This is total nonsense. The compass was in common usage for 200 years
before Columbus. In the first millennium, only one round trip from
Italy to the Middle East was possible each year. The Winter storms
and fog necessitated hauling ships for the Winter. By the late 13th
century, compasses (and charts annotated with compass courses) were so
common that trade flourished all year long. In Genoa, for example, 2
voyages per year were made compulsory by law.

Use of the compass spread to Spain and Portugal, and to Northern
Europe within a hundred years. In Portugal, Henry the Navigator
sponsored extensive exploration and colonization, as far out as the
Azores, 900 miles off shore. They also developed early celestial
navigation, primarily to map the coast of Africa to document its
colonization. (The "famous" school at Sagres appears to be a myth.)

As it turned out, Columbus was quite adept in using the compass, and
startlingly accurate in his dead reckoning (when you considered his
private logs) but he never mastered the more modern techniques. For
instance, he was unable to reliably determine the latitude of his
early discoveries.

Personally, I lean towards the theory that there were numerous
European voyages to America long before Columbus. Certainly, there
were fishing trips to the rich banks going on, and very likely there
were camps set up to dry and salt the fish and collect water. No one
would benefit from publicizing these ventures, so they continued in
secret. These trips certainly predated Columbus, perhaps by 100
years. Farley Mowat forwarded a theory that Newfoundland was
continuously colonized by Albans (from Scotland, related to the
Basque) from before Norse times, and were visited annually by European
ships.



Ed Conrad wrote:

The compass!

That was his secret..

Columbus was one of the first seafarers to realize that the compass,
invented hundreds of years before the days of King Ferdinand and Queen
Isabella, was not a child's toy, as almost everyone believed at the
time.
- much more nonsense snipped -