“The Spanish monarchy was at the height of its power and wealth and could easily afford the expedition, so there was absolutely no need for Queen Isabella to sell her jewels,” Fowler says. The explorer first solicited the kings of Portugal, France and England, but they would not hear of financing a voyage to China. There was no need for Spain’s Isabella to hock her royal jewelry. The funds for Columbus’ first voyage came from the wealthy Spanish treasury. Columbus was ill and old beyond his years during the fourth and final journey. On the third voyage, Columbus’ entire flotilla was shipwrecked and marooned for a year on Jamaica. So for the second voyage, all the great adventurers of the day signed on. “Actually, Columbus organized and led four expeditions to the New World.”Īfter the first voyage, Columbus was hailed as a hero. “One of the most popular myths about Columbus was there was only one voyage,” says Weissmann. Twenty-five years after the death of Columbus, in 1521, Magellan circumnavigated the globe and proved that Columbus had been bumping into a new continent, not the outer islands of China. So people of the 15th Century already knew there were northern and southern land masses to the west of Europe. Lewis says Columbus himself had been on expeditions to Iceland, Greenland and to what is now the Hudson Bay. “Historians have a map drawn by Portuguese sailors before the time of Columbus showing the coastline of Brazil,” says Archibald Lewis, professor of history at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst.
Thor Heyerdahl, a more modern explorer and author of “Kon-Tiki,” is leading a three-year research project which he says will prove that Columbus knew about the Viking journeys and settlements in Greenland during the 11th Century. The Vikings in the 11th Century and the Irish in the 6th Century sailed to the North American continent.
In reality, those empires were the Inca in Peru and the Aztec in Mexico.Ĭolumbus was hardly the first European to reach the New World. He persisted in his beliefs because he found gold among the natives and heard rumors of great empires farther inland. The explorer went to his grave convinced he had discovered a short sea route to Asia. When he made land in the Americas, Columbus sent out emissaries to search for the Great Khan of China. Thus, when he landed in the islands we now know as the West Indies, Columbus thought he had reached the outer islands of Asia. But the explorer didn’t know the Western Hemisphere was between Spain and Asia. Rich imaginations took over when others looked at the maps.Ĭolumbus proposed to sail west across the “Western Ocean,” as the Atlantic was then known, to reach the Orient. Sailors described to chart makers the whales, which then were depicted as sea monsters on the edges of some maps. The stories about sea monsters weren’t as terrifying as they seem-at least not to the sailors of the day. “Before 1492, virtually all lettered men and certainly all European navigators knew the Earth was round,” says Gerald Weissmann, M.D., author of “They All Laughed at Columbus.”Īdds Fowler: “Anyone claiming that a ship would sail off the end of the world in 1492 would have been laughed out of court.” The flat Earth theory held sway among common folk during the Dark Ages and was still popular among peasants in the 15th Century, but all educated Europeans knew the Earth was round.
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