The MV Explorer left Halifax on June 16 for this summer’s Semester at Sea voyage to the Mediterranean. While on the way to their first port stop of Cadiz, Spain, the ship and its 720 students passed between the outpost islands of Corvo and Flores in the Azores late in the afternoon of Sunday, June 21.
What they probably didn’t realize was that in February of 1493, in these very same waters, Christopher Columbus made his first land fall on the return trip from his first voyage to the New World.
He had left Hispaniola (present day Haiti/Dominican Republic) on January 15 on a northeasterly course that would take his dinky-little 67 foot-long caravel into the unexplored vastness of the Atlantic Ocean. In contrast, the MV Explorer is 590 feet in length … and the MV Explorer, despite its size, looks tiny when docked next to most cruise ships!
After three weeks of sailing, and watching Polaris rise higher and higher in the night sky, Columbus reckoned that he was in the proper latitude and swung the Niña — the caravel that he took command of after the Santa Maria sank — to the east. He nailed the Azores spot-on eleven days later.
When Columbus swung the Niña around to the east he noted in his log that he thought Flores was still to his north. This is 1493. The island of Flores wasn’t discovered by the Portuguese inhabitants of the Azores until 1450, and yet Columbus had detailed charts of the various islands of the Azores and knew where he was (more or less) relative to the islands of Corvo and Flores — they were not in the direction he wanted to go — he was looking for either São Miguel or Santa Maria, which are further to the east (and closer to his target of the European mainland).
If you’ve taken a bridge tour of the MV Explorer, then you’ve probably discovered that the captain and his crew didn’t take sightings of Polaris to reach Corvo and Flores in the Azores — they have all the benefits of modern charts, satellite technology and radar to find any spot — in any ocean, sea or river — on the planet.
The only time a Semester at Sea voyage has actually made port in the Azores was on Mar. 2, 1965, when the floating campus stopped in Porta Delgada (the capital of the Azores on São Miguel) on the “dead-head” voyage of Spring 1965 (the last of only three University of the Seven Seas “uncredited” voyages).
Some 80 students were transported on the MS Seven Seas from Los Angeles to South Hampton, so that the ship could be repositioned by the Holland American Line and returned to passenger travel. It was a dark time for the future of the Semester at Sea program in the waters of the Azores in March of 1965. These 80 students would eventually made their way to Barcelona and the Institute of North American Studies for a two-month stay before taking a bus ride to Rotterdam by way of Moscow and Berlin.
Porta Delgada is 760 nautical miles from Lisbon and going in the other direction, 2,111 nautical miles from the port of New York. If the Portuguese could sail 760 miles out into the open Atlantic Ocean, find a chain of islands, settle them and then make “routine” trips back and forth between them for some 30 years before Columbus is born, then why didn’t they, the Portuguese, discover the New World?
It is interesting that it was left to the Italian-born, Portuguese-speaking Christopher Columbus, in the service of Isabella of Castile and Ferdinand of Aragon, to be the first to claim the honor of discovering the New World.
.jpg "Semester at Sea: Fall Voyage 1963 - MS Seven Seas")
