as far back as the 15th century) could have used a lead sounding weight and a line to test and see if there was any ocean floor anywhere near their bottom. Once you start encountering a sea floor of some kind again (or rather, a depth that would indicate that there might be dangerous waters ahead in terms of being too shallow for your vessel) then you might want to start watching for land (if you didn't see it beforehand, didn't hear it as matts2 suggested, or birds are often a sign of land nearby).
  • If you are starting to find indicators of land being nearby, the real concern is if it's a night without any stars and a new moon, and/or thick clouds that block any light from stars and moon out (or a storm as matts2 suggested, though then you have the concerns of weathering the storm on top of finding land) since that means a lookout won't be able to see the horizon where, if all else fails in terms of hearing it, or even smelling it (if the wind is the right way, land can have a particular smell to it that can be caught) since with some star and moon light, you should be able to see the silhouette of land on the horizon. Hopefully, you don't put the one guy who has night blindness on watch (night blindness being caused by a Vitamin A deficiency, the liver takes about 2 years to run out of that stuff if not replenished, so only someone who had been on a foreign station for 2 years and hadn't had much of any access to the right foods like cheese and butter would get that - see pgs. 153-154 of the book Feeding Nelson's Navy for more on that). - One aside here, you would be amazed what night looks like well out at sea. On the Bortle scale, you would have quite a low rating (the lower on the scale, the more you'll be able to see) while at sea. The most ideal place for a clear sky are specific places on land that are away from places that may have light pollution, are high above sea level, are are dry - which is why the ocean is at a disadvantage, there is a lot of moisture in the air that can interrupt seeing the stars and whatnot. But out at sea, you'll see more celestial objects than you'll see anywhere near a modern population center because of light pollution. But there is one thing for certain, regardless of the night sky, it's hard to beat the ocean for darkest places at night.
  • An ultimate reality of being at sea, especially in the Age of Sail, is that wrecking a vessel is always a possibility, even in familiar waters. Coasts and ocean floors change enough that it's hard to keep up with the movement, disappearance, or creation of shoals and other places that a ship could get stuck or wrecked. Even in the age of GPS and sonar, accidents can happen - but just imagine an age before those pieces of technology came around? Imagine a time that, unless you know your celestial bodies and math well enough, you probably couldn't get more than your latitude. Short of using the stars, it would not be until well into the 18th century that a clock would be invented that allowed for longitude to be calculated accurately and consistently without the use of stars. Even with those two methods, you're not going to get a precise enough longitude and latitude to avoid every small shoal out there (that's when you need a good man in the bow with a sounding lead and a keen eye to watch what was coming, if he is a good local pilot all the better). Heck, Columbus's first expedition ran aground the Santa Maria and they lost that vessel.

So, to sum up, land wouldn't necessarily surprise Columbus or other Atlantic ships so quickly to the point of doing what you see in old Warner Brothers cartoons or Blackadder 2 where the ship hits a beach, everyone lurches and/or falls over, and then everyone runs out to see the beach that's right next to the ship. When they got a sense of land being really close, you stand off from going closer to shore somehow and wait until daylight to figure out the next steps (where there were anchorages and so on).

Sources: Honestly, it's hard to give one specific source for this. Learning about how ships and sailing worked during the Age of Sail literally fills thousands of books. Sometimes the easiest way to learn is to take classes, read a lot of books, learn from experience at sea, or learn from discussion/talking with people who know how ships worked in the Age of Sail. Even reading good Age of Sail fiction is good help since a series like Patrick O'Brian's "Aubrey/Maturin series" provides people (mostly the landsmen physician Stephen Maturin) as a device to instruct readers on how a ship works. Though, three of my favorite books that can give you a good start are:

  • Harland, John. Seamanship in the Age of Sail: An Account of the Shiphandling of the Sailing Man-of-War, 1600-1860, Based on Contemporary Sources. Annapolis, Md: Naval Institute Press, 1984. (they did a 2004 reprint I believe)
  • King, Dean, John B. Hattendorf, and J. Worth Estes. A Sea of Words: A Lexicon and Companion for Patrick O'Brian's Seafaring Tales. New York: Henry Holt & Co, 2000. (several reprints/editions)
  • The Visual Encyclopedia of Nautical Terms Under Sail. New York: Crown, 1978. (kind of old, but I like it for quick reference)