Columbus knew a thing or two......

     Columbus's good luck lay not in his miserably wrongheaded calculations about distance but in his accurate knowledge of the North Atlantic trade winds, which flow in a great clockwise circle.  How he came by this information we can't be sure.  It may have been the result of his own observations on his previous voyages, only some of which we know about.  In any case, it was information not widely understood at the time, even if in our own day it is common knowledge to transatlantic airline passengers.  As a result of his awareness of the trade-winds pattern, he was able to keep them at his back, plotting a southerly outgoing course and a northerly homecoming one, both of which enabled him to travel much more quickly than others had been able to do.  In this way, Columbus and his crew were saved from contrary winds, becalmings, and death by dehydration on the high seas.

-Thomas Cahill,  Heroes and Heretics: How Renaissance Artists and Reformation Priests Created Our World