The real significance of Colombus, Part I

Colombus Day is coming next week.  For all my public school education, I was told that Colombus’s sailors thought the world was flat, but Colombus thought the world was round and thus became a hero when he was proven right. 

            Wrong on all counts.  The sailors knew the world was curved.  Just climb the mast, dummy, and see much farther land.  You are looking around the curve of the earth.  Every sailor knew this. What is less well known is that Colombus did not think the world was round.  He thought it was pear-shaped.  This is what scholars of the day taught.  And his heroism wasn’t in proving a round earth.  His discovery of land proved that the old Aristotelian model was untenable—but he never realized this. 

Here’s what really happened. The Scholastic scholars of his day held that the earth consisted in 4 somewhat concentric spheres according to the 4 elements of Aristotle.  Earth was the inner sphere, surrounded by water, air than fire.  But of course that would be Water World with oceans covering everything.  The obvious Eurasia-Africa earth system led them to postulate that the earth sphere was off-center and protruded through the oceans.  It was like a basketball inside a beach ball and the basketball poked the side of the beachball on one side giving a pear shape. Colombus proposed going to the Orient by sailing west and the pear earth model predicted nothing but water all the way to China.  Thus Colombus thought that Santa Domingo was an island offshore of Asia and in 3 subsequent voyages found Mexico and Central America.  He died thinking he had discovered Asia and proven the pear earth. 

Though Eurasia was high-standing, it was thought that as one progressed out into the open ocean, the sea rose (Aristotle said water was lighter!) Hence we still use the terminology of sailing the high seas. In 1503, the very jealous Amerigo Vespucci stole and published Colombus’s landfalls as his own.  Vespucci had proposed exactly the same kind of voyage as Colombus to Portugal and they refused to fund him.  So he felt cheated.  In 1507, Waldseemuller, a Dutch cartographer made a map of these landfalls and said, Look, This is either a very large island or a continent! Colombus found a continent where none should be.  Clearly something was wrong with the earth model. That would revolutionize thinking and invent the era of science in the century following.

 

Meanwhile, Colombus was granted governorship of Santa Domingo and he was a tyrant ruler who basically killed off the native population.  Thus the stage was set for repopulating the Caribbean with slaves from Africa to raise sugar cane.  But his discovery and all the gold of the conquistadors led British, Dutch, French to spur on their own voyages of discovery.