> The idea of sailing west to reach the East is implicit in the world being a sphere, a fact known to all educated men since about 2,000 BC. Aristotle even managed to come up with a measurement within 0.1% of the currently accepted circumference. The only original original idea that Columbus came up with was to arbitarilly reduce the circumference until the sailing ships of the day could make the crossing.
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> His theory was "The world is only half the size all these educated people claim. I will prove it by sailing 3,000 west miles from Portugal and arriving in China".
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> It was an abysmal theory, wrong on every level, and the practice didn't kill him and his crew only because of the happy accident of the Americas being about as far from Europe as he expected Asia to be.
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> winter"Columbus was an idiot"mute

I was talking about the Columbus that we learned about in school. Not the real Columbus. I think those stories about George Washington and the cherry tree came from the same writer.

I've heard that Columbus didn't know where he was going and when he got there he didn't know where he was. It's really remarkable that he made three voyages and found his way back.
Howard