![\"\"](\"http:\/\/www.john-howe.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2011\/12\/Edge-of-the-World-port.jpg\" "\\"Edge-of-the-World-port\\"")
<\/a><\/center><\/div>\n<\/td>\n<\/tr>\n<\/tbody>\n<\/table>\nThe story was taught to endless ranks of school kids ( including me). The only problem is it\u2019s not true.
\nIt was all made up.
\nLike so much \u201chistory\u201d, what really happened (or in this case didn\u2019t) only plays the supporting role. This business of medieval man thinking the Earth to be flat, of sailors fearing to sail beyond sight of land because they might \u201cfall off the edge\u201d, is a fairy tale. Made up wholesale, in the 18th and 19th centuries.<\/p>\n
We seem to love our ancestors as much as we seem to deplore them. We treat them as superstitious and ignorant, all the while investing them with secret lore and lost knowledge. (In the Middle Ages, man thought the world was flat but he could turn mercury into gold.) It is an exceedingly ambiguous attitude, concomitant with a combined nostalgia for the imagined mysteries and disapproval of the supposed backwardness of the past. We deal in heritage, thinking we are dealing in history. (Of THAT subject, more – and at some length – another time.)<\/p>\n
So, in the mid-19th century, after millenia of living on a ball variously floating or upheld in space (just where the earth was in the universe and how it stayed \u201cup\u201d was a matter of great speculation, along the lines of angels on heads of pins, the mores of the inhabitants of the Antipodes and the nature of Hell, but apart from a handful of declarations and the odd curious notion in the head of an astronomer from Alexandria, the Earth was a ball to all), with a deft retroactive stroke of political propaganda, it came to be understood that during humanity\u2019s great dark period between the Roman Empire (collapsed) and the Renaissance (brightly dawning) our forefathers fearfully huddled inland and if they had to venture out on the wine-dark sea, did so with the dread of being swept off the edge or munched by krakens and other sea monsters.<\/p>\n
The first to launch the medieval Flat Earth was John William Draper.\u00a0 Draper likely had no real interest in the history of the shape of the Earth; he had the anti-Darwinists in his sights. Darwin\u2019s \u201cThe Origin of Species\u201d had touched off a barrage of indignant attacks from conservative and religious circles. Draper rose in Darwin\u2019s defence. He set out to prove that obscurantist theology had long held progress and science in check – anyone foolhardy enough to contradict the Church was persecuted and mocked (when not tortured and obliged to recant). According to him, it was a long-standing war, and this was only the most recent skirmish.<\/p>\n
Science and Roman Catholicism, according to Draper, had been waging war on progress since the fall of the Roman Empire, and those brave few who upheld terrestrial sphericity in the face of religion were so many martyrs in the conflict. (Protestantism and science could get along he suggested, since the Protestant church took a more lenient or at least less united stand on men and monkeys.) Columbus became the hero of \u201cThe History of Conflict Between Religion and Science<\/a>\u201d, published in 1873. \u201cScience has never sought to ally herself with civil power. She has never subjected anyone to mental torment, physical torment, least of all death, for the purpose of promoting her ideas\u201d<\/em> said Draper, considering that humanity was making slow but steady progress despite theological dragging of feet. To better discredit critics of Darwinism and evolutionary theory, what better strategy than to paint them as the direct descendants of obscurantists and dogmatic persecutors of rational science. Draper called Lactantius to the witness box, and quoted (or misquoted, to be more exact) Saint Augustine as representing the \u201cofficially sanctioned\u201d view of the world. Any who opposed their \u201cuniversally accepted\u201d views were precursive heros of modernity braving the wrath of religious obscurantism. The \u201cleyenda nigra\u201d, the \u201cBlack Legend of Spain\u201d, initially popularized in Queen Elizabeth\u2019s time, was dragged out and dusted off and propped up in the public eye. The Spanish Inquisition – all-hearing, all-knowing – was held to have stopped all scientific progress for half a millenium. According to Draper, they were the shock troops and strategists in the War Against Learning. \u201cThe antagonism we thus witness between Religion and Science is the continuation of the struggle that commenced when Christianity began to attain political power.\u201d<\/em><\/p>\n Next to promote the conflict theory came Andrew Dickson White, guns also blazing. (He had the Protestants as well as the Catholics in his sights.) Up in arms over fundamentalists of every kind, immigration from Europe (mongrel hordes of Roman Catholic Italian and Irish arriving en masse and tainting American blood was the platform of the thankfully short-lived Know-Nothing Party) and anything else he felt threatened America, White was determined to show the New World as a new departure for society and humanity. Thus, anything that smacked of Catholicism was anathema – if the Church had held that the Earth was flat for the whole of its existence, it had nothing to offer a modern society. Logically enough, Christopher Columbus, with his practical skills and bravery in the face of the unknown, was a leading exemplar in this crusade. Had he not braved the western ocean with the same solid bravoura with which he braved the corrupt and dogmatic church and Inquisition? All these were naturally considered prime American qualities, and Columbus came to typefy a renewed Age of Enlightenment. And of course, to make this sterling endeavour shine all the more brightly, it was necessary to blacken the past – in a good composition, contrast is everything. White\u2019s two-volume \u201cHistory of the Warfare of Science with Theology in Christendom<\/a>\u201d did just that, with wide and vigorous strokes.<\/p>\n Now, the truth of the matter is that medieval man generally considered (when he needed to consider the question) that the world was indeed a ball. There was debate over whether or not humans could be found in the hypothetical antipodes, but basically what Augustine said was the shape of the Earth, not being explicitly stated in the Bible, was a matter to be left to philosophers, cartographers and astronomers. The different viewpoints were not considered antagonistic. Augustine even went as far as to say that literal interpretation of Biblical texts was hardly the point, they were metaphores and images.<\/p>\n Nor did sailors live in fear of falling off the edge of the world or being parboiled in the waters at the equator. T and O maps, deemed useless by modern authors to get from A to B were not used by sailors or voyagers any more than a drawing of the solar system from a high school atlas would be given to astronauts to guide them to the Moon. The coastline of a 14th-century portolan of the Mediterranean, laid over a satellite view of the same, is practically exact down to the last detail. The other principal type of medieval traveller\u2019s map was very close to what any internet route planner will offer : a detailed list of localities and distances, with helpful instructions,\u00a0 between departure and destination.<\/p>\n One of the main culprits in the inventing of the Flat Earth, curiously enough, is Washington Irving. Best remembered for headless horsemen and well-aimed pumpkins, Irving possesed a prolific pen, travelled widely and wrote a good deal of wishful history. (He also coined the name \u201cGotham\u201d for New York, as well as the saying \u00ab the almighty dollar \u00bb.) Irving spent three years researching in Spain before he wrote his \u201cLife and Discoveries of Christopher Columbus\u201d. (What exactly he researched is a matter of debate, but it certainly wasn\u2019t anything that was going to rain on his gripping tale of one lone pragmatist against a legion of dogmatic persecutors that must have been assembling in his mind.) Published in 1828, Irving\u2019s book was reprinted 175 times before the end of the century.<\/p>\n \u201cSuch was the period when a council of clerical sages was convened in the collegiate convent of St. Stephen, to investigate the new theory of Columbus. It was composed of professors of astronomy, geography, mathematics, and other branches of science, together with various dignitaries of the church, and learned friars. Before this erudite assembly, Columbus presented himself to propound and defend his conclusions. He had been scoffed at as a visionary by the vulgar and the ignorant; but he was convinced that he only required a body of enlightened men to listen dispassionately to his reasonings, to insure triumphant conviction.\u201d<\/em> (Irving, Life & Voyages, p. 61).<\/p>\n <\/p>\n
\nEven Copernic was drafted into Draper\u2019s ranks. (That the debate in Copernic\u2019s case was his heliocentric view as opposed to Ptolemaic geocentric and had nothing to do with the actual shape of the Earth he conveniently overlooked.) Columbus, by sailing to America, and Magellan, by circumnavigating the globe, had won a decisive battle, but the war was far from over.<\/p>\n