[Ulugh Beg]

From the article: << "Columbus believed the Earth was a sphere. He thought he could reach the Far East by setting off on a westward course. Though he stumbled upon what is now the Bahamas by accident, he was still a great explorer and a great man, Billy." >> And the myth continues, no matter how many times it is corrected. Columbus's "belief" that the Earth was a sphere was shared by all educated people in Europe -- and had been accepted for a very long time. It wasn't even a issue between him and those opposed to his voyage. The controversey between Columbus and his detractors before the voyage was over the size of the Earth -- not its shape. His opponents at the Council of Salamanca argued for a circumference pretty close to what we now know to be the case. Columbus fudged his figures and argued for a circumference barely half that size. They were right; he was wrong. Columbus took with him a letter of introduction from the sovereigns of Spain to the Great Khan of China -- based on his reading of Marco Polo. Only problem was -- the Mongols had been overthrown by native Chinese a couple hundred years before! Columbus only took along enough provisions to get about as far as he did get. He was expecting to reach "the Indies" any day -- and he claimed to his dying day that he HAD done so. If he hadn't bumped into something that neither he nor his opponents knew about -- and if the Earth had been -- as he thought -- all water from Europe to Asia -- he and his crews would have perished at sea. They were already low on provisions when they sighted land -- and the crews were starting to grumble. Aristotle had explained the evidence for the sphericity of the Earth nearly two thousand years before -- and Eratosthenes, a few hundred years later, calculated its circumference, and got a number pretty close to today's figure. While I am sure many ignorant peasants were unaware of the fact -- the educated "elite" certainly knew it. If only we could get schools to stop perpetuating the myth about this. M PS -- I used several paragraphs, with double spacing between them, when I wrote this -- but the preview shows one big long paragraph. I apologize, but I cannot figure out how to fix this problem. Any help would be appreciated.

[John Locke]

Yep, pretty much the story. You could add that Columbus also thought Asia was bigger than it really is, and so stretched further to the East. Not his fault; it was drawn that way in Ptolemy's Geographia.

But enquiring minds still want to know: did he have a map?

[Windcatcher]

The double angle brackets you used to quote the article were likely interpreted by the site as HTML, and once it thinks you're using HTML it expects you to use "br" tags at paragraph ends and in line breaks (here I put double-quotes around the "br" instead of angle brackets so it wouldn't think I'm typing HTML).

When I quote an article, I usually put it in double quotes and use "i" and "/i" HTML tags to put it in italics (with the appropriate angle brackets, of course). It's a pain since it means that I have to use "br" tags at all paragraph endings and in line breaks, but that's where copy/paste comes in handy.