Columbus and Galileo (belated 10/12 post) [View all]

[JackRiddler]

What myths we make! Columbus didn't get it right that the world was round. This was well-known in Europe at the time. He got it wrong, claiming the Earth was much smaller than the roughly correct measurements of its circumference dating back to Ptolemaic Egypt. He sold the Spanish monarchs on his small-earth theory, making them think it was easier than anyone believed to reach China by going westward from Spain, and so got his expedition financed.

Then he ran into the unexpected continents in between Europe and Asia. This was lucky for him, because otherwise his crews would have starved for food before making even half the way to China - that is, if a mutiny didn't throw him overboard first. And so Colon (the name he actually used) became the first conquistador in the Americas, not a hero but a mass murderer and a tyrant even by his own accounts. Howard Zinn tells this tragic story powerfully in the first chapter of A People's History of the United States.

It's sad that Italian-Americans have adopted Columbus as the figure for their well-earned ethnic holiday in the United States. Once established, this is almost impossible to change. What figure from Italy has anything like the name recognition required to replace Columbus for the Italian holiday? It would have to be someone with the world-historical stature of a Newton, or a Galileo. The mind credited with originating the modern scientific method would be a genuinely worthy and universal hero to celebrate, so it's too bad Galileo was French, right?