CHAPTER 2

The Myth of the Flat Earth

As morning dawned over the Caribbean on October 12, 1492 (according to the European reckoning of time), three Spanish caravels sat anchored off a small coral island in what is now the Bahamas. The evening before, at about 10 P.M. as the ships were sailing westward, someone onboard had noticed a light in the darkness, apparently a bonfire, indicating that land was near. Now in daylight, as the crew gazed with relief at this unknown but welcome terra firma, a small boat was lowered and several of the men went ashore, led by Christopher Columbus. His biographer, Paolo Emilio Taviani, describes the scene:

The Admiral—at this moment Columbus acquired the title he so coveted—went ashore in an armed boat accompanied by [others]. He stepped on the fine white sand, kissed it, raised his eyes to heaven, thanked God, and wept. That emotional and joyous crying in which the Genoese and the Spanish captains joined, before an awestruck crowd of naked men and women—that crying summed up the outstanding significance of the most important encounter in human history. Encounter is more accurate than discovery because it was not humanity discovering a new and deserted land but two portions of humanity, two worlds, coming together that morning.⁴

However, discovery has long been the word of choice in the recounting of American history, whose starting point for historians has nearly always been that momentous landfall of 1492. Now, traditional history is being assailed as woefully incomplete. “It has been conventional,” notes anthropologist Alice Beck Kehoe, “to treat American history as if it were identical with United States history, [but] such a myopic view cuts students off from the context in which the United States developed, a larger history that will not go away.”⁵

So our traditional history turns out not to be as cut and dried as we all thought. “The past is nowhere,” says Kehoe, “It cannot be discovered.”⁶ In the words of historian Alexandre Koyré:

The past, exactly because it is the past, forever remains inaccessible to us: it vanishes, it is no longer there; we cannot touch it, and it is only starting from its vestiges and its traces, its still-present remains—books, monuments, documents which have escaped the destructive action of time and men—that we try to reconstruct it. But objective history—the history that men make and undergo—cares very little about the history of historians; it lets things without value subsist and destroys pitilessly the most important documents.⁷

Equally problematic is the simple fact that written history is the creation of historians, mortals with their own limitations and prejudices. And, since it is the victors who are left to tell the story, we necessarily get a slanted view. “Until lions have their historians,” says an African proverb, “tales of the hunt shall always glorify the hunters.” No wonder then, as stated by Princeton Professor Robert P. George, “often times what we know about history is just propaganda.”⁸

In the end, as master historian Will Durant observed after writing his multi-volume world history, “Our knowledge of any past event is always incomplete, probably inaccurate, beclouded by ambivalent evidence and biased historians, and perhaps distorted by our own patriotic or religious partisanship.”⁹

Nowhere is this better seen than in the story of Columbus’ discovery of America, beginning with the myth of a flat earth. Thomas Aquinas and most of the other philosophers and scientists of medieval Europe knew that the earth was round. The question that begs asking is, what notable scholars of the Middle Ages believed the world was flat, and why would their perspective persist for several hundred years, including in American schools? Of the many myths from the Middle Ages, this one is perhaps the most widespread; the idea that the people of Columbus’ day believed the world was flat.

The notable Columbus biographer Paolo Emilio Taviani, in his shorter book on Columbus, stated about the flat earth theory:

Unfortunately, for centuries people outside scholarly circles have thought that Columbus was the first, or among the first, to sense that the earth was round. That belief is incorrect. Classical geographers knew perfectly well that the earth was round. During the Middle Ages the notion was forgotten, but by the middle of the fifteenth century it was an established principle among geographers and scholars in general. By supposing that the earth was round, then, Columbus was doing no more than aligning himself with prevailing thought.¹⁰

The idea that the thinkers of Europe in Columbus’ day actually believed that the earth was flat is preposterous, as pointed out by Thomas E. Woods, Jr. in his book How the Catholic Church Built Western Civilization. Even Andrew Dickson White (1832—1918) in his two-volume History of the Warfare of Science with Theology in Christendom (1896) goes on to say “the evidence is so overwhelming that refuting this myth is like refuting the idea that the moon is made of cheese.”¹¹ Thomas E. Woods further states:

The two figures routinely cited by the myth peddlers are Lactantius (c. 245—325 CE) and the early sixth-century Greek traveler and geographer Cosmas Indicopleustes. Lactantius… believed that the pagan philosophers had no good arguments in favor of the earth as a sphere, and that since the Bible took no position one way or the other the issue was unimportant. At least some of his contrarianism in positing a flat earth can be attributed to his misplaced enthusiasm. But he was in no way representative of the early Christian thinkers and his ideas appear to have had no influence. Cosmas constructed an elaborate if peculiar model of the physical universe that portrayed the earth as flat. And even he did not intend his model to be taken as a literal description of how the cosmos was actually ordered. John Philoponus (490-570 CE) adopted the contrary view of St. Augustine before him and the view that would be expressed by Albert the Great and Thomas Aquinas after him. Some scholars actually used to argue that the views of Cosmas were responsible for the alleged edge-of-the-earth fears of fifteenth-century navigators, even though Cosmas was completely unknown in the fifteenth century. There were no Latin manuscripts of Cosmas in the Middle Ages at all. The first translation of his work into Latin was not undertaken until 1706. It is quite safe to say that Cosmas had absolutely no influence on anyone.¹²

Since Aristotle’s day, it was widely known that the earth was round. The origins and story of the flat earth myth can be found in a useful book by Jeffrey Burton Russell titled, Inventing the Flat Earth: Columbus and Modern Historians.¹³

The fact is that most European philosophers, mariners and thinkers of that day, who studied the heavens, attested to the earth’s spherical shape. Even the common man could effortlessly witness the evidences of a round earth by observing the rise and setting of the sun, ships as they slowly disappeared over the horizon, and lunar and solar eclipses.

With many understanding that the world was round, why did early American scholars and academic leaders allow this myth to be perpetuated in the classrooms of America? Could it be that it helped to advance political agendas, closing the door to any prior claims that other countries might make to the lands of America? Is it any wonder that the early Americans referred to this land, as a “new land,” making the case that the lands of America were free from all other claims and would be ripe for the taking.

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⁴ Paolo Emilio Traviani, Columbus, The Great Adventure (New York: Orion Books, 1991) 100.

⁵ Alice Beck Kehoe, America Before the European Invasions: (London: Longman 2002) 1.

⁶ Alice Beck Kehoe, The Land of Prehistory: A Critical History of American Archeology: (New York: Routledge, 1998) 230.

⁷ Pietro Redondi, Galileo: Heretic (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1987) ix.

⁸ Robert P. George, “Natural Law, God and Human Rights”, Wheatley Institution lecture Provo, Utah, January 26, 2011.

⁹ Will and Ariel Durant, The Lessons of History (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1968) 11-12.

¹⁰ Paolo Emilio Taviani, Christopher Columbus: The Grand Design (London: Orbis, 1985) 17.

¹¹ Andrew Dickson White (1832—1918) in his two-volume History of the Warfare of Science with Theology in Christendom (1896)

¹² See: Thomas E. Woods, Jr. in his book How the Catholic Church Built Western Civilization. And see: Andrew Dickson White (1832—1918) in his two-volume History of the Warfare of Science with Theology in Christendom (1896)

¹³ Jeffrey Burton Russell, Inventing the Flat Earth: Columbus and Modern Historians; (New York: Praeger, 1991).