I’ve always heard that was true. It’s always surprised me that the Greeks knew the world was round yet but in the 15th century that information was lost. Didn’t Columbus sail against contemporary thinking in that regard? But in the current zombie thread that’s floating around in GQ, there’s this:
So the experts knew but did the average Joe in 1492 think the world was flat or round?
Experts certainly knew and, as Colibri pointed out, had a better idea of its proper size than Columbus.
Did the average guy know? Probably not. It wasn’t something he’d be likely to encounter. As George Bernard Shaw pointed out, there’s a compelling argument for its flatrness: “Look at it”.
I’ll bet general knowledge of the true shape of the earth (and of maps, the sizes and locations of countries, etc.) didn’t start becoming “common knowledge” until general education became a regular thing, and then, it was only within certain groups. I’m always impressed by the general knowledge of the early settlers of Pluymouth and other parts of New England (probably elsewhere, toom, but I;'m not as well-read on Southern colonies), and I figure their forebears must have been as well informed. I’ll bet that a lot of this was the result of small Protestant groups in the British Isles forming their own schools affiliated with the churches. So by the mid-16th century I’ll bet this knowledge was beginning spread within groups there. Eventually it hit the general populace, but I don’t know when that would be – by the late 18th early 19th century, certainly.
How all this went elsewhere in the world I can’t say. Did Jewish education extend beyond Torak and Talmud to general science and other subjects? That was widespread and not just for the well-off. Other groups have traditions of teaching, but I know little about them.
People knew the world was round . In fact, many say Washington Irving is partly responsible for perpetuating a myth. On last cite for all the doubters:
Which argument loses a lot of power if you live near the ocean and see ships disappearing from the bottom up and appearing from the top down. Or if you walk far enough from town all you can see is the church tower, or the tops of the highest hills.
Then you should read more books. Or even, one book about Columbus or the European Age of Exploration.
I don’t mean that in a snarky way. If you believe that Columbus had to fight people who thought the world was flat, you have major gaps in your knowledge, and you’ll enjoy learning more.
Nothing was lost. When we say that “the Greeks knew the world was round”, we mean that the writing of a few Greek thinkers has survived, in which those thinkers proved in a satisfactory manner that the world was round. We don’t mean that every uneducated person in ancient Greece knew this, any more than every uneducated person knew it in medieval Europe.
The idea of long-distance sailing wasn’t original with Columbus. By 1492, the Portuguese had been exploring Africa for 77 years, and had sailed around its southern point and nearly to India. They had ample opportunity to observe the Southern constellations and how the sky changed in appearance due to the sphericity of the Earth. None of this was new in 1492.
You’ve misquoted Colibri. He says that “experts” offered a better opinion than Columbus as to the size of the Earth, not that only experts knew the world was round. By 1492, every educated European knew the world was round. It wasn’t a point of issue. We don’t know about “average Joes”, only because they were illiterate and didn’t leave any records about what they knew.
And, for the record, while the Church got a lot of things wrong about the solar system, the shape of the Earth was never in question. Long before Columbus, St. Thomas Aquinas wrote
". . .it should be noted that the different ways of knowing (ratio cognoscibilis) give us different sciences. The astronomer and the natural philosopher both conclude that the world is round, but the astronomer does this through a mathematical middle that is abstracted from matter, whereas the natural philosopher considers a middle lodged in matter. Thus there is nothing to prevent another science from treating in the light of divine revelation what the philosophical disciplines treat as knowable in the light of human reason” (Summa theologiae, Ia, q. 1, a., ad 2).
So, even the Church acknowledged that the Earth was round long before 1492.
The Nuremberg Chronicle was completed in 1493, just before any results of the Columbus voyages could be incorporated. It contains an overview of the history of the world as it was understood at the time. It isn’t an academic geography text but closer to a popular science book. Nevertheless by the standards of the time it was a major book project aimed at an educated audience.
The text does not give the exact shape of the earth but it mentions the possibility that it is a sphere.
(a more literal version of the first shape would be something like “rotundly disced” - whatever exact shape that is supposed to be.)
I once read that Columbus’s reputation and the story of his boldness was fluffed up by Washington Irving at the request of a consortium of Italian-American businessmen, who paid him for it, and that he invented the idea Columbus demonstrated the world was flat.
This does sound pretty whacky, so I’d appreciate hearing from anybody who has a better understanding of this and maybe could correct it.
In any case, there’s an old painting of Columbus holding an octant (which is an earlier version of the sextant). Now, why would people have been building octants for navigation if the world was flat?
i cannot state that this is impossible.
I can state that the number of “Italian businessmen” in the U.S. at the time the Irving was making up his tall tales was miniscule and the whole notion of propping up a “fellow countryman” would probably have had to wait another sixty or seventy years until the rush of Italian immigrants swelled to the point where xenophobes would have begun disparaging them, creating an audience for a popular hero with whom they could identify. (And this does not even address the point that there was no Italy for about 30 years after Irving wrote his Columbus biography: there was clearly a geographical Italy in the form of the boot-shaped peninsula, but in the 1830s, what would become the Nation of Italy was a scattered bunch of small kingdoms, often dominated by Austria or threatened by France.)
ETA: as Brickbacon’s cites note, the primary interst in Irving when shaping his story appears to be simple anti-Catholic rhetoric.
From Why did Columbus Think that He Discovered a Route to the Far East? (post #17), here is the entire quote:
“Columbus was truly the luckiest crackpot in history. His theory about the location of Asia relative to Europe was completely wrong, and the real geographical experts knew it.** In the popular mind, Columbus was supposedly arguing that the world was round, while the wise men insisted it was flat. Actually the experts told him he couldn’t reach Asia by sailing west because it was too far away , not because the idea wasn’t right in theory**.” (bolding mine)
If I misquoted Colibri I apologize but I don’t believe I did.
This is interesting because I recently got into an MB debate with a fundie who insisted that Colombus got the idea that the world was round from the Bible (which at one point refers to the “circle” of the world), and that the scientists of the day were hung up on “flat-earth theory”. Therefore the Bible is reliable and science is not.
When I posted the following quote from Wikipedia…
…she quite predictably argued that it was all a liberal media hoax.
This is probably a stupid question, but I’ll venture to ask anyway.
When experts were telling Columbus he couldn’t take enough supplies for his trip, did they mean food or drink?
If it was food, why couldn’t the sailors catch enough fish during the trip to supplement their supplies enough to complete the trip? Drag a net behind the boat and haul it up twice a day.
If it was drink, I imagine it would be hard to distill enough salt water during your trip for everybody on board.
Sqweels, does she think that C. S. Lewis is a horrible liberal? Because he wrote a book that describes it very nicely. It’s called The discarded image and is one of my favorite books. Also people are tired of me shilling for it on every thread about the earth. 
I would venture to say that since Dante’s Divine Comedy of the 1300s took place in a round-earth Universe and was one of the most widely-known literary works for a couple centuries afterward, I would say that every single literate person, and a fair number of illiterates, were probably aware of that the Earth was round.
No cites, sorry, but a book I read in college (where I first learned that the “flat earth” story was a bunch of bull… sigh, American education sucks) went into some detail about this. From what I remember, Columbus compiled various theories as to how large the circumference of the earth actually was.
Knowing he’d never get funding to sail west to the Indies if the world was too large, he threw out the larger (and, it turns out, more accurate estimates) and used only the smaller (incorrect) estimates to help make his case that the journey could actually be accomplished.
The productivity of the ocean way out away from land is pretty low. While you can haul up fish in coastal waters where nutrients are high, in mid ocean nutrients in the water are very low, and thus so is planktonic productivity and so also fish. You couldn’t rely on catching enough fish to feed the whole crew every day. Besides, the crew would get sick of it and mutiny.
Food preservation methods were poor. Ships would stow hardtack, flour, salted meat and fish, dried peas, and so on. But in the permanently damp sea atmosphere this even this stuff would go bad eventually. Barrels of salt meat would spring a leak and be ruined.
Likewise ships would have casks of water, but these might also leak. You could collect some water by catching rain in sails, but remember the sails would also be full of salt from spray and this would not be too palatable. And it would be a big risk to rely on rain indefinitely.
As for distilling enough water, where are you going to get enough firewood to keep a fire going? Even if you could maintain an operating still on a tossing ship.
Other risks were not well known at the time of Columbus because no voyage had ever gone out of sight of land for so long. One of these was scurvy due to the lack of vitamin C. Also, in tropical waters shipworms quickly ate away ship’s hulls so they had to be beached and re-caulked periodically. You couldn’t do this at sea. In fact, on Columbus’s last voyage all his ships became so wormy on his return from Panama he had to make land in Jamaica, then only inhabited by Indians, rather than Hispaniola where the colony was. He was shipwrecked there for more than a year before he was rescued.
It’s not so much that folks ever thought the world was flat, as that some folks just didn’t care about the question at all. In the Middle Ages, if you asked an educated fellow what the shape of the world was, he’d tell you it was a sphere. But if you asked an uneducated fellow, he wouldn’t say “flat”; he’d say “I dunno”, and go back to his plowing. It’s only the modern ridicule associated with believing in a flat Earth that puts it into the consciousness of modern uneducated folks, but many people are still ignorant of other, equally basic, facts of astronomy.
Thanks for the great info, Colibri, but I fell compelled to comment on one of your statements here.
cough Polynesians? cough I knew that they had colonized the Pacific Islands far before the Europeans ventured across the Atlantic, but I didn’t know exactly when, so I did a quick Google search and found this:
http://sscl.berkeley.edu/~oal/background/polyhist.htm
Western Polynesia (Tonga, Samoa etc.) colonized around 1000 BCE
Eastern Polynesia (Cook Islands, Marquesas, Hawaii, Easter Island, New Zealand) colonized from 500 BCE to 1000 AD
I grant that the Polynesian sailors didn’t go over to Spain and tell Ferdinand II and Isabella their secrets, but what did they know that the Europeans didn’t? Is it because they had smaller crews?
No, it’s because the distances between most island groups is much much smaller than across the Atlantic.
If you look at a map, you will see that most of the island groups are only a few hundred miles apart at most:
http://www.supertravelnet.com/map/1/61_0_3.jpg
The Polynesians mostly didn’t have to make very big jumps. Some more distant groups were probably colonized initially by chance rather than deliberate exploratory voyages. And wave patterns and the flight of birds could give clues to the existance of islands far beyond the horizon. But the greatest voyages were something like less than a third that of Columbus.
The Atlantic where Columbus crossed is a good 3000 miles across. It is of course is a bit narrower between Brazil and Africa but nobody knew that.
Recent research also suggest that the Polynesians weren’t quite as good as had been thought:
ETA: I should say that when I said no voyage had gone out of land for so long I meant no European voyage. Polynesians may have been at sea for longer periods on occasion, but rarely if ever deliberately. As you surmise, smaller crews would find it easier to subsist on fish but water would still be a problem.
Just a followup on the difficulty of making a large ocean crossing in Columbus’s time. Magellan was the first to complete the voyage to Asia that Columbus had planned. It took the expedition 98 days to sail from the Straits of Magellan in southern South America to Guam, a distance of about 8000 miles. They somehow missed almost all the islands that dotted the Pacific on the way, hitting only two small atolls with no good anchorages. They lost 30 men to scurvy en route, and many were on the edge of starvation by the time they arrived. Magellan had a much more accurate idea of where the “Indies” were than Columbus, but he underestimated the distance as well. Even though they were better equipped than Columbus, they almost didn’t make it.