Once again, Gfactor writes a very well-researched report. Impressive.
And, his writing doesn’t suck. Also impressive.
And thanks to samclem, without whom I might have concluded that the 1492 bit really was written by Winifred Sackville Stoner, Jr.
I was unaware of the debt owed by Columbus to the Federal-period identity crisis. It explains, I suppose, why Washington Irving was willing to tell such outrageous lies (cf. Parson Weems).
A couple of the links–regarding arthritis and the 1492 globe–don’t work for me.
Thanks for the info on the links.
Good link for reactive arthritis: http://www.uth.tmc.edu/med/comm/alumniMag/2006-Spring/articles/article-01a-explorer.html
The site that hosts the globe image appears to be down. You can see it here:
facsimile:
http://myweb.tiscali.co.uk/greavesandthomas/facsimile/globe_behaim.html
And it’s on the Germanisches National Museum’s splash page: http://www.gnm.de/
It’s available via archive.org.
My mother, a teacher at an all-girl’s Catholic high school at the time, taught me this little ditty when I was about 11 . . .
“In 1492, Columbus sailed the ocean blue
He hit a rock
Broke his cock
And pissed all over the crew!”
Well, she WAS a strange mother . . .but I always remembered that date. It’s not often I can trot that lil’ poem out to company . . . :rolleyes:
I would like to point out that the statement, “Columbus never set foot on the continent where the U.S. would ultimately be established” from the report is incorrect. Central America is technically part of the continent of North America, and Columbus certainly had his footprints all over the sand in Nicaragua and Panama.
Thanks.
Um, other than that little faux pas, it was a very enjoyable report to read. 
I like your style, as I think you know. 
You know, this report reminded me of something I’ve been curious about for a while.
Does anyone know who originated the idea that Columbus set out to prove that the world was round, while the rest of Europe thought he’d “sail off the edge” before he got to the Indies? It seems to have been around forever, and it turns up in pop culture all the time. But where does it come from?
I’ve often seen it attributed to Washington Irving’s biography of Columbus, as in this wiki about flat-earthism.
James J. Loewen, Lies My Teacher Told Me (1995) says, “Washington Irving wins credit for popularizing the flat-earth fable in 1828. In his bestselling biography of Columbus, Irving described Columbus’s supposed defense of his round-earth theory before the flat-earth savants at Salamanca University. Irving himself surely knew the story to be fiction. He probably thought it added a nice dramatic flourish and would do no harm.” (p. 46).
And see, John Noble Wilford, The Mysterious History of Columbus (1991).
Barlow, who wrote his Vision of Columbus in 1787, doesn’t mention the flat-earth theory. Instead he describes Columbus as hypothesizing that “a considerable portion of the earth was still undiscovered,” and that “by attending to the spherical figure of the earth, Columbus drew this conclusion, that the Atlantic Ocean must be bounded on the west either by India itself, or by some great continent not far distant from it.”: The Vision of Columbus: A Poem, in Nine Books - Joel Barlow - Google Books