Caravel Ships: A Cost-Cut Roman Sail, Sagres, and Columbus's Niña Refit

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The ship that opened the Age of Discovery was no towering galleon. A 15th century caravel ran roughly 12 to 18 meters long, carried only 50 to 60 tons, and had a narrow hull about three and a half times longer than wide, letting it beat to windward off a deadly lee shore where round hulled cogs and naus were helpless. Its name runs from Portuguese caravela through Late Latin caravus to Byzantine Greek karabos, a light ship. Its triangular lateen sail spread through the Roman world by the 4th century, and in the 5th century shipwrights stripped costly brails and lead rings from square rigs to save money, pushing the industry to the cheaper lateen rig. Cost cutting also brought frame first carvel construction, shown in the Kelenderis ship mosaic.

Arab caliphates kept the Coptic and Greek shipyards running and carried the lateen rig west past Gibraltar. By the 13th century fishermen on the Atlantic coasts of Galicia, Portugal and Andalusia sailed open, undecked 20 ton caravels with five man crews over shifting sandbars. In the mid 15th century Prince Henry the Navigator gathered astronomers, Jewish mapmakers, Arab mathematicians and shipwrights at Sagres, and the enlarged caravel carried Diogo Cao and Bartolomeu Dias along Africa. In 1492 Columbus sailed with two caravels, the Niña and the Pinta, and refit the Niña with a square rig in the Canary Islands to run before the trade winds.

• The lateen sail works like a vertical airplane wing, generating lift instead of drag.
• A lateen rig can be dangerous with the wind dead astern, as its long yards swing wildly.
• The hybrid caravela redonda paired a square foresail with lateen sails aft.
• Added forecastles and sterncastles suited escort duty but eroded the caravel's sleek geometry.
• Its tiny cargo space doomed it once routes turned to profit, and the carrack, nau and galleon replaced it.