**\<h2\>ATLANTIC CROSSINGS\</h2\>**

For many generations European maritime expansion progressed slowly.
Irish monks, such as the semi-legendary sixth-century figure St.
Brendan, evidently explored and lived on several North Atlantic islands.
The Norsemen colonized the Faeroes beginning in the eighth century,
Iceland in the ninth, Greenland in the tenth, and North America in the
eleventh. In the 1200s Genoese, Portuguese, Majorcan, and French traders
reached the Canaries, which had been visited 300 years earlier by Arabs
and were known to the ancient Romans. In the fourteenth century Genoese
mariners discovered the Madeiras and established regular routes between
Italy and the Baltic.\<p\>The first consideration in sea travel was a
suitable and reliable craft. For their earliest sallies into blue water,
European mariners used coastal trading and raiding vessels, which were
small and clumsy, but generally sturdy enough to withstand the battering
they took on the open seas. By the tenth century the lateen sail, which
enabled a ship to sail closer to the wind, reached Europe from the
Middle East. The sternpost rudder, probably developed in the Netherlands
in the 1100s, made ships more maneuverable and forced shipbuilders to
differentiate bow from stern. Around 1000 the magnetic compass came
aboard European ships; within 200 years it was commonplace. By 1280
Mediterranean mariners were using crude navigational charts. As design
and construction improved, ships retained their durability but grew in
size\--first in order to accommodate guns and powder, later in order to
carry goods for trade and the provisions needed for long voyages.
Modification of rigging and sail plans afforded greater maneuverability
and control even by a small crew weak with disease, malnutrition, or
exhaustion. Thus advances in building and sailing ships were both a
cause and an effect of expanding horizons.\<p\>

In the fifteenth century supply and demand, opportunity and incentive,
technology and technique, knowledge and curiosity came together
explosively. Beginning around 1400, Spain conquered the Canaries and
exterminated the native Guanches. In 1418 Prince Henry the Navigator of
Portugal began sending expeditions farther and farther down the west
coast of Africa from Ceuta, his base in Morocco. In the 1420s he
colonized the Madeira group. By 1432 Portuguese were populating the
Azores. Within thirty years they had reached Guinea and begun settling
on the Cape Verde Islands, discovered by the Venetian Cadamosto. In the
1480s Dias rounded the Cape of Good Hope under the Portuguese flag, and
Bristol mariners began to visit Newfoundland. Columbus, a Genoese in
Spanish employ, made his epochal transoceanic voyages beginning in 1492.
Working for England, another Genoese, John Cabot, crossed on a northern
route in 1497 and again in 1498, the year that the Portuguese Da Gama
sailed around Africa to India.\<p\>By the early 1600s oceanic travel was
burgeoning. Spain was eagerly stripping the New World of its immense
wealth; Portugal enjoyed lively commerce with India, the Spice Islands,
and its New World colony, Brazil; France was developing its mining and
other interests in west Africa; and nearly all the countries of western
Europe were exploiting the Newfoundland fisheries.\<p\>\<cenre\>\<font
size=2\>\<b\>

> \[ **Insert graphic here with sidebar:\<br\>**
>
> **Gerardus Mercator (Gerhard Kremer, 1512-1594) and Jocodus Hondius
> (Josse de Hondt, 1563-1612), two important continental cartographers,
> with their globes. From the first English edition of Mercator's
> posthumous *Atlas* (1636); courtesy of the Library of Congress.**
> \]\</b\>\</font\>\</center\>\<p\>At length Spain became the
> pre-eminent economic power in Europe. Large flotillas regularly
> crossed the Atlantic bearing gold, silver, jewels, cochineal, cacao,
> tobacco, and other valuable commodities back to Spain. Superior
> navigational knowledge and skill developed by long experience\--and a
> commitment by the crown to underwrite some of the expenses of
> transatlantic expeditions\--made Spain ruler of the seas for a
> time.\<p\>The rich traffic between the New World and Spain, and the
> vast areas in North America that Spain had ignored, were irresistible
> temptations for other European countries. But when England decided at
> last to contend for a piece of the New World and its trade, she had
> few mariners with deep-water experience and little knowledge of the
> Atlantic or the Western Hemisphere. Worse, the English government was
> unwilling and often unable to subsidize exploration and
> colonization.\<p\>English mariners were highly skilled in coastwise
> navigation, however. Aware of their shortcomings, but convinced of
> their ability to learn and excel, the English hired Portuguese and
> Spanish pilots and instructors.\<p\>\<center\>\<font size=2\>\<b\>\[
> **Insert graphic here with sidebar:\<br\>**
>
> **Sir John Hawkins, an influential mariner and ship designer, from
> Henry Holland, *Herwologia* *Anglica* (1620); courtesy of the Folger
> Library.** \]\</b\>\</font\>\</center\>\<p\>

Not content just to copy techniques and memorize accepted knowledge, the
English set about making advances. Textbooks on piloting and navigation,
navigational instrument, nautical charts, and oceangoing ships
multiplied rapidly. Sails, rigging, armaments, and seamanship
improved.\<p\>The English crown transferred fiscal responsibility by
granting royal charters to wealthy trading companies such as the Muscovy
Company of 1555. These companies, in turn, pushed for legislation that
ultimately led to the licensing of ship\'s masters and the founding of
Trinity House at Deptford\--the Tudor equivalent of a merchant marine
academy.\<p\>With an increase in the knowledge of navigation and the
availability of trained pilots and masters, an interest in overseas
trade and expansion began to flourish. By the time of the first voyage
to Roanoke in 1584, Drake had already circumnavigated the globe,
Frobisher had explored the barren Arctic, and Queen Elizabeth\'s Sea
Dogs roamed the shipping lanes with impunity. In this climate, Walter
Ralegh petitioned the crown for the right to explore and claim lands in
the New World not yet inhabited by any other Europeans. Upon receipt of
the grant, Ralegh and his fellows sponsored seven voyages in 1584, 1585,
1586, and 1587 aimed more or less at eastern North Carolina; others
backed voyages in 1587, 1588, and 1590.\<p\>The pilot on four of
Ralegh\'s first five voyages was Simon Fernandez, a Portuguese pirate
then in the service of Sir Francis Walsingham\--a member of the Privy
Council of England. Fernandez was one of the most highly regarded
western navigators available, for he had crossed the Atlantic on several
occasions to reconnoiter the North American coastline for Sir Humphry
Gilbert and may have had earlier experiences on the high seas in the
service of another country.\<p\>Fernandez\' routes for the outward and
return Atlantic crossings were largely determined by the characteristics
of the typical sixteenth-century ship. Most of the ships used for
transatlantic voyages were square-rigged. While able to sail to the
windward, that is, as nearly as possible in the direction from which the
wind was blowing, it was seldom desireable to make long passages to
windward. The maneuver was very labor-intensive and subjected the
rigging to great wear and tear. It was also slow. Consequently,
Fernandez and other masters of square-rigged ships crossing the Atlantic
usually kept close to the traditional routes established by Columbus and
Verrazzano, and sailed with the prevailing winds and currents at their
backs.\<p\>Following the clockwise flow of winds and currents, the
expeditions sailed south from England, past Spain and Portugal, and
stopped over at the Canaries, Madeiras, or Cape Verdes for food and
water before attempting the long Atlantic crossing. In the absence of
major obstacles, such as foul weather or pirates, this leg of the voyage
usually took ten to fourteen days.\<p\>

Then, with the northeasterly trade winds and the Equatorial Current at
their backs, the voyagers made for the West Indies, sailing as a later
generation of English square-rig sailors would say &quot;south \'til the
better melts, then west.&quot; An uneventful crossing usually required
four or five weeks.\<p\>After replenishing supplies once again, the
fleet picked up the Florida Current (precursor of the Gulf Stream) and
followed it northeast from around the Strait of Florida to the latitude
of Roanoke-a trip of another ten days to two weeks.\<p\>For the return
trip to England, ships usually took the Gulf Stream and its extension,
the North Atlantic Drift, back to Europe, perhaps with a stop in the
Azores for provisions and prize ships. Being more direct, the homeward
voyage usually took much less time.\<p\>By the last half of the
sixteenth century, English ships were crisscrossing the Atlantic with
considerable frequency. Increased navigational skill and improved ship
design had resulted in the emergence of English sea power and the end of
Spanish monopoly of the sea lanes to the new world. The English, largely
through their own initiative, had raised the art of navigation to a
science. A new age of discovery, exploration and expansion-one that
would change the world and man\'s understanding of the world-was about
to begin. .\<p\>\<center\>\<font size=2\>\<b\>Credits:\<br\>Text by
Olivia Isil; edited and expanded by lebame houston and Wynne Dough.
\</b\>\</font\>\</center\>\<p\>