Never Mind the Bullocks, Here's the Science (11 page)

In fact, Dr Russell found that the myth was started in the 1830s by a Frenchman and an American, acting independently. One was anti-Church, the other anti-British.

The Frenchman was Antoine-Jean Letronne (1787-1848), an antireligious academic of great renown. He wrote
On the Cosmographical Ideas of the Church Fathers
in 1834, in which he deliberately misrepresented medieval Christians as being scientifically ignorant. His supposed proof for this claim was that they believed in a Flat Earth. But this was untrue—they did not believe in a Flat Earth. (Mind you, in Galileo’s time, the Church persecuted him for advancing a model of the Universe without the Earth at its centre.)

The American whom Dr Russell refers to started his myth-making six years earlier than Antoine-Jean Letronne. He was
Washington Irving (1783-1859), who wrote his history of Christopher Columbus in 1828.

Microsoft and Flat Earth

According to the online BBC News Magazine, Microsoft used the Flat Earth metaphor in an advertisement in mid-2008.

‘Depicting an olden-days ship sailing on rough seas, presumably heading towards the “edge of the world”, the advert is part of a $300m campaign aimed at rescuing the reputation of Windows Vista by comparing its critics to flat-earthers.’

Why Rewrite History?

The year 1828 was a good time for Americans to revisit their European history—and rewrite or, at the very least, change its emphasis.

Around this time, the British were quite adamant that it was a Brit, Sebastian Cabot (c. 1476-c. 1557), who first made landfall in North America.

This could almost be correct, if you ignore the Scandinavians, who got there a few centuries before Cabot. You also have to ignore the fact that Cabot claimed (depending on whom he was speaking to) that he was born in England, or in Venice—so he may not have been British at all. In 1497, Sebastian may (or may not) have travelled with his father, John Cabot, on the ship
Matthew
, under the patronage of the English King Henry VII, to North America. The ship made landfall on 24 June, somewhere around southern Labrador, or Newfoundland, or Cape Breton Island. They believed that they had landed in China.

This British claim rankled with the Americans, who were not especially friendly with the British at that time. (There was that little matter of the War of 1812 between the USA and Great Britain, which lasted from 1812 to 1815.) So it made sense to shift the emphasis to Columbus ‘discovering’ North America.

This was the beginning of the reinvention of Columbus as the Mighty Discoverer of America. In truth, Columbus, in all of his four voyages, had never set foot on the North American continent. The closest he had come to the mainland was some small islands in the (West) Indies, well off the coast.

But Who’s the Man to Do It?

This was very good timing for the American author Washington Irving. He was probably the first American author to earn his living entirely from writing and one of the first who was confident enough to place the locations of his stories in the USA, rather than Europe. He wrote for the person in the street, rather than for the academic. His stories, written in the vernacular, were intended to entertain, rather than to enlighten. For this reason, his stories ‘The Legend of Sleepy Hollow’ and ‘Rip van Winkle’ were wildly successful with the general public.

In 1826, while he was in Paris, he received a letter from Alexander Everett, the US Minister to Spain, inviting him to Madrid. A huge archive of documents relating to Columbus had been painstakingly assembled over a period of more than 35 years, and they were about to be published—in Spanish. Everett suggested that Irving translate these into English, for American readers.

Irving agreed, initially seeing this task as a speedy translation job. But once he began to read the archives, he changed his focus to writing the first major biography of Columbus for the American public.

However, his aim was always to entertain, not educate. He didn’t read all of the archives, nor did he read the documents carefully. He saw his task as writing a ‘romantic history’ rather than an accurate one. And, indeed, such a work would attract more readers than a serious academic work.

His multi-volume work,
A History of the Life and Voyages of Christopher Columbus
, was published in 1828. It was translated into eight languages, and went through 90 printings and editions in Irving’s lifetime alone. It was enormously popular.

Batman

If you read your comics, and go to the movies, you will have heard of Batman. Batman hangs out in Gotham City, keeping it safe for its citizens. Most people know that Gotham City is just another name for New York City.

Washington Irving (of Christopher Columbus fame) was the person who gave us the name of ‘Gotham’. He first used this name in the 17th issue of the literary magazine
Samagundi
on 11 November 1807. ‘Gotham’ is an Anglo-Saxon word meaning ‘Goat’s Town’.

He also gave us the phrase the ‘almighty dollar’.

A Few Problems

However, Irving’s history of Columbus had serious flaws regarding its accuracy.

As one modern historian put it, Irving ‘turned the story of Columbus into a work of art’. To make it more interesting, he ‘created conversations and monologues; he manipulated chronologies for dramatic effect; he staged scenes of dubious validity. Through Irving’s dramatic narrative, numerous Columbian
myths—for example, Queen Isabella’s offer of her jewels to fund the first voyage, a near-fatal shipwreck off Lisbon…—reached a widening audience as Irving’s work grew in popularity.’ Columbus had now become ‘a modern rationalist whose 1492 voyage disproves the alleged medieval belief that the world was flat’.

And, of course, these myths were spread by other writers, who did not check the original sources.

Columbus—Westward Ho!

Columbus wanted to sail west to China, Japan and India.

But he made two major mathematical errors—he calculated the world as too small, and Asia as too wide.

His first error was that he used a value for the circumference of the world that was about 75% of the real value. He assumed that Arabic miles measured the same distance as Roman miles. But they were 75% the length—making the Mysterious East 25% closer.

His second error was that he used the wrong coordinates for Asia. As a result, Asia appeared to extend much much further to the East. So if he were to sail to the west on a planet that was spherical, according to his calculations he would run into the Mysterious East after sailing only 5,000 km.

These errors worked together to make it just barely possible to get to the Mysterious East (if it were located where Columbus claimed). You see, his three ships were quite small (between 20.5 and 23.5 m in length), and could not carry supplies for a very long voyage. But if he ran into a landmass before he ran out of supplies, he and his crew would survive. If Columbus was correct with his calculations, it was possible for him to reach Cathay in his tiny ships before running out of food and water.

So Beginnith the Myth

Washington Irving painted a colourful and dramatic word picture of Columbus trying to convince a board of Flat-Earth Inquisitors (the University Council of Salamanca) that the Earth was round, so that he could get funding.

The eminent biographer Samuel Eliot Morison wrote: ‘Washington Irving, sensing his opportunity for a moving and picturesque scene, took a fictitious account of this nonexistent university council…elaborated it, and let his imagination go completely.’

Irving wrote that Columbus had to deal with ‘an imposing array of professors, friars and dignitaries…[who] came prepossessed against him, as men in place and dignity are apt to be against poor applicants’. This Council supposedly argued, by quoting scripture, that the Earth had to be flat. Suddenly (according to Irving), Columbus was in really big trouble. Even though Columbus was deeply religious, he was now in danger of heresy—which could mean being burned alive at the stake.

The Facts

Like all good myths, there is an element of truth here.

Columbus did indeed meet with learned men. But they were not inquisitors and hooded theologians, they were scientists. Furthermore, there was no University Council of Salamanca—just the scientists at the Royal Court of Queen Isabella and King Ferdinand in Salamanca.

The scientists did not argue with him about whether the Earth was round. Nope, all educated people (especially sailors who had to know some astronomy to navigate) knew that the Earth was a ball.

However, the scientists did point out that Columbus’s distances for getting to the East by sailing west were wildly inaccurate—the distance was closer to 20,000 km, rather than the 5,000 km claimed by Columbus. The scientists were correct, and Columbus would have perished.

But, luckily, he happened across some islands off the American coast that he called the Indies, believing that he had sailed to India. Dr Russell writes: ‘If God or good luck had not put America—the West Indies—in the way to catch him, Columbus and his crews might indeed have perished, not from falling off the Earth but from starvation and thirst.’

The Myth Spreads

Various educational authorities of the day put the Irving version of the Council of Salamanca confrontation in their school textbooks. By the 1860s the myth spread throughout the USA, Europe and elsewhere.

It received an enormous boost after the publication of Darwin’s
Origin of The Species
in 1859. Evolutionists unfairly claimed that Creationists believed in a Flat Earth, as an example of how unscientific they were.

Some even used this Flat Earth myth in ‘the war between science and religion’. David Noble wrote in his foreword to Dr Russell’s
Inventing the Flat Earth
that, ‘It was during the last years of the nineteenth century and the early years of the twentieth century, then, that the voyage of Columbus became such a widespread symbol of the futility of the religious imagination and the liberating power of scientific empiricism.’

How times have changed! At least there’s one thing that Evolutionists and Creationists can agree on—the Earth is not flat.

How to Measure the Distance to the Moon with a Coin (and a Lunar Eclipse and a Clock)

Warning, Will Robinson, Warning! Danger, Will Robinson, Danger!

Please feel free to ignore this section, if you feel like ignoring it. It requires about 10 minutes of hard thinking, and maybe a small coffee or tea—and no interruptions. Get comfortable, and turn off your mobile phone. Switch off the radio, the TV, the music—leave nothing firing but your brain. But it’s fine to have another human reading it with you at the same time—you can help each other.

If you skip straight to page 100, you won’t lose anything.

But if you are able concentrate for 10 minutes, you will know how to measure the distance to the Moon with a coin.

Here we Go…

(Note: Diagrams are not drawn to scale.)

Aristarchus of Samos lived from 310 BC to around 230 BC. He measured the distance to the Moon using a lunar eclipse, a clock and simple geometry.

The Ancient Greeks could see that the Sun and the Moon are almost exactly the same apparent size in the sky. (In reality, the Moon is about 400 times smaller than the Sun, but it’s about 400 times closer, so it ‘appears’ the same size.)

1
The Sun and the Moon appear the same apparent size in the sky.

Get a coin (say, 1 cm in diameter). How far do you have to hold it from your eye to exactly block out the Moon? About 108 cm (but you need an exceptionally long arm). Imagine the shape of a cone between your eye and the Moon—this cone is 1 unit across at the base, and 108 units long.

So if you are standing on the Earth, and you look at the Moon, you are setting up a triangle with the height:base ratio of 108:1.

2
If you hold a 1 cm (in diameter) coin on the end of a stick about 108 cm from your eye, it will exactly block out the Sun, or the Moon.