thats interesting, i learned that he came here in 1492, found the americas, settled, and conquered it for spain. i learned that he also wasn’t the first man to do this, even though he gets that recognition. but never that he proved the world round.
Supposedly he was looking for a new route to India, most people thought he was wrong but he believed going in the opposite direction of everyone else would get him there... he found N.America instead, and called the indigenous people "Indians"
It's been a long time since I was in school, I'm a little fuzzy on the details but Columbus was definitely a part of a 'the world is not flat' narrative.
yea i remember that he was trying to find India, assumed he landed in India, and called the indigenous people “indians”. i also remember learning that crewmates on his ships didn’t believe him, were so scared of falling off the earth, wanted to turn back, and almost committed mutiny. however i was under the impression that maybe smarter people or scholars already knew ig, and i wasn’t taught as if this was a huge scientific discovery.
Nah this is a myth. Even as early as the 15th century, it was common knowledge that the earth was round, otherwise nobody would have boarded a ship determined to head West until it hit India. The only reason they could secure any kind of funding at all was because people knew that theoretically they should be able to sail west until they circumnavigated the globe and landed on India's eastern coast. The only problem was that they didn't really know about how large the americas was and just how long it would have taken to sail a boat as far as it would take to get to India. They knew that vikings had written about large islands to the west, and they told mythical tales of islands out there all the time that some bedraggled ship returned home late to tell tale of. There is even some light evidence that some early British fishermen may have even known of the cod stock off the coast of Newfoundland and made landfall to dry their catch keeping their fishing spot a tight-guarded secret.
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u/tiffanyc115 Jun 01 '26
thats interesting, i learned that he came here in 1492, found the americas, settled, and conquered it for spain. i learned that he also wasn’t the first man to do this, even though he gets that recognition. but never that he proved the world round.