Tommndebb, I once again bow to your obviously extensive History intellect. Your work is always phenominal, and your opinion is highly regarded. So the story of the Zenos and Sinclair is largely invented? If so, is it a post-Columbian invention, (meant to discredit his accomplishments after they were made) or a Pre-columbian invention (meant to Glorify the people involved for accomplishments they never participated in)
And sailor, when you say:
I am not saying that AT ALL. What I was asking was whether or not he was looking for Asia in the first place. I am not attempting to discredit the Columbus story by diminishing his actual accomplishments, I am attempting to get the facts straight by inquiring about the validity of other information that I had come upon. It is clear that the Sinclair/Zeno story can be largely discredited (as is shown by the marvelous bookwork by Tomndebb) and thus it would appear that much of our Columbus story is in fact verrified. I was not looking for an excuse to discredit Columbus, I was looking for an answer to a conflicting set of apparent facts I had come across. Having recieved my answer, I am quite content to admit that it is Sinclair that was the myth, and not Columbus.
Please do not belittle me in this way. The tone you take here is condescending and I am far more intelligent and informed in these issues than these statements by you make me out to be. I am well versed in the process and philosphy of science and discovery (as a trained Chemist and a trained educator) and I am also a bit of a history buff(though not nearly so as Tomndebb. I can only wish to be as good as he is at this stuff), and so understand the issues that face the process of discovery and such. Twice on this thread you have characterized me as a simpleminded reactionary and incapable of understanding the complexities of historical research and interpretation, and nothing could be farther from the truth. I am not a member of the “white man bad, natives good” liberal historical revisionary crowd that your first post made me out to be. Still, I have once already agreed with your points over the importance of Columbus’s voyages of discovery, and yet you still belabor the point. I have never once claimed that Columbus’s Italian heritage implied that credit should be given to Italy (which wasn’t even a NATION yet, and wouldn;t be for 400 years) and yet you make the effort to point that out to me. I AM NOT A RETARD. My original point was that Columbus as an Italian-born navigator would have certainly been familiar with the work of earlier Italian-born navigators (who themselves, it was claimed, made their explorations for Orkney/Norway and not Italy) making much the same plans as he was. Seeing as the Sinclair/Zeno story is largely bunk, the answer to my question is obviously: No, Columbus did not have an earlier model to base his voyage off of, and thus he is due the full credit that history has given him. I have said it before when I stated:
I do not appreciate when you ignore my attempts to agree with you merely so you can find a reason to take an arguementative stance with me. I still stand by my apology for being reduced to name calling and rudeness before, but I did not, and still do not, appreciate the characterization of myself as unappreciative of Columbus’s importance, in light of the obviously wrong revisionary standpoint popular to take against Columbus these days by those less interested in being educated than you or I. Let me say it again: I AGREE WITH YOU. 100%.
While I have answered the question of whether the Zeno voyages were historic to my complete satisfaction, I should point out that I have never found an actual scholarly work (other than those provided in the links) that actually attempts to prove or disprove the events.
If I had to make a wild guess, I would think that the document detailing the Zeno voyages was either a “travellers tale” (popular in the early days of the Age of Exploration) or a puff piece written to add glory and honor to the name of Henry Sinclair.
However,
those are WAGs and I have no information or source to support my conjectures.
Columbus unquestionably was a great explorer. But what prompted him to suppose that Asia lay fairly close to the Azores? -If I recall correctly, he told his captains that Asia lay 1200 (spanish) miles to the west of the Azores - not a horrendously long voyage. I understand that Columbus made a voyage to Iceland-is it possible that while there he was able to hear about Lief Ericsson’s voyage to Vinland?
jayron, my posting was not referring in any way to anything you had said. It was (as I said) totally tangential and i was addressing some common ideas but it is not related in any way whatsoever to what you were saying. I mean, you are asking about Sinclair and I am talking about Columbus because I know zip about Sinclair. that’s all. It is not meant to agree or disagree with you. I hope you can read my posting in that light. I am just babbling about Columbus because I have read a bit about him.
As for the egg story, I posted the origin and that’s as much as I know. Maybe someone can come up with another origin. This could well be a 16th century UL.
As someone aluded above, the Native Americans were probably not the original discoverers of the New World, either. The fossil remains known as Kennewick Man or Spirit Cave Man are over 9000 years old (older than any known Native American remains), and antropologically there is little doubt that they are not the bones of a Native American. Supposedly there are other ‘pre-Amerind’ fossils in South America. According to a Nova special, Kennewick Man is most closely related to the Ainu people. The Ainu were the original inhabitants of east-central Asia, before the Chinese, Koreans, Japanese, etc pushed them out. A few Ainu can still be found in the mountains of Japan and Taiwan. As one might expect, Indian tribes everywhere are having a collective coronary over these finds, because it suggests that, just like europeans, Native Americans took over the New World by subverting another culture.
egkelly, after Columbus resolved to sail west to the Indies he did some research. He learned enough Latin to read the ancient geographers. One source said that Aristotle had written you could sail to the Indies from Spain in a few days. Strabo wrote that several Greeks and Romans had tried it but returned unsuccessful. Columbus’ own copies of Imago Mundi and Historia Rerum Ubique Gestarum, two famous medieval texts with guesses that the Atlantic was narrow, are preserved with his own margin notes. There was a leading florentine scholar named Paolo Toscanelli, who communicated to the Portugeuse court his ideas of the narrowness of the Atlantic. The Portugeuse king asked him to elaborate and he wrote the “Toscanelli Letter”, dated June 25, 1474. Columbus latched on to this letter and wrote to Toscanelli for further info. Toscanelli sent Coumbus a chart and encouraged his “great and noble ambition”. Toscanelli died in 1482.
Toscanelli had estimated the distance from the Canaries to Japan at 3000 nautical models. Columbus estimated it to be 2400 nautical miles. It is actually 10,000 nautical miles.
His reasoning has been reconstructed. He assumed that it was 225 degrees to East Asia (instead of Ptolmey’s estimate of 180), added on 28 degrees for the discoveries of Marco Polo, added on 30 more degrees for the distance from the east coast of China to the east coast of Japan and started his voyage from the Canaries, 9 degrees from the coast of Spain. Thus, by his calcs he only had to sail 68 degrees west to reach Japan. He further argued that the ancients used too long of a degree of longitude. He assumed that at latitude 28 N, a degree was only 40 miles wide. By his calcs, he need only sail 2720 miles which he rounded down to 2400. As Samuel Eliot Morison put it, “He knew he could make it, and had to put the mileage low in order to attract supporters.”
eg and Your Sofan Majesty, Columbus’ son Ferdinand recorded that among his father’s notes was the statement that in February 1477 he sailed 100 leagues north of Iceland which would have put him in Jan Mayen Islands. Whether he actually landed in Iceland and sat in on some saga reading parties is not known. Near Galway, Columbus saw two drifting boats containing a dead man and woman. It is believed that they were Lapps or Finns but Columbus assumed that they were Chinese “blown across” and further fed the fire.
Columbus is known to have visited Iceland during his early journeys as a mariner. This is pretty widely known among students of history. However, there is no great event associated with that voyage and the general ignorance of that voyage by people who do not know of his life makes the trip a fertile source of conspiracy theories and whispered rumors of arcane knowledge. The Encyclopædia Britannica mentions it in passing on this page, Columbus: Life, but does not associate it with any other portentous event.
(The same page describes the various factors that led to Columbus’s miscalculation of the breadth of the Atlantic Ocean. Basically, the article ignores the claims that Columbus deliberately minimized the estimate of the journey in order to more easily secure funding or that Columbus truly believed that the Earth’s size was only 18,000 miles in circumference, stating instead that Columbus seriously overestimated the breadth of Asia and the distance from Asia to “the Japans.”)
** [Moderator’s note: Link fixed again. Who loves ya Tom? -manhattan] **
[Edited by manhattan on 07-06-2000 at 11:34 PM]
I am reading “Cristopher Columbus, the dream and the obsession” by Gianni Granzotto, published by Grafton Books in paperback.
in pages 36 - 38 it tells about Columbus’s voyage to Iceland and specifically mentions he sought information from everyone he could get it from. It says in Iceland the existence of greenland and Labrador was common knowledge but also mixed with myth and fantasy.
…were the icelanders still carrying on trade with greenland? i recall reading that the last recorded date in the (Norse) Greenland colony was a wedding, recorded as happening in 1502. This would mean that Columbus was fully aware of lands to the west of iceland. He was certainly an educated man-why did he not wonder that the greenlanders never mentioned China in any of their sagas?
I’m pretty convinced that Columbus really knew that N. America was NOT asia, and misled his backers about thevoyage from the start!
At that time it was difficult, if not impossible, to separate fact from fiction. people “actually saw” mermaids, witches, miracles, dragons, the Island of St Brendan etc. and Columbus had to try to separate the truth from the fantasy. You cannot assume because the information is available to some it is available toall , much less wi6thout adulteration. I mean today there is much information available and people still dispute the obvious. It is not so easy as “one person told him this fact”. How do you know it is a fact?
When Columbus saw manatees in the Caribbean, he reported that he had found actual mermaids. He also said that tales of their beauty had been greatly exaggerated.