If the Americas did not exist when would Columbus’s idea of a western route from Europe to Asia have been feasible? You may assume all Pacific islands would still exist.
Not with Columbus’ technology, would be my guess.
So there are no islands at all where the Americas are now? Thats a huge way to go without being able to stock up on fresh water and resupply. While it may have been feasible to build ships that could go that far nobody would have backed the idea because of the cost vs the return value of what you could bring back. Anyone who tried would have turned back, been stranded on some Pacific atoll or died at some point.
I’d say you would have needed steam power to have a decent chance and even then you would need the financial backing to take on such an endevor.
It should be noted that, even at the time, a lot of knowledgeable people thought it was too far for their ships. Part of the reason Columbus disagreed was that he really screwed up his math.
Based on his sources, Columbus estimated a distance of 2,400 nmi (4,400 km; 2,800 mi) from the Canary Islands west to Japan; the actual distance is 10,600 nmi (19,600 km; 12,200 mi).[65][66] No ship in the 15th century could have carried enough food and fresh water for such a long voyage,[67] and the dangers involved in navigating through the uncharted ocean would have been formidable. Most European navigators reasonably concluded that a westward voyage from Europe to Asia was unfeasible.
If North America hadn’t gotten in his way, they’d have all starved to death, probably less than half-way to Asia.
I know. I was imagining an alternate history where Columbus was not only wrong, but unlucky.
Leaving aside water and other supplies and whether his ships remained seaworthy, but CC’s provident God was listening, if he didn’t have landfall in the Americas, then his next stop on that same latitude (+/- 30 min) would be Okinawa. That’s an additional 14,000 km sail minimum.
If there were no continental masses separating the Pacific and Atlantic then the dominant current would be like that modelled when Pangaea was last in existence, so probably a big anti-clockwise swirl. If that nudged him southwards at the end he may have hit the gap between Taiwan and the Philippines, and sailed through to Hainan or even the Vietnamese coast.
If he hit any of the Okinawan islands they were not at that time under Japanese control, so no cigar at the end of the voyage either way. The nearest Portuguese landfall at that time was on the tip of South Africa and they’d not gone up its east coast yet.
Right. His crew would have all died from scurvy, starvation, and lack of drinking water.
That would be worse, since you have to refuel.
No, a sailing ship with proper food storage and extra water , etc could do it. but something like a clipper.
Yeas, but the key word is knowledgeable. Altho the Greeks did prove that the world is round, peasants still though it was flat.
Shortly before reaching America Columbus’ crew was close to mutiny, they probably saw that the water and food would not be enough for a return journey, they were approaching the point of no safe return. It was find land soon or perish. Columbus negociated to keep the same route three more days, at the very end of which (according to lore, the promise and the negotiations were not recorded on the log book) they saw land. Otherwise they would have turned around, with or without his consent. Cite.
Interestingly, it seems that the first voyage was one of the fastest made in the subsequent years, only the followers knew that there was land to be reached.
Had the journey been any longer, or had Columbus taken only a slightly different route, he would not have made it.
Aside: Everyone always assumes that Columbus was both extremely wrong and lucky, and that those two facts were independent. I think it’s more plausible that he was only partly wrong: He heard (true) tales of other lands to the West, across the ocean, and then (incorrectly) assumed that those lands were Asia, and so cherry-picked his favored distance measurements to match that. He hit exactly the land that he had heard of; he was only wrong as to which land that was.
Yeah, there is even some talk he had heard fishermen talk about land off the Grand Banks.
If he’d been nudged far enough south he would have hit Hawaii on the way. Some of the Northwestern Hawaiian Islands are at the same latitude as the Bahamas, and a lucky current would have sent him towards the major ones.
There were two different Greek philosophers who made two different calculations of Earth’s diameter. (Educated people knew even back then the Earth was a globe.) He took the smaller one, took the smallest interpretation of the measurement described (stadia?) and stretched Marco Polo’s description of his journey to get a number that was within reach of current sailing technology. There’s some debate whether on earlier voyages to Ireland or contact with Basque fishermen told him of the lands to the west. The reason he had trouble selling the idea was that the educated advisors in the courts of Europes knew he was wrong and the numbers were fudged, and it would be 10,000 miles to China and the Indies. When Portugal started making progress eastward around Africa, Spain decided to give it a shot the other way.
As mentioned, the crew was close to mutiny before Columbus finally spotted land, because of water and supplies. IIRC he had to agree with them if nothing was found in a few days they would turn back. More instructive is Magellan, a few decades later, who was so desperate 30 died and the crews were allegedly eating leather by the time the ships reached Guam (kill a few natives during a rest stop) then the Philippines. Water and scurvy were serious problems. The idea that they could have done the trip with an additional 3,000 or more miles to go - probably not.
What if Columbus took a more northerly, higher latitude route? If all of NA and (presumably) Greenland were not there, could he have made it, say, from Iceland to eastern Siberia during the summer? It would be shorter than the more southerly route actually taken. Then stay close to shore, resupplying as needed, while sailing southward toward population centers. Essentially the Nortwest Passage without the Canadian arctic islands and without the ice.
If I correctly remember my grade school history and the condition of the crew when they finally arrived, they would have starved to death before they even reached Hawaii which, my guess, would be another 5,000 miles or so west.
IMO the problem with that idea is that sailing ships’ routes are highly contingent on wind patterns. Trying what amounts to hopscotching Spain, Britain, Iceland, Greenland, etc., won’t work since the the wind is mostly blowing the other way.
Modern sailing vessels do well beating to windward-ish. 15th Century square-rigged high-drag tubs, not so much.
Good point. Assuming the wind patterns would remain the same in the absence of North America and Greenland, perhaps it would have been easier to sail from Asia to Europe along the Asian north Pacific coast and then to Iceland.
Which was ice-bound much of the year, and sparsely settled, so again he would run into the supplies issue, plus the risk of being caught in icejams.
How much ice would be present and how far south, without NA? We have no way of knowing, of course, but I would assume the sea ice would peter out roughly along the same latitude where it does today, leaving plenty of wide-open ocean where today is land.
Cite? I know this is a popular belief, but is there any evidence that people (peasants or no) thought the world was flat? The medieval T-O maps are more about centring Jerusalem than about accurately depicting the edges of the world. It seems more likely that people just didn’t care / weren’t interesting in what the world was or wasn’t like a thousand miles away.
We still have people who think the world is flat.