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Originally Posted by BoredSocial
We're talking influence for good or evil here. I agree about the effects of his influence.
OK, we agree about the nature of his influence. What I was disagreeing with was that the only thing you mentioned about Columbus having done or influenced was having discovered the New World. You mention this twice. And that is what he is most widely mis-remembered for. However he wasn't the first (or even the first European) to discover the New World. What you don't mention is the direct influences he actually did have, which is what I brought up. If you want to give him credit for a history-altering discovery, make it the European discovery of gold in the New World. Of course, he took it as a given he would find gold in Asia, given Marco Polo's descriptions, so he didn't consider finding gold to have been a new discovery.
Quote:
Originally Posted by BoredSocial
The earlier explorers did what they did using a different route and because of their extremely lacking shipbuilding they didn't stick.
When you mention "earlier explorers" I am not sure that you are referring to the same people I am. The first people to discover the New World were Asian nomads, sometime between 15,000 and 40,000 years ago. Their descencdants were the first people to discover gold in the New World. The Captain of the first European ship to discover the New World was either Gunnbjorn Ulfsson or Bjarni Herjulfsson (depending on whether one considers Greenland to be part of the New World). Neither Gunnbjorn nor Bjarni were explorers. They were traders blown off course by storms.
Inadequate shipbuilding had nothing to do with the failure of the Norse colonies in Greenland and Canada. (There is an argument that Norse knarrs were actually a more capable design than Spanish caravelles.) The Greenland colonies eventually failed because of climate change. The Canadian colonization attempts failed because of insufficient critical mass, and a combination of poor diplomacy and insufficiently advantaged weapons systems. Both groups of colonies failed because their products were not sufficiently valuable and the homeland on which the were based was too small to provide adequate investment for colonial self-sufficiency.
Quote:
Originally Posted by BoredSocial
I'm not making the 'columbus as a great man' argument here. I'm basically saying he was an idiot who convinced people to make a very bad investment from a Reward/Risk point of view that happened to pay off pretty ****ing hard. Him claiming to have found Asia on his deathbed is further proof of this.
Perhaps Columbus was less an idiot than some people think. Columbus wasn't original in thinking the world was round and that one could reach Asia from Europe by sailing west. He shared the consensus view that the earth was a sphere and that the land mass of Europe/Asia/Africa and its offshore islands was all the land there was, surrounded by
the ocean. The reason nobody had tried a westward voyage to Asia was that the approximately correct calculations of the day showed that it would be too far a trip to consider.
There is good reason to consider that Columbus undertook the voyage because practical knowledge he acquired about the distance westward across the ocean to land indicated it was far less than the prevailing theoretical westward distance to Asia. This knowledge would have come from seafarers and documentary sources. The news of the Norse discoveries was available in southern Europe. Adam of Bremen had written about the Norse discoveries in the 11th century. Gudrid Thorbjarnardottir, the woman who gave birth to the first European born in the New World - Snorri Thorfinnson - made a pilgramage to Rome about one generation before Adam's writings. There is reason to believe Basque fishermen had been fishing off Newfoundland for years before Columbus. The knowledge of Vinland was not lost in Iceland and Iceland was trading with western Europe. Columbus's son, Fernando, wrote about his father having visited Iceland and a land to its west fifteen years before his famous voyage of "discovery".
So there is a very real reason to believe that Columbus may have heard about land across the Ocean and that this gave rise to his estimate of the distance he thought he had to go. Faced with practical evidence from seafarers apparently contradicting the theories of mathematicians, Columbus chose to believe the stories, and to believe that part of the theory was wrong. His mistake was to choose to believe that the circumference calculation was wrong while the "one land mass" idea was correct.
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Originally Posted by BoredSocial
Basically when it comes to being influential sometimes it really is better to be lucky than good.
Some say the same applies to winning donkaments. Others say you need to be both good and lucky.