Reflections of a stormy petrel

You are missing the point badly, and if that is what the article builds on, I am not impressed. The Spanish had already, in a few years, built a viable sea empire based on Cuba, with cities with thousands of inhabitants, before they ever made it to the mainland. When Cortez was in distress or in need of reinforcements, he did not need to appeal to Cadiz or Cordoba - Havana had all the troops and weapons he required. The point with Columbus' mission, as he knew very well himself, is that as soon as he had discovered a new route to the East (as he thought) there were hundreds of ships and tens of thousands men ready to follow it for trade and - if it happened that way - for conquest. He was not using anything special, just the ordinary kind of ocean-going vessel with which the Portuguese were taming the coast of Africa, and with which northern Europe had traded across the most unfriendly seas in the world for centuries. Western naval technology had led the world for 700 years by the time Columbus reached America and Vasco da Gama accomplished the much longer and more dangerous journey to India; nobody had noticed because, until the Portuguese started sticking their noses outward, European trade had been confined to the northern seas - a vast ice path which led nowhere except to the very limited opportunities of Lapland, Russia and Iceland - and to the Mediterranean, three quarters of whose shores were held by hostile land empires. Even so, the superiority of European ships was such that, from the eleventh century on, the Mediterranean remained an European lake in spite of the fact that most of its shores were held by hostile Arabs, Greeks and later Turks. Cyprus only fell to the Turks in 1570, Crete in 1669, Corfu and Malta never. Even the fact that the Arabs and the Greeks became dreaded pirates only proves that the West had the naval supremacy, for piracy is a parasitical phenomenon that depends for its existence on its enemies' prosperity. So does the fact that the language of Mediterranean harbours was an Italian dialect, the lingua franca. The originally autonomous Viking culture had cracked the secret of ocean sailing before the ninth century, and when it was absorbed into the Christian West, the miracle of its ocean-going trade became a part of the West, constantly improved and advanced. The masters of the rest of the world's seas simply did not realize what this meant until the Portuguese fell on the Arab trade of the east, destroying it and replacing it within a generation. The arrival of the Portuguese galleons in the Indian Ocean has been described as like an alien invasion movie; the locals simply did not have the answer to its immense technological superiority. Astonished Japanese visitors described Japanese and Dutch vessels as floating cities, towering over the ocean. The Portuguese, and then the Dutch, actually took control of the internal trade of Asia itself. And the Spanish in America did that even more thoroughly. The fact is that Europeans were used to going down to the ocean in ships and crossing the most dangerous seas; each European state had hundreds of groups that did so regularly, in the face of wind and weather. Indeed, there is evidence that British and Breton fishermen had located the Newfoundland Banks before Columbus, but had kept quiet about it. It was this immense depth of naval capability that simply overwhelmed the Americas.