2.1.39 to 2.1.40

Calculations Contrary to common lore, Columbus never thought that the world was flat. Educated Europeans had known that the Earth was spherical in shape since at least the early 7th century, when the popular Etymologies of St. Isidore of Sevilla were produced in Spain. Columbus's miscalculations, such as they were, lay in other areas. First, his estimate of the sea distance to be crossed to Cathay was wildly inaccurate. Columbus rejected Ptolemy's estimate of the journey from West to East overland, substituting a far longer one based on a chart (now lost) supplied by the Florentine mathematician and geographer Paolo Toscanelli, and on Columbus's preference for the calculations of the classical geographer Marinus of Tyre. Additionally, Columbus's reading primarily of the 13th-14th-century Venetian Marco Polo's Travels gave him the idea that the lands of the East stretched out far around the back of the globe, with the island of Cipango—itself surrounded by islands—located a further 1,500 miles (2,400 km) from the mainland of Cathay. He seems to have argued that this archipelago might be near the Azores. Columbus also read the seer Salathiel-Ezra in the books of Esdras, from the Apocrypha (especially 2 Esdras 6:42, in which the prophet states that the Earth is six parts land to one of water), thus reinforcing these ideas of the proportion of land- to sea-crossing. The mistake was further compounded by his idiosyncratic view of the length of a degree of geographic latitude. The degree, according to Arabic calculators, consisted of 56 2/3 Arab miles, and an Arab mile measured 6,481 feet (1,975. 5 metres). Given that a nautical mile measures 6,076 feet (1,852 metres), this degree amounts to approximately 60. 45 nautical miles (112 km). Columbus, however, used the Italian mile of 4,847 feet (1,477. 5 metres) for his computations and thus arrived at approximately 45 nautical miles (83 km) to a degree. This shortened the supposed distance across the sea westward to such an extent that Zaiton, Marco Polo's great port of Cathay, would have lain a little to the east of present-day San Diego, California, U. S. ; also, the islands of Cipango would have been about as far north of the Equator as the Virgin Islands—close to where Columbus actually made his landfalls.