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Sure, I'm not suggesting that anyone could literally look across the Atlantic and see something directly. Just that humans were always fascinated by the idea of unknown land masses, and were using some pretty extreme methods to try to find it.
I guess what I was thinking for Columbus was that he could compare the wind and currents of the Mediterranean, North Sea, and Eastern Atlantic (and maybe some vague rumors about the Indian Ocean and Pacific Oceans). It's enough to see that the larger bodies have stronger winds and currents. Everyone knew to stay close to shore in the Atlantic because once you go out there the storms are rough. But he might have had some instinctual understanding as a sailor like "hmm, this is rough but it's not that much rougher than the Mediterranean. if this was really a 20,000 foot nonstop Ocean all the way to East Asia, the storms would be much worse." or even measuring the https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Volta_do_mar and seeing how it seems to loop in the central Atlantic, in a much tighter loop than you'd get if it was all one big ocean.
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