This had enormous implications for the explorer’s ambitious plans. The controversial issue in Columbus’s day was not the earth’s shape but its size. But seamen like Columbus knew better from practical experience: They saw that mountains appeared on the horizon before the land came into view and that the hulls of departing ships disappeared before the masts. There were, of course, some who clung to the ancient biblical notions that the earth was a flat disk with Jerusalem in the center and that one could fall off the edge. Every educated man in his day believed it was a sphere, and every European university taught the concept in geography classes. WAS COLUMBUS THE FIRST TO BELIEVE THE EARTH WAS ROUND? Had he invoked the words of the great Italian poet as he embarked? Dante had written in The Divine Comedy, “And turning our stern towards the morning we made wings of our oars for our wild flight, bearing always to the south-west.” It is doubtful that Columbus’s ships would have survived a more northerly crossing. The success of Columbus’s trip was due as much to his passionate belief in what he was doing as to his enlightened decision to sail west-southwest from the Canary Islands along the twenty-eighth parallel, thus avoiding the treacherous counter winds of higher latitudes. He sailed west from the Canary Islands following an ocean route he had mapped and survived a thirty-three-day trip to make landfall in a new world on October 12.įor years people had scoffed at the idea of a westward route to the Indies. But it’s convenient, it’s here to stay, and we shall use it. Of course, the term New World is thoroughly Eurocentric. But it was not until Columbus’s extraordinary feat of navigation in 1492 that the presence of a New World was revealed to the wonderment of the Old.
The Vikings touched base in the far northern lands during the eleventh century, as did Bristol seamen four centuries later.
Brendan and the Irish are credited with the earliest voyages, dating from the opening phase of the Middle Ages in the seventh century. There are claims that other explorers crossed the Ocean Sea long before Columbus. He declared that he had “found very many islands filled with people without number, and of them all I have taken possession for their Highnesses, by proclamation and with the royal standard displayed, and nobody objected.” This arrogant usurpation was wholly in line with Europe’s determination to expand its ordained and Christian world. The Genoese mariner made the announcement of his triumphant crossing in a letter addressed to his Spanish patrons, King Ferdinand and Queen Isabella. His disclosure of their existence baffled Renaissance Europe but eventually led to knowledge of an entire new hemisphere. When they came is still a matter of warring scholarship, but those natives were the discoverers of the New World.Ĭolumbus met only a small number of them after he had successfully navigated the Ocean Sea, as the Atlantic was then known.
They may have migrated from northeastern Asia more than fifteen thousand years ago.
Those continents had been populated for millennia by a mix of peoples whose cultures were as diverse as their lands. But how pleased he would have been to learn that he is often credited with discovering two vast, far-flung continents whose size and variety he could scarcely have begun to imagine.
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