In the late 1400s people thought the Asian continent was larger than it is in reality. So when Columbus et co saw islands they thought they had hit Japan†… roughly where all the best maps of the day said it would be.
See Toscanelli's 1474 map, which is what Columbus was going by:
* https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Atlantic_Ocean,_Tosc...
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paolo_dal_Pozzo_Toscanelli
† Cipangu: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Names_of_Japan#Jipangu
What we did not know was an accurate way to determine longitude, specifically on a ship, until 1761. [1] [2]
Consequently, any voyage before 1761 knew its latitude exactly, but dead-reckoned its longitude.
33 days of speed-estimated dead reckoning in 1492, plus having no idea of the speed or orientation of the underlying current you're in, leaves a lot of room for error.
[0] For values of "did" that include "the correct answer had been derived and was documented (Eratosthenes, within ~2.5% in ~240 BC, working at the Library of Alexandria), but it wasn't broadly accepted as the correct answer." Thus leading to Columbus believing an incorrect value instead https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Earth%27s_circumference#Colu...
[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Harrison#H4
[2] Except via some very complicated planetary transits that were pre-calculated and could only be used as they occured. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_longitude#Satelli...
It's fascinating. We are on the same track today. We know the truth but most of us jump on the same entirely wrong band wagons.
One could argue that ignoring the truth is worse than pure ignorance.
Our predecessors lived in a culture suffused with unreliable information. There weren't even "alternate" facts, because there were few accepted ones to have alternatives to.
On the one hand, we know more than they did (stronger & longer mandatory education + post-primary + informal access). On the other hand, we've forgotten how to responsibly handle uncertainty.
Or, as I sum it all up: science should be a verb (aka process), not a noun (result).
No, we're actually (thankfully) a lot better at that than 15th Century Europe.
I wasn't picking out a local minims on either end (well, not intentionally); I was picking out the times being compared (that of Columbus vs. now) from the context of the discussion.
But really, the same applies to the whole of history from the ancient period up through and including all of the early modern period vs. say, any time from the mid-20th century on, to avoid any problems with overspecificity on either end.
Now, we know many things. Then, we did not know many things (although we perhaps believed more).
So an every-person (I'm talking generally, not only of the most scientific), plucked from a more ignorant time of history, would have a more developed method of dealing with confusion.
I don't quite buy the counter-argument (if this is yours?) that we're a more scientific society. I would have before COVID, but not now...
Science could be made a verb, but like wisdom, calling something science doesn't de facto make it so.
We know that our knowledge better describes the results we reliably reproduce in the world around us.
We have knowledge about things that our ancestors did not.
If that doesn't constitute "knowing more than they did," I'm not sure what does.
We have a tendency to assume we know more than at any other time before on the basis that we know more than our rather recent ancestors.
What does that mean, if not "we know more than they did"?
But we've also made some genuine proofs. For example, we know that Fermat's last theorem is correct. That was suspected, but not known.
Yes, this applies basically to all of maths - and even to other disciplines that produce proofs. Another example: we know that one model of gravity permits black holes, wormholes, and warp drives. Sure, the model might not accurately reflect reality. But still: this is something we know nowadays, that we didn't know 105 years ago.
Not to mention all the things we collectively have done - we know it's possible to leave Earth, to live in orbit for a while, to convert sunlight directly into electricity, that it is (barely) possible to run the 100m in under 10 sec, what the earth looks like from a distance, how to make fusion bombs, how to fly... we know a lot more than folks from even the early 1900s, let alone further back.
Vaccine efficacy and safety is one of the few things mentioned in the media as science that really is actually science.
I guess pre-COVID I would have said "Some people are ignorant." Post-COVID experience, I'd agree more with "Some people are ignorant and refuse to admit their ignorance, to the extent of cherry picking reality."
It's like expecting some people were bad at math, but getting a stack of tests back where half have multi-page essays on why numbers don't exist.
And it isn't only half idiots promoting these ideas.
Just take a look at The Craft of Writing Effectively from the university of Chicago, social science of course. You will be even more baffled, it is a hard to believe and difficult to watch lecture. Apparently these things are university approved and now watched in the millions on YouTube.
Correct. This is key to understand most of the issues at play in these past events.
Edgar Allen Poe's novel The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym of Nantucket details a fictional account of what might be in the Antarctic, an unexplored area in his time. We now know that Poe's imagined account is a far cry from the reality of the Antarctic continent, but he could have been "right" in that there are people living there. That doesn't really imply any knowledge of such lands though. If Poe had lived several hundreds years earlier he might have written a similar story with s/Antarctic/across the Atlantic/.
Add a few hundreds years with confusion between "fiction" (or "myth" or "legend", if you will) and "science" (a concept which didn't really exist in the first place, at least not in the same form) and things get very murky fast.
I don't think that the mere existence of the concept of "Antillia" really proves any actual knowledge; there needs to be some additional evidence; reading that Wikipedia page there doesn't seem to be any. We'll likely never know for certain if the roots of Antillia were based in reality or entirely fictional.
Which people do you mean?
> Sandy Island (sometimes labelled in French Île de Sable, and in Spanish Isla Arenosa) is a non-existent island that was charted for over a century as being located near the French territory of New Caledonia between the Chesterfield Islands and Nereus Reef in the eastern Coral Sea.[1] The island was included on many maps and nautical charts from as early as the late 19th century. It was removed from French hydrographic charts in 1974. The island gained wide media and public attention in November 2012 when the R/V Southern Surveyor, an Australian research ship,[2] passed through the area and "undiscovered" it. The island was quickly removed from many maps and data sets, including those of the National Geographic Society and Google Maps.[3]
He was thinking they reached India.
Same mistake today people do with Miles and Kilometer, when you are raised in one or another it is difficult to switch.
Erastothene was speaking in stadium, Columbus in Nautic miles.
The Spanish crown was motivated by greed.
Funny how those parts are also disproportioned.
Are you saying birds were carrying twigs over the Atlantic from Americas -> Europe?? Genuinely curious as to if birds actually do that, seems pointless.
But that's different, I doubt birds intentionally carry anything from Africa either.
Ok, it seems that Aristoteles believed, that birds actually transformed, but zoologist of that time at most believed, that they hibernated underwater", which seems a more solid theory, than transforming.
And as you can see, we did not in fact know that in the 18th century. Transformations are not so easy to observe directly; they often happen e.g. underground.
Not if the shape is stable, because the underlying cells are too complex to merge into something different. Cells were known already. And that insects transform is known, but birds were closely known and there was not observation of them changing drastically. So that Aristoteles had this thinking is understandable given the time, but after enlightenment, I would not expect that from the early scientists.
This is not a valid concept. Vertebrates develop from stem cells the same way insects do.
Makes me think of loons, which completely change their plumage for the winter in addition to migrating from fresh water lakes to oceanic waters. Without close study, you might not realize they're the same birds.
I'm more wondering about the effects of seed/life transfer. Doesn't seem feasible to me.
If you edit out 'birds', it'd be pure comedy.
[0] https://www.researchgate.net/publication/274193260_Has_the_m...
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Magnificent_frigatebird
[2] https://royalsocietypublishing.org/doi/10.1098/rsfs.2016.008...
I knew birds could regurgitate food (to feed their young) but this is something else…
The Portuguese settled the Azores before Columbus was born, so this sounds like a weird reason to believe India was closer.
(Or in less generous terms, "fraud.")
The Vikings/Norsemen had already spread awareness of Vinland to monks in Iceland, as the sagas regarding Vinland were written down about 100 years before Columbus visited Bristol. Did Columbus or other merchants in the North hear of these sagas? Did they come into contact with the written versions of these sagas?
Italian merchants had a serious incentive to find alternative trading routes.
There is a deeper question of why a man would go on a theoretically suicidal voyage, and on top of that, be funded by royalty to do so. Believing in your miscalculations is courageous I suppose, but its your life at stake; would a pious man be willing to kill himself chasing possible alternative geographic calculations?
For the Spanish crown, it could have been just a matter of hedging its bets. It was a huge amount of money to one man or enterprise, but not so much to one of the great powers of Europe.
Norse mythology talked about a land full of woodland elves who had very long life spans, that could only be reached after a journey of many months through the land of the frost giants and across a rainbow shaped bridge. Odin and Loki are said to have made this trip.
The real life explanation is probably that 2 Norseman crossed Siberia and crossed the Bering Strait to visit B.C.
The way we imagine it? An interdimensional gate leads to a spiritual realm in the sky called Asgard filled with gods (whatever the hell that means) who are immortal.
At least that's what I recall reading awhile back. If anyone could corroborate that would be nice.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Galley_slave#Europe
Unfortunately, I don't know anything about what Columbus's crews were told. It does seem they were free men (four of whom signed up in return for an amnesty) and were paid:
... which is why Native Americans have been referred to as "Indians," because Columbus was certain he'd reached the Indies.
As others have pointed out, what Columbus believed and what he said in order to acquire funding are two different things. At the time, the prospect of finding an unknown continent would have been less motivating than that of finding a new route to an area known as a source of wealth; only in retrospect is the value of the former obvious.
> the physical or social setting in which something occurs or develops
In German, though, AIUI "das Milieu" usually means a different kind of environment: That of crime and shady business. "Es bewegt sich was im Milieu" is something a worried cop could say, meaning approximately "something's happening on the streets".
What Columbus (and the Greeks) did not know was the size of landmasses in proportion to each other.
They thought Europe was much, much larger than it was. Large enough to leave little room for ocean between the Azores and East Asia.
A bit like chicken of the sea. It’s not that they’re saying that tuna is a form of waterfowl, just that the two have common applications.
India is not a collection of islands, it's unlikely that Columbus mistook an archipelago for a known vast land mass.
Also, I think Indies was used to refer to Asia in general, rather than specifically India. But am open to correction.
I had always thought that Columbus made the trip because he miscalculated the distance around the globe, while everyone else was saying they'd starve before reaching Asia. He was just lucky enough there happened to be land halfway there, and then mistakenly assumed he made it, since the Caribbean was where he wrongly thought Asia was going to be.