Did Christopher Columbus Really Try to Prove the Earth was Round?

For many years, history has seen Christopher Columbus as a type of crusader against the superstitions of his contemporaries. Many people today still believe that he set out in the Nina, the Pinta, and the Santa Maria to prove that the earth was round. Unfortunately, that belief does not match the historical facts. It was his ignorance that allowed Columbus to do what he did, not his foresight. We have revisionist historians like Washington Irving to thank for the common misconception that Columbus was a light in the darkness of Medieval superstition.

The fact is that most learned people in Columbus' day knew that the earth was round. Indeed, it was Aristotle himself who first popularized this belief in 3rd century BC. After observing an eclipse, he correctly reasoned that the eclipse was caused by the earth's shadow being cast on the moon. He realized that this observation implied a spherical earth. The earth could not be a disc or any other shape, because it would cast a different shadow depending on its relation to the sun. Only one shape, a sphere, can cast the same shadow with whatever angle you light it.

Of course, scholarship declined after the fall of the Roman Empire, so the myth that the earth was flat regained some popularity. Nevertheless, many scholars gave their own reasons for why they believed the earth was round, so the idea of a round earth never died. After the Renaissance and the reintroduction of the classical texts, the idea that the earth was flat became even less popular. By the time that Christopher Columbus "sailed the ocean blue" in 1492, very few educated peopled would have argued in favor of a flat earth. That belief may have persisted for a time among the illiterate masses, but Columbus had nothing to prove about the shape of the earth to the scholars of the Spanish court. They believed that the earth was round the same way he did.