KK> Chris's estimate of the earth's circumference came from a guy named
 KK> Poseidonus, who did his work about a century after Eratosthenes. Like
 KK> E., P.'s methodology was fine but his data were far from exact. E.
 KK> worked out the land distance from Alaxandria to some southern city by
 KK> estimating how far feright camels could travel in a day.  P. used the
 KK> time it took a ship to travel from port to port on the ocean sea. P.
 KK> ended up with a circumference of about 20,000 - odd miles.  This was
 KK> reported by Ptolemy and eventually got to ol' Cristoforo.
   I'm not sure just how much geographical knowledge Christopher had but we
presume he was well acquainted with sailing the Mediterranean and regardless
of where it came from, the educated populace of Europe knew the world to be
round and speculation of finding a shorter and more direct trade route to the
spice and other goodies in the East was not an unreasonable guess.  Doing it
for "gold and God" was not unusual either as historically it can be viewed as
a continuation of the ousting of the Muslims from Spain which was occuring at
the same time.  In the same manner, the English settlement of the colonies 
an
also be viewed as a natural westward movement with Ireland as the first step.
The settled islands off the coast of Africa and Spain were quite well known
and setttled and the general populace in modern times hardly ever places the
voyages of Columbus in the context of the previous work of Prince Henry the
Navigator and the succeeding work of the Spanish chief pilots who within
twenty-five years after the Columbus voyages had mapped the coast of the
"Nuevo Mundo" quite thoroughly.  This was done by people whose name are not
household ones as Columbus is. 
 KK> Interestingly, Columbus may have had good reason to think there was land
 KK> 4-5,000 miles to the west, even if he still thought it was China.  He
 KK> probably knew that just 10-some years before, the Portuguese and Swedes
 KK> had visited Nova Scotia and Newfoundland.  (In case you ever wondered
 KK> what a Latin word like Labrador is doing up there in Canada, well, it's
 KK> Portuguese.)
   All of this is interesting and possibly even true in some respects but,
alas, to the moment, it's still historically only speculation.  One of the
first speculations I learned in college about Columbus was that he MIGHT have
sailed in the service of England before he did so for Spain.  We just don't
know.  
 FM> Why NOT knock him down further.  For all of his troubles and even
 KK> the FM>near-conciousness (when he saw the fresh waters of the Orinoco on
 KK> the third FM>voyage) that he was in "another world" his "masters"
 KK> deprived him of his "pay FM>and his heirs only inherited a small strip
 KK> of land along the Honduran coast. FM>You can score big with modern
 KK> bigots by attacking him.
 KK> This all reminds me of "Stan Freberg Presents the United States of
 KK> America," from the fifties:
 KK> INDIAN: What you mean, you discover us?  _We_ discover _you_, right here
 KK> on beach!  Is all how you look at it.
 KK> COLUMBUS: I suppose.
   I can even mythicize that this same story might one day be applied to our
efforts to learn more about areas beyond the earth but it seems to me there 
s
something of a difference.  We do still seem to NEED heroes so we readily 
ake
SOME of the individual astronauts into them but the facts are that these
modern enterprises are not so intelligible in any context of the daring of 
ne
man as even the Lindbergh flight was.  A modern spaceship is built and
catapulted into some orbits by a multitude of scientists and technicians
working together with the astronauts' survival due more to the efficiency of
that enterprise than to his own efforts.  As I understand it, there is a
school of thought that holds the presence of human astronauts to be an
unncessary drag on the whole program.  
   Cortes had used his own ingenuity to divide and conquer in the area of 
hat
is now Mexico and the less well-educated Pizarro consciously followed these
same methods to do the same thing in Peru.  Charles V only a few years later
in the early 16th century appointed the first commission to study the
possibility of a canal at Panama and now, behold, the Panama Canal is 
utdated
and probably will be abandoned quite soon to be replaced with a modern
container-hauling system somewhere else in Central America.  
   I still haven't finished my piece speculating about the possibility that
our modern technology could end, somewhat as happened in the Hellenistic Age
of Eratosthenes and others, but perhaps with a more abrupt transition.  
Sincerely, 
                                     Frank
                                                                              
                                                       
--- PPoint 2.05
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