Boy, am I out of the loop. I don’t work in an office, have no kids in school, don’t watch TV or pay to have ads delivered to my house in a daily paper. I didn’t know it was Columbus Day until I noticed that my outgoing mail failed to go out, and then asked around.
So, today we celebrate the discovery of San Salvador by an Italian leading a small Spanish fleet looking for India. Why would I pick this to write about?
Because of the way the whole “Discovery of America” thing is covered in elementary schools. I’m not talking about the earlier settlements of the Vikings, nor the obviously much earlier travelers from Asia.
Columbus didn’t argue that the world was round to an establishment that thought it was flat! Anyone with an education knew that the world was round. He argued that is was only 15,000 miles around, and therefore a trip of only a few weeks to reach “the Indies” (India, Ceylon). The prevaling wisdom came from a conclusion reached around 250 B.C.E. when Eratosthenes [1] figured the circumference of the world to be about 26,400 miles. (The current measurement is 24,900 miles around the equator.)The various 15th century guilds involved with the sea all knew this. The progressive uncertainties in available maps was also a problem.
Even the known distance eastward to the far Indies was a rough estimate, good to within a few thousand miles. Anything farther than India was mostly guesswork based on foreign traveler’s tales. So they figured that a trip of 3 to 5 months across this uncharted water that may well be full of deadly shoals, severe weather, and even ferocious sea creatures to get to an unknown point on the other side was a bad bet. Columbus just got lucky that he found habitable land well before reaching his stated goal.
Columbus was using the latest in high-tech navigation aids: A chronometer. See here [2] for an idea of how rough cartography was at the time when latitude was just starting to be measurable.
Anyway, Columbus did discover the New World, landing eventually all over the Caribbean and the Bahamas. Yet every school kid learns that before Columbus, the world was flat, and that he discovered our continent. Actually, the closest he came to hitting either North or South America was Panama and the Yucatan Peninsula. You can get there from here on foot.
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