As children, my friends and I knew as a matter of indisputable rhyme that â??In fourteen hundred and ninety-two, Columbus sailed the ocean blue,â? and that, by doing so, he both discovered America and proved that the earth was not flat. Few of us, Iâ??d venture, ever questioned whether or not this was true.
Our ignorance was to the clear advantage of the mythmakers, for Christopher Columbus doesnâ??t do too well when subjected to the eagle eye of the fact-checker. First off, however you elect to parse â??discovery,â? Columbus wasnâ??t the first outsider to discover America. As early as 30,000 years ago, human beings started to move across a Siberia-Alaska land bridge named Beringia and then to fan out throughout the Americas. On the Western side of things, Leif Ericson and the Vikings made it to North America around a.d. 1000 but saw fit not to stick around. Strike one for the fable.
Strike two: Contra Mr. Gershwin, â??theyâ? did not all laugh â??at Christopher Columbus when he said the world was roundâ? â?? primarily because they already knew that. As Stephen Jay Gould has observed, â??there never was a period of â??flat earth darknessâ?? among scholars.â? They had accepted the spherical theory from the time of Socrates, and it had reigned without interruption ever since. Insinuations to the contrary, still pervasive in the public imagination, derive first from 17th-century Protestant attempts to paint Catholics as backwards, and then from the 19th-century atheist movement, which picked up the falsehood and propagated it to demonstrate the supposed benightedness of the religious.
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