I was under the impression that Columbus died still believing he’d reached India or at least the (east) Indies, but I read an aside in a book on language recently that he realised his mistake after his first voyage, but it was too late and the original tag stuck. Does anyone have some more definitive source on that?
I don’t, but he knew that he hadn’t found a source for pepper and, to compensate, he brought back “vegetable pepper”, which explains why capsicums have the same or similar names as pepper in a number of languages. More recent recipients of resaerch grants have been known to emulate this behavior.
Whoa! What’s that all about?
And kick is … GOOOOOOD!
You win
Columbus believed until his death that he had reached part of Asia. He knew, from the relatively uncivilized state of the native peoples in the areas he found, that he was not actually in India. However, at that time much of Asia was referred to in general as the Indies, and that’s how he generally referred to his discoveries.
Columbus kept imagining on each of his voyages, based on what the locals told him, that Japan and other civilized parts of Asia were just over the horizon. On his fourth voyage, which explored the coasts of Central America as far south as Panama, he was looking for a strait that would allow him continue westward to Japan and China.
On his third voyage, he discovered the coast of northern South America. Because of its southern position, he realized this was in fact some new continent, not described by the ancients, and not part of Asia. But all the rest of his discoveries he thought were somewhere in Asia.
My staff report on Columbus’s naming of the Indians has more information on Columbus’s first voyage.
Thanks Colibri/George, exactly what I needed, and I should have thought to search SMDB. So it was as if he thought that he’d reached, for instance, the Philippines in his first two voyages, turned south and hit New Guinea or Australia on the third, and was thinking on his fourth he’d slip between them and find India or Japan.
Something like that. Columbus had a great aptitude for self-delusion.
Magellan was the first to actual make the voyage that Columbus thought he was going to make. After crossing the Pacific, the first major island he hit was Guam, where the level of civilization was not too dissimilar to that of the West Indies. He then sailed on to the Philippines, where he was killed in a scuffle with the locals. His crew eventually reached the Spice Islands (Moluccas) in the “true” Indies. So it was not unreasonable (at first) for Columbus to think that he had reached some outlying, less civilized islands of Asia.
If Columbus had turned west instead of east on his fourth voyage, he might well have been the first to discover the high civilizations of Mesoamerica, including the Aztecs. One wonders how he would have tried to fit them into what was known of Asia.
Not to hijack, but when did the folks back in Europe figure out that Columbus was nowhere near Asia?
And also, who discovered that Columbus had grossly underestimated the size of the earth?
I don’t know when it was rediscovered but Eratosthenes worked out the true size of the earth in the third century BC. I guess Columbus and his contemporaries figured they knew better than some old Greek.
Europeans knew this before Columbus ever set sail (they were familiar with Eratosthenes). One reason why they thought he was making a mistake was that their measurements of the Earth (and, yes, they knew it was a sphere) indicated that a sailor would run out of water and food before reaching the Indies. They were correct – except for the fact that the Americas were in the way.
They began to understand that a whole new continent had been found once the outlines of South America became known due to the discoveries and explorations of Cabral, Vespucci, and others in the first decade of the 1500s. By 1519 the understanding was clear enough that Magellan could propose reaching Asia by sailing around the southern end of South America.
As has been said, the best available geographical knowledge indicated that Asia shouldn’t have been located where Columbus found land. That and the failure of explorers to actually locate China or Japan eventually led to the realization that it was a New World and not Asia.
I should have mentioned also that the clincher was the discovery of the Pacific by Balboa in 1513. Columbus himself could have made the discovery in 1501, when his local contacts in Panama told him about the othere great ocean not far away. But Columbus was more concerned about getting the locals to give him gold than about geographical knowledge. (And since he couldn’t get to the other ocean - and hence China and Japan - by boat it would not have solved his quest for a sea route there.)
Clueless, upon a peak in Darien …