Mariners and Their Ships: A Revolution in Ship Design

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The Galley. Christopher Columbus’s “enterprise of the Indies” and subsequent European overseas expansion would have been unthinkable without a variety of shipbuilding and navigational innovations that made it possible for fifteenth-century Europeans to sail across long stretches of treacherous ocean waters. Throughout the later Middle Ages trade and naval warfare on the Mediterranean and Atlantic coasts of Europe had been dominated by a class of ships called “galleys.” They typically employed one square sail set on a central mast. Their principal source of power, however, was not the sail but rather a large number of oars that lined each side of the ship. Reliance on oar power carried both advantages and disadvantages for the captains and owners of galleys. On one hand the ships were not dependent upon the vicissitudes of the wind for their propulsion, and they could thus make forward progress at relatively steady and predictable speeds. For a Venetian merchant, for instance, this meant that a galley could be dispatched from Venice on a trading voyage to the eastern Mediterranean with a reasonable idea of when it would return to the home port. Such dependable scheduling was critical to commerce. On the other hand the galley also required large crews to man the oars. For this rather unpleasant task the Venetians and other commercial powers typically used convicts and prisoners of war. With such a large number of people on board, galley captains had to dedicate a great deal of cargo space to food and water as well as make frequent stops to obtain fresh supplies. For voyages in the Mediterranean or along Europe’s Atlantic coast, where ports of call were plentiful, this was not a problem. For lengthy trips across the open ocean, however, the galley was impractical.

Iberian Roundships. Ships better suited for long-distance ocean travel developed gradually from the twelfth through the fifteenth century. The maritime powers of the Iberian peninsula (Portugal and Spain) provided the setting for a variety of technological innovations that contributed to the development of new sorts of vessels called “roundships.” Unlike galleys Iberian roundships were propelled entirely by sails. Moreover they employed not only traditional square sails but also lateen (triangular) sails. While the square sail was the most efficient means of harnessing wind power when the wind blew from directly behind a ship, the lateen sail carried the advantage of being more easily rotated to take advantage of all sorts of contrary winds. By combining the two sorts of sails on the same vessel, Iberian round ships proved to be effective in a wide variety of sailing conditions. In addition, since they did not depend on oar power they carried crews that were much smaller than those of the galleys. Having on board fewer mouths to feed, a fully supplied roundship had a sailing range that far exceeded that of the galley. These roundships, as it turned out, generally could store just enough food and water to maintain their relatively small crews for a journey across the Atlantic Ocean to the Americas.

Caravel and Carrack. The earliest of these roundships was the caravel, a small but agile Portuguese vessel. Caravels, which existed in prototype form as early as the thirteenth century, were typically between twenty and thirty-five meters in length and extremely maneuverable. Fifteenth-century Portuguese mariners used these ships in their explorations along the coast of Africa and in lengthy voyages to the Madeira Islands and the faraway Azores. The Portuguese crown considered the caravel’s technology an essential state secret, and a Portuguese man was in fact executed in 1454 for selling a ship to an English buyer. Despite their attempts the Portuguese monarchs found it impossible to keep the caravel technology entirely to themselves. Shipbuilders in southern Spain were constructing caravels of their own by the late fifteenth century. The Spanish also began to build a new class of roundships called carracks—ships which were two to three times larger than the Portuguese caravels.

Together the caravel and carrack were the most-prominent ships in the early phases of European exploration and expansion in the years around 1500. The three ships used by Columbus in his 1492 voyage, for instance, included two caravels (the Niña and Pinta) and one carrack (the Santa Maria).

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William D. Phillips Jr. and Carla Rahn Phillips, The Worlds of Christopher Columbus (Cambridge, U.K.: Cambridge University Press, 1992).