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Caravels were a common type of vessel in the coastal waters of the Iberian Peninsula in the fifteenth century. [ 5 ] The caravel was the preferred vessel of Portuguese explorers like Diogo Cão , Bartolomeu Dias , Gaspar , and Miguel Corte-Real , and was also used by Spanish expeditions like those of Christopher Columbus .
Christopher Columbus, on his voyages to the New World in the service of Castile, used ships also called caravelas redondas (round caravels) by the combination of sails (Possibly in based lateen caravels and other traditional ships models), they were however different from the Portuguese models, which differed by the number and arrangement of ...
Columbus spent some time exploring the interior of the island for gold. Finding some, he established a small fort in the interior. Columbus left Hispaniola on 24 April 1494, and arrived at the island of Cuba (which he had named Juana during his first voyage) on 30 April and Discovery Bay, Jamaica, on 5 May.
Caravels and naus created an unmatchable team for explorers. Columbus used one nau, La Santa María, and two caravels, La Pinta and La Niña, on his journey across the Atlantic. It was so successful because it had defensive armaments and the team was highly maneuverable; they were similar to floating batteries of firepower. [21]
They were called caravels, a name then given to the smallest three-masted vessels. Columbus once used the word for a vessel of forty tons, but it generally applied in Portuguese or Spanish use to a vessel ranging from 120 to 140 Spanish "toneles". This word represents a capacity about one-tenth larger than that expressed by the modern English ...
The other ships of the Columbus expedition were the caravel-type Pinta and the carrack-type Santa María. Niña was by far Columbus's favorite. She was originally lateen sail rigged caravela latina , but she was re-rigged as a caravela redonda at Las Palmas , in the Canary Islands , with square sails for better ocean performance. [ 2 ]
Christopher Columbus [b] (/ k ə ˈ l ʌ m b ə s /; [2] between 25 August and 31 October 1451 – 20 May 1506) was an Italian [3] [c] explorer and navigator from the Republic of Genoa [3] [4] who completed four Spanish-based voyages across the Atlantic Ocean sponsored by the Catholic Monarchs, opening the way for the widespread European exploration and colonization of the Americas.
Illustrative woodcut from the Latin edition of Columbus's letter printed in Basel in 1494. [1]A letter written by Christopher Columbus on February 15, 1493, is the first known document announcing the completion of his first voyage across the Atlantic, which set out in 1492 and reached the Americas.