Current Events > Was Christopher Columbus stupid for reaching America and thinking it was India?

(+) Yeah! (+)

He sailed and reached a land mass that was thousands of miles away from his intended target. Somehow, the climate, geography, and people didn't clue him in that he wasn't in India. Despite the place bearing no resemblance to India, he actually called those people Indians, and that's why we're stuck with the name today. Was he an idiot for not realizing that he was not in fact in India?

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ITT: we think India has one climate, geography and people.

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He was attempting a new route. So no. The point was to try going west until reaching India. That was actually quite audacious of him.

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You think they were bumping this the entire time?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BJhF0L7pfo8

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It was the 1400's... Was knowledge of the appearance and culture of East Indians well known among the Spanish?

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Why didn't he just use a World Map? Dummy

@Complete_Idi0t

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Flauros posted...

You think they were bumping this the entire time?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BJhF0L7pfo8

lol'd. Dined on lobbies the whole way

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He badly underestimated the circumference of the world. He and his entire expedition would have starved to death at sea if there hadn't been another group of continents fortuitously located at about where he thought Asia would be.

Pretty much everybody except him was aware of this, which is why he had so much trouble finding a sponsor.
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The fact that he didn't believe in flat earth means he was a hell of a lot smarter than the average American at least.

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WalkingLobsters posted...

He was attempting a new route. So no. The point was to try going west until reaching India. That was actually quite audacious of him.

Yeah, I agree with that.

Its honestly cringe to read TC criticizing Columbus exploration into uncharted territories, while typing from the comforts of his (TCs) safe, basic modern day life.

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Anyone picking "No" is objectively incorrect.

There's a reason an Italian/Genoan basically had to shop himself around until he finally found someone willing to sponsor it in Spain, who only did so because they were that desperate to obtain a W.
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He also never reached America, just some islands. They weren't large landmasses.

He was an incomparable navigator... and a completely s*** commander, captain, leader... I mean you name it aside from navigation he was pretty bad.

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Gruntling posted...

It was the 1400's... Was knowledge of the appearance and culture of East Indians well known among the Spanish?

Dude the fucking Roman Empire extensively traded with India.
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slk_23 posted...

He sailed and reached a land mass that was thousands of miles away from his intended target. Somehow, the climate, geography, and people didn't clue him in that he wasn't in India. Despite the place bearing no resemblance to India, he actually called those people Indians, and that's why we're stuck with the name today. Was he an idiot for not realizing that he was not in fact in India?

How familiar are you with Eastern asian culture in the 1400's? PRobably more familiar with it than they were.

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Bio1590 posted...

Dude the fucking Roman Empire extensively traded with India.

And were long gone by then and that would have been a fairly long time ago. What is your point? They had gone through the dark ages by then.

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Cristopher Columbus is a **** human being, but it's not like he knew there was a different continent lmao

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He shouldn't have disabled location services .
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JBaLLEN66 posted...

Cristopher Columbus is a **** human being, but it's not like he knew there was a different continent lmao

Absolutely horrid guy agreed, but this topic has hog's ass knowledge all over it lol

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Stupid.

First. Ocean trade flourished in the East Indies for thousands of years and at the time of Columbus there would have been ocean traffic and ports.

Second. The equator. It passes through the East Indies. The equator in the Americas passes through North Brazil.

Third Cotton. People kept trading cotton to CC as something valuable and he decided that they were subnormal. Cotton was one of the best things to hit Europe and anyplace that wore trousers or had a winter. People used to use wool, linen or leather underwear. CC was the son of a wool merchant and should have learned something about cloth.

Fourth the map.

Fifth different kinds of coral.



Kind of sad though that he landed on Panama and was just miles from the Pacific.

* * * *

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^^^

Add on to this the aforementioned "everybody already knew that there could be a route, but they also knew the approximate size of the globe and Columbus wasn't planning on bringing enough supplies to actually cover the distance", and yes, he was a complete idiot. A lucky idiot, but an idiot nonetheless.

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CobraGT posted...

leather underwear

I highly doubt anyone was using leather underwear
That sounds awful day to day

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The idea that Columbus was a moron is absurd and a weird cognitive brainfart that I suspect is a misguided attempt to portray him negative in absolutely every way in an effort to make him more dislikable.

Because apparently being a genociding, slaving monster isn't strong enough to stand on its own. He'd also have to be STUPID!
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AlCalavicci posted...

Why didn't he just use a World Map? Dummy

Or GPS even? It even has options for alternate routes if that's what he was looking for.

ShyOx posted...

And were long gone by then and that would have been a fairly long time ago. What is your point? They had gone through the dark ages by then.

The spice trade literally drove the world economy for centuries and Genoa was one of the main trade centres when Columbus was born and grew up there. This has nothing to do with the Spanish potentially not knowing what Indians look like, it's all on Columbus.

JBaLLEN66 posted...

Cristopher Columbus is a **** human being, but it's not like he knew there was a different continent lmao

Columbus being an idiot has nothing to do with North and South America actually existing. It's solely:

1) He massively overestimated how wide Eurasia was in terms of longitude.
2) He massively underestimated how far west India/China/Japan were, partly because of 1 and partly because he used the wrong fucking units in his calculations

There's also no evidence he ever actually believed he hadn't reached the Far East, despite the fact all evidence would point to the contrary the longer he stayed there and the more he explored.

And don't forget that just 5 years after Columbus landed in The Bahamas, Vasco da Gama sailed south around Africa and up its east coast and made it to India for the Portuguese, which eventually led to Portugal having complete control of the spice trade in the early 1500s.
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CE is out of its mind lol

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He had been to Iceland, so he had heard about Vinland. Based on those rumors that there was land within sailing distance to the west, he assumed that the circumference of the world people had been using since the Greeks did the math thousands or years ago was wrong.

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Bio1590 posted...

The spice trade literally drove the world economy for centuries and Genoa was one of the main trade centres when Columbus was born and grew up there. This has nothing to do with the Spanish potentially not knowing what Indians look like, it's all on Columbus.

Columbus being an idiot has nothing to do with North and South America actually existing. It's solely:

1) He massively overestimated how wide Eurasia was in terms of longitude.
2) He massively underestimated how far west India/China/Japan were, partly because of 1 and partly because he used the wrong fucking units in his calculations

There's also no evidence he ever actually believed he hadn't reached the Far East, despite the fact all evidence would point to the contrary the longer he stayed there and the more he explored.

And don't forget that just 5 years after Columbus landed in The Bahamas, Vasco da Gama sailed south around Africa and up its east coast and made it to India for the Portuguese, which eventually led to Portugal having complete control of the spice trade in the early 1500s.

Portugal mainly got control of Africa and the Eastern part due to the Treaty of Tordesillas, but Spain also grabbed the Philippines too. Portugal was already in Africa(vaguely North Africa at the time well before Columbus set voyage). There's a reason they risked everything to sail west to possibly find an alternative route.

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I think he's stupid for allowing genocide, allowing rape, cutting the ears off of his slaves as a form of punishment, and for basline keeping people as slaves in the first place. The dude was not a good man. Even his contemporaries thought he was an asshole. Columbus refusing to admit he never reached India is like Trump refusing to admit he lost the election.

I would that we could rewrite the history books and give credit to someone else for locating the New World, but it is what it is. Sometimes, history is shaped by shitty human beings.

DeadBankerDream posted...

The idea that Columbus was a moron is absurd and a weird cognitive brainfart that I suspect is a misguided attempt to portray him negative in absolutely every way in an effort to make him more dislikable.

Because apparently being a genociding, slaving monster isn't strong enough to stand on its own. He'd also have to be STUPID!

He WAS stupid. People ITT are already pointing out the fact that people already knew the earth was round, and the size of its circunference back then. They knew just how far the India is by going west.

Columbus didn't intend to find a new continent, Spain didn't either. He was just lucky, he would have drowned if he didn't cumpletely lucked himself into land nobody knew existed

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JBaLLEN66 posted...

Portugal mainly got control of Africa and the Eastern part due to the Treaty of Tordesillas, but Spain also grabbed the Philippines too. Portugal was already in Africa(vaguely North Africa at the time well before Columbus set voyage). There's a reason they risked everything to sail west to possibly find an alternative route.

Spain didn't grab The Philippines until the 1520s. It took them almost 30 years after Columbus landed in the East Indies to finally reach Asia. Their trade route ended up having to go across the Pacific and then the Atlantic.
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YoungMutual posted...

He WAS stupid. People ITT are already pointing out the fact that people already knew the earth was round, and the size of its circunference back then. They knew just how far the India is by going west.

1) Columbus didn't think the Earth was flat

2) To my understanding, Columbus didn't think he had landed in India, but off the shore of Japan or China.
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He suck with geographic like most american
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Fun fact: Did you know that when Columbus reached America he was considering naming it Land of The Bulls?

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Considering that when he left, the scientific community in Europe had a decent approximation of the size of the earth and knew that sailing to India by traveling west was impossible at the time. And they were right, had there just been a wide open ocean and no Americas, Columbus and crew would've died of starvation or thirst.

But Columbus was convinced that everybody was wrong and that the world was actually something like 40% smaller, so that India was in reach without really any basis for that belief.

So he lucked out there.

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I don't get where this idea that Columbus thought the world was smaller than it was is coming from.

What Columbus got wrong was accepting really flawed primary source materials, such as Marco Polo. Using the data from Marco Polo and other travelers, he came to the conclusion that China was not that far off the coast of Spain.

Bio1590 posted...

There's a reason an Italian/Genoan basically had to shop himself around until he finally found someone willing to sponsor it in Spain, who only did so because they were that desperate to obtain a W.

WTF are you talking about? Spain just came off a massive W with the Reconquista, which literally ended with Granada capitulating on January 2, 1492. They were the spearhead of Christiandom, driving the Moors off the Iberian Peninsula for good. This was 18 years after Isabella and Ferdinand unified Castille and Aragon making the defacto Spain. What Spain was now desperate to do is find new trading opportunities and they had missed out on the atlantic island discoveries as they were busy conquering land on the home front for the time being.


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Yes. Because after he confirmed that he hadn't reached India at all he still called the native Americans Indians. The united states was born into stupid in front of the entire world because of him.

Norman_Smiley posted...

I don't get where this idea that Columbus thought the world was smaller than it was is coming from.

Because he did. Not only did he use completely wrong values and units (not counting for conversions), he straight up changed geography to fit his beliefs.

https://spectrum.ieee.org/tech-talk/at-work/test-and-measurement/columbuss-geographical-miscalculations

Washington Irvings overly imaginative A History of the Life and Voyages of Christopher Columbus notwithstanding, it was widely known by the 15th Century that the Earth is spherical. The question was, how big is the sphere? In 200 BCE, after all, Eratosthenes calculated the circumference of the earth to within one percent of its actual girth. He figured that one degree of latitude was equal to 59.5 nautical miles.

In making his own calculation, however, Columbus preferred the values given by the medieval Persian geographer, Abu al Abbas Ahmad ibn Muhammad ibn Kathir al-Farghani (a.k.a. Alfraganus): one degree (at the equator) is equal to 56.67 miles. That was Columbuss first error, which he compounded with a second: he assumed that the Persian was using the 4 856-foot Roman mile; in fact, Alfraganus meant the 7 091-foot Arabic mile. (This is, of course, the sort of confusion of units that sent the Mars Climate Orbiter into its terminal swan dive in September 1999.)

Taken together, the two miscalculations effectively reduced the planetary waistline to 16,305 nautical miles, down from the actual 21,600 or so, an error of 25 percent.

And then there was the third error. Not content with whittling down the degree by 25 percent, Morison writes, Columbus stretched out Asia eastward until Japan almost kissed the Azores. Through a complicated chain of reasoning that mixed Ptolemy, Marinus of Tyre, and Marco Polo with some corrections of his own, Columbus calculated that he would find Japan at 85 west longitude (rather than 140 east)moving it more than 8,000 miles closer to Cape St. Vincent.

All in all, he figured, the Indies were just 68 degrees west of the Canary Islands. Calculated travel distance: 3080 nautical miles. Actual distance from Tenerife to Jakarta: 7313 nautical miles. Margin of error: 58 percent.

Of course, Morison noted, Columbus's calculation is not logical, but Columbuss mind was not logical. He knew he could make it, and the figures had to fit. Morison, an admiral himself, is full of admiration for Columbuss skill as a practical navigator, capable of pinpoint landfalls on his returns to the New World. As a metrologist and theoretician, however, he failed to double-check his work.

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gafemaqs posted...

Fun fact: Did you know that when Columbus reached America he was considering naming it Land of The Bulls?

Ah, finally, a comment by somebody with culture.

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Dunning Kruger Effect https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dunning%E2%80%93Kruger_effect

for STARTERS CC "figured out" that the earth circumference is less than everyone else thought.

All the points I listed above.

In particular not recognizing the value of cotton. He grew up in a wool business ???
Then he claims to be an oceanic sailor. Coral is extremely important if you are an oceanic sailor. Recognizing coral tells you all sorts of stuff about currents and storms.

https://reefdivers.io/guide-caribbean-coral-identification

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CobraGT posted...

Dunning Kruger Effect https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dunning%E2%80%93Kruger_effect

for STARTERS CC "figured out" that the earth circumference is less than everyone else thought.

All the points I listed above.

In particular not recognizing the value of cotton. He grew up in a wool business ???
Then he claims to be an oceanic sailor. Coral is extremely important if you are an oceanic sailor. Recognizing coral tells you all sorts of stuff about currents and storms.

https://reefdivers.io/guide-caribbean-coral-identification

yeah why didn't he look this up on the internet

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vigorm0rtis posted...

ITT: we think India has one climate, geography and people.

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I feel like the vote is based on people trashing Columbus for not having modern values when he literally lived about 3 times closer to Ghenghis Fucking Khan than he did to any of us.

He was stupid in the sense that he insisted he wasn't wrong.

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Was Christopher Columbus stupid

Yes.

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WalkingLobsters posted...

yeah why didn't he look this up on the internet

No. Why did he not observe directly and why did he not listen to discussions of other sailors

Atralis posted...

I feel like the vote is based on people trashing Columbus for not having modern values when he literally lived about 3 times closer to Ghenghis Fucking Khan than he did to any of us.

Modern value? CC was raised in the wool trade. This meant he spent his entire life evaluating wool for cloth until he left home. In his own time he did not learn from observation or he did not know how to apply knowledge.

Either way. When I say CC passed on cotton, I am judging him by his own time. CC was too wrapped up in himself to ask and how do you use these little balls of fluff which you keep trying to trade me?

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