With square-rigged sails aloft and all hands at their stations, a wondrous fleet of tall ships from all over the world will glide majestically into New York harbor Saturday morning, transfixing multitudes along the shore and in front of TV screens, just as they did in similar maritime parades here for the U.S. bicentennial in 1976 and the centennial of the Statue of Liberty in 1986.
Awaiting them will be three small ships-a cargo ship and two little caravels, which arrived in New York Harbor last Friday. Though dwarfed by the tall ships, they will not be overlooked, for they are the Nina, Pinta and Santa Maria-archeologically correct full-scale copies of the most famous vessels ever to ply the Atlantic.
The occasion here is not simply another 4th of July but perhaps the most climactic moment of the global hoorah marking the 500th anniversary of Christopher Columbus` voyage in 1492 to what became known as America.
On Saturday, the small ships will join the tall ships in a parade that will begin at the Verrazano-Narrows Bridge and take the ships past the Statue of Liberty and up the Hudson River to the George Washington Bridge.
This quincentennial has been and continues to be celebrated in all manner of scholarly, civic-minded and boistrous ways, some of them frivolous and not a few woefully inaccurate (a sculptor in Florida is completing a 311-foot-long bronze commemorative statue that has Columbus at the wheel of the Santa Maria, for example, though ships were not equipped with steering wheels until well into the 17th Century).
Interest in the anniversary has ebbed and flowed like the tides, but the Columbus ships are providing its principal excitement and focus-most especially for the 62 Spanish naval and civilian seamen who, joined by 16 honorary crew members representing other countries, sailed the three clumsy, diminutive but hardy replicas across the Atlantic from Spain.
If anyone knows what that long-ago crossing was like for the visionary, if quarrelsome, Columbus and his men, it is they.
”We learned that, in these ships, in good weather, crossing the ocean is no problem,” said the expedition`s skipper, Lt. Cmdr. Santiago Bolibar of the Spanish navy, during a chat in Annapolis, Md. ”The problem is sailing near the coast.”
At one point, said Rafael Mazarrasa, president of the sponsoring Spain
`92 Foundation, ”they were almost swept to Cuba.”
It has already been a long voyage for these modern-day Spanish adventurers. The three replicas were launched in August 1990 and spent months undergoing sea trials and shakedown voyages. After their official departure from the Spanish port of Huelva last Oct. 13, they paid goodwill visits to 22 other European ports.
Having made their stateside landfall Feb. 15 at Miami, they stopped off at 12 other American cities en route to New York, including Galveston, Texas; New Orleans; Charleston, S.C.; Baltimore and Philadelphia.
While it took Columbus 36 days for his Atlantic crossing (from the Canary Islands to the Bahamas), his 20th Century counterparts managed the sail from the Canaries to Puerto Rico in just 29 days-with no help from any new-fangled engines.
The three ships seem tiny now-the Santa Maria is 97 feet long; the Pinta, 74 feet; the Nina, 70 feet-but they were enormous in their day. Though they left out the 15th Century deck guns and granite cannonballs that Columbus brought along, the historians, archeologists and ship architects who built the replicas from 15th Century plans used wood from the same forests as Columbus` shipwrights.
The modern-day Santa Maria`s decks are just as steeply canted as the original`s, a design that Bolibar said adds structural strength, lets the sea water from waves run off quickly, and actually improves footing by forcing the men to walk in braced position when the ship is rolling, which is most of the time. (In good weather, he said, the roll is 20 degrees to one side or the other; in bad weather, it`s from 30 to 40 degrees.)
Political entanglements
The similarities between the two expeditions are striking, though not all were planned.
Both were horrendously expensive. Columbus` cost 1.5 million maravedis
(an obsolete copper coin), and any kind of million in the 15th Century was a lot. The replicas cost $14 million to research, build and outfit-plus $25,000 a day to sail them.
Both enterprises were initially bogged down by politics and governmental foolery. Columbus, who had learned of lands across the western sea from Spanish and Portuguese fishermen and whalers and from Viking sailors, put the pertinent data down on secret charts and then went peddling his idea to a variety of civil and ecclesiastical authorities and sponsors in Spain and Portugal.
For years, considering his notion crackpot and risky, they turned him down. So at first did Spain`s Ferdinand and Isabella, who objected to Columbus` demands that he be made a member of the nobility and get a 10 percent cut of the proceeds. Columbus refused to compromise. Isabella, who owned lands in the west of Spain that might prosper from Atlantic trade, finally changed her mind and persuaded Ferdinand to go along.
The modern expedition got enmeshed in scandal when Miami businessman John Goudie, appointed by President Ronald Reagan as chairman of the cosponsoring U.S. Columbus Quincentenary Jubilee Commission, was accused of steering lucrative contracts to friends and had to resign. Wanting no part of the trouble, Texaco, which had promised $5 million for the project, pulled out, forcing the sponsors to find other sources of funds.
Other entanglements included a threatened dockworkers strike in Puerto Rico timed for the flotilla`s arrival, and a $17,000 billing dispute, quickly resolved, with the City of Miami.
But both fleets managed to weigh anchor, and both enjoyed smooth sailing across the Atlantic. The replicas were able to determine their exact positions by using space satellite navigation, but took simultaneous readings with navigation instruments from Columbus` time.
”At the end, they were just 30 miles off” the intended destination, Bolibar said.
Common sense wins out
At first, the modern sailors couldn`t figure out how to steer the ships. The Santa Maria`s huge rudder and its tiller, which juts into the main cabin under the captain`s deck, took seven men to move.
”It was impossible,” Bolibar said.
They thought of using ropes, blocks and tackle so that just two men could shift the steering bar, but the helmsmen still couldn`t hear the commands of the skipper a deck above in stormy weather.
Finally, they ran ropes through blocks up to the captain`s deck, connecting them-yes-to an anachronistic steering wheel.
”We used common sense,” Bolibar said.
Columbus` crews were all volunteers, though most of the seamen were unaware that he was bound for what he thought was Asia.
The mixed military-civilian crews of the 20th Century fleet were selected from about 600 volunteers, and range in age from 21 to 43. Not atypical is David Garcia of the Santa Maria, a 24-year-old economist not long out of college.
Bolibar, 41, is a destroyer skipper who learned to sail when he was 6 and had experience aboard the Spanish tall ship Juan Sebastian Elcano, part of the fleet visiting New York in 1986.
”The admiral of the Spanish navy told me that he wanted me to command the replicas,” said Bolibar, ”and my answer to him was yes. This is how I volunteered.”
Notably absent on Bolibar`s passenger manifest was a 43-year-old Spanish navy commander (and onetime fellow naval academy cadet of Bolibar`s) named Cristobal Colon-which is Spanish for Christopher Columbus.
A direct descendent of the original Columbus (to be exact, a great-great- great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great- great-great grandson), and like him the Duke of Veragua, this Columbus is a navy fighter pilot and not much of a hand at skippering sailing ships.
Though Cmdr. Colon has made Columbus Day appearances in New York and showed up for the Tournament of Roses Parade in Pasadena, he declined to join the voyagers. There was some talk about his suffering from seasickness, but, as Bolibar noted, ”When the weather is bad, I never see any person who is not sick.”
Unlike the 15th Century fleet, Bolibar`s was required by the U.S. Coast Guard to be equipped with running lights and all manner of safety equipment, including life rafts and lifejackets.
His ships also have small, 118-horsepower inboard engines, but only to help with docking. Columbus simply dropped anchor and rowed ashore. Bolibar and his men had to tie up at municipal wharves so they could be greeted by bands, speechifying politicians and bathing beauties.
Hostile greetings
Columbus was greeted by friendly Indians who later turned hostile-with good reason. In Florida, Bolibar was greeted by representatives of American Indian and Haitian groups who were just as hostile, complaining that Columbus practiced genocide and was no better than Hitler.
In Ft. Lauderdale, the replicas were welcomed by an armada of yachts, water-spraying tugs and a facsimile Viking ship skippered by a man in a Hagar the Horrible costume.
In Baltimore, the helmsman of an escort craft boomed to Bolibar over a loud hailer: ”Hey captain, where you want to dock at?” On shore, they were serenaded by ceremonial ”Spanish music” that proved to be mostly mambos. An aide had been dispatched to a record store to get a tape and snatched up one from the Latin section more or less at random.
Perhaps the biggest difference between the two voyages was in provisioning the ships.
Not knowing there was a whole hemisphere of undiscovered land lying in his way, Columbus stocked up for a long voyage to Asia.
”His ships were packed with live goats, chickens, sheep and pigs-their only source of fresh meat,” said Mazarrasa of the Spain `92 Foundation.
”Also horses and cows, which traveled suspended in slings so they wouldn`t break their legs.”
Bolibar`s ships were equipped with refrigerators and stoves.
”On only two days were we given sandwiches to eat instead of hot meals,” he said.
The replicas ran into two bad storms off Florida, the worst hitting as they were trying to sail north from Miami in the Bahama Channel.
Primitive even by sailing ship standards, these vessels have great difficulty sailing against the wind. Like Columbus, Bolibar followed the circular route of the trade winds in making his crossing, which kept the breeze at his back. In coastal waters, he was at the mercy of the weather, and in the Bahama Channel he was confronted by northerly winds of 30 knots and more and wall-like waves exceeding 40 feet in height. The Santa Maria`s best speed with favorable winds is 6.5 knots.
”It was very, very bad,” Bolibar said.
Faced with the prospect of being blown south to Cuba, or worse, Bolibar radioed for a tugboat and a tow line. ”We cannot sail like Columbus and be in Ft. Lauderdale at the scheduled time,” he explained.
Respect for the explorers
The replicas encountered no such trouble as they neared New York City, where they arrived, on schedule, Friday morning and docked near the World Financial Center. Except for July 4, they are to be open to visitors through July 14. Then they`ll sail to New London, Conn., and on Aug. 3 are to dock in Boston, bringing their long voyage to an end.
Mazarrasa said plans call for the ships to remain in the U.S. instead of returning to Spain, which has another copy of the Santa Maria on display at the World`s Fair in Seville. He said several offers have been made for the three ships, and they could end up in an American theme park.
Bolibar and Garcia explained how they felt about Columbus now that they had experienced a voyage like his.
”This trip made us realize how uncomfortable it was to sail in these boats 500 years ago, how difficult it was to maneuver these boats,” Bolibar said. ”They were in danger-in very bad situations-many times, and they did not know where they were going, whether they would arrive in 30 days, 40 days, or never.
”It was not a very easy life on board these boats. These men were really, yes, courageous. That is what we learned.”
”We have more respect for those men,” Garcia said. ”They were really tough. Very tough guys.”
