Columbus Coat of Arms Christopher Columbus' purpose was to find a faster, safer route to the silk , spices , and opiates of Asia (a total system rewrite for the failing legacy system - Silk Road). "Columbus map", drawn ca. 1490 in the Lisbon workshop of Bartolomeo and Christopher Columbus [1] Was his problem that he didn't know his location and the location of his destination? No. Those were knowns to him. He had maps of these locations. Was his problem that he didn't know how to navigate? No. He was an accomplished ship's captain and in those days you had to navigate via dead reconing and he was adopting the new technology of celestial navigation . I'm practicing a bit of historical speculation but in his day, figuring out Latitude was hard but a known problem with lots of calculations requiring a computer (person good with figures & lookup tables). Guessing at Longitude was an unknown problem. It would be centuries before t...