Did Europeans believe that the world was flat in 1492?

[Walloon]

@Colibri

His estimate of the distance to be traveled was way way off. He thought the distance from western Europe to Asia heading west was less than 3,000 miles, when it is actually about 11,000 miles.

Could his error have been deliberate, to increase the apparent possibility and success of the voyage to his sponsors?

[Colibri]

@Walloon

Could his error have been deliberate, to increase the apparent possibility and success of the voyage to his sponsors?

No, unless you count deluding himself. As has been noted elsewhere, Columbus was a dyed-in-the-wool crackpot. He cherry-picked data to convince himself the voyage was possible. It is clear from his own log of the voyage that he expected to find land where he had calculated it to be - on September 25 he was in the vicinity where he thought a couple of islands should lie, and there was a false alarm that they were sighted. (In fact there were several such in the last weeks of the voyage.) In fact, Columbus deliberately falsified the information on distance he gave the crew, including the other captains, so they would not become too afraid and mutiny (which they nearly did anyway.)

[Colibri]

@Arnold Winkelried

I thought that the point of SlowMindThinking’s post was that Columbus was betting that there was a landmass not so far away. Columbus’ mistake was thinking that the landmass was Asia when in fact it was the Americas. So he was wrong on the continent but lucky in his deduction, from the debris washed on European and African shores, that another landmass was not so far away. Now, if his deduction had a rational basis, that I don’t know.
(This is of course assuming that what SlowMindThinking is saying has a historical basis.)

Well, yes, to some extent. Apparently carved bits of driftwood and “sea beans” (the seeds of a tropical liana) sometimes washed up in the Azores, and this is one of the hints Columbus used to convince himself land was not too far away to the west. But this wouldn’t allow him to predict very well just how far it was.

[SlowMindThinking]

@Colibri

His estimate of the distance to be traveled was way way off. He thought the distance from western Europe to Asia heading west was less than 3,000 miles, when it is actually about 11,000 miles. That’s a pretty damn big error. It was only the fact that the Americas were where he calculated Asia to be that his expedition didn’t end up an utter disaster or coming back without result.

I did not mean his estimate of the distance to Asia. I meant his estimate of the distance to land. Yeah, he thought the land was Asia. It doesn’t seem to have occurred to anyone that there was land between Asia and Europe that was not known to either.

[SlowMindThinking]

@Colibri

Well, yes, to some extent. Apparently carved bits of driftwood and “sea beans” (the seeds of a tropical liana) sometimes washed up in the Azores, and this is one of the hints Columbus used to convince himself land was not too far away to the west. But this wouldn’t allow him to predict very well just how far it was.

My understanding was that he based his estimate on the quantities of various forms of debris. The weak part of all this is, of course, where did I read this? Given what I read, it was most likely an article in Scientific American, possibly in the Smithsonian , which my mom still got for a few years after my dad died, or American History, which my dad got. I suppose it could have been a National Geographic lying around somewhere. In any case, it was years ago, perhaps in 1992. Without dredging it up, it is hard to determine if the author wasn’t a crackpot, himself.

[Colibri]

Driftwood and other evidence from the Azores is mentioned in Samuel Eliot Morrison’s biography Admiral of the Ocean Sea. However, he does not mention that Columbus made any estimate of actual distance because of this. Even if he had, there could hardly have been any real basis for it.