First of all, thanks to the folks at the Kråkeelva Lodge of the Sons of Norway, Hutchinson, Minnesota, for their hospitality Saturday evening. They were incautious enough to invite me to speak to them, and to pretend that my PowerPoint presentation on Leif Eriksson and Vínland was interesting.
Speaking of Leif Eriksson, it’s Columbus Day. We Norwegians celebrate Leif Eriksson Day on the 9th, not because we think Leif reached America on that date (he would have sailed as early in spring as possible), but in order to preempt Columbus’ celebration.
Not that anyone notices.
Dr. Gene Edward Veith posts today on an important issue I’ve covered before on this blog—that the old story that says Columbus sailed “to prove the world was round” is complete codswallop. It’s something Washington Irving put into a biography of Columbus (apparently on a day when he didn’t have the energy to walk to the library to verify his information), and school children learned it and believed it for generations.
Here’s a fact—almost every educated person has known the world is round since the times of the ancient Greeks.
I have a translation of a Norwegian book called The King’s Mirror (out of print). This book was written in the 13th Century (that’s the 1200s, for those of you who went to Ivy League schools), and its anonymous author writes the following:
…if you take a lighted candle and set it in a room, you may expect it to light up the entire interior, unless something should hinder, though the room be quite large. But if you take an apple and hang it close to the flame, so near that it is heated, the apple will darken nearly half the room or even more. However, if you hang the apple near the wall, it will not get hot; the candle will light up the whole house; and the shadow on the wall where the apple hangs will be scarcely half as large as the apple itself. From this you may infer that the earth-circle is round like a ball and not equally near the sun at every point. But where the curved surface lies nearest the sun’s path, there will the greatest heat be….
The logic here is a little hard (or impossible) to follow, but you’ll note that the author clearly understood the earth to be a sphere.
This was written in Norway in the 13th Century, a couple centuries before Columbus’ voyage. Even I, rabid Scandinavophile that I am, can’t pretend that Norway was a center of scientific sophistication in the Middle Ages. If the Norwegians knew the world was round, you can be pretty sure everybody else did too.
Of course the simplest way to avoid making mistakes in talking about Columbus is to talk about Leif Eriksson instead, and to make mistakes about him.
Which is what I did Saturday night.
I think Minnesota should declare war on Italy.
Let’s liven things up a bit.
I don’t think declaring war in Italy is generally considered an act of particular valor…
Besides that, Columbus was from Spain. And in other news from 1492, Queen Isabella kicked all the Jews out of Spain and reinstated the Inquisition, from what I’m told. I also heard that Columbus offered a reward to his crew for the first person to see land, and when a man claimed to have seen the moon glinting off a distance shoreline, Columbus said he had seen it himself the night before–the cheat.
As I understand it, recent DNA tests have led some experts to believe that Columbus was not an Italian but a Catalan (a native of Catalonia). But it’s a matter of dispute.
A few years back somebody even wrote a book trying to prove that Columbus was Norwegian. I’m not making this up.
And the “first sighting” cheat, as far as I know, is perfectly true.
But my friend John Eidsmoe regards Columbus highly, for reasons he explains in his book Columbus and Cortez: Conquerors for Christ.
Everyone else is wrong, especially these so-called Lars and Phil characters who lurch around at this otherwise decent blog.
War is the answer. If we are suddenly unsure of Chris’ nationality, let Minnesota declare war on Italy, Spain, Norway, the District of Columbia, India, San Salvador, Cuba and Rhodesia.
And to further make our point against Pacifism, let us bomb the entire Pacific.
Yes, lurch around.
Samuel, I see no flaw in your argument.
We actually re-did the calculations of Erotothsenes in our Astronom,y section at St. John’s.
Easier than Ptolomy.
Seafaring people in particular have known that the earth is round; going out to sea proves it.
Set out to sea in your boat, and watch the shore recede. If the Earth were flat, everything in view would look smaller the further out you went… but you’d see everything.
In the real world, this is not what you observe, As you move away from the shore, the lowest parts of the shore vanish; the highest parts remain visible. In the case of a mountainous area, the effect is pronounced. Well out from shore, you can see the top of the mountain, but not the base.
The only shape that explains this is that the surface from which you are viewing is round. *Big*, but round.