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> 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 t
by jmchuster 5y ago
> 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.
- tootie 5y agoGiven 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.
- blfr 5y agoI think the idea is that he heard the same tales because he was in the same milieu, not that he read that book.
- tailspin2019 5y agoTIL a cool new word; "milieu" > the physical or social setting in which something occurs or develops https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/milieu https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/milieu
- ochrist 5y agoThe Danish (Scandinavian) word 'miljø' usually translates to 'environment'.
- tgflynn 5y agoMilieu is a French word. My guess is that your Danish word is also derived from the French.
- CRConrad 5y agoAnd 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".
- krapp 5y ago> and then mistakenly assumed he made it, since the Caribbean was where he wrongly thought Asia was going to be. ... which is why Native Americans have been referred to as "Indians," because Columbus was certain he'd reached the Indies.
- interestica 5y agoAnd why the Caribbean is alternatively known as the West Indies.
- tialaramex 5y ago"No, of course not, not North Wales" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Df-uemc-e3w https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Df-uemc-e3w
- felipelemos 5y agoIt's important to remember that he thought he was in the Indian sea, not the Indian country. https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/mnvt37/did_the_term_indian_really_come_from_a_mislabel/ https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/mnvt37/did_t...
- joecot 5y agoColumbus 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.
- crakenzak 5y ago> 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.
- interestica 5y ago> seems pointless I'm more wondering about the effects of seed/life transfer. Doesn't seem feasible to me.
- hadlock 5y agoEvery 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.
- thevardanian 5y agoA 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.
- mannykannot 5y agoThe 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. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Galley_slave#Europe 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: http://www.christopher-columbus.eu/ships-crew.htm http://www.christopher-columbus.eu/ships-crew.htm
- throw0101a 5y ago> 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: * https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Atlantic_Ocean,_Toscanelli,_1474.jpg https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Atlantic_Ocean,_Tosc... * https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paolo_dal_Pozzo_Toscanelli https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paolo_dal_Pozzo_Toscanelli † Cipangu: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Names_of_Japan#Jipangu https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Names_of_Japan#Jipangu
- santiagobasulto 5y agoIt'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. [0] https://wikipedia.org/wiki/Antillia https://wikipedia.org/wiki/Antillia
- arp242 5y agoIf 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.
- buescher 5y agoEducated 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?
- Andrex 5y agoI believe in current parlance that is called "hustle." (Or in less generous terms, "fraud.")
- bserge 5y ago"Startup."
- sammorrowdrums 5y ago“Disrupting navigation”
- yissp 5y agoEuropean contact with the new world was pretty disruptive indeed.
- ncmncm 5y ago"Conspiracy" would mean somebody else was in on it. By definition.
- hirako2000 5y agoMagellan must have been.
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- JudgePenitent 5y agoColumbus 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?
- dboreham 5y agoProbably fake history. Modern thinking is that Columbus had a pretty good idea where he was going because others had already been there.
- weswpg 5y agoWhy is the area referred to as "the west Indies" unless he thought it was India
- Tabular-Iceberg 5y agoMy 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.
- pbhjpbhj 5y agoIf he thought it was India then it should have been the East India ... Also, I think Indies was used to refer to Asia in general, rather than specifically India. But am open to correction.
- tremon 5y ago"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.
- heavenlyblue 5y agoYou mean Eastern end of the archipelago?
- koheripbal 5y ago
- otabdeveloper4 5y agoNo, 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.)
- zeteo 5y agoI 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.
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- mannykannot 5y agoEven 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.
- pyuser583 5y agoColumbus knew the distance around the globe. That was accurately determined by ancient Greeks. 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.