In 1492, Christopher Columbus was shocked when his ship made landfall in a land Europeans had never explored. Along the way, he proved that Earth isn’t flat after all. Right?
Wrong: Despite a persistent legend, neither Columbus nor his Spanish patrons thought Earth was a finite plane instead of a round planet. And you can blame one of the United States’ greatest authors for creating a myth that still surrounds one of history’s best-known figures.
When Columbus set sail in 1492, he predicted he’d make landfall in Asia. Legend has it that he defied Spanish officials to do so, sailing west instead of East because he was certain the world was round.
There’s just one problem: It’s almost certain that in the 1490s, nobody thought the earth was flat. According to historian Jeffrey Burton Russell, “no educated person in the history of Western Civilization from the third century B.C. onward believed that the Earth was flat.”
That was thanks to scientists, philosophers and mathematicians who, as early as around 600 B.C., made observations that Earth was round. Using calculations based on the sun’s rise and fall, shadows and other physical properties of the planet, Greek scholars like Pythagoras and Aristotle determined that the planet is actually a sphere.
During Columbus’ time, educated people carefully studied knowledge passed down by the ancient Greeks. Thus, it’s nearly impossible—and completely implausible—that rich Spaniards of the late 15th century thought Columbus would fall off the edge of the map.
However, Columbus ran into resistance when he tried to get funding for his landmark journey for a different reason. He mistakenly believed that the circumference of Earth was very small and that by traveling west toward what he thought was China, he’d open up new trade routes. After years of negotiation and argument over the actual length of the proposed journey, he finally convinced Ferdinand II of Spain and his wife Isabella to finance the expedition.
