The Canary Islands, meanwhile, would soon serve as a critical springboard for the Columbus voyages and for Spain’s subsequent Church-sanctioned control over almost all of the new New World.¶ The geographic situation of these islands, astride the Canary Current, all but assured Spain’s success in this incomparably more famous breakthrough of its own. Ships that set sail from the Azores, the Portuguese launching point into the Atlantic, by contrast, were always stubbornly blown back toward Europe.
