Timothy Birdnow

A much more thorough examination of Christopher Columbus and the round Earth by Bill Federer at American Minute.

Read it here.

Columbus' Miscalculation: How Far Around is the Round Earth?

Columbus was looking for a SEA route to India and China because 40 years earlier Muslim Turks conquered Constantinople in 1453 cutting off the LAND routes.

A biography of Columbus was written by Washington Irving in 1828, titled A History of the Life and Voyages of Christopher Columbus.

In it, Irving created an imaginative dialogue of Europeans arguing over whether the Earth was round or flat. His book was so popular, that people actually thought such a debate took place when it had not.

Washington Irving was known for mixing entertainment with history and legend.

He wrote Rip Van Winkle, The Legend of Sleepy Hallow, and Diedrich Knickerbocker's A History of New-York from the Beginning of the World to the End of the Dutch Dynasty, filled with tales of visits from St. Nick coining to New York City, which he nickname "Gotham."

Europeans knew the Earth was round.

Pythagoras had speculated that the earth was a sphere in the 6th century BC, and Aristotle validated it in the 4th century BC.

In the 3rd century BC, Eratosthenes computed the circumference of the earth with amazing accuracy.

He had heard that at Aswan, Egypt, the sun cast no shadow at noon on the summer solstice, June 21, yet at the exact same moment in Alexandria, Egypt, a column cast a shadow with a 7.2 degree angle.

7.2 degrees is 1/50th of a 360 degree circle.

It was known that the distance between Alexandria and Aswan was 5,000 stadia or 800 kilometers (approximately 500 miles).

All Eratosthenes had to do was multiply 800 times 50, which equals 40,000 kilometers, just 75 kilometers less than the actual circumference of the Earth, 40,075 km, or 24,901 miles.

Eratosthenes also calculated distance to the sun and moon, the tilt of the earth, and created the first world map with parallel latitude and meridian longitude lines.

In the 1st century BC, Posidonius used stellar observations at Alexandria and Rhodes to confirm Eratosthenese's measurements.

In the 2nd century AD, astronomer Ptolemy had written a Guide to Geography, in which he described a spherical earth with one ocean connecting Europe and Asia.

St. Isidore of Seville, Spain, wrote in the 7th century that the earth was round.

Around the year 723 AD, Saint Bede the Venerable wrote in his work Reckoning of Time that the Earth was spherical.

The Book of Isaiah 40:22 states:

"It is He that sitteth upon the globe of the earth." (Douay-Rheims Bible)

Columbus knew the Earth was round, but the question was, how far around.

The confusion was over the length of a mile.

Columbus read Cardinal Pierre d'Ailly's "Imago Mundi," which gave Alfraganus' estimate that a degree of latitude (at the equator) was around 56.7 miles.

What Columbus did not realize was that this was expressed in longer Arabic miles rather than in shorter Roman miles.

Therefore Columbus incorrectly estimated the Earth to be smaller in circumference, about 19,000 miles, rather than the actual nearly 24,901 miles.

Columbus knew there was land to the west, as he may have read Ptolemy's account, written in 150 AD, of the Greek sailor named Alexander, who visited the Far East port city of Kattigara, beyond the Malay Peninsula (Golden Chersonese).

He could have heard of the Roman traveler, during the reign of Roman Emperors Antoninus Pius or Marcus Aurelius, who made his way to the court of the Chinese Emperor of the Han Dynasty.

Indeed, Roman glassware and medallions dating from this period were found at Guangzhou along the South China Sea, and at Óc Eo in Vietnam, near the Chinese province of Jiaozhi.

Read the rest! It's a fascinating treatise on Columbus and the mistake he made.

Posted by: Timothy Birdnow at 06:51 AM | Comments (3) | Add Comment
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