Re: Talking of old jokes

On Fri, 30 Jun 2006 22:57:33 GMT, in article
<J1p3rx.A2D@xxxxxxxxxxx> whheydt@xxxxxxxxxxx "Wilson Heydt"
wrote:

In article <e845d7$pii$1@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>,
Paul Ciszek <nospam@xxxxxxxxxx> wrote:

In article <20060630.0937.106933snz@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>,
David G. Bell <dbell@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:

I'd even be willing to believe evidence of northern European contact
pre-dating Columbus, and not being the Vikings, but I'm sceptical about
tales of refugee Templar Knights. Still, the Columbus story has a lot of
myth in the popular version.

So, how about the "conspiracy theory" that Columbus new the true size
of the Earth (as did most scholars) but had some knowledge beforehand
that there was a land mass west of Europe, so he made up a bogus pitch
based on a much smaller Earth just to get some ships and funding?

The story I've read is that the initial Ptolemaic Egyptian Greek
measurement of the size of the Earth was done correctly by,
what's-his-face nicknamed 'Beta'. The work was redone *wrong* by
another Greek (Hipparchus?) giving a circumference of about 18K
miles. The Portugeuse used the larger earlier) figure, which is the
correct one and refused to back Columbus because the
thought--correctly--that he couldn't cross 12K miles of ocean.
Columbus convinced the Spanish that the smaller--wrong--figure was
right and he only need to cross 5k miles of open ocean--which was
just barely possible with the existing tech. As it turns out, even
if it had been only 5K miles, he probably wouldn't have made it,
since he barely made the 3K he actually did have to cover. And, of
course, the Portuguese were correct, but *nobody* anticipated a
couple of extra continents being in the way.

There's a plausible mechanism by which he could have learnt of the
basic Viking story, through the Church administration. Remember, the
Greenland Colony was nominally Christian, and the collapse wasn't all
that long before Columbus. So he could have found records suggesting a
forested landmass west of Greenland.

I don't think anyone can point at anything in particular, but that would
have tended to support the smaller Earth. And when did Europeans start
fishing on the Grand Banks? John Cabot's voyage was in 1497, but there's
a few vague mentions of earlier Basque fishermen.

Newfoundland might, of course, have been interpreted as another, warmer,
Iceland, rather than as the outlier of a continent.


--
David G. Bell -- SF Fan, Filker, and Punslinger.

"I am Number Two," said Penfold. "You are Number Six."
.

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