Coming of Age in the Milky Way by Timothy Ferris Page A

being turned into a state monopoly, an amateurscholar in an era of growing professionalism. “Neither reason nor mathematics nor maps were any use to me,” he wrote of his discovery of America, which he died believing was Asia. “Fully accomplished were the words of Isaiah.” 10 He had in mind Isaiah 11:11: “And it shall come to pass in that day, that the Lord shall set his hand again the second time to recover the remnant of his people, which shall be left, from Assyr’-i-a, and from E’-gypt, and from Path’-ros, and from Cush, and from E’-lam, and from Shi’-nar, and from Ha’-math”—and here came the part that spoke most vividly to Columbus—“and from the islands of the sea.” The “islands of the sea” were the Indies. To “recover the remnant of his people” was what the Portuguese slavers had been doing in Africa, reclaiming lost souls for Christ. Cruel work in the short term, it was thought to be worth it in the end. The chronicler Gomez Eannes de Azurara observed that when Prince Henry, “mounted upon a powerful steed,” picked out 46 slaves for himself from a cargo of 223 men, women, and children huddled wretchedly in a field in Lagos, Portugal, an act that required that he “part fathers from sons, husbands from wives, brothers from brothers,” he “reflected with great pleasure upon the salvation of those souls that before were lost. And certainly his expectation was not in vain, since … as soon as they understood our language, they turned Christians with very little ado.” 11
    Columbus was to carry on a similar crusade in the New World. He longed to reach the East for the usual reasons: Out there was a rich continent, the conquest of which could bring a man wealth and glory and (if Toscanelli could be believed) even wisdom. The brave and irresponsible argument by which he persuaded Queen Isabella of Spain to finance his expedition was not that the world was round—every educated person knew that—but that it was small. * “I have made it my business to read all that has been written on geography, history, philosophy, and other sciences,” 12 Columbus said, but the lamp of his learning cast its narrow beam only on those maps and old geographies that most severely underestimated the dimensions of the terrestrial globe. By marshaling a total of eight different geographical arguments, all tending to make the globe smaller and Asia larger than they really are, Columbus arrivedat the extraordinary conclusion that the distance from the Canary Islands to the Indies was only 3,550 nautical miles—less than one third the actual figure. “Thus Our Lord revealed to me that it was feasible to sail from here to the Indies, and placed in me a burning desire to carry out this plan,” Columbus wrote. 13 His position was simple: God was right and the professional geographers were wrong.
    Columbus’s plan appeared foolhardy to anyone who possessed a realistic sense of the dimensions of the earth. To sail westward to Asia, as the geographers of the court at Castile took pains to inform Columbus, would require a voyage lasting approximately three years, by which time he and his men would surely be dead from starvation or scurvy. * The voyage had been attempted twice before, by Moorish explorers out of Lisbon and by the Vivaldi brothers of Genoa in the thirteenth century; none had been heard from since. Columbus endured ten years of rejection on such grounds by the geographers of the leading courts of Europe. “All who knew of my enterprise rejected it with laughter and mockery,” he recalled, but the pilot light of his destiny shone on undimmed. He replied to the scorn of the experts with his collection of shrunken-earth maps, Aristotle’s assertion “that there is continuity between the parts about the pillars of Hercules and the parts about India,” 15 and Seneca’s prophecy that “an immense land” lay beyond Ultima Thule. All this Columbus delivered up with thundering certitude; one