Within a decade of Columbus’s discovery of lands west of Europe, many other explorers (Cabot, Lavrador, the Real brothers, Cabral) set out to explore the New World Lands.
But, if Columbus hadn’t made his voyage in 1492, how much longer would that have delayed others from sailing west? Ten, 20, 100 years? Or, would similar curiosity have driven someone to make a similar voyage before the end of that century?
No way to know, of course, but, in general, when the technology permits something to be done…it gets done. The history of flight is, perhaps, instructive: if the Wright Brothers hadn’t done it, others surely would have, and within very short order. (There are even revisionists claiming that others did do it first.)
Shipbuilding technology, and navigation arts and sciences, had progressed to the point where Columbus’ journey was possible. Others were already making fabulous voyages of discovery. “The time was ripe.”
This kind of “technological determinism” can, obviously, be over-stated. The technology doesn’t always determine historical events. But a fairly good argument could be made – and has been – that technology is the single biggest driver of historical events. (Geography would probably be the second. If England hadn’t been an island, would it have built such powerful Navies?)
I believe Brazil was first bumped into by a ship making a bit of a wide birth around Africa and being blown a bit off course. Had there been no Columbus I imagine there would have been more ships giong around Africa and the New World would have been found fairly soon.
Columbus seriously underestimated the circumference of the earth. That has at least as much to do with the discovery as technological advancements.
I agree. Anyone with a good understanding of how far Europe was from China and the Indies would never have even tried the voyage. Perhaps someone would have discovered America when they got to Kamchatka and then over to Alaska, but it would have taken a while.
Strictly speaking Columbus wasn’t ahead of his time - he was more like 2,000 years behind it, given that the Greeks had a better understanding of the size of the earth than he did.
The short order doesn’t apply to Columbus. The Wright Brothers had competition by Langley and Voisin. Columbus didn’t have competition in his time. It took both courage and ignorance to endeavour his trip, and only Columbus had both.
He was ignorant, because he was convinced that he had found the east coast of Asia, even when he returned there as a governor and even until his death. That’s why America isn’t called after him. It’s called after Amerigo Vespucci, the one who publicly claimed that it was a new world.
So Columbus wasn’t ahead of his time, but one still can claim that his performance was.
I doubt it. Got cite?
Otherwise, I agree with Voyager. The technology was there, which is why so many followed him so quickly. He got lucky that the Americas were in his way between Europe and Asia, because he was sailing to Asia and he would never have made it to his actual destination. The only reason he thought he could make it there was a faulty calculation of the circumference of the earth.
Shipbuilding and navigation had allowed for sailing to America for at least five hundred years before Columbus. The Vikings did it. Thor Heyerdahl showed even the Egyptians could have done it in boats made of papyrus. These days people are crossing the Atlantic in everything from small rowboats to rafts made of coke cans.
It’s risky, too.
well I have a few books that mention it but when I Googled it just now the first site that comes up was
http://www.ucalgary.ca/applied_history/tutor/eurvoya/brazil.html
sorry I’m not a computer type and don’t know how to enable the link but I typed in “discovery of Brazil” and it was the second entry
This is discussed by Wikipedia which also mentions:
Related question: How good were the ships of Columbus’ day compared with those of a few centuries earlier?
Was it improved ships that helped lead to these voyages of discovery, or was it social and political conditions?
Conditions of various kinds, political too. His ships were old; his budget didn’t allow him to buy the state of the art.
It doesn’t take much navigation technique to go ahead to the west. It only takes determination. Even his crew didn’t believe that the earth was round.
He must have been really strapped for cash if he could only hire crew from the insane asylums as opposed to, y’know, experienced sailors.
Columbus was not at all “ahead of his time.” Instead he was the luckiest crackpot in history. His success was due to the accident that a different land coincidentally happened to be where he mistakenly thought Asia was located. Otherwise his voyage would have been a failure and could quite likely have had a fatal result.
The New World was discovered independently only 8 years after Columbus’s first voyage, by Pedro Cabral in 1500. The discovery was almost certainly accidental, when Cabral’s ships got blown farther west in trying to round Africa en route to India. (There has been some speculation that Cabral might have had some inkling that land was out there, but that theory wasn’t advanced until more than three centuries after the voyage.)
Regardless of whether Cabral’s discovery was intentional, it was only a matter of time before Brazil would have been discovered. Portuguese ships were in the habit of sailing far out to sea when rounding Africa to take advantage of prevailing winds. Given that Brazil was so close, it was inevitable that a ship would eventually be blown within range.
Columbus’s voyage was important in determining the pattern of Spanish colonization of the Americas. But many other navigators were out there. If Columbus had never existed, the New World would have been discovered by Europeans in as little as eight years later than it actually was, but certainly no more than a few decades.
Cite? I’m sure it was common knowledge among navigators and sailors that the world was round. The “hull down” phenomenon makes it obvious.
The Vikings did it by making comparatively short hops between the islands of the North Atlantic. They generally stayed near coasts whenever possible, as did most vessels of that time.
Columbus’s main navigational innovation was heading straight out into the open ocean. Ships of that era touched land regularly to replenish their water supplies and take on more provisions. I believe that Columbus’s voyage probably spent more time at sea intentionally than any other voyage up to that time. And that was the issue as far as the misgivings of his crew were concerned: not that they were going to sail off the edge of a flat Earth, but that they were so far from a known place of resupply.
It’s a myth that people believed the earth was flat. A rather annoying one too.
There’s also a pretty good case to be made for Zheng He and Vasco de Gama being better sailors in that era than Colombus. (Columbus, Vasco da Gama, and Zheng He - 15th Century Mariners: Crash Course World History #21 - YouTube). I do have to disagree with that video though a little, while I’m not going to say Colombus was a lucky idiot, (being wrong about one thing, even if that one thing is rather important, doesn’t make you a total idiot) he was still lucky as hell. That expedition would have been entirely doomed to failure if there didn’t happen to be a landmass where he thought the Indies were.
Even so, I don’t think he’s the greatest because his entire legacy is built around something coincidental and unintentional. Even if Colombus had reached the Indies and was right about the size of the Earth his name in history would barely be a footnote, he’d be that guy you mention exactly once in history class when discussing Atlantic trade routes (which I guess is still better than Vasco de Gama or Zheng He as far as being mentioned goes). Even so, I put more weight on people who get good results knowing what they’re doing than I do for people who get good results because reality conspired to save them from disaster.
Just because something can be done, doesn’t mean that it will. Consider: Your ship has some constraint on its maximum range, set by the amount of food or fresh water or some other consumable you’re carrying. You make the already bold move of heading out straight across open ocean. You get to the point where you’ve used up half of your consumables, and there’s no land in sight. What do you do? If you’re sane, you turn around and go back, because, while there might be land ahead of you in range, there also might not be, and you don’t know. But if you’re insane enough to go ahead anyway, and make it, then it’s easy enough for anyone else to follow you.
How did Columbus manage to get a crew? Were they all convinced of his erroneous calculations?