While I agree with the thrust of your comment, as far as I’m aware Columbus believed the world was round, and the reason he called it the West Indies (which… should have been the East Indies, but whatever) was because he thought the earth was much smaller than it is. If the Americas hadn’t been there, he would have absolutely died in the Pacific Ocean well before reaching land.
So there’s plenty to dislike him for, but he wasn’t so much lost as just wrong about the size of the earth. I mean, I guess that makes him lost sorta. Eh. I’m just amused at the mistake.
If he believed he was somewhere he was not, I’d say he was lost. He genuinely believed he’d made it to India, to the day he died he believed that. He wasn’t just wrong about the size of the earth, he was insane about it. The relative size of the earth had been known for more than a thousand years before Columbus was born.
While I agree with the thrust of your comment, as far as I’m aware Columbus believed the world was round, and the reason he called it the West Indies (which… should have been the East Indies, but whatever) was because he thought the earth was much smaller than it is. If the Americas hadn’t been there, he would have absolutely died in the Pacific Ocean well before reaching land.
So there’s plenty to dislike him for, but he wasn’t so much lost as just wrong about the size of the earth. I mean, I guess that makes him lost sorta. Eh. I’m just amused at the mistake.
If he believed he was somewhere he was not, I’d say he was lost. He genuinely believed he’d made it to India, to the day he died he believed that. He wasn’t just wrong about the size of the earth, he was insane about it. The relative size of the earth had been known for more than a thousand years before Columbus was born.