In 1492, Columbus sailed the ocean blue… with a whole lot
of maps and information about the very round Earth.
Contrary to popular belief, not only did Columbus realize the world was round, so did his contemporaries.
In fact, it was so well accepted that daring seafarers had been exploring the Atlantic
for hundreds of years before Columbus’ time.
Without a doubt, men of the early Renaissance knew the world was round, and that the Nina,
the Pinta and the Santa Maria were in no danger of sailing over the edge.
The ancients were well aware the world was a sphere.
Pythagoras (6th century B.C.) is generally credited with having first suggested a round
Earth.
Aristotle (4th century B.C.) agreed and supported the theory with observations such as that
the southern constellations rise higher in the sky when a person travels south.
He also noted that during a lunar eclipse, the Earth’s shadow is round.
Eratosthenes (3rd century B.C., head librarian at the Library of Alexandria) built on their
ideas and calculated the circumference of the Earth with remarkable accuracy at about
252,000 stadia.
Depending on which stadion measurement he was using, his figure was either just 1% too
small or 16% too large; many scholars think it likely that he was using the Egyptian stadion
(157.5 m), being in Egypt at the time, which would make his estimate about 1% to small…
remarkable.
Later, the Roman Ptolemy added to the collected wisdom.
He observed that as a man approached a far off mountain, it appeared to grow out of the
ground – a clear indication of a curved surface.
He later devised the forerunner of modern-day longitude and latitude, including measuring
what we now call latitude from the equator.
In Christian medieval Europe, Bede (7th century C.E.), a scholar and a Catholic monk, produced
an influential treatise that included a discussion of the spherical nature of the world.
This work, The Reckoning of Time, was copied and distributed to clerics across the Carolingian
empire.
Later, in the 1300s, Dante Alighieri’s Divine Comedy also describes the Earth as a sphere.
The Catholics weren’t the only religious sect that thought the world was round.
The Islamic world is known to have consistently maintained the scientific knowledge of the
Greeks and Romans, preserving the works of Aristotle and Ptolemy, among others.
They were well aware the Earth was round, having calculated with relatively good precision
its circumference in the early 9th century.
As historian Jeffrey Burton Russell stated,
With extraordinary few exceptions, no educated person in the history of Western Civilization
from the third century B.C. onward believed that the Earth was flat.
The debate since then among the educated, both religious and secular, was not whether
the Earth was approximately a sphere, but exactly what the size of the Earth was.
The idea of sailing west to reach India also has its origins in antiquity, with the first
known person to mention the notion being the Roman writer Strabo in the 1st century BC,
who stated:
If of the more recent measurements of the Earth, the one which makes the Earth smallest
in circumference be introduced–I mean that of Posidonius who estimates its circumference
at about 180,000 stadia, then.
. . if you sail from the west in a straight course, you will reach India within 70,000
stadia.
“
Beyond the educated, even the most empty headed sailor knew the Earth was round simply by
the fact that ships and the like disappeared over the horizon with the bottom first and
then the mast the last to be sighted.
A similar effect is observed when spotting land from a ship.
Again, what was the real mystery at this time was the actual circumference of the Earth.
Most- correctly -thought Eratosthenes’ estimate was probably reasonably accurate, meaning
that if one did not encounter a well stocked land mass in between Spain and Asian to resupply,
Columbus’ expedition would end in failure with the crew dying of thirst or starvation.
In fact, this would have happened if not for Columbus encountering the Caribbean islands
around where he expected to encounter his destination.
Columbus, of course, felt that the Earth was much smaller than Eratosthenes’ estimate,
so the journey was doable at Columbus’ estimation of only about 3100 miles (5000 km) to Japan,
rather than the true 12,400 miles (20,000 km) it is.
Queen Isabella eventually sided with Columbus and agreed to finance the expedition, despite
the objections of scholars who were consulted over the plan.
As to how the myth that people during Medieval times thought the Earth was flat came about,
this is up for debate.
The idea seems to have first popped up in the 17th century and appears to have been,
at least in part, put forth by secular scientists railing against the ignorance and misguided
notions of religious groups (specifically Catholics), who they claimed in Medieval times
believed the world was flat- ironically, despite the lack of much evidence supporting that
claim, and the numerous documented instances of religious scholars from that era stating
the Earth is round.
The myth gained significant traction in the 19th century with various works, such as Andrew
Dickson White’s History of the Warfare of Science with Theology.
The “Columbus / Flat Earth Myth” itself was widely popularized in Washington Irving’s
The Life and Voyages of Christopher Columbus, which was in numerous places largely fiction,
though presented as fact and a scholarly work.
In his account, Irving claimed that it was Columbus’ voyage that proved to the world
that the Earth was round, going so far as to explicitly state that one of the objections
to Columbus’ voyage was that a round Earth wasn’t scriptural, so the voyage was doomed
to fail when Columbus encountered the edge of the world.
In fact, there is no first hand record of any such objection to Columbus’ expedition,
with the primary documented objections having to do with the length of the journey.
Irving’s fanciful tale is simply in line with the “Warfare of Science with Theology”
viewpoint, which at least in terms of the “flat Earth vs. spherical Earth” issue,
historically wasn’t ever a sticking point as has been so often claimed from the 17th
century on (though around the 1920s, most scholars stopped believing this myth).
One of the only significant Christian works that seems to put forth the notion of a flat
Earth was written by an Egyptian Monk in the 6th century AD, Christian Topography.
On the whole, though, evidence seems to indicate this work wasn’t very influential, as you
might expect given that most educated Christians were well aware of the mountain of evidence
that the world was a sphere.
That being said, Christian Topography was often cited as support for the notion that
Christians thought the world was flat until recently, with those authors casually ignoring
all evidence to the contrary.
Another common myth surrounding Columbus’ voyage was that he was the first to discover
the “New World”.
In fact, there is no question that North America was visited by Northern Europeans in the 10th
or 11th centuries.
Specifically, Norse settlements, one of which has since been excavated, were established
in continental North America in the 10th century.
The settlements were a failure in part, it appears, due to problems with the Native Americans,
who the Norse called Skrælings.
However, according to recent scholarship, the Norsemen continued to meet and trade with
indigenous Americans, at least sporadically, even after the failure of the two colonies
they setup.
Not the dull oafs of legend and Capital One commercials, the Vikings apparently made a
map of their North American conquests.
The Vineland map is believed by some to have been made circa 1440, and demonstrates that
at least some Europeans were aware of the existence of continental North America, well
before Columbus set sail.
Today, there is also increasing evidence, and speculation, that the Americas were visited
by Muslim and Chinese explorers long before the “Age of Discovery” in the late 15th
and 16th centuries.
Although still somewhat up for debate, there is evidence that a Muslim sailor, Khashkhash
Ibn Saeed Ibn Aswad, traversed the Atlantic and landed in the New World in 889 C.E.
In 956, famed Islamic historian, Abul Hasan Ali Ibn Al Masudi, created a map from his
research of this journey that depicts an unknown landmass where America is located.
Other voyages to the New World chronicled in Muslim histories includes that of Ibn Farrukh,
who seems to have visited islands far to the west of the Canaries in 999 C.E.
Proponents of the Muslim exploration theory repeatedly turn to an intriguing map drawn
in the early 16th century by the famous cartographer, Piri Reis.
Reportedly copying from ancient documents found in a Turkish library, it is widely accepted
that Reis created the map in 1513.
Even though this is after Columbus “discovered” the New World, the Piri Reis map depicts the
accurate placement of islands and landmasses far before they were visited and mapped by
Europeans.
In fact, it shows the Andes Mountain range, which was not “discovered” by Pizarro
until 1527.