According to this, on August 3, Columbus set out “half an hour before sunrise” from Palos, on the southern coast of Spain, taking his three caravels, the Niña, Pinta, and Santa Maria, to the Canary Islands. Here locals assured him that his journey would probably be a short one, because every day at sunset “they saw land to the westward.”42 If true, this would have implied that the Americas were between three and twenty miles away. Plainly, they were not.
