A barrier that became a highway
For most of human history the Atlantic divided peoples rather than joining them. Its width, its storms and the lack of any mid-ocean landmarks made regular crossings impractical for the vessels of most cultures. The story of Atlantic crossings is therefore partly a story of technology and partly one of knowledge: learning which winds and currents to use, and when.
The ocean has a broad clockwise circulation in the north, with prevailing westerlies at higher latitudes and trade winds nearer the tropics. Sailors eventually learned to go out on one wind belt and return on another. That pattern, rather than any single ship type, is what opened the ocean.
Early contact before Columbus
The best-documented pre-Columbian crossing is Norse. Seafarers from Iceland settled Greenland in the late tenth century, and Icelandic sagas describe voyages further west to lands they called Helluland, Markland and Vinland. Archaeology at L’Anse aux Meadows in Newfoundland confirms a short-lived Norse presence there at around the year 1000. Their warships were the clinker-built longship, though the broader, cargo-carrying knarr did most of the North Atlantic work.
Other claims of early contact, whether by Irish monks, Phoenicians or medieval Africans and Asians, are debated. Most historians treat them as unproven for lack of physical evidence. Cautious accounts stick to the Norse case and note that these voyages had no lasting economic effect on Europe.
Fishing in the northeastern Atlantic was long established, and European fishers began working the banks off Newfoundland in the decades after the first crossings, though the early record is thin.
The Columbus era
The crossings that changed the world began in the late fifteenth century. Portuguese seafarers had already explored the African coast and the island groups of Madeira, the Azores and Cape Verde, and they developed the volta do mar, a looping route that swung out into the ocean to catch favourable winds. This was the practical groundwork for the Spanish voyages.
Christopher Columbus, sailing for the Spanish crown, made landfall in the Bahamas in October 1492 with three ships, the Santa Maria, the Pinta and the Nina. He used the trade winds on the way out and westerlies on the return. His success relied on the vessels of the day, the caravel and carrack, and on simple navigation instruments: a compass, a sandglass and estimates of speed and direction.
John Cabot, sailing from Bristol under English patronage, reached the North American coast in 1497. Portuguese and Spanish expeditions, including Cabral’s in 1500, soon placed Brazil and the Caribbean on European charts. Within a few decades the Spanish had established regular Caribbean sea lanes linking the islands to Seville.
Learning the ocean
Knowledge of the Atlantic built up gradually and was often passed on by experience rather than in books. The Gulf Stream, a warm current flowing north along the North American coast and across to Europe, was known to Spanish pilots in the early sixteenth century, who used it to return home. In the eighteenth century, American and British captains compared notes on the current, and a chart of it was published in the 1770s with the involvement of Benjamin Franklin, who had learned of it from Nantucket whalers. Later, naval officers such as Matthew Fontaine Maury collected ships’ logs in the nineteenth century to prepare wind and current charts, shortening many passages under sail.
Treasure and trade
By the mid-sixteenth century Spain was running organised convoys carrying silver and other goods from the Americas, protected by warships because of the threat from rivals and raiders. The treasure fleet galleons that served this trade were large, multi-decked sailing ships. Competing European powers built their own Atlantic networks in the seventeenth century, with chartered companies and colonial ports at the centre.
The ocean also supported huge fisheries and, later, whaling. Trade in sugar, tobacco, furs and timber tied Europe, Africa and the Americas into one commercial system.
The Atlantic slave trade
The darkest chapter of Atlantic maritime history is the transatlantic slave trade. Between the sixteenth and nineteenth centuries, historians estimate that more than ten million Africans were forced aboard ships and carried to the Americas, with many more dying in capture or on the voyage. Portuguese, Spanish, Dutch, French, British and later American and Brazilian vessels all took part.
The crossing from Africa, known as the Middle Passage, usually lasted several weeks or longer depending on winds. Conditions aboard were severe and mortality was high. Slave trade ships were often converted merchantmen, and later purpose-built vessels. Britain banned its slave trade in 1807 and the United States prohibited imports from 1808, though illegal voyages continued for decades afterwards, and the Royal Navy and others patrolled the African coast to suppress them.
Steam and the liner era
Sail dominated Atlantic travel until the nineteenth century, when the steamship era began. Regular scheduled sailings began with the packet ship lines operating from the 1810s onwards, offering departures by date rather than waiting for a full cargo. Steam power then transformed crossings. The American-built Savannah crossed in 1819 using steam as an auxiliary to sail, and in 1838 the Sirius and Great Western crossed under steam power from Britain to New York. Samuel Cunard’s mail service followed in 1840.
Iron hulls, screw propellers and bigger engines produced faster and larger ships through the century, and the prestige of speed gave rise to the Blue Riband. Millions of Europeans emigrated to North America in steerage accommodation, in conditions that improved only slowly, a world of emigrant steerage. Alongside them travelled wealthier passengers in elaborate saloons.
Passenger traffic declined after the introduction of long-distance jet aircraft in the late 1950s, and the great liners, the heart of ocean liner history, largely gave way to container ships and cruising. The Atlantic still carries a large share of world trade, but for most travellers it is now crossed in hours, not days.
Wars at sea
The ocean was also a battlefield. Naval conflicts from the age of sail through the two world wars, including the long campaign to protect merchant shipping in the twentieth century, depended on control of Atlantic routes. The Atlantic convoy battle of 1939 to 1945 is the best-known example.