> But it could help explain why Columbus, a Genoese, was prepared to set off across what most contemporaries considered a landless void.
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.
> 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.
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:
It's interesting how deeply wrong we were at that time, while we precedently knew all the dimensions and distance of most parts of the globe with pretty high accuracy.
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...
I guess my perspective (from watching struggles with public health & vaccine development information during early COVID-19) is that modern intellects aren't well exercised with respect to uncertainty.
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).
> Local minima aren't the historically average bar to exceed.
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.
History renders comparisons murky and imprecise, but my point was more contingent on the availability of quality information than behavior.
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...
We don't know more than we did. We have a strong belief that our cumulated knowledge, tools and infrastructure are leading to more accurate knowledge. We accomplish technological advancements that comfort us in the idea we know better. That's all.
Science could be made a verb, but like wisdom, calling something science doesn't de facto make it so.
We actually do know more. Sure, physics is basically modelling and observations. Our current models might be completely wrong - even if their predictive power is far greater.
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.
Yes and no. The public's (and media's) inability to differentiate between preprints, efficacy vs safety trial stages, and basic statistics boggled my mind.
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.
The effect of constructionism coupled with post modernism offering an attractive alternative to the complicated math.
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.
It's interesting that in Toscanelli's map it also appears the "Antillia"[0] island mentioned in another comment. There was definitively some knowledge of land in between, maybe they just didn't know it was a huge continent.
If you look to the west from Europe you see a vast sea. It doesn't take a great deal of effort to imagine some form of land beyond or in that sea. You would be quite a boring and unimaginative person to not wonder about this.
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.
> 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.
> 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]
Columbus thought India was closer than it was because birds could be seen returning to the West Coast of England with twigs and leaves from somewhere. Portugal, Spain and anyone else he asked thought he was wrong because that would've required the Earth to be around 20k miles in circumference, when the Ancient Greeks had calculated it to be 24k miles in circumference (and they were very close in their calculations). Columbus turned out to be right that there was land there, he was just wrong about what the land was.
> birds could be seen returning to the West Coast of England with twigs and leaves from somewhere.
Are you saying birds were carrying twigs over the Atlantic from Americas -> Europe?? Genuinely curious as to if birds actually do that, seems pointless.
It doesn't matter whether the birds did or didn't. What matters is that people of the time thought birds were bringing in sticks from somewhere west. People believed there was a land out there. Whether or not the observations behind those beliefs are credible doesn't take away from the fact of their believing there was a land to find.
Another piece of land to the west before the Americas is the Azores archipelago roughly half way between Europe and Newfoundlannd. Maybe the bird came from there. This was known to Europeans well before Colombus trip.
Not a twig, but there is a recorded case of a bird making it to Europe after being shot with an African arrow. (Which it involuntarily carried with it.)
"Before migration was understood, people struggled to explain the sudden annual disappearance of birds like the white stork and barn swallow. Besides migration, some theories of the time held that they turned into other kinds of birds, mice, or hibernated underwater during the winter, and such theories were even propagated by zoologists of the time."
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.
Shape stability would be an example of being less complex than insects.
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.
"Shape stability would be an example of being less complex than insects."
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.
> Besides migration, some theories of the time held that they turned into other kinds of birds...
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.
Every year or two, people decide to fly from North America to Europe in a short range Cessna. They get the extra fuel tankage package, then hop from PEI to Greenland, Greenland to Iceland, then Iceland to.... Svalbard, or maybe somewhere in the Scotish Isles. From there it's pretty standard flight operations over local bodies of water. If a Cessna can do it, that's well within a bird's migratory travel distance.
A bit different, but IIRC some seeds spread by passing through birds' digestive tract—which sidesteps the bird's decisions on the luggage. However, I'd guess the distance travelled is much shorter in this case.
One of the only species of birds known to be capable of transatlantic flight, and also credibly thought to regularly making the crossing [0] is the magnificent frigate bird [1]. The bird has a super interesting capability of flying on a single half of the brain. Remarkably similar to single slower core operation of a computer... [2]
> Columbus thought India was closer than it was because birds could be seen returning to the West Coast of England with twigs and leaves from somewhere
The Portuguese settled the Azores before Columbus was born, so this sounds like a weird reason to believe India was closer.
Educated people already knew the circumference of the globe. Columbus’ miscalculation was… hopeful. There’s a sort of conspiracy theory that it was deliberate - how else was he going to get funding?
It reminds me of Amundsen. He wanted to be the first man at the north pole and raised funds to mount an expedition. However while he was planning his expedition other explorers beat him there. Without telling anyone but his crew, on the day of departure he headed south and was the first man to reach the south-pole, using funds raised for arctic exploration.
Columbus made a voyage to Bristol in the UK and certainly came across merchants who had travelled in the northern reaches, Iceland in particular. It is suggested that he did indeed travel to Iceland although the source we have for it is quite a few degrees removed from Columbus claiming it.
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?
> 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.
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.
Humans are not very good at seeing patterns when they have preconceptions.
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.
I always find it fascinating that people are so much more interested in why he sailed for America rather than how. Columbus was a navigator, not a geographer. His true discovery was not America (which plenty of people, including some Europeans, had reached before) but the replicable transatlantic voyage.
A lot of early voyages funded by the various crowns was actually put under extreme secrecy so much so that many sailors would only later be told of the real voyage...
At least that's what I recall reading awhile back. If anyone could corroborate that would be nice.
The value of secrecy in matters of commerce and state has probably been recognized from the get-go. Beyond that, nobody thought sailors had much in the way of rights; in 1571, almost a century later, there were tens of thousands of galley-slaves on both sides in the battle of Lepanto.
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:
Even if Columbus was aware of Chiesa's work (no evidence for it being widely known is given here) or had independently heard of the Norse discoveries, he could have assumed they had reached some part of Asia already speculatively sketched on the maps of the day.
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.
Given that nobody knew about this book for centuries, it seems pretty unlikely that Columbus saw it. Let alone, saw it and believed it and discounted the giants and also didn't mention it to anyone.
And in French it means, pretty much, "environment". In Swedish, I'd guess Norwegian, and in a way even in Finnish, it's "Miljö" is used as in Danish: Mainly to signify the natural environment at large; "Greta kämpar för miljön" means "Greta fights for the environment". (Though in Finnish, the native "ympäristö" is used much more than the loan "miljöö".)
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".
No, that was just the story he told to his venture investors. Fishermen probably had lots of circumstantial evidence for America at the time, but explaining that to a venture capitalist is much harder than spinning some fantabulous tall tale. (People do this sort of thing today too.)
My theory is that it means not the actual Indies, but a place like the Indies, but to the west. I suspect Europeans at the time though of India less as where the Indians live and more like a place to get cool stuff, and cool stuff was indeed found in the West Indies too.
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.
"The Indies" referred to the known archipelago in the Indian Ocean (now Indonesia and the Philippines). The Caribbean is also an archipelago, so if Columbus believed himself to be in the Indian Ocean, it's not that odd for him to assume he'd reached the western end of the same archipelago.
India is not a collection of islands, it's unlikely that Columbus mistook an archipelago for a known vast land mass.
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.