When you reach that page where they say sailors were afraid of the ship falling down the edge of the earth, you know you have reached the moment to close the book.
The awareness of the earth’s sphericity, in fact, has been a cultural heritage since ancient times, and common to many civilizations traditionally mentioned as “ancient” and “medieval”, such as the Hellenistic, the Christian, the Islamic, the Indian, and the Chinese. Philosophers (Pythagoras, Plato, Aristotle, Isidore of Seville, Bede the Venerable), astronomers (Eratosthenes, Al-Farghānī), geographers (Strabo, Ptolemy), and mathematicians (Ibn Hazm, Al-Biruni, Shen Kuo), with very few and marginal exceptions, helped to pass on and fix this awareness essential to navigation and voyages, which only in relatively recent times has been questioned.
This “Myth of the Flat Earth,” part of a rather progressionist narrative, has been pinned down in detail and it is mostly due to some 19th-century American and English authors. What is amazing is how stubborn and reoccurring this fictional view of the “good flat earthers of old” has been over decades.
In any case, what is relevant from our nautical end is to make this clear: it is totally inconceivable that sailors on board a 15th or 16th-century Iberian ship would entertain any idea of a flat earth. Not only is the curvature of the earth very obviously observable when at sea, but it is also that the techno-scientific environment in the oceanic vessels was imbued with a sophisticated cosmography, heir to countless centuries of study. Crews aboard the Columbus and Magellan expeditions, just to name the most prominent examples, may have had other grievances and misgivings, but certainly not that they would fall down the edge of the earth—their “job” made them part of an elite fully acquainted with a wealth of cutting-edge navigational knowledge, perhaps comparable to something between our aviators and astronauts. [Acevedo/Moreno Madrid/Salomoni]
No comments:
Post a Comment