Originally published 11 October 1993
When I was a kid I had a picture book about Christopher Columbus.
One page showed a Spanish galleon sailing off the edge of a flat Earth. This supposedly illustrated the prevailing view of the world at the time of Columbus, and the fate of any sailor foolish enough to venture far out onto the Western Sea.
The next page showed Columbus standing before Queen Isabella with an apple in his hand. “I believe the world is round, like this apple,” he said. “Give me ships and men to sail them and I’ll prove it.”
A further illustration showed imaginary people on the “bottom” half of the globe moving about by grasping hooks with their hands, their feet dangling down into the air. “This is the sort of absurdity that would follow,” say the critics of Columbus, “if we suppose the world’s a sphere.”
Later, in high school, I used Washington Irving’s romanticized History of the Life and Voyages of Christopher Columbus as source for a Columbus Day essay. As I recall, Irving’s book, originally published in 1828, was the only biography of the great explorer in our school library. Never mind: I had heard of Washington Irving, and assumed he was a reliable historian.
Irving gives an account of the council at Salamanca, when scholars and sages of Spain were convened to consider Columbus’s proposed voyage. Against the reasoned arguments of Columbus, the benighted professors quoted Scriptures and the Church Fathers, including this passage from Lactantius: “Is there any one so foolish as to believe that there are antipodes [people who live on the opposite side of the globe] with their feet opposite to ours; people who walk with their heels upward, and their heads hanging down?”
Here was historical confirmation for the drawing in my picture book.
And so it was that another child learned one of the 20th century’s most enduring myths.
The myth remains alive and well. Every year, students in my Earth Science class protest my assertion that every educated person in Europe at the time of Columbus — including Isabella and her priestly advisors — knew the world was spherical. The students are disappointed to learn that such knowledge had been part of the Western heritage for nearly 2,000 years.
Columbus’s achievement was considerable, but proving the world was spherical had nothing to do with it. Yet teachers and textbooks continue to propagate the myth. Irving’s romanticized account of Columbus’s life remains on the shelves of libraries (as of course it should), and for all I know is still being used as a presumedly reliable source for essays and papers.
The sphericity of the Earth had been established beyond doubt in the 3rd century B.C. by the Alexandrian Greeks. Eratosthenes, curator of the library at Alexandria, succeeded in determining the circumference of the globe. The greatest of the Alexandrian geographers, Claudius Ptolemy, who lived in the 2nd century A.D., produced a magnificent atlas of the known world that made the sphericity of the globe abundantly clear.
This ancient learning was somewhat eclipsed in Europe during what we used to call the Dark Ages, but it was never lost.
A standard astronomy textbook of the late Middle Ages was the Sphere of Johannes de Sacrobosco. The book offers several evidences for the sphericity of the Earth, including observations of the rising and setting times of stars, the times of eclipses of the moon, the changing elevation of the stars as one moves north and south, and the different views of a signal on the shore by observers at the top and bottom of the mast of a ship at sea.
A copy of Ptolemy’s geographical text, in Greek, was brought to Italy in 1406 and translated into Latin. By the time of Columbus, the learning of the Alexandrians had been fully recovered and taught in the schools. Queen Isabella and her advisors were assuredly confident of the sphericity of the Earth.
Then where did the flat-Earth myth come from, and why is it so enduring?
Jeffrey Burton Russell, a historian at the University of California at Santa Barbara, has written a book analyzing the myth, titled Inventing the Flat Earth. Russell suggests that the flat-Earth myth was a 19th-century invention, partly deriving from Washington Irving’s fanciful life of Columbus, and partly the result of the battles between secularists and religionists sparked by Darwin’s theory of evolution.
Champions of Darwin’s theory professed to find in the Middle Ages a time of ignorance and superstition, encouraged by the Church. Against this dark conspiracy Columbus supposedly stood as a beacon of reason and courage, fighting for truth against the powers of obscuration. Anti-Darwinists, according to this view, were alike in spirit to the reactionary flat-Earth churchmen arrayed against Columbus.
The flat-Earth myth became enshrined in Andrew Dickson White’s influential History of the Warfare of Science with Theology, published in 1895, and the rest, as they say, is history.
Somewhere today another child will read the story of Columbus and the apple; somewhere today another teacher will regale a classroom with Washington Irving’s account of Columbus confronting the obscuring power of superstition. We love our myths. They endure because they satisfy our enduring need for heroes and villains.
