Columbus assuredly was a crackpot, but he also was undeniably a great navigator (although not such a good sailor or leader of men). And he did explore huge areas of the West Indies and Central America, even if his motivation was to find riches rather than to expand geographical knowledge.
Correct! More or less. He was looking for islands called “the Indies,” not India! Back then, it was not yet called India; it was called Hindoostan. He reached islands, thought they were the ones he wanted.
The Vikings did reach North America, about the year 1000. They established a settlement called Vinland somewhere in New England, but it was unsucessful. Most likely, the Indians/Native Americans (whom the Vikings called Scralings) kicked them out.
Circa 1000, the Europeans, Scandinavians, etc, were not enough advanced beyond the Indians in technology/weaponry to carry off a sucessful invasion. 500 years later, they were.
I think Europeans back then had only the haziest ideas about the geography of eastern and southern Asia. They knew there were rich lands over there, some of which were islands, and that at least some of these lands or islands produced valuable goods unobtainable elsewhere, such as silk and spices. However, they did not clearly distinguish between India, China, Japan, and the Indies (what is now Indonesia, Malaysia, The Philippines, etc.). “Indians” were just people from that general, vaguely conceived area.
This is incorrect. Please read my article, which I linked to in my first post.
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Circa 1000, the Europeans, Scandinavians, etc, were not enough advanced beyond the Indians in technology/weaponry to carry off a sucessful invasion. 500 years later, they were.
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Also incorrect. Europeans were much more technologically advanced in weaponry than American civilizations even by 1000 AD. Europe had already had metal weapons for thousands of years, not to mention armor, horses, and often more disciplined and effective tactics than most Indian groups.
The Vikings didn’t colonize North America at that time because they weren’t that motivated to do so, and were at the end of a very long supply chain from Europe. In any case, the reason Europeans were able to conquer the Americas relatively easily had much more to do with the fact that introduced diseases devastated native populations than any technological advantage.
Columbus was a pioneer. I mostly wanted to undermine the attitude that he had some powers and abilities that would make his travels more than they were.
There is no evidence that the Vikings ever set foot in New England. The only documented site in North America is at the very northeastern tip of Newfoundland, hundreds of miles from New England.
Here’s an image ofMartin Behaim’s globe of 1492, which pre-dated Columbus’s voyage, which gives an idea of the state of European knowledge of east Asia. The approximate relationships between India, China (Cathai), and Japan (Zipangu), are correct, but the shapes and distances are wrong. Notice also that Zipangu is shown as not being very far west of the Azores, as well as the host of imaginary islands to its south. Columbus could easily have imagined he was among those islands and Zipangu was somewhere in the vicinity.
And he didn’t care to take their advice on not sailing into the monsoon. Both examples of how poorly informed these explorers can be on simple trading concepts – where to go, what to say, what to do, what not to do. Seriously, how do you eff this up – you’re going somewhere strange, bring MONEY.
Agreed. Columbus was the luckiest crackpot in history. His erroneous calculations led him to embark on a voyage that would probably have been fatal, if the Americas hadn’t happened to be almost exactly he thought Asia should be.
As with other historical figures, Columbus wasn’t all white or all black. He had great skill as a navigator and in figuring out where he was in the vast ocean. He was a scholar and a learned man, but he cherry-picked the data in order to come up with the answers he desired. He was brave to an almost insane degree in daring to sail farther from land than anyone else had ever gone or thought to go.
On the down side, he was virtually delusional about his pet theory about the distance to Asia, and incapable of changing his conclusions in the face of conflicting data. He wasn’t a very good sailor, and lost several of his ships to shipwrecks. He was greedy, with a single-minded focus on finding riches. And he was hypocritical - while he talked a great deal about how he wanted to bring Christianity to the Indians, he abused them horribly and was the first European to enslave them (defying the direct orders of Ferdinand and Isabella) when he wasn’t making enough profits on gold in Hispaniola.
The story I read long ago was…
The ancient Greeks had long ago established the earth was a globe, by various means. The educated classes of Europe at the time of Columbus knew this. The “earth is flat” idea was long discredited. Two different Greek philosophers had taken a stab at it. For example…
Of course, there was some confusion too about which “stadia” they were using. Anyway, Columbus took the smallest measurement interpretation, then analyzed Marco Polo’s Journal and calculated how far east he travelled, to conclude the fabled riches of the Orient were only a few thousand miles away if one sailed west. Too far before then for ships to have made it, but now within reach of a determined explorer.
The reason he had trouble getting anyone to back his voyage was that most educated people believed Eratosthnese and said (logically) that Columbus would have to travel almost 15,000 miles to hit land, not 3,000. Apparently Isabella decided to give it a shot since Portugal was hogging the around-Africa route, so what the hell, why not try?
So Columbus’ exploration was not a shot in the dark. Of course, everyone knew that Africans were very dark, Asians tended to be lighter brown and Chinese had funny eyes - but it’s not like there were dozens or examples in Spain to look at, other than Arabs. He found a land with light brown people where he expected to find light brown people, and they had eyes that could be very similar to Chinese. Must be close to the jackpot, right?
Money … and that G-O-L-D the world over, at that time. Seriously, you have to “prime the pump”, Columbus had some gold ornaments, the Carib Indians had some small gold ornaments, so Columbus could gesture – This and those, U got some more? Really Vasco de Gamma, you brought brass implements, to India? You gave the king you met at India, from which comes sugar – and sells at a premium price in Europe, you gave him honey?
You have to give Columbus credit for being a great sailor. Sailing three small boats across the ocean is no small feat. The Santa Maria - the biggest ship in his “fleet” - was only about sixty feet long.
Last summer, exact replicas of two of Columbus’ ships were docked at Charlotte. I hope you had a chance to see them.
Tiny doesn’t begin to describe how claustrophobic they were. Columbus’ cabin was four feet high, for example. The guides told a story about one ship’s picking up the survivors of a wreck. The problem was that they could fit either sufficient bodies or food aboard but not both. They solved the problem by dying of starvation.
However, being a great sailor is not the same thing as being a great explorer. That implies something more than mindless control of a ship and crew.
Hindustan is a Persian construct and it wan’t called Hindustan until the Mughals took over a couple decades after Columbus. Mughals looks like a bastardized version of Mongol because they are. Mongols that were assimilated by Persians and took over India. You can tell it’s a central-asian-influenced name because of 'stan, as in Pakistan, Afghanistan, Turkmenistan, etc. The Indus reference predates it by several thousand years and Hindustan was also known concurrently as Indostan. Not to pick an argument, just supplementing your knowledge.
Almost certainly. The masts of ships sailing away dips below the horizon. The star map doesn’t just shift, but stars disappear as you move north/south of the equator. (IIRC, the southern cross was used as the example of it being visible in southern Egypt but not Greece). It was the easiest model to explain eclipses.
The flat world theory was only common among the unwashed masses. You’re right in that the only real argument was in just how round the world was.
That map is awesome, and thanks for sharing.
Note that the map virtually ignores all the islands to the north that the Vikings found. Iceland may possibly be represented but not Greenland or Newfoundland.
That raises another question. Did the Vikings even know that Greenland was a large island and not a continent? If so, how?
Probably not. I also think it’s fascinating how acutely aware the globe was of just how small western Europe was in the grand scheme of things.
I’ve heard speculation that Columbus might not have been a crackpot after all. Apparently, before his famous trip of 1492, he had made a few trading trips up to Scandinavia. While there, the idea goes, he might have heard rumors of lands across the Atlantic, accessible by ships. Knowing in advance that there were lands across the ocean, his only mistake was in the identity of those lands. But it wasn’t coincidence that the Americas were right where he thought Asia was, because the Americas being there was why he thought that to begin with.
I’ve heard of this theory but I’ve never seen any evidence to support it. Columbus certainly never made any of his claims based on it. And when he did sail across the Atlantic, he gave no sign that he knew there was a place called Vinland out there - he went looking about two thousand miles south of where the Vikings landed.
My understanding was that the Vikings weren’t sure that all the major land masses of the world–meaning everything they’d seen that was bigger than Britain–weren’t connected. They may not have had a concept of continents. They were certainly aware that Asia extended immensely beyond their farthest voyages, so the glimpses of great lands fringing the sea in the other direction may have seemed like more of the same.
Not so unlike Columbus and co., actually.