American Minute with Bill Federer
Columbus' Miscalculation: How Far Around is the Round Earth?
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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.
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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.
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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."
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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.
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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.
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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.
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Eratosthenes
also calculated distance to the sun and moon, the tilt of the earth, and created the first world map with parallel latitude and meridian longitude lines.
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In the 1st century BC,
Posidonius
used stellar observations at
Alexandria
and
Rhodes
to confirm
Eratosthenese's
measurements.
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In the 2nd century AD, astronomer
Ptolemy
had written a
Guide to Geography,
in which he described a
spherical earth
with one ocean connecting Europe and Asia.
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St. Isidore of Seville,
Spain, wrote in the 7th century that the earth was round.
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Around the year 723 AD,
Saint Bede the Venerable
wrote in his work
Reckoning of Time
that the
Earth was spherical.
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The
Book of Isaiah
40:22 states: "It is He that sitteth upon the globe of the earth."
(Douay-Rheims Bible)
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Columbus
knew the Earth was round, but the question was,
how far around.
The confusion was over the length of a mile.
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Columbus read
Cardinal Pierre d'Ailly's "Imago Mundi,"
which gave
Alfraganus'
estimate that a degree of latitude (at the equator) was around 56.7 miles.
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What
Columbus
did not realize was that this was expressed in
longer
Arabic miles
rather than in
shorter
Roman miles.
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Therefore
Columbus
incorrectly estimated the Earth to be smaller in circumference, about
19,000 miles,
rather than the actual nearly
24,901 miles.
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Columbus
knew there was land to the west, as he may have read
Ptolemy's account,
written in 150 AD, of the Greek sailor named
Alexander,
who visited the Far East port city of
Kattigara, beyond the Malay Peninsula
(Golden Chersonese).
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He could have heard of the
Roman traveler,
during the reign of Roman
Emperors Antoninus Pius or Marcus Aurelius,
who made his way to the court of the
Chinese Emperor of the Han Dynasty.
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Indeed,
Roman glassware and medallions
dating from this period were found at
Guangzhou
along the
South China Sea,
and at
Óc Eo in Vietnam,
near the
Chinese province of Jiaozhi.
Great amounts of
Roman coins
were found in
India,
indicating there was
Roman sea trade.
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Columbus most likely heard the story of
Irish monk St. Brendan,
who sailed west in 530 AD to
"The Land of the Promised Saints which God will give us on the last day."
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Columbus
would have known of the Christian
Viking Leif Erickson's voyage
in the year 1000 to Vinland.
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Columbus owned a copy of
Marco Polo's travels
to China and India in 1271.
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He studied
Pliny's "Natural History,"
Sir John Mandeville,
and
Pope Pius II's "Historia Rerum Ubique Gestarum."
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In the 1360s, there are accounts that, after the
Crusades
had ended, some
Swedes
may have sailed to
Greenland,
and possibly beyond to
North America.
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Columbus may have possibly seen maps, rumored to have been in
Portugal's royal archives,
from
China's treasure fleets
which were sent out in 1421 by
Ming Emperor Zhu Di,
led by
Admiral Zheng He.
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Columbus
corresponded with
Florentine physician Paolo dal Pozzo Toscanelli,
who suggested China was just 5,000 miles west of Portugal.
Based on this,
Columbus
estimated that
Japan,
or as
Marco Polo
called it
"Cipangu,"
was only 3,000 Roman miles west of the
Canary Islands,
rather than the actual 12,200 miles.
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Since no ship at that time could carry enough food and water for such a long voyage,
Columbus
would have never set sail if he had known the actual distance.
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As a young man,
Columbus
began sailing on a trip to a Genoese colony in the Aegean Sea named Chios.
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In 1476, he sailed on an armed convoy from Genoa to northern Europe, docking in
Bristol, England,
and
Galway, Ireland,
and even possibly
Iceland
in 1477.
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When
Muslim Turks
conquered
Constantinople
in 1453 and hindered land trade routes from Europe to India and China, Portugal, which had been freed from Muslim domination for two centuries, began to search for alternative sea routes.
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Portugal, under P
rince Henry the Navigator,
led the world in the science of navigation and cartography (map-making), and developed a light ship that could travel fast and far, the "caravel."
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During
Portugal's Golden Age of Discovery
under King John II,
Columbus
sailed along the west coast of Africa between 1482-1485, reaching the Portuguese trading port of
Elmina on the coast of Guinea.
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In 1498, Portuguese sailor
Vasco de Gama
did make it around South Africa to India.
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But six years before that, in 1492, the Catholic Monarchs
Ferdinand and Isabella
finished driving the Muslims out of Spain and wanted to join the quest for a sea trade route to the India.
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They backed
Columbus' plan.
Though
Columbus
was wrong about the miles and degrees of longitude, he did understand trade winds across the Atlantic.
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On August 3, 1492,
Columbus
set sail on
the longest voyage to that date out of the sight of land.
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Trade winds called "easterlies" pushed
Columbus' ships for
five weeks to the Bahamas.
On OCTOBER 12, 1492,
Columbus
sighted what he thought was India.
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He imagined
Haiti was Japan
and
Cuba was the tip of China.
He called the first island he saw
"San Salvador"
for the
Holy Savior.
In his journal,
Columbus
referred to the native inhabitants as
"indians"
as he was convinced he had successfully arrived in
India:
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"So that they might be well-disposed towards us, for I knew that they were a people to be. ..converted to our Holy Faith rather by love than by force, I gave to some red caps and to others glass beads ...
They became so entirely our friends that ... I believe that they would easily be made
Christians."
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American Minute is a registered trademark of William J. Federer. Permission is granted to forward, reprint, or duplicate, with acknowledgment.
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Schedule Bill Federer for informative interviews & captivating PowerPoint presentations: 314-502-8924
[email protected]
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