I don’t think it was thinking that he could circumnavigate that makes Columbus a crackpot but the adamant refusal to believe that the land he found wasn’t the Orient that make him crackpotish.
I’ve also read the scandanavian tales (or heard/saw on History channel?) but it doesn’t jibe with me. The land that Leif Erickson found is decidedly NOT China/Japan/India/Indonesia. It was full of tall pines and hostile natives and apparently had some great indigenous grapes. It doesn’t exactly match the descriptions from the guys that headed East.
A description of the landscapes of Sweden wouldn’t match one of Portugal either, and yet they’re both Europe. The tales from travelers included mention of “other lands” which they hadn’t visited, some further North than China; Europeans knew that their knowledge of Asia was skimpy and fragmentary. How’s Siberia for tall pines and hostile natives?
Columbus is alleged to have visited Iceland as a young man, although the evidence for that is disputed. The Viking settlements in Greenland may have failed by the 1400s, and knowledge of them was not widespread in Europe.
Since there is sea ice around northern Greenland even in the summer, there was no way for them to circumnavigate it and know it was an island. I don’t think it was confirmed that Greenland was an island until Peary reached Cape Morris Jesup, its northernmost point, in 1900. (Even then I’m not sure it was definitely known that it was not attached to the Arctic Archipelago to its west.)
However, that description doesn’t sound very different from the Asian mainland north of Japan. Not that Europeans would have known what northern Asia was like, but the description would in no way rule out that Japan and China weren’t just to the south of it.
“Hindu” is the persianized version of “Sindhu”, which is the local name for the Indus (though its called Sindh today). Hindustan means literally the land of the Indus…and that has been the case for thousands of years in Persian.
India was the land beyond the River Indus. All lands beyond
Well I was aware of Indus/India since grade school but didn’t know that the Persians had been calling India Hindustan for thousands of years prior to the 1500’s. Cite?
As for the “Siberia had tall pine too”, I understand that. However if you’re an explorer theorizing that going West meant the Indies, and you come up across [scant] evidence that going west resulted in a land vastly different than the Indies coupled with math that shows you the world is bigger than you think and that IF there was land where you claim it is, in likelihood would not be the Indies… I would be more open to the fact that when I reached Dominica/Cuba/Honduras it probably wasn’t the Indies.
None of this mattered to Columbus. As I said, he attempted to interpret everything he saw in terms of what he knew of the Indies. For example, the fact that Capsicum chilis are referred to as peppers is due to Columbus comparing them to the black pepper or pimiento that came from the Indies, even though the plants are completely different. He identified other local products with those from India, such as cinnamon, aloe, and mastic, an aromatic resin.
The Indians told him of a place in Cuba that they called Cubanacan that had much gold. It is thought that Columbus heard this as El Gran Can, and decided it must be the court of the Great Khan.
[QUOTE=Little Nemo]
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.
[/QUOTE]
De Torres was a converted Jew who spoke Hebrew, Aramaic, and a little Arabic. Because of this, Columbus sent him as his ambassador to the court of the “Great Khan.” When de Torres and his party arrived, he found it was a village of 50 huts, and was disappointed that no one understood his Arabic.
I remember James Burke writing about Columbus. His take was that Columbus took the low end of the then-acceptable range of sizes for the Earth, combined with the numbers given by Marco Polo for his (now sometimes disputed) travels, and came up with a pretty nifty idea that getting to the Indies might really be feasible.
Assuming the above is true, finding a continent right where he expected one to be led him to history’s greatest case of confirmation bias. This would not make him a “crackpot” or a “poor explorer.” It would simply make him human.
Columbus had sold his venture as a way to get to the Indies without circumnavigating Africa (with the battles with Portugal that that would entail). His major opponents to his sales jobs were the clergy of the Catholic universities who pointed out that Eratosthenes had already calculated the circumference of the Earth at approximately 25,000 miles, as opposed to the 16,000 mile figure on which Columbus’s sales job depended.
Columbus had no incentive to report back that he had found a different land than the one he sought. He wanted to prove that he had arrived at his intended destination so that he could get financing for future voyages.
Crackpot? I dunno. Scam artist sounds more likely.
It’s not unusual for even modern scientists to get over-invested in a pet hypothesis, so it shouldn’t be too surprising that Columbus (certainly no modern scientist by a long shot) would not be too open to proving himself wrong. Witness Piltdown Man in the 20th century.
Thanks everyone. Great thread! I think Bremidon is on the right track when he writes…
And a good salesman. A crackpot? I would say delusional in convincing himself that he was where he thought/hoped he was. A con artist? Only if he knew for a fact he had fooled everyone deliberately into believing the had reached the Indies when he knew he hadn’t.
I decided to look up the info that I remembered in “The Day the Universe Changed” by James Burke.
On June 25, 1474 Toscanelli wrote a letter to Martins talking about a shorter route to the Indies. In it he included a chart bsaing the circumference of the Earth using a degree equal to 75 miles. He also used the exagerrated size of Eurasia from Marco Polo, as I mentioned above. This made a western route look really doable.
This chart was sent to our intrepid Captain C., and was used as the basis for both his arguments to the court as well as his expectations for the journey.
Toscanelli was consedered by some at the time to be the best mathematician in the world, so using his estimates is not exactly a glaring problem in judgement. Columbus simply had the ill fortune to find exactly what he was looking for the first time he went looking for it. Is it really so surprising that he held on to the idea that made his career, even when evidence started mounting that it might not be quite the continent they had set out for?
Columbus fooled himself more than anyone else. Nevertheless, he did distort and withhold information in his reports to his royal sponsors to make it look like he really had found the Indies.
He rectified this mistake on a later voyage by bringing the Indians quite a few lovely cannonballs, although he gave them away a bit faster than the locals preferred.
Do I detect a reader of the works of Larry Gonick?
A degree at the equator would be a bit less than 70 miles… unless these are 75 much smaller miles, or Marco Polo’s camels travelled really fast each day, that doesn’t do much for Columbus.
You’re right! I’m relying on James Burke here, because I only have so many hours in the day, but that should actually make the estimate larger, not smaller. I assume he’s using the modern definition of “mile”, because he does not explicitely say otherwise.
I abridged quite a bit of what Burke wrote, so it may have something to do with other estimations made by Toscanelli. If I get the time, I’ll write out the whole thing.
What is true is that the length of the route given by Marco Polo was exaggerated quite a bit, so maybe that is enough to explain Burke’s reasoning.
Antilliahad supposedly been encountered by a Portuguese ship, but could not be located again and was not in the possession of Portugal.
The Behaim globe I linked to previously also contains other mythical lands, such at St. Brendan’s Island in the middle of the Atlantic and the Kingdom of Prester John in central Asia, a supposedly Christian monarch.
If memory serves, some folks in Ptolemaic Egypt did the following: 1) At location A, measure the angle of shadows cast (down a well, in the story I heard) at high noon. 2) At location B (a substantial distance north or south from location A), measure the angle of shadows cast at high noon. Assuming that the Earth is a globe, one can use these measurements to calculate its circumference. They were very close.