Columbus Discovers America?

Since this is Columbus Day weekend, I am blogging about Christopher Columbus and the discovery of America.

Good old Colombo (as he was probably known at the time) used to be a major hero, which is how he got a Day.  When I was a kid, textbooks often portrayed him as blond and rather Anglo-Saxon looking, which would doubtless have puzzled an Italian who sailed under the sponsorship of Spain.  The "America" he discovered, it was suggested (though never actually said), was the United States.  No wonder he was a hero!

Now in fact it's perhaps something of a misnomer to say he "discovered" the Americas, given that the natives knew the whole time that these continents were here.  They looked around, and there they were!  The America Columbus discovered was also not the US but almost certainly Hispaniola, the island that now is home to Haiti and the Dominican Republic.

Columbus really was important for proving to Europe that the "outer sea" did not go all the way around the globe, but that there were continents in the middle.  Everyone of course knew the earth was a globe, as I discussed earlier.  Columbus was sailing west in order to find a "shortcut" to India, which is why he called the natives Indians.  He insisted he had indeed gotten to Asia, but no one paid any attention, realizing instead that he had stumbled onto a New World.  Less than five years later the Spanish and Portuguese kings were dividing up the planet at the Treaty of Tordesillas, Spain claiming the New World, everything that lay west of a line down the middle of the Atlantic, Portugal claiming what lay to the east, that is Africa and Asia.

(In fact, although they didn't realize it at the time, the treaty line through the Atlantic sliced through what is now Brazil.  Portugal insisted that Spain observe the original treaty, which is why Brazil is Portuguese-speaking, unlike the rest of Latin America.)

Columbus was also not the first European to reach the Americas.  Legends of the Irish Saint Brendan said that he made it across the Atlantic in a boat made of oxhide--and miraculously made it home again, in spite of whales coming to rub against the boat.  More prosaically, Portuguese fishermen fished the Grand Banks and may well have gone a bit further west to the mainland.  Icelanders (Viking descendants) got as far as the Canadian Maritimes in the year 1000, though at most they seem to have over-wintered before deciding this was too far and heading home.  (This has not kept Scandinavian-descent people in places like Minnesota from finding "authentic" rune-stones with deeply meaningful inscriptions like "Eric was here.")

Even if not an Anglo-Saxon who discovered the US, Columbus certainly marked a major transformation.  If one wants to date "the end of the Middle Ages," 1492 is a good year to choose.  Europe discovered a whole new area to exploit and to influence with its culture.

© C. Dale Brittain 2014

Was the World Flat?

You have certainly heard that "everyone" before Columbus thought the world was flat.  This is however not true.  It is in fact wildly false.  Everyone knew the earth was a globe.

(Well, maybe a few ignorant folks thought it was flat.  But no one paying attention thought so.)

The ancient Greeks had known it was a globe.  Aristotle in fact had attempted to measure its size and come up with a figure that was a little small but a good guess.  It was pretty obvious that it was a globe, after all.  The sun and moon and stars were assumed to go around the earth.  During an eclipse of the moon, when the earth's shadow moves across it, you see the shadow of a globe.  If you watch a ship sail out to sea, it goes "hull down," that is the hull disappears while you can still see the sails, as it goes over the earth's curve.

Medieval people speculated about the people who lived on the other side of the globe.  Some thought that down was absolute, so that people on the other side would have trouble not falling off.  They were depicted with giant feet and toes, good for holding on.

In addition, since medieval people knew that the climate got colder as you went north and hotter as you went south, they were concerned about how people could survive down in the southern hemisphere, close to the "Hot Pole."  But in all this, even though we know better than to think that one could fall off the bottom of the globe, or that there is a Hot Pole, or that the universe revolves around the earth, we can recognize that our ancestors knew they were living on a globe.

So where did the "flat earth" notion come from?  From Washington Irving, best known now as the creator of the Headless Horseman of Sleepy Hollow.  In a comparable burst of imagination, he write a fictional story about Columbus at the court of Ferdinand and Isabella.  In this hilarious (?) and very anti-Spanish story, the Spaniards all believed in 1492 that the earth was flat and warned Columbus he would fall off the edge if he sailed west.

This story made its way into the Big Little Book of Racist Stories for Children (or whatever it was called) during the nineteenth century.  Everyone knew it was fiction.  But at some point it migrated:  out of the storybook and into the history book.  Now American children were being taught that Columbus was a great scientific thinker, the only one not to believe in a flat earth.  (Interestingly, in Europe, where Washington Irving was never in the school storybooks, no such nonsense was ever taught.)

The real Spanish court of 1492 certainly knew the earth was a globe.  They were however concerned that the globe was much too big to get to India by sailing west.  (Columbus was claiming he could find a shortcut to India and beat the Portuguese.)  They were, in fact, right.  But Columbus, using Aristotle's measurements and thinking that, since he would be sailing close to the North Pole, it couldn't really be far at all, set off west.  And right about the time he thought he should be reaching India, he bumped into Hispaniola.

The Spanish court immediately recognized that there was a whole continent between the Atlantic and the Pacific, when they'd always assumed it was all ocean all the way.  They and the Portuguese divided up the globe between them a few years later.  Columbus, however, kept going back again and again, denying that he'd found a New World and thinking the silk and spices had to be there somewhere.  He is responsible for us calling native Americans "Indians."  (See here for more on Columbus.)

But in none of this, note, was there ever the slightest thought that the earth might be flat.

© C. Dale Brittain 2014

For more on medieval understanding of the world, see my ebook, Positively Medieval:  Life and Society in the Middle Ages.