Columbus made a total of four voyages to the New World, spending most of his time in the Caribbean. He did see the Isthmus of Central America and he saw the mouth of the Orinoco river in modern day Venezuela.
He went to his grave thinking he’d visited Asia and did not believe he had discovered a new continent. He thought the various Caribbean islands either were the Philippines or some remote unknown islands. Mind you this guy had Marco Polo’s White Guy’s Misinterpretations Of The East and some bad math to go on.
He sailed up and down the isthmus of Central America on one of his voyages looking for a straight into the Indian ocean. You can see how he might mistake the Gulf of Mexico for the Gulf of Thailand…until there outright is no Singapore Straight, and the Panama Canal wouldn’t exist for another 500 years.
He did see the mouth of the Orinoco river, and observed that a river discharging this much water must mean this is the coast of a huge landmass. Which he apparently took for the “earthly paradise” which was supposed to be somewhere in the East. And instead of checking that out he brutally enslaved the Caribbean natives.
It wasn’t until an expedition attempting to sail south around that big landmass that navigator Amerigo Vespucci said “Look, there’s no way this could possibly be indonesia. I can’t make what we’re seeing here fit any map I have. We have to be in a new, undiscovered land.”
Still later, Magellan managed to accomplish Columbus’ goal of reaching the spice islands by sailing West across the Atlantic…armed with a more correct understanding of the Earth’s size and the idea that a big vertical continent was in the way.
At least some of it is the principle that you can’t make a man understand something if his job requires him to not understand it. Columbus was, essentially, a capitalist. Anything that matched the maps and descriptions he was working from was evidence that he’d made it to Asia. Anything that didn’t match was proof that they’d landed in a remote, unexplored part of Asia. He was going to exploit it, anyway. He didn’t find any hint of pepper or cloves but by god he was going to wring the gold out of these people one way or another.
Columbus made a total of four voyages to the New World, spending most of his time in the Caribbean. He did see the Isthmus of Central America and he saw the mouth of the Orinoco river in modern day Venezuela.
He went to his grave thinking he’d visited Asia and did not believe he had discovered a new continent. He thought the various Caribbean islands either were the Philippines or some remote unknown islands. Mind you this guy had Marco Polo’s White Guy’s Misinterpretations Of The East and some bad math to go on.
He sailed up and down the isthmus of Central America on one of his voyages looking for a straight into the Indian ocean. You can see how he might mistake the Gulf of Mexico for the Gulf of Thailand…until there outright is no Singapore Straight, and the Panama Canal wouldn’t exist for another 500 years.
He did see the mouth of the Orinoco river, and observed that a river discharging this much water must mean this is the coast of a huge landmass. Which he apparently took for the “earthly paradise” which was supposed to be somewhere in the East. And instead of checking that out he brutally enslaved the Caribbean natives.
It wasn’t until an expedition attempting to sail south around that big landmass that navigator Amerigo Vespucci said “Look, there’s no way this could possibly be indonesia. I can’t make what we’re seeing here fit any map I have. We have to be in a new, undiscovered land.”
Still later, Magellan managed to accomplish Columbus’ goal of reaching the spice islands by sailing West across the Atlantic…armed with a more correct understanding of the Earth’s size and the idea that a big vertical continent was in the way.
Really? Didn’t know that.
At least some of it is the principle that you can’t make a man understand something if his job requires him to not understand it. Columbus was, essentially, a capitalist. Anything that matched the maps and descriptions he was working from was evidence that he’d made it to Asia. Anything that didn’t match was proof that they’d landed in a remote, unexplored part of Asia. He was going to exploit it, anyway. He didn’t find any hint of pepper or cloves but by god he was going to wring the gold out of these people one way or another.