MAX EBB — E
ven though I'm mostly working at home these days, my company still expects me to be at my desk. But we also get Columbus Day off, so I was free to take one of my newly discovered favorite long walks, through the nearby university campus. I used to avoid it for the crowds, but with most of the classes online this semester and the dorms less than half full, it's a very pleasant, parklike environment. So it was with much surprise that I came upon a fairly large crowd assembled in front of the Geography Building. It didn't take long to discover what was going on. The object of all the attention was a small statue of Christopher Columbus. He was holding a cross-staff, the 15th-century forerunner of the sextant. Of course, there is no such thing as "Columbus Day" on campus. It's "Indigenous Peoples Day," and the statue had to be dealt with. The main issue on the agenda, according to the speaker standing on the building's front steps, barely comprehensible through an improvised portable amp, was deciding on the most appropriate way to deface this symbol of brutal colonial oppression. But the amplified voice had something familiar about it, and suddenly I realized that I knew who was behind that Hawaiian-print face mask. The speaker was none other than Lee Helm, a graduate student in naval architecture and a racing navigator in demand. "We could, like, replace that cross-staff with a globe," she implored the crowd. "But it would be a special globe, only about 12,000 miles in circumference, and totally leave out the Americas, North and South. It's the globe that Columbus imagined, with the Far East like, just a couple thousand miles west of Europe. We could expose him as one of the poorest excuses for a navigator in all of maritime history!" However, the crowd wanted to do something a lot less subtle, like cut off his hands or bind the statue in chains. I took a bearing on Lee when she disappeared into the mob, estimated course and speed, tightened the elastics on my N95, and pushed through the crowd on an intersecting course. "Good speech, Lee," I said when I finally maneuvered into hailing distance. "But don't you think perhaps we could judge historical figures in the context of their own time? Columbus might have
done some nasty stuff to the Arawaks and Caribs, but don't you have to admit he was a great navigator?" "No way, Max," she answered, shaking her head. "Even for his own time, he was a total schnook. Read up on the mutinies, and why he came home from his third voyage as a prisoner in chains." "But as a visionary and a navigator …" "Wrong again, Max. He might have been OK at dead reckoning, but his vision was all wrong and his navigation sucked. For crossing an ocean, he couldn't navigate his way out of a 15thcentury paper bag." I was about to point out that he did manage to make four trips to the Caribbean, but Lee cut me off with the real story. "He was clueless about the actual size of the Earth," Lee explained. "He rejected the science, instead treating
"Well, Columbus could use a crossstaff," I said. "Even that statue shows him with one." "That’s the thing, Max. I don't think he could use a cross-staff. And actually he had a quadrant and an astrolabe, but no cross-staff, and the backstaff wasn't invented yet. His log from the first trip shows major confusion, with observations that he believed put him at 40-something latitude instead of 20something. It's all in his log. That's not just experimental error; he didn't know how to read the thing. There's credible speculation that he was reading from the quadrant's tangent scale instead of from the angle scale." "Well, I've made the same mistake on my slide rule," I confessed. "During an exam. Right in that building over there, in fact." "Later in 1492, probably in Haiti," Lee added, "he recorded a latitude as 34 degrees when he was really at 19." "That's pretty bad for a noon sight," I agreed. "But ol' Chris never sorted it out," Lee insisted, "and he gave up on noon sights during that first voyage. Point is, he did not understand the data that indicated the real size of the Earth, even then. So he actually believed it was only a couple of thousand miles across the Atlantic to the Orient, and he sold the idea to his sponsors." "And the rest," I said, "is history. He cruised around the Caribbean searching for the Spice Islands and other commercial resources of the Far East with no luck." "But wait, there's more. Columbus fraudulently tried to cover it up. There was a lunar eclipse on September 15, 1494, on the second voyage. Columbus knew the predicted local time of the eclipse back in Europe." "Wait, Lee. You're saying he couldn't figure out noon sights, but could predict an eclipse?" "Like no way. He didn't figure this out himself. Had a copy of Johann Müller's ephemeris from 1474, which predicted lunar eclipses within about 20 minutes." "They could do that in 1494, even though they still thought the Earth was the center of the universe?" I remembered some of this history. "Copernicus didn't publish his heliocentric view of the solar system till 1543." Lee explained that as far as celestial navigation and the early versions of
"Back to the accomplishments of Columbus," I said. "Dubious or otherwise. Isn't he the only person in history to actually pull off the infamous lunar-eclipse scam? Seems he deserves some recognition, good or bad, for that stunt."
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the ancient texts from Marinus of Tyre and Claudius Ptolemy as gospel. Tyre proclaimed the Eurasian land mass spanned 15 hours of longitude, leaving only nine hours, which is like, 135 degrees of longitude, for the size of the Atlantic Ocean between Europe and Asia." "But did anyone back then really know?" I asked, noting that Lee pronounced both the P and the t in Ptolemy. "Like, for sure. Measuring the angle of the sun above the horizon at noon is not hard, especially if you're on land where you can be precise with a plumb bob and a quadrant. And every navigator who could use a cross-staff knew that the sun at noon measured one degree lower in the sky for every 60 miles they moved to the north. So the fact that the Earth was about 21,600 nautical miles around was no secret to anyone who bothered to check it out."
