The Flat Earth Theory

It’s almost baffling that Christopher Columbus is as respected as he is and regarded as such a hero when this book makes him seem like a lying, manipulative, murdering colonizer. So I watched this silly little movie to try to figure it, and this is what I came up with: Christopher Columbus is considered a hero because he is a seen as a brave, ambitious man who dared to question accepted science and set out to prove that, despite popular belief, the world was actually round. This is understandable—people like brave and courageous, they like people who think for themselves, they like people who take risks that pay off (Columbus did, after all, prove that the world did not just end with the oceans falling off into space). Unfortunately, it is also very wrong. No educated Westerner believed the world was flat after the 3rd century BC, but when Washington Irving wrote a highly fictionalized fantasy story about Columbus’ life, it became accepted that the Flat Earth theory was way more widely believed that it ever was.

The Flat Earth theory can be found in Mesopotamian writings, the Bible, and ancient Babylonian, Greek, and pre-17th century Chinese cultures. But as early as the 6th century BC, scientists and mathematicians like Pythagoras began to question this theory. Aristotle is said to have disproved the theory in 330 BC, and after that, westerners pretty much accepted that the world was round. In the 1800s, Camille Flammarion’s woodcut L'Atmosphère: Météorologie Populaire depicted a man hanging over the edge of the world where the Earth meets Heaven. Although he was only illustrating a scene from the bible in the style of a 16th century woodcut, many people came to believe that the woodcut was actually from the 1500s, and actually depicted what people believed about the shape of the world. From this, Washington Irving got the idea to incorporate the Flat Earth theory into his Columbus biography, which was largely mistaken as true.