that's District of Columbia, not District of Cabot.ģ. Hence we have the capital, Washington, D.C. So the American colonialists instead turned to Columbus as their hero, not England's Cabot. Giovanni Cabot, another Italian) "discovered" Newfoundland in England's name around 1497 and paved the way for England's colonization of most of North America. So why does the United States celebrate the guy who thought he found a nifty new route to Asia and the lands described by Marco Polo? This is because the early United States was fighting with England, not Spain. He never got close to what is now called the United States. On his subsequent voyages he went farther south, to Central and South America. What Columbus came across was the archipelago of the Bahamas and then the island later named Hispaniola, now split into Haiti and the Dominican Republic. Until his death he claimed to have landed in Asia, even though most navigators knew he didn't. If Columbus discovered America, he himself didn't know. And let's ignore that whole Leif Ericson voyage to Greenland and modern-day Canada around the year 1000. Yes, let's ignore the fact that millions of humans already inhabited this land later to be called the Americas, having discovered it millennia before. His crew wasn't nervous about falling off the earth. The Columbus flat-earth myth perhaps originated with Washington Irving's 1828 biography of Columbus there's no mention of this before that. Columbus, in effect, got lucky by bumping into land that, of course, wasn't Asia. For these reasons, he figured he could reach Asia by going west, a concept that most of educated Europe at the time thought was daft - not because the earth was flat, but because Columbus' math was so wrong. He also thought Europe was wider than it actually was and that Japan was farther from the coast of China than it really was. Ĭolumbus, a self-taught man, greatly underestimated Earth's circumference. This text was well known throughout educated Europe in Columbus' time. In the second century, Claudius Ptolemy wrote the "Almagest," the mathematical and astronomical treatise on planetary shapes and motions, describing the spherical Earth. And by the third century B.C., Eratosthenes determined our planet's shape and circumference using basic geometry. provided the physical evidence, such as the shadow of the Earth on the moon and the curvature of the Earth known by all sailors approaching land. Ancient Greek mathematicians had already proven that the earth was round, not flat. If he did, he was about 2,000 years too late. Columbus set out to prove the world was round.
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