When Columbus set out for the ‘new world’ I think he thought he was going to run into China or Japan, but we’re taught in school that when he landed in the Caribbean he called the natives he found there Indians, presumably because he thought he had landed in or discovered India.
Was India known to Europeans at the time of his voyages? If it was known he could certainly tell that the people he found there weren’t the same as the people that came from India (they spoke a completely different language). If it wasn’t known then where did the term Indian come from?
India would certainly have been known about. It is unlikely that many Europeans had ever met an Indian, however. It would have been a mysterious place known through tales rather than direct contact.
Well Alexander the Great invaded India so that was a clue. Somewhat later on Marco Polo visited India and told tall tales and true. Plus monks, traders, and adventurers from 500AD onward brought back spices and accounts of this place called India. It was mysterious and a long way from Europe by land but it was well known centuries before Columbus set sail.
So Columbus was searching for the ‘Indies’ and ran into North America which wasn’t supposed to be there, even though the Scandinavians had been there centuries before.
He named the natives ‘Indians’ because he thought he was in India, but the natives looked nothing like the people that actually lived in India, but he didn’t know what they were supposed to look like. An innocent mistake.
So did Columbus live long enough to learn that he hadn’t landed in India after all?
All the Scandinavians knew was that there were some large islands in the Arctic. There is no evidence that they ever touched upon the mainland of North America and even if they did they had no conception of what it was. Nobody would have associated frozen northern islands with semi-tropical islands thousands of miles to the south, especially when they knew that the East Indies were filled with semi-tropical islands and brown-skinned native peoples. Columbus knew he wasn’t on the mainland of India. He thought he had hit the numerous island chains to the east. He would have no more than a few tall tales to judge the people by. (Look at the nonsense promulgated by someone as widely read (and read as widely) as Pliny.) And there were so many of those islands and so many undiscovered peoples that he would have no reason to think that he hadn’t run across another.
India used to be a pretty broad term. It included all that we currently call India plus all of the various islands south of the mainland. So places like the Andaman and Nicobar Islands, Indonesia, Malaysia, the Philippines, and even Australia if people had known it existed would have been considered “India”. So when Columbus arrived in the Caribbean, he convinced himself he was just in some previously unknown islands in eastern part of “India” - somewhere in the vicinity of Luzon maybe.
> If it was known he could certainly tell that the people he found there weren’t
> the same as the people that came from India (they spoke a completely different
> language).
This business about the languages is confused in major ways, so let’s go through this carefully. Did Europeans know that there were a number of different lands on the far edge of Asia which were called by various names (like India, Japan, China, etc.). Yes. Did they sometimes call this area the Indies? Yes. Did they have translators around who could distinguish and translate the various languages of that part of Asia? No. They knew almost nothing of those languages. They presumably knew that the various peoples on the far edge of Asia spoke a variety of languages. Columbus and the later European explorers of the Americas soon found that the people there also spoke a variety of languages. Did they immediately try to correlate the languages and say, “Oh, look, the languages of the Americas are completely different from those of Asia. It must be a different continent.” No. That took centuries of work. It was only in the late eighteenth century that Europeans discovered that the languages of northern India were related to those of Europe and not those of southern India or the rest of Asia, for instance.
We simply don’t know. But look at it this way. You’re sailing to another part of world. There you encounter a long coastline. What is it? It could be a continent. It could be a large island. It could be a peninsula. It could be an isthmus. Without sailing completely around it, how can you be sure?
Look at the East Indies, here with the proper link. If you sailed for hundreds of miles along Borneo or Sumatra could you tell it was an island? For that matter, did the natives in what is now Panama know they were on a continent? They must have known that another ocean was less than 100 miles away but did they have any idea of the extent of we today call North and South America?
The evidence that we have as to what Columbus knew is equivocal or contradictory. What we can’t do is say that he should have known what we know today.
Fair enough, but if someone was a great explorer, as Columbus certainly was, I would expect him to try and figure out what he had discovered. Was it an island? A group of islands? A continent? Having reached Central America he could have just sailed north or south and quickly realized it was too big to be an island. Sure, it would take years and years to figure it all out, but Magellan didn’t stop when he first found land… he kept going to see what else was there.
The canonical story I’d heard in grammar school was the explorer Balboa, landed in a sport we now call Panama, and sent his men on a forced march westward. When he hit salt water, he figured, “O-Kay, this isn’t a small island so far as I can tell to the north and south. I started in the Indies. I’m back at an ocean again. This is either Palestine or Europe, and it doesn’t look like either.” And that’s when everyone found out Columbus was wrong. Meh. YMMV.
I liked the miniseries had some hot headed Spaniards insult governor Columbus after his third voyage, “This isn’t the Indies, fool.” Of course, anyone who hated Columbus “knew” he was wrong from the very beginning, and they turned out to be correct, but they didn’t really know.
From Columbus’s perspective, he really hit pay dirt. He reached the Indies, and found primitive, easily dominated tribes on sparsely populated islands. Perfect for a Spanish colony to establish trade with other Asian civilizations. What if the Earth was smaller, and he had landed in 15th century Japan? That wouldn’t have worked out very well economically at all.
There’s a lot of simplistic information taught in grammar school on this subject. Example: when Vasco di Gama circumnavigated Africa, school told me the ship made it back, its hold heaped with spices. According to Wikipedia, when that ship finally made it to India, it made it to Calicut and then Goa, which was already dominated by other traders, who were not happy to hear their exclusivity was now breached.
Heck, people in India speak completely unrelated languages to the people in India, too. Even today, there are at least 19 different languages (not counting English) that have official status somewhere or another in India, and there are probably a fair many that are spoken without official recognition, too. And that’s only counting the modern-day nation of India, not all of what Columbus would have called “the Indies”.
In short, India was well known by name to Europeans, although they knew very little in detail; Columbus was trying to reach eastern Asia, which was generically referred to as “the Indies” (although his real ultimate goal was Cipangu, or Japan); and Columbus named the people he found “Indians” because he believed he was somewhere in that region.
Columbus had immense facilities for self deception. When he first reached the West Indies, he believed he was among islands somewhere near Japan. He interpreted everything that his native informants told him to mean that Japan must be just the next island over. (He went to Cuba because of this belief.) As evidence mounted in succeeding years from his own and other explorations that this was not the case, he denied it. He was the first to reach the coast of South America, and from the size of the rivers knew he had found a very large land mass instead of an island. But his refusal to understand that this was really a “New World,” a new and completely unknown continent helped result in it being named after Amerigo Vespucci, one of the first to promote that viewpoint.
Neither Columbus nor Magellan were exploring just for the sake of exploring, like later navigators such as Cook. They had a very specific goal: to reach the Indies, or barring that find a source of gold or other treasures.
On Columbus’s last voyage in 1502 he discovered Central America, landing first in Honduras. He could have turned north (and was tempted to because he captured a Mayan trading canoe that had come from that area), but decided to turn south instead because he thought he might have found the Golden Chersonese, the Malay peninsula. He hoped to find the Straits of Malacca and head to India. But the land continued to trend east instead of west. When he reached eastern Panama he gave up and turned back to a spot in western Panama where he had seen the most gold among the Indians. He founded the first settlement on the mainland of the Americas, but was soon driven out when the Indians got tired of his demands for gold.
The Indians told Columbus about an ocean on the other side of the Isthmus, and if he had been a real explorer he could have crossed over and anticipated Balboa’s discovery of the Pacific by a decade. But since he couldn’t imagine that this was the real route to Asia, he didn’t bother.
By Magellan’s time people had realized Columbus’s mistake. The outlines of the central part of the Americas were understood. Magellan didn’t stop because he was looking for the real passage to the Indies, which he ultimately found through the Straits of Magellan. The first major land Magellan found was the Philippines, which was not dissimilar to parts of the Americas in its level of civilization and the appearance of its people, but was clearly different in culture from China, Japan, or India. So there was nothing about the people that Columbus found that would have caused him to reject the notion that he was in Asia and more than Magellan would have based on the Philippines. Magellan stopped in the Philippines, short his goals of the Spice Islands (Moluccas), in part because of his desire to spread Christianity. He got embroiled in some local conflicts and was killed in a skirmish. His crew eventually continued on to find the Spice Islands.
Columbus did make some preparations for speaking with the locals. One of his crew was Luis de Torres, who spoke Arabic. It was known that Arabic was a common trading language in Asia so they expected to be able to find people who spoke it when they arrived.
Obviously they didn’t find any Arabic speakers in the Caribbean. But they just assumed they were in some lesser known islands that didn’t get a lot of visits from traders.
