There are people who believe that Christopher Columbus discovered the world is round, as I demonstrate here. My cites being sufficient evidence to show the idea exists, where does it come from?
I can’t link to a cite at the moment but apparently Washington Irving is to blame for this idea. In 1828 he wrote a multi-volume biography of Columbus that has passages critics have described as “fanciful”. The flat earth business became popularly taught in schools because of what Irving wrote.
Try this article. Somewhere around the 9th paragraph he mentions Irving. You can also try Wikipedia. They mention it in several different articles.
It’s so galling that this myth persists because the truth is so much more interesting. (I wouldn’t have funded his little adventure either.)
In her introduction to the third edition of Frankenstein, Mary Shelley mentions a famous wager concerning Columbus and an egg. Columbus had bet someone (Amerigo Vespucci?) he could make an egg stand up straight on a flat table, pointy-side down. He won the bet by smashing the pointy end, allowing it to stand freely on its broken point, adding “When you do something first, it’s easy for the next fellow to do it.” I can see the story of Columbus and some vaguely spherical object morphing over time into “The world is round, not flat.”
I guess it’s down to that rat bastard Washington Irving then.
I’m amazed there was enough info on Columbus available to make a multi-volume bio. I wonder if he was paid by the word.
This shouldn’t be surprising. Columbus was a major figure and there is a great deal of original information and correspondence in the Archive of the Indies. Several accounts of his life and voyages were written in the years after his death, including a biography by his son Fernando. While the information on his early life is rather sparse, there’s plenty on his later life.
No, it isn’t.
Washington Irving’s four-volume opus is in the public domain, which allows us to read it and see whether it’s worthy of the scorn heaped upon it. In many ways, it is. There is some really bad writing and gross historical exaggeration. But, even in Irving’s telling, most Europeans accepted the sphericity of the Earth, and flat-earth objections played a relatively small role in Columbus’s struggle for funding.
Irving’s description of the Council of Salamanca forms Chapter IV of Book II of Volume I, and so far as I can tell it is the only place where Irving discusses a flat Earth. He writes:
This follows an earlier discussion of Columbus’ attempts to gain funding from Portugal, where flat-Earth objections are never raised, and discussion focuses on the practicality of the eastern versus around-Africa route to the Indies.
Again, Irving’s description of the Council of Salamanca is bad writing. He wrote at a time when Americans conceived of explorers in general, and Columbus in particular, as 100% heroic, and of the Catholic Church as backward and obscurantist. He paints the Council of Salamanca in as ridiculous a light as possible. But even in this telling, he casts flat-Earth objections as held only by a minority and not decisive in the (early) Spanish rejection of Columbus.
The few sentences mentioning flat-Earth objections were seized and distorted by later writers, with a different agenda for a different period.
I don’t understand your defense of Irving, Freddy the Pig. The passage you quote seems to be saying that Columbus faced objections (on Biblical grounds) to his idea that the world is round.
And that seems not to have actually been the case. So it looks to me like Irving is guilty.
Indeed. But that is a far cry from saying that most educated Europeans of the Fifteenth Century believed the world was flat, or that Columbus went against the consensus on this issue. Irving never makes those assertions.
Consider Russell’s article above, cited in Post#3:
This is false. Irving makes it quite clear that not all members of the Council so believed, as my quote demonstrates. Note how Russell is subjecting Irving to the same careless distortion which Irving applied to Columbus.
Irving is “guilty” of distorting history, but it isn’t fair to lay the entire blame for the “medieval flat Earth myth” at his doorstep. “People before Columbus” believed in a flat Earth" is as much an exaggeration of Irving as Irving is of the truth.
Still, fuck Washington Irving.
Freddy the Pig: But, regardless of what Irving claims Europeans believed, did he also claim Columbus proved the world to be round? It’s possible to prove something that most people already think is true.
No, he does not make that claim. I’ve searched the four volumes for “round”, “flat”, “spherical”, and “sphere”, and the only place he discusses sphericity at all is in describing the Council of Salamanca.
Of course, it wasn’t Columbus who (empirically) proved the world was round anyway, but the voyage of Magellan/Elcano. If Columbus had actually arrived in Asia, he would have proved it, but he didn’t.
So it isn’t Irving’s fault after all, and our quest continues.
Well, yes. Obviously. As I made a point of saying in the thread of mine I linked to in the OP.
I should have put a note in the OP of this thread saying “Do not try to reason your way through this belief; you cannot, as it doesn’t even attempt to be internally consistent.”