Geo Talkies

Exciting news! In addition to paleontology, we’re diving into the fascinating world of geochemistry. Please join me in welcoming our new Geotalker, João Barreira, currently pursuing his PostDoc at LPG, Angers. He completed his PhD in Brazil while collaborating with IFREMER in France.

Columbus never saw North America

Native Americans had been living on the continent for about 11,000 years, and the Norwegian Vikings had made about two dozen visits to a functioning colony on the continent 500 years before Columbus’s noisy arrival, yet Columbus gets the credit. Why? Because his interesting souvenirs, exaggerated stories, inaccurate charts, and promises of vast wealth excited the imagination of royal courts. Columbus made North America a media event without ever sighting it! Columbus wasn’t trying to discover new lands. His intention was to pioneer a sea route to the rich and fabled lands of the East, made famous more than 200 years earlier in the overland travels of Marco Polo. As “Admiral of the Ocean Sea,” Columbus was to have a fi nancial interest in the trade routes he blazed. He was familiar with Prince Henry’s work and, like all other competent contemporary navigators, knew Earth was spherical. He believed that by sailing west, he could come close to his eastern destination, whose latitude he thought he knew. Because of wishful thinking and dependence on Ptolemy’s data, however, Columbus made the smallest estimate of Earth’s size by any navigator in modern history. He assumed Earth to be only about half its actual size! Not surprisingly, Columbus mistook the New World for his goal of India or Japan. He thought that the notable absence of wealthy cities and well-dressed inhabitants resulted from striking the coast too far north or south of his desired latitude. He made three more trips to the New World but went to his grave believing that he had found islands off the coast of Asia. He never saw the mainland of North America and never realized the size and configuration of the continents the future of which he had so profoundly changed.

Credit: Tom Garrison (Essentials of Oceanography)