Hacker News Reader

Comment by Maultasche | Hacker News Reader

It turned out Columbus was wrong and everyone else was right. The Earth was simply too large to sail around the other way.

The only thing that kept Columbus' expedition from certain doom was bumping into a continent that was unknown to most of Europe, despite some Norse having settled there in earlier centuries.

Imagine if the Americas hadn't existed. He would likely have died in the middle of a huge ocean.

View on HN

Earth was simply too large to sail around the other way.

Yet ... 27 years after Columbus' first voyage, the Magellan expedition started it's circumnavigation sailing west proving it was possible.

There are plenty of islands in the Ocean to load up on food and water. Magellen, in fact, stopped at several islands.

It was too large for the ships Columbus took, provisioned as Columbus provisioned them. And everyone who ridiculed him knew that.

Magellan went out with a larger fleet and two years' provisions laid in.

2 years' provisions

Magellan Voyage took 3 years.

Hey may have left with 2 years' provisions, but as you said, he stopped at many islands along the way to restock his provisions.

Also it's a good thing he set out with the fleet he did, becaue only one of the ships, and a handful of the original crew, made it back.

Columbus' plan was equivalent to crossing the Atlantic and then the Pacific, with nothing in between.

That is a 24,000 km trip in a straight line (from Spain to the Moluccas, the Spice Islands) for which he was absolutely unprepared.

It's important to remember that the voyages weren't attempts to prove scientific theories, the Spanish wanted to establish new trade routes.

Both sides were wrong. An earth of a larger size doesn't imply a lack of land, just the lack of assurance.

Columbus was wrong. While the grandparent posits a hypothetical where there was no land in between, that's not what Columbus critics suggested -- they suggested that the known size of the Earth was such that a more economical route to the Indies from Europe sailing West was not a reasonable thing to expect.

They were correct, and Columbus -- who insisted that he had reached the (East, now, because of the confusion he caused) Indies -- was wrong.

It was still a gamble where the outcome was entirely unexpected. They were both wrong about their expectations: finding the indes, or finding nothing and running out of resources.

True, but one could say that the critics of Columbus based their opinion on reason and knowledge: world is too big to find India that way, and you can't know that there's land in between.

Columbus wasn't looking for America. He had miscalculated the circumference of the earth and thought he could sail west to India. The Portuguese laughed him out of the country because of this. Note that the Caribbean was called the West Indes for this reason -- Columbus thought he had hit India.

Sure. But the bet on finding something paid off when others would not have made the journey. The outcome was something nobody expected. They were both wrong.

For someone to be wrong, they have to have made a some statement that turned out to be incorrect. The people that disagreed with Columbus' calculations said that the earth was larger than Columbus gave it credit for. This was not an incorrect statement.

Columbus didn't bet on finding 'something', he bet on finding India.

Imagine what his crew would have said if he'd told them he was betting on finding 'something'.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com