How long did Columbus take to cross the Atlantic?

36 days

His three ships left La Gomera in the Canaries on 6 September 1492 and sighted land in the Bahamas in the early hours of 12 October.

For the same journey in 1492, our Journey Planner estimates 46 days. See its route below.

Source: Columbus’s journal, Fordham Medieval Sourcebook

Journey Planner

The same trip, later

La Gomera to the Bahamas by the quickest means of each age.

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1492

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From

Year1492

1 CE2025

Travelling

Take a ship where it’s quicker

Real journeys

How close do we get?

Documented journeys, with how long they really took and what the planner estimates. Pick one to see its route.

A traveller’s pace, from the historians

We divide the world into squares about 28 km across and note how much of each is land, how high and how rugged it is, whether it is desert, and whether a railway runs through it. Then we find the quickest way through them for a traveller of the year you choose: on foot, on horseback, or by the fastest means of the time, by land, sea or, from 1945, air. The speeds come from studies of how fast people really moved, listed below.

Travelling	We use	Based on
On foot	30 km a day on easy ground	ORBIS uses 30 km a day for walkers; Scheidel suggests 20 over many weeks. Tested against documented journeys, 30 fits best.^{1, 2}
On horseback	45 km a day	ORBIS uses 56 km a day for routine riding; most 14th-century French journeys ran at 20 to 30 miles a day.^{1, 3}
Hills, mountains and deserts	Slower the more rugged the land; caravan pace in desert	Royal itineraries show rugged country slowed travellers. Camel caravans kept about 30 km a day; sand seas such as the Taklamakan are skirted, not crossed.^{3, 1, 4}
Sailing ships	120 km a day, 130 after 1450, 150 after 1780	Ancient ships averaged 4 to 6 knots with a fair wind and under 2½ against it. Ocean ships of 1750 managed about 4.5 knots under way. We use a little less, as ships followed the winds.^{5, 1, 6}
Where ships sailed	Only seas in regular use that year	The Mediterranean, Red Sea and monsoon crossing to India from the 1st century; the Bay of Bengal and China Seas from Faxian’s time; Viking seas from 793; Japan–China from 630; the Atlantic from 1492; Portuguese routes to India from 1498; the Manila galleons from 1565; every unfrozen sea from about 1600. No ship travel in the Americas before 1492.^{7, 8, 9, 10, 12, 11, 13, 14}
Boarding a ship	A day under sail, a few hours by steamer	Our own allowance for finding a ship and loading. No source gives a figure; one day fits documented voyages best.
Coaches (Britain)	45 km a day from 1650, 60 by 1750, 280 for mail coaches from 1784	Coaching timetables of the 17th and 18th centuries; mail coaches ran day and night.¹⁵
Steamers, from 1838	12 to 26 km an hour; Atlantic liners from 15 days in 1838 to about 5 by the 1930s	Average Liverpool–New York voyage times by year, and liner speeds.^{16, 17}
Canals	Suez from 1869, Kiel from 1895, Panama from 1914	Opening dates from the canal authorities.^{18, 19, 20}
Trains, from 1830	Express 40 to 130 km an hour on the main networks, 25 to 60 elsewhere	Trains run where railways run today, from the year each region’s main lines were open: Britain and Belgium by 1850, the US to the Pacific in 1869, Canada 1885, the Trans-Siberian 1904. Where no year is known, our rule is the first railway plus 25 years.^{23, 21, 22, 26, 25, 24}
Flights, from 1945	Propliners about 420 km an hour with stops and overnight rests; jets about 880 from 1958	By 1957 airliners had replaced ocean liners across the Atlantic. Earlier flying was rare and is left out.^{27, 28, 29}
Roads, from 1950	500 km a day where there is no train	Our own allowance for car and bus travel. No source gives a figure.

We tested the planner against 101 documented journeys, from Roman voyages to jet flights. For steamers and trains it usually came within about a fifth of the real time; for walkers, riders and sailing ships, within about half, because real journeys varied so much with the weather, the season and the traveller. That is why each answer comes with a likely range.

The estimate is for steady travel in fair conditions. It leaves out river boats, the state of the roads, storms and becalmed ships, and the wars, tolls and border waits that held real travellers up, and for modern journeys how often trains, ships and flights ran. Borders on the map are those of the nearest earlier map year.

Sources

Map data: land outlines and deserts from Natural Earth; elevation from the Terrain Tiles open dataset (Mapzen, from SRTM, GMTED2010, ETOPO1 and other sources); historical borders from historical-basemaps.