<< Pedagogical techniques brought about the flat earth concept of
history, and not any real historical context that Cristobal Colon
would have recognized, as Russell's HM book review reported.
Pointing to Columbus' third trip to the New World, and the Jamaica
'shipwrecked' sailors were saved by Columbus easily predicting an
eclipse. Note that Columbus had to know the proper longitude of
Jamaica, time-wise, to scare the natives into supplying food to them. >>
Christopher Columbus's son Fernando wrote the following about what people
thought up to 1492:
"Others argued, as some Portuguese had done, about the sea-route to
Guinea, asserting that if a voyage was made due west, as the Admiral
[Christopher Columbus] proposed, it would be impossible to return to
Spain, because the earth was round. These men were convinced that men
who left the hemisphere known to Ptolemy would be going downhill, and
so could not return; for that would be like sailing a ship to the top
of a mountain: a thing that ships could not do even in the most powerful
of winds."
Fernando is not quite an eyewitness, having been 4 years old in 1492,
but he must have based his account on what he heard from his father and
contemporaries of his father.
[The above quote is from Bjo"rn Landstro"m _Columbus: the story of Don
Cristo/bal Colo/n_ New York: Macmillan, 1966, page 39. The quote is from
Fernando Colo/n _Historia del S. D. Fernando Colmbo, Nella quale s'ha
particulare e vera relatione dell; Ammiraglio D. Cristoforo Colombo,
suo padre, Nuovamente di lingua spanuola tradotte nell; Italiana dal S.
Alfonso Ulloa_ Venice: 1571.]
That was Columbus's fourth voyage, not his third, on which he got stranded
at Jamaica. On his second voyage, on 14 September 1494, Columbus attempted
to use an eclipse of the moon to compute his longitude, by measuring the
time differential from what his almanac predicted for Nuremberg. His results
placed him 23 degrees too far west (that is, between his measurements and the
almanac, he was off by about an hour and a half).. However, at least he knew
the approximate correction to make to his Nuremberg almanac.
By the way, Columbus got stranded on Jamaica because neither he nor his men
could figure out their longitude while sailing the Panama coast.
James A. Landau