Original subtitles

Back when I was a boy, I had to learn a little poem,

and I expect you did as well.

It went, "|n 1492, Columbus sailed the ocean blue."

I can't remember any of it after that,

but it doesn't actually matter, because those first two lines

cement the salient pub quiz fact in your head.

It was 1 492, Christopher Columbus set sail from Spain,

he discovered America, hopped ashore at Long Island,

and rewarded himself with a nice, fat hot dog.

But there must actually be more than that

to this rather enigmatic character.

Why, for example, is he celebrated as a national hero

in a country he never even visited?

'So, join me, viewers, as I set out to discover that.

'The age of the Great Explorers

'was one of the most dramatic in history.'

BOOMING EXPLOSION Oh-ho-ho-ho!

'When men risked their lives...'

Cast off and set sail. Whoa!

Take up on the peak. Argh!

'..To seek new lands.'

We're somewhere north of the dog's arse.

Where the camera gone? Hello.

They crossed thousands of miles of treacherous ocean,

they built floating fortresses, they mapped the stars,

they developed whole new branches of science.

Eurgh! Absolute pish.

'But were these explorers really heroes,

'or just a bunch of chancers?'

It's a miracle he found anything, really.

Completely made up. Man was a charlatan.

'And is their legacy one of triumph...'

Ooh! '..or destruction?'

Crikey. Now it's turning a little bit dark.

'I'm doing a bit of discovering of my own...'

BANG Unbelievably terrible.

Medieval satnav 2.0 - a stick.

'..To learn how these explorers conquered the oceans...'

Look at that. I love it.

Nobody panic yet.

It's not just a map, it's a weapon.

'..And changed the world forever.'

Whoa! Dial out!

Ah, gold!

If you were in the navy, the French would definitely have got us.

CHUCKLES

CLUNK

'Columbus's world-changing voyages began in southwest Spain,

'which is nice, because I get to have a lovely scenic stroll

'for your viewing pleasure.'

I think we got it, the walking shot.

'All good voyages start with a map, and here's the one Columbus had.'

Now, very easy for me to say this in the 21st century

after a very agreeable lunch, but it's a bit crap.

Apart from that there are a lot of things missing -

Australia and New Zealand for example -

look at the shape of everything!

Look at Africa. Look at the shape of that.

It's ridiculous.

Back when Columbus was a lad,

the most exciting part of the world was Asia.

This is where all the shiny and aromatic stuff

that Europeans coveted came from, carried along the Silk Road.

But... unfortunately, in 1453 -

this is when Columbus was still an infant -

Constantinople had fallen to the Ottomans,

which caused a bit of a Silk Road block.

The Europeans no longer had access to all those lovely silks

and spices and jewels.

They were just stuck with their mud and turnips,

as if they were all living in Norfolk.

Something had to be done,

and what had to be done was to find a sea route from Europe

over to the Indies, as Asia was then called.

This is how The Great Age of Exploration began.

Forget the space race, this was the spice race.

The Portuguese were the hot favourites to get there first,

but it was a hazardous voyage over 10,000 miles south,

around Africa, and off to the east.

'Enter a man with a plan.'

Those steps are really annoying. LAUGHS

'Not me, Columbus.'

Rather in the way that young men these days are obsessed with, say,

magazines about Airfix models,

the young Chris Columbus was obsessed with maps.

And he had a brother who ran a map shop,

so he could get high on his own supply.

Historians have long believed that Columbus was an Italian from Genoa,

but recently, some have claimed

that he may have been a Spanish Jew from Valencia.

While they fight it out,

what we do know is that he spent a lot of time on boats,

and he knew that daring sailors were rewarded with great riches.

He became obsessed with finding a quicker route to Asia,

and with, of course, the glory that would follow.

So, after several more years of sailing and calculating

and map-bothering, he'd come up with a plan.

He would absolutely slash the journey time to Asia

by simply going west.

This was revolutionary - sailing off the edge of the map.

But if he could pull it off, fame and fortune would be his.

With fevered excitement, he travelled to the courts of Europe

and pitched his plan to their kings and queens...

...who all told him to sod off, sailing west was madness.

But Columbus, whether stubborn or simply delusional, persevered.

He tried schmoozing. He tried "map-splaining".

He tried boring them witless. He tried for years.

Finally, and at the grand old age of 41, he got a bite.

Isabella and Ferdinand of Spain had just won a very expensive war

expelling the Moors from their country,

and they needed a bit of a cash injection.

They also probably quite liked the idea of sticking one over

on their great rivals, the Portuguese.

And it's also possible

they were simply sick to death of Columbus nagging them.

It was game on.

Europeans would be sailing over the horizon to the west.

The Crown found backers to pay for crews and three small ships,

and they sent Columbus here, to Palos de la Frontera,

to collect the lucre.

In the 15th century,

the streets of Palos would have been rammed with boat builders,

ropemakers and drunken sailors.

Columbus met with the bravest of the ship-owners,

who lived in this house and laid out his plans.

In just a few short weeks,

he would be in Asia - except for one slight snag.

Let's have a look at Columbus's workings

to see where it went so horribly wrong.

As our high-tech demo will show,

it starts with a philosopher in ancient Egypt

whose name is very easy to say (!)

STRUGGLING: Eratos...thenes.

He noticed something a bit strange about shadows.

This is the spinning celestial dust mote that humanity calls home.

The sun is represented by this torch on a stick.

In reality, it is much bigger and much further away.

This is how they do things at the Griffith Observatory (!)

Here is Egypt. Now, here is a camel.

And if I put the camel down there, you can see

that the shadow of the camel is directly below the camel.

If we now move the camel further north...

...you can see it casts a shadow that way.

Clever old Eratosthhh...whatever

measured the different angles of the shadows,

did a spot of trigonometry

and worked out the circumference of the Earth.

He was accurate to within 1 %,

which is an absolutely phenomenal result.

Unfortunately for our hero Christopher,

he based HIS reasoning on the work of a different ancient, Ptolemy,

who, in turn, had based his work on the assumptions of some other bloke,

and they were miles out.

The moral of this story is don't copy other people's homework.

Ptolemy's estimate shrank the world by 28%

Columbus had backed the wrong camel.

I shall extinguish the sun.

Getting the girth of the Earth wrong could have fatal consequences

for the sailors on the voyage.

Right, let's go back to that 15th century map of the known world,

reproduced here in handy laser-cut wood.

His idea was to go west

and approach the Indies from the other side.

So, we'll rearrange the map.

Erm... Hang on. How does it look?

Something like that? Bear with me.

With the 28% shrinkage, he was already off to a bad start.

But then Columbus made a series of other errors.

Most notably, he confused the Roman mile

with the bigger Arabic mile,

and that made the Indies apparently there.

Columbus's whole plan was based on an idea of the world

that was 58% too small.

He calculated that that would be four weeks' sailing away.

The truth, however,

is that Asia is all the way over there,

or twelve weeks' sailing.

Columbus's mistakes,

and the mistakes of those around him all the way back to antiquity,

spelled certain death for a crew on that voyage.

If only he'd had the plastic Chinese globe, the bicycle light,

and the knock-kneed plastic camel with Blu-Tack on its feet,

he'd have known.

And, of course, there was another thing he didn't know yet.

There was something else here.

JAMES MAY: Welcome back, viewers, to 1492.

After ten years of persistent nagging,

Christopher Columbus has finally convinced the Spanish Crown to pay

for his frankly insane voyage sailing west to Asia.

There was just one thing he'd forgotten -

to check if a ship could actually sail there.

Well, he was in luck.

Sailing technology had recently made a major leap forward,

thanks to a new type of sail.

'Time for a demonstration.'

Permission to come aboard, skipper.

'Now, if you're expecting fancy CGI or re-enactors in dodgy wigs,

'this is not the series for you.

'But if you're expecting me with dodgy hair

'investigating exactly how it all happened and why...'

Morning.

'..Well, you're in luck. join me aboard 12ft dinghy Skiffy.'

This sail setup is known as square rig, for obvious reasons.

This is what most European ships would've had.

But the Portuguese, especially in the 1400s,

noticed another type of sail, a triangular one.

And what we're going to do today is demonstrate the difference

by sailing to a buoy just over there and back again.

I've got the skipper on board, who is Alan.

AVe, aye. AYE. aye.

And he's here to take control if necessary,

and to make sure I don't accidentally sail to the Caribbean.

Are you ready, skipper? I am.

In three, two, one. Go! Go.

If you just slacken off that. That's it. Right.

Goodbye, cruel world.

'The first leg is downwind, plain sailing all the way.'

Oh, God, there's the buoy. Bring it round.

'But next comes the upwind leg.'

CREW MEMBER: Going in the wrong direction!

Where are you, camera? ALAN LAUGHS

Come over here. I need to talk to you.

The point about the square sail is that it's really just like

a big bin bag full of wind.

It's great when you're going downwind,

the wind is roughly behind you,

it fills up, and it thrusts you along.

But when you want to go towards the wind, it's a bit problematic.

'Whilst it's all very easy downwind,

'upwind, the ship has to do something called tacking -

'basically, catching what wind you can

'to zig-zag to where you want to go.'

For this reason, sailors were quite nervous

about sailing away from the shore downwind,

because their fear was that they'd never be able to get back.

They'd be lost at sea forever, rather like we are.

SONG: 'Drunken Sailor'

We want to go over there.

'But tacking with a square sail is not easy.'

Ready about?

Ready about. OK, here we go.

We ARE moving.

ALAN LAUGHS just the wrong way.

Well, that's three metres

in about 15 minutes. ALAN LAUGHS

It'll take us a while to find the New World at this speed.

'After about half an hour of getting nowhere fast,

'or rather slowly,

'we admitted defeat and got a tow from the crew

'back to the start line.'

Right, that square sail was frankly rubbish,

but let's see how we get on with the triangular ones,

which were an absolute game-changer.

'In the early 15th century,

'sailors had noticed a different sail used in the East.

'On the River Nile, for example, the wind mostly blows south,

'but boats could still sail north just fine.

'Triangular sails were the key,

'and they would revolutionise where sailors like Columbus could go.'

Ready? R'9hty-ho.

'Just like with the square sail,

'the downwind leg is easy-going, a gentle beeline towards our buoy.'

Right, we're going to come round, up towards the wind now.

'But as we round the buoy, we're not being blown backwards.'

We're pretty much going in the right direction.

That's where we want to go.

But we're only, sort of, 30 or 40 degrees off.

It's a huge difference.

The sail is now acting like an aerofoil.

When the wind rushes over it,

it creates an area of low pressure on the curved side, the outer side,

and high pressure on the inside.

It's great.

'And the finish line's in sight.'

Victory! Yay!

We've clone it.

What a craft Skiffy is with triangular sails.

A nice, neat zig-zag,

and home in time for cocktails and a debrief.

And that was deeply significant because it shortened journey times,

and it meant the sailors weren't quite so scared

of being lost at sea.

All because of triangular sails. It's fantastic.

'A simple change in the shape of a sail

'meant that Columbus could now change the shape of the world.

'But to go with his sails, he needed ships.

'And for ships, he needed to go to the Palos Port,

'the Cape Canaveral of its time.'

Here is a replica of Columbus's fleet.

In the middle is the Santa Maria.

Not really very big,

when you consider what it was going to achieve,

but it is at least "plumptious" in the hold,

so it can bring back all those spices and treasures from Asia.

Ha-ha! Either side, there is the Pinta and the Nina,

based on Portuguese designs.

Small, sleek, fast.

The whole lot could be expected to bimble along

at a very vigorous four knots or so, roughly a brisk walk.

Ships like these

were one of the greatest feats of engineering of the age,

floating fortresses that harnessed the wind

to transport you to lands afar.

Now, if anybody watching this is thinking,

"Ooh, that would be an adventure, going off on an old sailing ship,"

you might want to think again.

Come aboard, and I'll show you what I mean.

You have to bear in mind that there were 90 blokes on these three tubs.

They stayed in the same clothes for the entire voyage

in their own slime and filth.

They slept in shifts,

and you slept simply in a convenient place on the deck,

probably curled up on an old sack or something.

The smallest of the lot was the Nina,

a proper little leaky tub, God above!

It's about 60ft stem-to-stern.

And I don't know if you've watched any of those YouTube videos

called things like Container Ship In Heavy Atlantic Swell.

HOWLING WIND

They're absolutely terrifying.

But now imagine doing that in this,

which is really just a bit of a GCSE woodwork project.

It's unthinkable.

This would be bad enough on a trip along the coast,

but the renegade Columbus would be sailing these ships west

into the blue beyond.

I don't know what he's smiling about.

Believe it or not, it wasn't that easy

to persuade men to go on these voyages,

and one way they got around this problem

was to offer an amnesty to criminals.

Murderers, for example.

"We'll let you off,

"but you have to go on Christopher Columbus's voyage." Hm.

To sum up, this was a death cruise on a rickety tub,

sleeping on a sack with a bunch of stinking murderers.

No wonder he couldn't get the staff.

I know some of you are wondering, and no, there were no lavs on board.

You just had to let it hang out over the side.

But at least the food was terrible.

Somehow, Columbus managed to scrounge up

a motley crew of 87 sailors, and they would need feeding.

Food rotted quickly in the hot, damp ships' holds,

so almost everything he took was dried to preserve it.

Right, well, here is a selection of the sort of things

Columbus's crews would've had on board.

There's salted fish, some hard cheese,

salted pork, peas, raisins, lentils, and some nuts.

They would've also had lots of liquid things, thankfully.

Delicious red wine and beer.

But half of their calorie intake would have come from something

called ship's biscuits, or hard tack,

and we're going to make some of that right now.

OK, this is not really very different

from making something like a chapati,

but don't get your hopes up.

'It's a very basic recipe.

'Two types of flour, boring old wholemeal

'and a delicious, fibrous green flour made from peas.'

Mm, very nice (!)

'Add some salt, because even sailors deserve flavour in their biscuits,

'and bind it all together with water.'

Now, I've worked on a cooking show, and I know that we're now going

to skip ahead to a point where I've already made a lovely ball of dough.

That's how cooking shows work, even in the 15th century.

SHORT BEEP

Weirdly, that we're talking about explorers,

this has worked out to look more like a map of Tasmania,

but anyway, that comes much later.

'Now, one essential requirement of ship's biscuits

'was that under no circumstances

'were they allowed to be light and fluffy.'

They made a series of holes in it,

going all the way through with a fork

to stop exactly that happening.

So, anyway, that's basically the gist of it.

And now, again, by the magic of television,

we will skip forward to a point

where a whole load of these have been baked.

SHORT BEEP Look at those.

Let's see what it tasted like, being an explorer.

Oh.

It's quite difficult to articulate how horrible that is.

It's extremely boring, very dry.

I mean, almost wantonly miserable.

Now, those were once-baked biscuits,

but the fact is, they baked them a lot more than that.

The point was to remove all moisture from them

because moisture would encourage the growth of mould.

So, here are some I made even, even earlier.

These are twice-baked. Let's see what the effect is.

Oh, God!

So hard to chew. That's only twice-baked.

OK, four-times-baked ship's biscuits.

SLIGHT CRUNCH, HE LAUGHS

Oh!

You need a machine tool to get through this.

CRUNCH Oh, a bit came off.

CRUNCHING

That's unbelievably terrible.

Oh, excuse me,

I'm gonna have to have a bit of beer to get rid of that.

'The sailors soaked the biscuits in water to soften them.

'But once a day, if the weather was calm enough to cook,

'they got to dip them in a bowl of this stuff.'

Ta-da! Salt pork and pea stew.

That is a pre-softened ship's biscuit.

I can't do it, I'm sorry.

How long has that been soaking for?

CREW MEMBER: About an hour. An hour?!

'Best resort to a spoon if I want to keep my teeth.'

Mm. That is delicious.

But it might be delicious because I've been eating ship's biscuits.

It's a bit like being beaten up, and then when it stops,

you think, "This is nice."

But it isn't really nice. It's just normal.

Columbus's very, very baked biscuits might have been mould-free,

but there wasn't much he could do about these little fellas.

These are weevils,

and these got into absolutely everything.

Now, they're perfectly harmless to eat.

They also help to weaken the structural integrity

of the ship's biscuit by burrowing through them.

But nevertheless, they are weevils.

To demonstrate just how different

their enthusiasm for ship's biscuits is compared with mine...

Oh, yeah, they've gone absolutely mad for it!

SHORT BEEP They're also escaping.

CREW MEMBERS: Oh, no!

Some of them have actually jumped out.

They're very agile.

So, now, as a poor sailor, miles from home,

hungry, probably cold, you're faced with stark choice.

It's a protein-enhanced,

unchewable ship's biscuit, or...

a nice glass of red.

Thank you for watching.

Mm! SHORT BEEP

Oh, God. There's one in there!

Finally, Columbus's ships were packed with everything he needed -

sailors, biscuits, wine, weevils, and a very badly wrong map.

All that was left to do was pray.

The night before the voyage,

Columbus came and prayed fervently to the Virgin Mary,

because he knew that what he was about to do was terrifying.

Even for a seasoned sailor,

it was a highly dangerous leap into the unknown.

"0 mare o l'e male," went the ancient Genoese saying.

"The sea is evil."

Early the next morning,

after four months of preparation and decades of planning,

the three tiny little ships weighed anchor

and set off that way, over the horizon, into the unknown.

JAMES MAY: Welcome back to the dawn of the age of exploration.

Christopher Columbus is finally setting sail for Asia.

And it's lucky he had all these sea gods looking out for him,

because he'd misplaced it by around 10,000 miles.

He'd set off, had a brief stop at the Canaries

to stock up on more delicious hard tack and wine,

and headed west, roughly speaking.

Very roughly speaking.

This is the satnav of Columbus's era, the astrolabe.

It basically gives you the height of the sun above the horizon,

and that allows you to calculate your latitude,

how far north or south on the globe you are.

Now, this is a piece of tourist tat from a gift shop,

and it is completely useless,

but the one Columbus had was completely useless as well.

And in any case, he didn't like using it.

He said, "For my voyage to the Indies,

"I did not make use of intelligence, mathematics or maps."

At that rate, it's surprising he made use of a ship.

So, how exactly was he navigating his way to Asia?

Let's find out.

Sailors would use something called "dead reckoning".

Which is nothing to do with being dead -

although that was highly likely

if you were a sailor in Columbus's time -

but it's to do with your relationship

to something that is dead in the water.

Typically, a piece of seaweed.

If I toss this over the side, that's dead in the water.

There it goes. We're going that way.

It can also tell you how fast we're going that way.

'Time to reckon with dead reckoning with a little challenge.'

Right, what we're gonna do now

is attempt to sail a perfect equilateral triangle,

in which each side

is half a nautical mile long.

'We'll navigate our triangle course Columbus-style.

'Skipper Ben is in charge of the seaweed dispersal.

'Skipper Alan is in charge of direction.

'And Skipper Me is in charge of time

'and bossing the other skippers about.'

I'm going to count how long it takes the seaweed to go

past the boat, all the way to the stern.

They didn't have any reliable way of measuring seconds back in the day,

so they had to do it by chanting, which is what I'll do.

OK, skip, are you ready with seaweed? Aye.

And go!

One mea culpa, two mea culpa, three mea culpa, four mea culpa.

Four seconds. Four seconds is a boat speed of four knots.

So, to do a nautical mile will take us...?

Seven-and-a-half minutes. Seven-and-a-half minutes, OK.

By the way, the reason the chant for the piece the seaweed going past

is "one mea culpa, two mea culpa" is because, well,

these days, we'd say "one potato, two potato",

but potatoes hadn't been invented yet.

SKIPPER LAUGHS

About a minute to go until the new heading.

'On Columbus's voyage,

'the crew made careful records of speed and direction every hour.'

Nobody panic yet.

'But for our exercise, we have to do it on each new leg of the triangle.'

Ready to go about. And go!

That's gonna go with a bang, guys. Yeah.

Helm over. OK, jibe ho!

C0r! And yes' 90!

One mea culpa, two mea culpa, three mea...

It's just under three seconds.

Six knots, five minutes. Relax, everybody.

And next, we will turn back for the final leg

of our perfectly-sailed equilateral triangle.

'After one more tack...'

Here we go.

OK. '..one more speed check...'

Four mea culpa, five mea culpa... Three-and-a-half knots, six minutes.

'..And five-and-a-quarter more minutes...'

We've got about 45 seconds to go, crew,

and then we will be back exactly where we started.

Keep on saying it, and you'll be right!

ALL LAUGH Does it look like where we started?

Well, the point is, it does look like where we started,

because it looks like the sea, that's part of the problem.

Yes, yeah. And hang on, here we go.

Three, two, one. There we are, we are back where we started.

Perfect. In the ocean.

Right, let's have a look at the actual GPS plot of what we did.

Right. Our triangle.

There you go. That is absolutely woeful.

BOTH LAUGH It's not...

It's not even vaguely triangular. It's actually more of a rectangle.

'If we went this badly wrong over just three nautical miles,

'imagine how wrong Columbus was going over 3,000.'

We were a bit rubbish then, but in fairness to us,

so was Christopher Columbus.

Everything he did was wrong.

It's a miracle he found anything at all, really,

and didn't just go round in a circle.

In truth, the ships were lost at sea,

heading in the direction not of China, but Papua New Guinea,

and that would have been a whole other story.

The weeks were ticking by,

and the crew were getting more and more worried,

because sooner or later, their supplies would run out,

if indeed they were still edible.

Which brings me back to Spain and onto my favourite subject.

Now, I've said this many times before,

but this is an excellent place to say it again.

Woodwork... is important.

WHIRRING

Good woodworking was a matter of life and death for sailors,

not just because their ships were made of wood

but because of what is being made here - barrels!

These people are coopers.

'What a polite man.

'I don't think he actually needed that bit.

'In case you haven't noticed the racket in the background,

'there have been a few updates

'since the handsaws and planes of Columbus's day.'

Each vertical piece, or stave, as it's called,

is quite a sophisticated component in its own right.

It is of itself barrel led, to use the engineering term,

it's fatter in the middle than at the ends.

It's also hollowed out on the inside,

and it's slightly chamfered on both edges.

'Now, like me, you're probably thinking

'that these barrels are love poems

'written in the language of exquisitely curved oak.

'But no, this is some high-grade tech,

'engineered with precision

'to perfectly preserve Columbus's food and wine... and weevils.

'They are the tin cans of the 15th century,

'just a lot more beautiful.'

Your half-finished barrel is soaked in water

to make the wood more pliant.

And then it's brought over here and put on a bonfire.

Whoa!

Thank God he put it out.

Look at the inside.

'The fire leaves behind a layer of carbon that helps seal the wood.'

It's a thing of beauty.

It's still not finished.

Getting that end in is a little bit like

getting the tyre back on your bicycle after a puncture.

Gracias. Did you see the end-over-end bit?

That's why the barrel is the shape it is.

It's a very, very manoeuvrable object.

Skilled people can just flip them around,

spin them around, roll them over there,

even when they're full.

MUSIC: 'The Blue Danube' byjohann Strauss ll

You find yourself slightly in fear of being run over by a barrel.

So, there is the completed barrel.

A thing of beauty, but also vital,

because all the provisions that went on board

would have gone in these, liquids and food.

That horrible hard tack,

the ship's biscuits that we made earlier on,

they would have been stored in these.

So they had to be perfectly sealed, otherwise liquids would run out

or seawater would get in and make those biscuits,

believe it or not, even more unpalatable.

So, this really is a matter of life and death for sailors.

The cooper is as important as the captain and as the shipwright.

So, I'm gonna say it again, woodwork is important!

Now, while these beautiful barrels

would have perfectly preserved Columbus's dried foods,

as his voyage went on,

his drinking water would have started festering

with deadly diseases.

Time to visit a lab with my own mini water barrel,

presumably made by a mini cooper.

Now, four weeks or so ago,

Jason, our Spanish fixer, filled this with water,

well water, fresh but untreated,

exactly the sort that Columbus would have had on his journey.

And Chris thought the voyage would last for four weeks.

So, let's see what four-week-old barrel-stored water is like.

Here we have a sample pot, and we need 100 millilitres.

Oh, dear. It's disgusting.

It's sort of stale and definitely a bit brown.

If only we had lab technician called Melania

to do a proper analysis of that for us.

Gracias.

'Melania is going to extract the filth from our water

'and grow a culture from it to see what's lurking.'

That now goes off for analysis in the lab.

She'll also do a second batch

that factors in the sailors' hygiene on board.

Last time I was left alone in a chemistry lab

with a Bunsen burner was in about 1976.

Didn't end very well.

So, now do I get to look down a microscope?

'In the great tradition of television,

'here's one Melania made earlier.

'First, the four-week-old well water, straight from the barrel.'

Oh, that looks disgusting! What is it?

IN SPANISH:

'The bacteria in this water

'could cause food poisoning, pneumonia and sepsis.

'Bad news for Columbus's crew. What about the second sample?'

Now, what Melania did is sort of simulate water

that would have been drunk by people from a communal scuttle bucket

with their personal drinking cups - tankards, if you like.

And, of course, the sailors didn't live

particularly clean or wholesome lives,

so things like sweat and faecal matter

would have been introduced.

And I'll look at it underneath my magnifying lamp.

Eurgh! It's got a face!

This sample actually has E. coli in it.

So, what that means is if you were a sailor in the 15th century

and you wanted to go on a voyage of exploration,

you had to be prepared to drink Tom Bowling's turds.

Thank you, that was... delightful.

Back to 1492, nearly a month into Columbus's journey.

He'd thought that by now he'd be enjoying a slap-up supper

and a hero's welcome in Asia.

But he was still lost in the blue beyond.

Four weeks passed and then five weeks.

Supplies were dwindling. There was still no sign of land.

The crew were becoming edgy, and they wanted to turn back.

Columbus's crap sums on the back of an envelope

were leading them further and further into nothingness.

The water must have been disgusting by now.

But maybe God was on Columbus's side.

Because after five and a bit weeks at sea,

and at almost exactly the point where he said they would find land,

they found... land.

But it wasn't Asia.

JAMES MAY: 'You rejoin me at an exciting time, viewers.

'An utterly inept sailor...'

Boom!

'..Not me - Columbus - had somehow crossed an ocean and made it to...

'not Asia, some mysterious islands that we now know as the Bahamas,

'Cuba and Hispaniola in the Caribbean in the Americas.

'Try telling him that, though.'

'He was certain he was on some islands just off japan.'

Now, it's probably fair to say that the people of Spain

weren't exactly on tenterhooks waiting for news of Columbus.

He'd been gone for seven months.

Most people thought they'd never have to be bothered

by Columbus again.

But then a letter to the Queen arrived,

sent by Columbus on his safe return to Europe.

I've got a copy of it here.

It's all written in miniscule Old Spanish,

but this is the 21st century, so I have a translation app.

And he wrote that, "I arrived at the Indian Sea..."

Ha-ha-ha.

"..Where I discovered many islands inhabited by many people.

"I took possession of all of them for our most illustrious King

"by public proclamation and unfurling of banners,

"with no-one making any resistance."

Really?

The letter was shared all over Europe, accompanied by -

brace yourselves, viewers, for the next best thing after woodwork -

woodcut prints.

CHORAL MUSIC

This is a 15th-century version of a tabloid front page.

The first thrilling pictures of the new lands to the west

and of the localTaino people,

who Columbus said welcomed them with open arms.

Also, here's one in colour as a treat.

"They traded with us and gave us all they had,

"graciously and willingly.

"Your Highness may believe that in all the world,

"there can be no better people.

"They love their neighbours as they love themselves.

"They have the sweetest manner in the world,

"and they are gentle and always laughing."

Now, we should probably take a moment to enjoy that record

of a rather beautiful bit of human interaction,

because pretty soon, things are gonna get a bit bloody.

The ships returned, minus the Santa Maria,

which Columbus, ever the skilled navigator,

had crashed into some rocks.

And he got a bit lost too.

But when they finally arrived,

the nation was in fevered anticipation

to see what they'd brought back.

The two ships arrived back in Spain seven months after they'd departed,

and they were full of marvellous and exotic things,

the likes of which had never been seen in mouldy old Europe.

To start with, exotic fruits.

Here is a selection of things that weren't available

in the local greengrocer up until then.

This one deserves a particular mention.

It is a fruit. It is a chilli pepper.

And people discovered that if you ate these,

they set fire to both ends of your alimentary canal,

but they did change our eating habits forever.

There were fun new pets.

Talking parrots became all the rage,

whether you were a prince or a pirate.

This one came from the visitor's centre.

There were things to swing in.

The hammock would go on to revolutionise sailing

and the health of sailors.

There was... oh, dear, tobacco.

The sailors tried this,

and the weird thing was that once they tried it once,

they found they couldn't stop trying it.

And there was one other thing that was even more addictive.

That...

...is gold.

Forget Asian silks and spices,

this was the stuff explorers' dreams are made of.

The word "gold" appears in Columbus's diary

of his first voyage 142 times.

In truth, he only managed to scrounge a piddling amount

from the Taino people,

but that's not what he told the Queen.

He said they had "vast mines of gold"

and that she could have as much gold as she desired.

That little white lie was the sweetest sound to a monarch,

because gold means power.

Gold! We've always believed in it.

Humans have been obsessed with it. And why?

Well, the Aztecs thought it was produced

by the life-giving force of the sun.

It's also in limited supply, which means it can be controlled.

Even today, it is believed that all of the world's gold reserves

would fit in one big block between the legs of the Eiffel Tower.

'Here, old gold is melted down and refined in one of these, a crucible,

'by one of these, an Adam.'

How long will that take to warm up? About five to eight minutes.

'The Taino gold was in the form of beautiful jewellery and keepsakes,

'but to Columbus, it just meant cold, hard cash.'

It's things that were once incredibly precious to people,

but they're probably now dead.

Just remember that when you retire

and you're given your gold watch or your solid gold letter opener,

one day, you will turn to dust, and it will turn to scrap.

There it is.

That's upbeat, isn't it? THEY CH UCKLE

The crucible is now as red as a Spanish sailor

exposed to too much Caribbean sun.

This is your last chance to reclaim that wedding ring,

gold sovereign, watch band.

No? OK, chuck it in, then.

It's all gone in the pot. It's all coming out as an ingot.

I love the colours of the flames. Look at that green there.

Gone.

'While our gold melts,

'let's look at how Columbus managed to persuade his new acquaintances

'in the Caribbean to part with their gold.'

Now, the Taino people on the islands didn't have this technology.

They didn't have furnaces.

What they would do was find nuggets in the streams and rivers

and simply hammer them into shape.

But what really impressed them was the work of the Arawak people

on the mainland, because they did have furnaces.

They melted gold, and they alloyed it with rich red copper

to give them something a bit like what we would call rose gold.

They called it "guanin".

Now, fortuitously, Columbus's men had with them

a great deal of another copper alloy, brass,

which is made from copper and zinc.

And it was in the form of trinkets, really,

like these little hawk bells.

And the Tainos really loved these, because they looked like,

and just as importantly, even smelled like

the guanin from the mainland.

So the sailors were able to trade these virtually worthless trinkets

for handfuls of real gold.

The sailors couldn't believe their luck.

Neither could the Spanish Crown.

Right, here is the big moment, the pour.

I am going to press the button.

Are you ready for me to press the button?

Ready. Here it comes.

Ah! Gold!

We talk about people dripping in gold.

This actually is dripping gold.

Looks like a slightly... bar of toffee at the moment.

Just don't lick it.

'Columbus said that gold is the greatest treasure

'and that he who possesses it can do all he wishes in life.'

I like it!

'Gold, simply put, meant greatness.'

Gold, like the love it so often represents, has been quenched.

Last thing now, to clean it.

And it's heavy... because it's gold!

Oh-ho-ho! There it is.

Even in that state, it's worth, I would guess,

what, £350,000-£400,000?

Yeah, give or take.

So, really, it's that or a pretty decent house.

That's what the Spanish went mad for.

It drove them insane.

Is your security quite good here?

Columbus was the court's new golden boy.

He was granted a second voyage post-haste,

but this wasn't just a gold grab -

or at least it couldn't be seen as one.

Isabella wanted souls too, to convert the Taino people

from their gods to her Christian one.

This time, Columbus set sail with 1 7 ships

full of sailors, obviously,

but also soldiers, priests, woodworkers, stonemasons, miners,

everybody you needed to set up a whole new society.

And his instructions from the Crown were twofold -

convert souls and find gold!

JAMES MAY: 'Welcome, viewers, to 1493.

'And Christopher Columbus is now a pretty big queso

'after finding land to the west

'glittering with the promise of gold.'

I am walking on television.

'But now he has to do it again.

'And all of Europe is watching.'

Now, as we know, he's a terrible navigator.

Look, he's dropped the chart,

and that globe's probably just a drinks cabinet.

So, how the hell is he going to pull it off it a second time?

Well, it was actually a bit of a breeze.

This bucket 0' ice represents the cold of the North Pole,

and this bucket of hot water represents the heat of the equator.

Science again!

My handy smoke stick will show how wind is formed.

And you will see that the flow of cold to warm

will make it go down that tube to the equator in a second.

Yes! Look at that!

That's really quite fabulous, isn't it?

Anyway, if I can just give that to an assistant

so I don't burn down Christopher Columbus's old headquarters.

That steady airflow, AKA wind, is pretty handy for sailors.

If we look at the globe again, that means the wind would blow...

Whee! ..south towards the equator.

But of course, the world is spinning.

So if I make the wind blow and the world spin

at the same time, look what we get.

That was almost spot-on, actually.

Columbus had stumbled upon God's own transatlantic conveyor belt,

the trade winds.

And this is still used by modern sailors.

They say things like, "|f you want to go to America from Europe,

"sail south until butter melts, and then turn right."

Now, any old idiot could sail to the Americas,

but next came the difficult part -

establishing Spain's first New World HQ.

So, a man who was bad at maths but got lucky

was now tasked with setting up a whole town

on an island 4,000 miles away.

1,200 people would be travelling with him,

and they would need housing, and before that, of course, feeding,

and that meant taking animals.

'Columbus packed cows, mules, some of these cute little fellas...'

He's surprisingly heavy for a little pig.

'..And, of course, a herd of TV's least co-operative contributors.'

Hello, goat. They are largely buggering off.

Now, all of the animals they took

were completely alien to the people of the Caribbean.

The only animals they had domesticated so far

were dogs and guinea pigs, which were for -

children, look away - eating.

Columbus's ships were the New World Noah's Ark.

His animals would go on to populate the Americas.

Every time the Spanish passed an island,

they'd drop off a couple of pigs, a boy and a girl, obviously,

so that they would multiply and become a future food source.

It's just cupboard love, isn't it? GOAT BLEATS

You just want goat snacks.

Chomp, chomp, chomp!

Goats like these ran wild and feral all over.

And if you'd never heard one, you might have found their bleating

quite intimidating or even terrifying

until you work out that goats are actually just complete halfwits.

Aren't you?

But there was one animal

that would truly captivate the people of the New World.

Imagine if you'd never seen a horse before,

or, more importantly, seen someone riding one

going faster than any human could go on their own legs.

The horse would become incredibly important

to the indigenous people's culture,

because they could ride them for transport.

They also used them for warfare and for hunting.

And most importantly,

if you'd never seen a horse before and you didn't have horses,

you would never have seen that level of cuteness.

That foal is one week old.

Took me years to learn that,

standing up and... wagging my tail.

Oh. CREW: Hey!

Riches from Columbus's new colony

would soon start arriving back in Spain,

and the palace in Seville became the operations centre

for all New World exploration.

Spain was so delighted with its new lands,

it wanted the world to know about them.

And the way to get the world's attention back then

was with a painting.

WOW!

This is The Virgin Of The Navigators.

This painting comes from an era when art was largely functional.

It was there to dispense quite clear messages.

And the one in this painting seems to be that Columbus's journeys

were really more like missions, it was about spreading Christianity.

And the painting is surrounded by saints.

It's all pretty clear.

It's not about conquering lands or anything tawdry

like, I don't know, gold.

Even then, spin was alive and well,

and there's a second lie hidden in the painting.

You will notice at the back, barely visible,

the indigenous people gratefully sheltering

under the loving embrace of the virgin,

just as Queen Isabella herself felt that she was.

Isabella had told Columbus,

"Treat my Indians well and kindly and do not upset them in any way."

Well, guess what?

Thanks to the trade winds,

Columbus had arrived back in Hispaniola,

which he still insisted was Asia.

He built a rudimentary camp, called it La Isabela

and waited for the gold to roll in.

So, this story so far has been really rather upbeat,

nice sailing ships, making barrels and so on.

And now it's turning a little bit dark.

He immediately ran into a problem.

The settlers he brought with him weren't collecting enough gold.

But that was OK, because he had the answer as well.

He'd get the local people to do it.

So, he decided that

the Taino people would deliver him one hawk's bell full of gold

every three months, or they would be punished.

Now, I have to warn you that these next pictures are horrifying.

It was brutal.

There were floggings and maulings by dogs,

women were raped, people's hands were cut off

and they were left to bleed to death.

There were mass suicides,

and hundreds were sent to Spain as slaves,

to the horror of Isabella.

It was all presided over by Columbus, and all for gold.

Now, none of this stuff is mentioned

in the famous 1492 ditty, unsurprisingly.

Word got back to Spain, but Columbus would still make two more voyages.

It was only when the Spanish settlers complained

about him flogging them too

that Ferdinand and Isabella could no longer turn a blind eye.

Spain's national hero was brought back in chains

and banned from the colony he'd founded.

But that wasn't the end of the regime.

In fact, it was only the beginning.

Pretty soon, Isabella was sending anybody who had a ship

over to the Americas,

and they would take their crops, their animals,

everything they needed to set up a new society.

And they also took death, because they took disease.

This handsome building is St Bart's Hospital in London.

It's home to their Pathology Museum,

which is home to these interesting-looking jars,

which are home to...

...oh, dear, bits of people.

This is one of the few places in the world

where you can still see the hideous effects

of the sort of diseases that were rife in the time of Columbus.

Here, for example, is what smallpox does to you.

It causes the end of your foot to drop off and land in this jar.

This is what bubonic plague does to your kidneys.

Typhoid does this to your...

I think that's probably someone's appendix, or was.

And then syphilis does terrible things to your skull,

and it does particularly terrible things to your "thumbs".

Now, the point here is that Europeans had lived

with a lot of these diseases for a very long time,

so they'd built up a certain immunity,

they had antibodies to act against them.

But the indigenous Americans didn't have them.

So when the Spanish sailors arrived,

they brought quite a lot of this stuff with them

to devastating effect.

So far, so horrifying, but the history is worse.

'Dr Caroline Dodds Pennock is not the sort of doctor

'who can help you with your plague

'but the sort who can help us understand

'what the indigenous Americans were experiencing.'

This is an image of the 1520 smallpox epidemic

which took place in the Aztec capital of Tenochtitlan.

You can see how people experienced it.

The woman here is caring, they're speaking.

That's what that little scrawl means.

She's caring for this person here.

This is smallpox? This was new to them?

They didn't have it pre-Columbus? It was. It was new.

It's the first of three enormous epidemics

which sweep across Mexico in the 16th century.

Within 150 years of Columbus's voyage,

disease, made worse by famine and war,

would kill a staggering 80% of the indigenous American people.

And for those who survived, more horrors awaited.

You have accounts of people who are being enslaved

ancl transported across the Atlantic even, some into the Caribbean,

some all the way as far as Spain and Portugal.

I hadn't really quite appreciated that.

So, the indigenous Americans,

they were actually enslaved in Europe? Yes.

But it's a really unknown part of this colonisation.

Ancl so perhaps a million people are enslaved in Mexico alone

in the first 100 years after the invasion.

Maybe tens of thousands are shipped across the Atlantic,

far more into other parts of the Americas.

Wow. I didn't know that.

The better-known transatlantic slave trade is, of course,

the one shipping African people to the Americas.

And it turns out that's embedded in the disease story too.

In the Caribbean especially,

the Spanish work to death so many people,

and so many die of disease, that they start needing more labourers.

So they begin to think in terms of importing people

across the Atlantic to replace the indigenous communities.

Right. Wow.

Some of the darkest chapters of human history

seem to have followed in Columbus's wake.

In your opinion, Columbus, goodie or baddie?

Was he a product of his times,

and therefore we shouldn't judge him for it,

or is he culpable?

I mean, as you'd expect from a historian, I'm gonna hedge,

because I don't think goodie or baddie

is a great way to measure history.

He was a product of his time,

but he was also the largest single trader

in enslaved indigenous people during this early period.

He saw the slave fortresses that the Portuguese had built

on the West African coast, and he is inspired by that

and thinks he can do the same thing in the Americas.

He literally says to Ferdinand and Isabella,

"We can take as many of these people as you want."

Ancl it's all very well to say he's a man of his time,

but Isabella is also of her time,

and she keeps saying, "Stop enslaving these people.

"I've told you not to."

Yes. Very good point, yes. Hmm.

It's 1506, viewers, and after four journeys to the Caribbean,

Christopher Columbus has been banned from the colony he'd helped found.

I bet you're gagging for me to tell you about Columbus's fifth journey,

the one where he finally discovers America,

what would become the USA and where he is so widely celebrated.

Well, there wasn't one,

because he never went there and he never set foot there.

Instead, he went to bed in a sulk, in ill health,

and in a fury over his fall from grace,

and then he died.

Historians speculate that the cause of death could have been anything

from heart disease, a tropical disease, arthritis,

an intestinal parasite or even an STD.

Whatever, as the old sailors used to say, he had gone aloft.

And he's probably buried here in Seville's cathedral.

I say probably because we can't be entirely sure.

He was dug up and reburied six times.

An explorer, even in death.

So, Columbus's legacy.

This map was made the year after he died.

But what are those two weird streaky bits on the left?

Hint, they're not called Columbus Land.

While Columbus maintained right to the end

that he had been in Asia,

a rival explorer, Amerigo Vespucci, had two continents named after him.

North Vespucci, and, of course, South Vespucci (!)

'Soon, anyone with a ship was heading to the Vespuccis,

'or the Americas, as they're sometimes called.

'From now on, there would be a constant flow

'of all sorts of strange and wonderful goods

'to European shores, from the exotic...

The pineapple!

So highly prized, if you were having a posh dinner party,

you could rent one to impress your mates.

'..To the delicious...'

Where would we be in Europe without the potato?

No crisps, no chips, no delicious Sunday roasties.

'..To the nutritious...'

Tomatoes, we had courgettes, we had avocadoes.

Life for the European vegan was about to become very exciting.

They'd been stuck with the parsnip cutlet for centuries.

'..To the frankly world-changing.'

Very easy to grow, doesn't require much irrigation.

And potatoes and maize together

would cause a European population boom.

The exact opposite, in fact, of what was happening in the Americas.

And as the Spanish took over more of the new world,

spreading disease as they went,

they finally got hold of what had eluded Columbus -

great big boatloads of gold.

Right, the exact figure is hotly debated in academic circles -

ie pubs - but we believe that prior to Columbus's first voyage,

the amount of gold in the known world came to 297 tonnes.

We don't have that kind of props budget,

so we're using a scale of one gram to one tonne.

That is your 297 tonnes in the world.

Within 60 years of Columbus's first voyage,

the Spanish had extracted from the New World

a further 100 tonnes.

Oh, look at that!

But that is actually nothing

compared with what happened to silver.

Because it is thought that before the Columbus voyage,

the world's silver reserves was 3,600 tonnes,

which is represented by...

There it is in silver scrap.

How much do you think they extracted from the New World?

Phwoar!

25,000 tonnes of silver.

For all Columbus's obsession with gold,

it was silver that changed the world.

This is what funded the building of magnificent European cities,

a golden age - or silver age - of art and literature

and the rise of European empires

which would go on to colonise yet more lands.

Columbus's voyages enriched the Old World

beyond their wildest dreams, to the cost of the New World.

So, let's go back to the spot whence he set off.

An obsessive map-botherer, a crap navigator

and a bloodthirsty gold-looter

who took a punt on the trade winds and changed both worlds forever.

I'm now charged with coming up with some meaningful conclusions

about the voyages of Christopher Columbus,

which feels like a open goal to self-cancellation.

Because for hundreds of years,

Columbus had a sort of historical whitewash.

There were countless positive tomes written about him.

He's got the little poem. In 1934, he was granted his own day.

But in the last 50 years,

we've started to examine these things a little more closely.

And over the last five years, we've put them right under the microscope.

40 or so statues of Columbus have been removed around the world.

But I think the way to approach this

is to look at it through the lens of technology.

This statue was erected to the courage of the navigator,

and, of course, once the sailing ship had been invented,

it was going to happen.

To explore is an imperative.

It still is, and we're still doing it.

We're going to do it into space.

We will do it to the bottom of the ocean.

Maybe the important thing is that in the modern age,

we've become a little better at exploring inwardly.

So, let's remember that there are continents,

there are countries, and there are peoples,

but there is only one humanity, and it's work in progress.

'Next time...'

Good morning, m'luds.

'..Sir Walter Raleigh.'

Imagine making your way here.

You may position yourself

where you can vomit discreetly into a flower bed.

This is medievalsatnav version 2.0 - a stick.

I've got no training, I've had no practice,

I'm going to be busking it.

He touched the Queen? Yeah, yeah.

Crikey.

This is a Tudor license to kill.

CANNON BOOMS Oh!

So much for the great explorer, eh?