The Columbus confusion

I’ve always been suspicious of the story I’ve read (and heard) about how Christopher Columbus sailed across the Atlantic Ocean to discover the Americas – and along with it, proved to everyone that the earth was round. Apparently, before Columbus’ trips across the Atlantic, people (read that as the Europeans) believed that the earth was a flat disc, and if they travelled a reasonable distance, they’ll fall off the earth’s edge into an abyss.

The reason I’m suspicious of Columbus proving the earth was round is because, I believe, by the time Columbus sailed across the Atlantic, people in Europe were evolved enough to know the earth was round. I mean, Columbus achieved his feat in the late 15th century, right? Hadn’t the Greek mathematician and astronomer Ptolemy map the earth into 360-degree meridians way back in 150 AD? Thereby proving that the earth was round?

In fact, 200 years before Columbus, in late 13th century, the Italian trader and explorer Marco Polo had travelled from Venice all the way to China on ‘the Silk Road’, met the great Kublai Khan, stayed with him for many years, and returned to Italy by sea via Sumatra, India and Persia. Surely, Marco Polo’s journeys would have removed all doubts in the minds of the Europeans that the earth was flat?

So, I was delighted to read an explanation of the confusion over Columbus’ ‘the earth is not flat, but round’ story in Umberto Eco’s book, Serendipities: Language And Lunacy. Here’s an excerpt:

“So what was the big argument all about in the time of Columbus? The sages of Salamanca had, in fact, made calculations more precise than his, and they held that the earth, while assuredly round, was far more vast than the Genoese navigator believed, and therefore it was mad for him to circumnavigate it in order to reach the Orient by the way of the Occident. Columbus, on the contrary, burning with a scared fire, good navigator but bad astronomer, thought the earth smaller than it was. Naturally neither he nor the learned men of Salamanca suspected that between Europe and Asia there lay another continent. And so you see how complicated life is, and how fragile are the boundaries between truth and error, right and wrong. Though they were right, the sages of Salamanca were wrong; and Columbus, while he was wrong, pursued faithfully his error and proved to be right – thanks to serendipity.”

[Citation: Serendipities: Language And Lunacy by Umberto Eco.]