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Columbus (who was never painted in his life-time) at La Rábida monastery, Palos
Columbus was invented in 1777
We all know about Christopher Columbus: while everyone else thought the earth was flat, Columbus set off from Spain to sail round the world to China. He never arrived, but that was only because on the way he discovered America. Columbus was the original romantic hero of modern science. Well was he?
Columbus, the romantic hero, is a myth created in 1777 by the Scottish historian Revd William Robertson. It hit the big time with Washington Irving’s biography 50 years later. Tales of lone scientific geniuses were becoming popular and Columbus had been snapped up by rebellious American colonists waving their newly minted Declaration of Independence. But the historical research was hopelessly flawed. Columbus had been wrong about pretty much everything.
Who thought the earth was flat?
Nobody.
Since long before the 2nd century Greek astronomer Claudius Ptolemy, everybody who ever thought about it had agreed that the world was round. And yet Washington Irving’s imaginary scene (in his immense 1828 history of Columbus) in which Catholic scholars try to persuade Columbus the world is flat, got taken up by mid-19th century polemicists who used it to argue that Catholic theologians refused to believe in science. And this misinformation continues now.
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Frau Mauro map, c1450. It was thought the other side of the world was all sea
Why was he heading for China?
Because it suited him.
Columbus’s case hung on the width of the sea between Europe and Asia and how long it would take to cross it. Too long and your crew would starve before you reached the other side. So if he wanted to go he needed to believe he could get there.
The circumference of the world seems first to have been worked out correctly around 245BC by the Greek mathematician, geographer, astronomer, philosopher, poet, and music theorist Eratosthenes. He calculated that the circumference of the world is about 40 000 kilometres.
However it was Claudius Ptolemy who was better known in the 15th century. Not only had he said it was much smaller, but his Geography had also been translated a number of times after 1410 and finally printed in 1477. In the 1450s a Florentine physician, Paulo Pozzo del Toscanelli, drew up a map that featured a strikingly narrow Atlantic ocean. There is even a story (which seems entirely fanciful) that Columbus stole Toscanelli’s map from the Portuguese king in 1485.
Columbus took all these ideas and many more, including the stories from the travels of Marco Polo that argued there was a vast archipelago of islands that stretched far into the ocean east of China and Japan, to make his case to the royal courts of Europe. Nobody believed him.
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All we have is a series of deeply flawed accounts and nothing from Columbus himself – for example about his key first voyage – except for a few self-aggrandizing letters saying the rivers were running with gold
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