![]() Both wine and fresh water were stored aboard the ships in wooden casks. Crews drank mostly wine during their voyage.To stubbornly justify his position, he proposed that the Earth was pear-shaped, making him the laughing stock of Europe. In fact, Columbus died maintaining that he had found a new passage to India. In actuality, Columbus and his crew were over 8,000 miles away from their intended target, offering further proof that his calculation skills were less than exemplary. Later that same year, Columbus sighted Cuba, which he mistook for China, and Hispaniola, which Columbus mistook for Japan. Columbus thought he had landed on India, and named the land the Indies. They spotted land on October 11, 1492, and on October 12, 1492, Columbus and his crew landed on what is likely Watling Island in the Bahamas. His expedition sailed in search of a direct water route to China, India, and Asia - and the valuable spices they held. Columbus’ theory of a pair-shaped Earth made him the laughing stock of Europeįinally finding a country to fund his dubious plan, Christopher Columbus and about 120 crew members set sail from Palos, Spain on August 3, 1492.Clearly, Columbus would have been an extremely unsuccessful engineer. His calculations were not only consistently faulty, they were also based on an incorrect measure for a mile. They all believed that the Earth was far larger than he had calculated – and they were right. Portugal, England, and France all refused to fund Columbus’ voyage because they thought he was a fool. ![]() Rather than discuss the value, or lack thereof, of Columbus and his voyages, we are examining six interesting facts about Columbus - from an environmental engineer’s point of view: In fact, many Americans support either changing the Columbus Day holiday to Indigenous People’s Day as the City of Berkeley, California did in 1992, or of abolishing the holiday altogether. In recent years, there has been a lot of controversy surrounding Columbus, particularly for his treatment of the native peoples he found in the new land. 1490 Map of the world by Henricus Martellus Germanus
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