We know from our history lessons that Columbus thought he had reached Asia when he landed in the New World. And that the Italian or Spanish word for India encompassed a larger area of Asia than the present-day country of India.
But this has long puzzled me. There was a more or less continuous trade route by land from the Indian subcontinent to Europe since at least the middle ages. Post-Marco Polo, surely Europeans had a different geographic term for the very different culture, never mind landmass, of China?
Or did Columbus mistakenly think the Caribbean aborigines were “Indians” because they were relatively dark skinned, and did not resemble what he heard the Chinese looked like?
I started basically the same thread a long-time ago and it got some very good replies. There has been at least one other thread on it as well. The basic answer is to abandon your logic when it comes to Columbus because he was a world class crackpot.
They called it Cathay. They knew little of the culture, except what Marco Polo and a few other traders during the Pax Mongolica had reported, and such information was 200 years out of date.
He didn’t know what the Chinese looked like. He did believe, however, based on Polo, that they were fairly wealthy and technically sophisticated, which the Caribbeans clearly were not. Hence the Caribbeans could only be given the more general label of “Indians”, or east Asians.
The (East) Indies, India, China and Japan were all known as distinct areas to Europeans at the time. Japan the least well known. The (East) Indies the next least. So Columbus thought the first place he hit was Japan. Sailed south to get to the Indies. Whatever islands he hit there became the West Indies. Never intended to reach India. Didn’t really care how much further India might have been. The Indies/Spice Islands were the main goal.
That is absolutely not true. Columbus, for his time, was a great navigator and knew more geography that 99.9 of the people. It is unreasonable to demand a precission that was impossible at the time. Even today many geographic terms are quite vague and depend on context.
Columbus was looking for “the Indies,” basically meaning “those lands East of us where spices come from.” He went a long way west and reached land: his mistake was that he hadn’t thought there could be another continent in the middle of the road. So instead of saying “hey, cool, a new place” he said “ah, finally, bloody place sure was far!”
Same as the notion of “the Spains” (yes, plural) which they used wasn’t the same as our current notion of “Spain”, “the Indies” isn’t the same as “India.”
He may have known a lot of geography, but a lot of the geography he knew was just plain wrong. And the precision needed to know that he was wrong was most certainly possible at the time, given that it was possible 1700 years before then when Erastothenes measured the circumference of the Earth.
Guy invents a super-nifty-keen hyperdrive, thinks the universe may be different in scope than we thought. He actually goes out and effin tets the bloody thing by zooming off into the farthest reaches of space.
Yes, there were better scientists than Columbus. But until him, nobody knew. He proved by experiment (if accidentally) what they only calculated and assumed.
I have a question: What was Columbus’s plan for getting ahold of the gold/spices? Did he have anything to trade? Was he expecting it to be just lying on the ground? Or had he always intended to just shoot whoever had the gold/spices, and then run off with it?
How about Magellan? Columbus, by the fact of discovering new lands, did not link up with old lands going west instead of east like before, and so didn’t really prove anything. (If he were to have hypothesized a new continent where America is, that’s another story…)
No he didn’t. Columbus’s calculations of the circumference of the Earth were completely off, and were much less that the true distance. The scientists had it right - they were correct on the distance to Asia. Since Columbus never reached Asia, he never even tested the idea of what the true distance was. It wasn’t until Magellan, long after Columbus’s death, that it was empirically demonstrated that the scientists’ calculations were correct, and Columbus’s were bogus.
Columbus was a great navigator, but he was also a loon. The two are not mutually exclusive.
To quote a post of my from the thread linked above:
Columbus studied a lot of geography, but it was in the interest of formulating his own crackpot theory. Like most crackpots, he cherry-picked the information he had, and he ignored anything that wasn’t convenient to his hypothesis. If not for the good luck of the Americas being almost exactly where he calculated Asia to be, he and his crew would have starved or died of thirst (if he didn’t turn back).
Columbus was a great man not a “world class crackpot”. The fact that he may have ignored something does not detract from his greatness or the greatness of his feat. He was definitely not a “world class crackpot”.
First off, Columbus was NOT a great man. He enslaved an entire island’s population and killed an estimated 3 million people.
Second, I’ve read excerpts from Columbus’ diary and when he first “discovered” the carribean he described the people as comely, handsome, and incapable of hate. He also said that they must be a new, previously unheard of people. This changed after he was convinced of the profit that could be had, which is about the time when he and his head priest started hanging the locals that refused to convert to Christianity in groups of 13 (representing Jesus Christ and the 12 apostles).
I wouldn’t say he was a crackpot, though maybe a loon, but he was definitely quite the capable navigator. He most certainly was NOT a great man, and not the hero most westerners remember him as.
A good book for this sort of thing is Lies My Teacher Told Me by James Loewen
edit: I should note that much of that 3 million was not killed directly by him, but died of disease during shipment or upon arriving as slaves in Europe. He did basically cause the genocide of an entire island, though
Columbus didn’t invent the ships he sailed, so that part isn’t relevant. As for the fellow who goes zooming off in the ship, he may be brave, and he may be lucky, but that doesn’t make him smart.
sailor, what did Columbus do that reflects personal greatness on his part, rather than dumb luck? The minor thing he ignored was ten thousand miles.
Columbus was a great sea captain (crossing the Atlantic ocean was a very difficult task) and a heckuva salesman. But after that his skill list drops off. His navigation skills were nothing special - keep going west is not a real difficult skill. He was indeed a very bad geographer who ignored the best geographic experts of his day - and he was wrong and the experts were right. He was a very bad administrator who ruined the country he was in charge of and ended up getting called back to Spain in disgrace. And he had no great talent for facing the facts - to his dying day he insisted he had reached Asia.
However, anyone who wound up believing, based on his own navigational errors, that he had established that the Earth is partly shaped like a woman’s breast, with the Earthly Paradise on the nipple itself, probably did at least have some unresolved issues …
I suppose we could blame Columbus for the war in Iraq too as well as for everything that came out of America since 1492. This is just silly. First off Columbus never enslaved anyone and, even if he had, it was a common thing at the time and it is plainly ignorant to judge him byt today’s standards. We would have to condemn everybody who lived more than a century ago and even after that. What we do today will be seen as barbaric pretty soon (and even by some today).
From your description it sounds like crap to me. Do you have some proof that it is something better?
I don’t know if there was ever any connection, but I see an interesting sequence of events.
Geographica was written in the 2nd century A.D. by Ptolemy (Claudius Ptolemaeus). Because Ptolemy used unreliable data, his map of the Earth was too small — possibly about 1/6 too small, roughly the size of Columbus’s discrepancy.
Following the fall of the Roman Empire, the work ended up translated into Arabic. Fast-forward to the early Renaissance, and guess which work turns up again? That’s right, Geographica, erroneous measurements and all. The work returned to Italy via Arabic translation in 1295 but it had to be copied by hand, sans maps. Fresh maps were drawn to Ptolemy’s specifications by Byzantine monk Maximus Planudes. It is translated into Latin in 1407, then seventy years and one movable-type printing press later, it is published in 1477 in Bologna.
Now I don’t know if Columbus read Geographica or if he based his measurements upon the reconstructed maps inside, but it’s interesting to speculate if there’s a connection.
Wikipedia says that Columbus believed the smaller-Earth figures proposed by Marinus of Tyre. But who was he? Why, Marinus was the Phoenician cartographer upon whose figures Ptolemy relied for Geographica.
Basically, Columbus sailed westward to discover the New World because Ptolemy had a lazy fact-checker.
