Posted on 12/12/2019 11:11:38 AM PST by Perseverando
Columbus was looking for a SEA route to India and China because 40 years earlier Muslim Turks conquered Constantinople in 1453 cutting off the LAND routes.
A biography of Columbus was written by Washington Irving in 1828, titled A History of the Life and Voyages of Christopher Columbus.
In it, Irving created an imaginative dialogue of Europeans arguing over whether the Earth was round or flat. His book was so popular, that people actually thought such a debate took place when it had not.
Washington Irving was known for mixing entertainment with history and legend.
He wrote Rip Van Winkle, The Legend of Sleepy Hallow, and Diedrich Knickerbocker's A History of New-York from the Beginning of the World to the End of the Dutch Dynasty, filled with tales of visits from St. Nick coining to New York City, which he nickname "Gotham."
Europeans knew the Earth was round.
Pythagoras had speculated that the earth was a sphere in the 6th century BC, and Aristotle validated it in the 4th century BC.
In the 3rd century BC, Eratosthenes computed the circumference of the earth with amazing accuracy.
He had heard that at Aswan, Egypt, the sun cast no shadow at noon on the summer solstice, June 21, yet at the exact same moment in Alexandria, Egypt, a column cast a shadow with a 7.2 degree angle.
7.2 degrees is 1/50th of a 360 degree circle.
It was known that the distance between Alexandria and Aswan was 5,000 stadia or 800 kilometers (approximately 500 miles).
All Eratosthenes had to do was multiply 800 times 50, which equals 40,000 kilometers, just 75 kilometers less than the actual circumference of the Earth, 40,075 km, or 24,901 miles.
Eratosthenes also calculated distance
(Excerpt) Read more at myemail.constantcontact.com ...
Columbus wasn’t good at math. He was Italian.......................
Why didn’t he just GPS it?
They *NEVER* learn!
>>>
'Mercans... you just can't curse these People.
Anyone who bothered to notice that a ship (or land viewed from a ship) disappeared over the horizon while it could still be seen knew this.
When the Turks captured Constantinople they destroyed all the satellite uplinks for the GPS constellation.
Eratosthenes declares that it is no longer necessary to inquire as to the cause of the overflow of the Nile, since we know definitely that men have come to the sources of the Nile and have observed the rains there.
— Eratosthenes
Proclus on Plato Timaeus, Vol. 1, 121.8-11 (Diehl). Quoted in Morris R. Cohen and I. E. Drabkin, A Sourcebook in Greek Science (1948), 383.
https://todayinsci.com/E/Eratosthenes/Eratosthenes-Quotations.htm
“Columbus was looking for a SEA route to India and China because 40 years earlier Muslim Turks conquered Constantinople in 1453 cutting off the LAND routes.”
Time for those “wokesters” to finally cast disdain upon the Moslems.
For if they had simply allowed the Europeans access to the Far East via land, the “Evil White Man” would never have had to seek the Oceanic route, thus never despoiling the idyllic lives and culture of the peaceful Native Americans.
So, there you go. It’s all the Moslems fault!!!
Columbus was laughed at because of his math error, not because he thought the world to be round. Educated people of the time (kings’ science advisers, etc) all knew this. They also had a decent idea of the earth’s diameter.
The crazy thing is, Columbus discovered land pretty much were he expected to find it. Islands, and then farther west a mainland. People with darker, but not black skin, straight black hair, little body hair (He had Marco Polo’s description of China), strange animals, food, etc.
His problem was that all of his rewards, a percentage of things found, being in charge of it all—Admiral of the Ocean Sea, all depended on it being the Indies, not some new place. Soon everyone knew he hadn’t found a new way to the Indies—but he couldn’t or wouldn’t admit it.
When the Turks captured Constantinople they destroyed all the satellite uplinks for the GPS constellation.
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I should have known better and just trusted my tagline. It was the Islam. It’s always the Islam!
It was around here somewhere. I think it’s very close.
bkmk
“Columbus wasn’t good at math. He was Italian.......................”
He was actually one of the best “Dead Reckoning” sailors/navigators of all time. A different kind of ‘math’. That’s where you average off of potentially faulty sailing information to figure where you “probably” are (It didn’t help that the North Star starts to shift its position in the sky the further West you go, and Longitude calculations didn’t exist yet). He also probably understood it was still quite far but with favorable wind patterns (once discovered) long distances could be overcome in ships (BTW He wanted the wealth of china trade to fund a new Crusade in the Holy Land).
Consider that he led 3 MORE official expeditions once he found the New World for the Europeans (the second he led had a dozen or more ships and 1500 men) (Thats a different kind of Math too....)
Because he was an Italian (an outsider) various Spaniards used court politics against him and he was swindled out of his full reward (it was ‘one tenth of all the wealth’ his discovery generated) and had to settle with gaining a Dukedom for his descendants -— one of which still has his other Title of ‘Admiral of The Ocean Seas’, which was part of the original agreement with the Spanish Monarchs
I recall that a number of years ago someone (an islamist I assume) said that an arab scientist did the same ‘test’/experiment and came out with a even more accurate estimation.
I had to point out that the arab was copying the experiment invented by the greek, and that the arab did it 1000 years later
Given the close proximity of South America to Africa, it is a wonder that sailors, especially Portuguese ones, did not sail west in search of the east Indies.....................
It is postulated, but not confirmed by other evidence, that the Basque cod fishermen of North Spain and the east French coast actually were sailing to the cod fish bonanzas off of the NE and Newfoundland coastlines, but kept the location hidden for many, many years.
That said, that two Greeks wrote about a single calculation 1700 years before Columbus, does NOT mean “everybody in Europe knew the diameter of the earth had been correctly calculated”! It means ONE BOOK mentioned TWO Greeks made ONE calculation. Now, over the next 1700 years, how many OTHER PEOPLE wroteclaiming they too knew the earth was round.
Only 50 years earlier, the Portuguese began sailing south around Africa. Very, very slowly south.
Thanks Robert A Cook PE. The grand banks were being fished well before 1492. Gascons, Basques, people of the Low Countries, and others were expanding the fish catch to compluy with the Papal suggestion of days without meat to cover a supposed meat shortage in Europe, and the Medieval Warming period had caused fisheries to move north. It's well known that the Vikings had settlements in North America, two of them have been located, one was archaeologically excavated over 40 years ago.
Learning had taken off by Columbus' time. It's possible that the idea of a flat Earth has only caught on in quite modern times. Columbus was familiar with the ancient Greek estimate of the circumference of the Earth, but he was also familiar with the existence of a continental mass west of the Atlantic, as he'd been to Iceland to research what he'd already heard about. He also accepted another ancient Greek idea, that all the landmasses were known and were connected (other than islands), so he concluded (incorrectely) that the circumference of the Earth must be much smaller than had been accepted since classical times, and that the lands known to the Gascons, Basques, and Vikings must be the easternmost reaches of Asia.
It’s a good thing he got the distance wrong, else he’d have kept on sailing and there was the problem of a whole bunch of land in the way.
Astronomy was one of the seven liberal arts in the medieval academic curriculum. Every liberal arts student in medieval Europe was taught that the world was a sphere and learned about the five circles: Equator, the tropics and the Arctic and Antarctic.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/De_sphaera_mundi
Ptolemaic astronomy was based on a spherical earth. No education person in the West, or the Islamic world believed the earth was flat at Columbus’s time.
“It didn’t help that the North Star starts to shift its position in the sky the further West you go, and Longitude calculations didn’t exist yet”
Hipparchus discovered the precession of the equinoxes and had accurately calculated both latitude and longitude as a grid on our spherical globe in around 130 BC. The problem for a long time after this discovery was the absence of an accurate universal time keeping system to measure longitude. :)
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