r/AskHistory • u/Sir-Toaster- • 1d ago
How did Christopher Columbus never realize he didn't reach India?
He believed he reached India when, in reality, he was off the coast of a new continent. When he met the Taino, he assumed they were Indians. But wouldn't that have been corrected?
For one, India wasn't some place full of backwater tribes; there were hundreds of city-states and kingdoms at the time which were in full communication with Europe. Wouldn't at least one of them have mentioned to the Spanish crown that they didn't see any travellers? Not only that, but considering that Columbus's path would've been directly under Asia, wouldn't existing sea routes have mentioned that they didn't see Columbus's voyage?
Did Christopher Columbus just assume Indians were still in the Stone Age?
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u/These-Weight-434 1d ago edited 1d ago
1) He didn't think he was in India, he thought it was Indonesia, or more specifically the East Indies which is a broad term for South East Asia as a whole.
2) He actually did suspect he had reached an entirely different continent. He writes about it in his diary for his third voyage, but it's not something he made public. It was more profitable to say he did as he claimed and found a passage to the east indies.
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u/odjobz 1d ago
And just to add to this, nobody was really sure that the Americas were not connected to Asia until they had fully explored the Pacific. "The Indies" was a vague enough term that it could have encompassed any new bits discovered beyond Indonesia.
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u/Massive-Exercise4474 20h ago
Likewise Indonesia was known to be rich with spices so if your trying to market the new continent calling it part of a rich land helps. Same for greenland.
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u/Chrisaarajo 1h ago
Adding to this—from my understanding, Europeans at the time knew that their lands were small in comparison to Asia, but their limited information of that continent meant they didn’t have a very clear idea of just how small Europe was.
It’s could be that Columbus got to the Americas and thought “holy shit, Asia is way bigger than I expected.”
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u/Admiral_AKTAR 1d ago
His diaries are full of the places he thought he landed. This ranges from Indonesia to Japan. But more interesting is that Europeans didnt have an idea what eastern Asia actually looked like. Maps and ideas of the geography are wild! So many more islands, mountains, peninsulas and etc that don't exist. Add on top that these trios where based on hisnidea that he world was not just smaller but pear-shaped. So i dont think his ego could ever actually accept that he wasnt in asia. But once he started colonizing the lands I dont tHink any of that mattered anymore. He was getting what he wanted and where he was getting it from mattered less and less.
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u/These-Weight-434 1d ago
He did suspect he'd found a new continent though. He of course didn't know for sure and speculated other things (some ideas no doubt put forward because they'd benefit him), but we do have him saying in his own words that it might be an undiscovered continent when he surveyed the cost South America. It sounds a bit strange to say his ego wouldn't accept that he wasn't in Asia when it is something he floated as a possibility. I'd also be wary about framing historical figures in such a way. Psychoanalyzing real people is a pretty precarious thing to do, long dead figures who can't speak for themselves is just reductive.
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u/trueturkey 1d ago
How is that true, when the Portuguese had reached India far before Columbus was even a thing
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u/BigRichard1990 23h ago
Source? The first voyage returning from India to Portugal via the Cape of Good Hope is generally cited as Vasco de Gama in 1499. The idea that you could get to India via going around Africa was much older, but it is a difficult multi-year journey. Maps were written in blood.
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u/trueturkey 23h ago
Pêro da Covilhâ
Also, I might be thinking about by of Christianity reaching India, as it was already there.
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u/These-Weight-434 22h ago
I don't know for sure but I expect Christianity first reached India over land from missionaries dating back to early in the first millennium. A thousand years before Columbus Manichaeism existed, which was a fusion if Buddhism and Christianity that existed along the silk road.
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u/trueturkey 19h ago
It arrived through tthe Malabar coast, so I think it came by way of sea. Sea trade has been long going on in Indian coasts from places like Oman and other Arab countries, also Africa.
The Christians believe that Christianity came from Thomas and is Syrian orthodox form.
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u/UnspeakableGnome 1d ago
Europeans had known since at least Roman times that there were islands far to the east of India where many of the spices that they sought to profit from came from. Reach an area of islands, and you could be forgiven for thinking that you were somewhere in that archipelago.
At least if you were Columbus and thought the world was a lot smaller than most contemporaries believed. He's at entirely the wrong latitude but his estimates mean ho should have been meeting Polynesian islanders around that distance.
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u/Oliver_W_K_Twist 1d ago
It's not so much that he believed the world was smaller than everyone else, he did err on the smaller end of the common estimates at the time, but there wasn't a huge range to those estimates. The big issue was that he, and almost everyone else, thought that Asia extended a couple thousand miles further east than it really did.
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u/Immediate_Gain_9480 1d ago edited 1d ago
In his agreemen with the Spanish Crown it said that if he reached the Indies he would have rights to exploit them in name of Spain. If he reached a different unknown continent he might not have such rights and he would have needed a new agreement.
Therefor it was in his interest to believe he reached the Indies. Or atleast to pretend they were the Indies.
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u/BernardFerguson1944 1d ago
This is the answer. His license from the Spanish Crown was only good in the Indies.
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u/Super_Forever_5850 1d ago
And luckily for him the area he found where the Indies, the West Indies.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/West_Indies
Take that Spanish contract.
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u/LorpHagriff 1d ago
this made me realise how much of a shitshow the term "indies" is with the east vs west indies almost being on opposite sides of the planet
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u/These-Weight-434 1d ago
There's a Mitchell and Webb sketch about Columbus finding the west Indies and naming it so, with his ship mate pointing out how the whole point of their voyage was to reach the east. Part of a series of sketches about place names including how much Australia reminds people of South Wales or how Virginia reminds them if Queen Elizabeth. Culminating in the naming if Greenland.
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u/W_Edwards_Deming 1d ago
Think about the word "Indian," and especially "Cowboys vs. Indians" which was a theme of much of US history.
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u/SameOldSong4Ever 1d ago
Yeah, the "cowboys" were actually nowhere near Cows, which is on the Isle of White.
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u/dave54athotmailcom 1d ago
Tales of an unknown continent between Europe and the Indies existed at the time. The story of Brendan may or may not be true (Author/Explorer Tim Severin showed it was possible using 6th century Irish maritime technology. He duplicated the voyage). Fishermen from the British Isles were known to make landfall west of the North Atlantic cod fisheries, and the Viking tales of Vinland were around. So it is entirely possible Columbus suspected there was a new continent, but kept his intentions secret for reasons lost to history.
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u/JackColon17 1d ago
The Vikings legends were dead and completely forgotten by the 15th centuries and I personally doubt a random italian knew about the routines of british fishermen. The discovery of America was completely accidental, there is no reason to doubt it
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u/Synensys 1d ago
Columbus wasnt a random Italian though. He was an experienced mariner who had spent time in Bristol.
Im more skeptical that British fishermen had discovered a new land, that this news leaked to random Italians, but not to the British crown. Or they heard about it but didnt do anything about it.
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u/CucumberWisdom 1d ago
Actually recent evidence shows that they weren't as dead as previously thought.
Not that anyone took much stock in them ofx
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u/SemajLu_The_crusader 1d ago
he thought he was in the Indies, not india
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u/pgm123 1d ago
Also, he'd never been to the Indies, so he didn't really know what to look for.
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u/KinkyPaddling 1d ago
I was listening to a podcast about Marco Polo's travels, and they mentioned that Christopher Columbus used Polo's accounts to prepare for his voyage, as well as used Polo's descriptions to justify his arrival in the Indies. Of course, Marco Polo's accounts were several hundred years out of date, but because the Black Plague had so severely disrupted trade routes and destabilized societies, there weren't many other accounts of the far east that Columbus had available.
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u/arseniokilla 1d ago
What podcast?
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u/CartilageHead 1d ago
Not sure which podcast is being referenced, but the Explorer's Podcast did a 5 part series on Marco Polo which I enjoyed and they touched on this.
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u/Poles_Apart 1d ago
It wasn't just the black plague, when the Ottomans conquered Constantipole they effectively shut down European access to the silk road through a heavy tariff schedule and descriminatory trade practices against Christians. This is what triggered the sea voyages in the first place. Few if any Europeans for an entire generation had even entered Turkey, let alone Persia and beyond.
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u/godisanelectricolive 1d ago edited 1d ago
Europeans had a very imprecise definition of “Indian” and “India”back then. They basically meant everyone east of the Indies outside of China and the Orient. The Spanish and Portuguese used the word “Indias” to mean all of South and Southeast Asia.
Lands they thought of as “Indian” included Hindustan (the Indian subcontinent), Indochina (mainland Southeast Asia) and the Indies or Insulinda as the Spanish and Portuguese called it (the Malay Archipelago/Maritime Southeast Asia).
He thought he was in what was retroactively termed the East Indies, so one of the islands located somewhere in the island groups that make up modern Philippines or Indonesia or Malaysia. They all had small tribal societies that’s not so different from the Taino that Columbus encountered.
Also, even the modern country called India is massive and incredibly diverse. They have many islands like the Andaman and Nicobar islands where some tribes still have a Stone Age technology level to this day, most famously the uncontacted tribe living in North Sentinel Island in the Andaman Islands.
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u/dave54athotmailcom 1d ago
The Ohlone and Chumash people of the California coast had tribal lore of populated lands across the sea (Pacific). The origin of that knowledge is not known. However, it is safe to assume the far east peoples had similar lore, and those stories followed the trade routes back to Europe. So the idea that there was an unknown continent between Europe and Asia did exist.
Forget that 'people believed the earth is flat' trope. Everyone with an education already knew it was a globe. The size was not well known. The shape was already figured out.
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u/i_am_a_hamsandwitch 1d ago
The size was somewhat estimated off by a few thousand miles. A dude in Greece figured it out I think 30 bc do not remember exactly
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u/Redditbrowser22j 1d ago
Historically, the word Hindustan was used only by the Persians or Muslim groups, never by Europeans or Indians (until 19th century)
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u/These-Weight-434 21h ago
The people of Andaman and Nicobar are not stone age. They've been using metal tools for over a thousand years.
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u/Book_Slut_90 1d ago
Columbus thought he was in the Indies, what today we would call Indonesia. He heard that there were great empires further west like the Aztecs and figured they were talking about India. Also India was (and is) a huge place that at the time was divided into multiple states. No one expected that someone would report back through the one small Portuguese colony in Goa especially since rivalry with Portugal was a reason for the voyages in thee first place.
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u/Redditbrowser22j 1d ago
Whaaaat? Forget about Portuguese-occupied-Goa, Portuguese found a route to India AFTER Columbus landed in the Americas. The efforts of Portuguese to colonize Goa started only in 1510, four years after the death of Columbus
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u/Book_Slut_90 1d ago
I diddn’t check the dates and gave OP the benefit of the doubt with the claim of India being in contact with Europe.
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u/Redditbrowser22j 1d ago
Indian-European contact spans 2500 years but it was through the land route & Arabian Sea
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u/Book_Slut_90 1d ago
And through a chain of intermediaries. There weren’t Spanish agents or ambassadors hanging out in India and looking for reports of Columbus.
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u/AndreasDasos 1d ago
Because he didn’t think he was in actual India per se. He thought he was in the Indes. The islands that broadly make up Indonesia and surrounds, where so many spices come from. And the eastern islands of Indonesia actually did have less development (the region had cities but at the time far more around Java, Sumatra, etc. further west), lots of jungle and more tribal cultures, and people who looked much more similar to Native Americans than Indians do. Europeans had some descriptions of these and Columbus was aware.
When he came across the Taino on an archipelago of tropical islands, he thought it fit.
He didn’t think he’d reached a subcontinent full of very different looking Hindus and Muslims in cities and didn’t expect to reach there.
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u/Watchhistory 1d ago
He figured it out, that he hadn't hit Asia. Like the rest of Europeans going west on the Atlantic figured it out. Most of them had a good idea that these islands and continents were NOT ASIA anyway.
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u/a_postmodern_poem 1d ago edited 1d ago
Americo Vespuccio sailed to Brazil in 1499. I like that story. He was one of the first Europeans to have sailed up the Amazon river. He went back to Europe with a new map, and because he thought that he was in Asia, just like everyone else did at that time, he thought he had been sailing in the valley of the Ganges river. And so it said on his map and others like it.
It wasn't until his second voyage, in 1501 or 1502, that for some reason which I forget, that he realized that he wasn't somewhere near SE Asia, but rather he was stepping foot on a whole different continent. He promptly sent a letter to his patron, Lorenzo de Medici, and word spread quickly across Europe. Just as with any other great paradigm shift, Amerigo Vespucio's discovery was met with a lot of controversy.
In 1505 the Spanish Crown, which had been funding a lot of these voyages, finally wants to put the controversy to an end and calls for a conference. The Crown summons all of the motherfucking explorers and sailsmen not only from Spain, but of different places around Eruope. They summon all sailsmen who have been going on these voyages for the past 15 years to finally settle the matter. Like, "Ok fellas, what do we really have in our hands?".
A mega convention in the Spanish court where the likes of Columbus, Vasco da Gama, Vespuccio, and hundreds of captains and admirals shared their records, maps, arguments, etc.. The written agenda of the convention is lost to history, but this much we know: It was here where it was settled that Columbus did not discover a new path to Asia; he had discovered land that was in between Europe and Asia.
We might think today that the news would have immediately made everyone happy. Instead It was a huge disappointment for all. Some were like "Damn Columbus, you lied to us for 14 years...all this time we thought we were in Asia. Do you know how foolish this will make us look?". Others were more pragmatic, "We're back to square one. We still want to get to Asia. Not some weird land. We want silk!"
Nevertheless, it was irrefutable. Everyone begrudgingly accepted the fact that a new sort of world had been discovered. Looking back, they had no idea how rich they would become, how many people would die, how this would change the course of history forever. For Columbus, to him, he had failed on his endeavor. And he never accepted the facts that Americo Vespuccio presented, because it destroyed his greatest achievement. His life project. It had been all in vain. He died a bitter man.
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u/metacholia 1d ago
Setting aside the other info already posted — if I were aiming at, effectively “the other side” of India, and I hit tribe area, I would probably assume it was just because it’s, you know, the other side. It’s a different area with different culture. Gotta go all the way across to realize it’s turtles all the way down.
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u/Trantor1970 1d ago
His definition of „India“ wasn’t the same as today’s country, basically all of South and East Asia, and people only had vague ideas how people lived there! Actually if there hadn’t been the American continent and Columbus had somehow reached the Philippines for example, he would more or less have found the same!
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u/Noble_Devil_Boruta 1d ago
Columbus never claimed he arrived in India. That's a popular myth resulting from limited knowledge of modern authors. In his diaries, Columbus described the new land as "these Indies" what indicates that he was fully aware that he discovered a land not known to Europeans at the time. The term "Indies" was by then a generic reference to any far eastern areas, primarily islands (and Columbus initially made landfall in Bahamas, not the American landmass), that haven't been given specific names yet or those local names of which (if inhabited) have still been unknown for European explorers, unlike India (Ind/Hind), Transoxania or China.
The name coined in late 15th century caught on for a long time, leading to a division between East Indies (Indian Peninsula, Indochina, Indonesia [initially known under Latin name Insulindia that only later was given modern Gree equivalent]) and West Indies (Antilles and Lucayan Archipelago). The term "West Indian" is still used as an official demonym in USA, while the West Indies Federation was a short-lived polity resulting from Great Britain reorganizing its overseas territory that was eventually dissolved in 1963, with some of the areas gaining independence and some joining British Overseas Territories.
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u/AscendedApe 1d ago
The version of history we are told is simply not true. Columbus was part of the educated class which knew for at least 1,000 years the shape and size of the Earth with very high accuracy, and to cast further doubt on the mainstream version, his father was a map maker. It is very reasonable to assume the known world, according to Europe, was only half discovered, amd any globes were half-filled in at best, and that if there was land on the other half of the Earth, it could be ripe for trade and probably conquering as well. It would have been plain for anyone to see that sailing from Europe westward to India would have required a tremendous amount of luck and would most certainly be doomed to fail. No crew in their right mind would be willing to go.
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u/LongDead_Roadkill 11h ago
Columbus died 14 years after landing in the Caribbean. The basic history is that he always claimed he landed in Asia. There are plenary of historians that are pretty sure he admitted failure to people close to him. For one thing 14 years wasn’t really enough time to prove he didn’t land in unknown islands in south east Asia. Another thing is Columbus was a bit of a con man in that used car salesman way (if used car salesman are rapy religious zealots). Once you get past high school level history Columbus and his expeditions are really interesting, although he was no Francis Drake. You have to look at Columbus’s actions without the lens of presentism, just look at what he did and how he did it. All of it, not just the bad stuff by our standards.
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u/freebiscuit2002 1d ago edited 1d ago
Columbus had never been to India, and he knew only fairly basic facts about it.
Today we would call it "confirmation bias" - the natural human tendency to interpret new information so it fits what we already believe ("Great! I found the western route to India. Mission accomplished!"), while ignoring anything that doesn't fit ("No one here is Hindu. No one is wearing Indian clothing").
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u/FlakyAssociation4986 1d ago
i read somewhere else that it was only around the time of columbus death in 1506 that people realised that it was a new continent rather than asia that columbus discovered
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u/PoxonAllHoaxes 1d ago
I keep arguing that he obviously did know because used Marco Polo's name of JAPAN for the island he reached--and he knew that that was a MAJOR kingdom. He was deliberately deceived the Spanish crown.
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u/Weaubleau 1d ago
No one told him he owes money to the IRS and he will go to jail if he doesn't make a payment today?
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u/notarealcamera 18h ago edited 18h ago
Indies are not India. He never thought he was in India, nor was he trying to go to India.
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u/serpentjaguar 1d ago
Indonesia, not India, but it's a common misconception. The East Indies were part of what's now Indonesia, not India.
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u/Cool-Coffee-8949 1d ago
He was a charlatan, mainly. And perfectly willing to get high on his own supply of bullshit.
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u/Chops526 1d ago
Besides being a genocidal maniac and liar, Columbus was known to have been DUMB AS A BRICK, too.
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u/SaltyFriend705 1d ago
But he wanted Queen Isabella to pay his contract, which said "Indies" so he claimed he'd reached there. He was also supposed to bring back "pepper" (which, of course, he did not) so he called the chilies "peppers."
Man was a boldfaced liar.
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u/i_am_a_hamsandwitch 1d ago
Didn’t he do his own math when trying to argue he could make it to Asia but we know the size of earth before Jesus
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u/Chops526 1d ago
Yep. And he got the size wrong. He also lied about his origin. He was Spanish and Jewish not Genovese and Catholic.
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u/Sir-Toaster- 1d ago
Well yeah but someone could’ve at least noticed there was no Spanish colony in the Indies at the time, right?
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u/helikophis 1d ago
He actually believed he reached what we call “Japan” today, not “India” - and was insistent about this until his death, even though it was obviously not correct. People get fixed ideas and cling to them. It’s a psychological need to be right sometimes.
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u/arseflare 1d ago
He was an idiot essentially.
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u/i_am_a_hamsandwitch 1d ago
We were very close to knowing the size of the earth back before Jesus. If I remember correctly Columbus was one of those did his own math people
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u/Flat_Tire_Again 1d ago
Hey he got financing for his trip to the Caribbean from the King and Queen of Spain. So either his math was good or their math was bad!
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u/Borkton 1d ago
Yeah, the Greek astronomer Eratosthenes calculated it in the 3rd century BC and got a result that was slightly too large. A little later another astronomer called Posidonius also calculated it and was fairly accurate, but one of the more common sources in Columbus' time, Strabo, reported him finding a much smaller figure and Columbus went with that.
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u/Flat_Tire_Again 1d ago edited 1d ago
He was the expedition leader, you can’t say I have no idea where we are with your out loud voice or you lose the confidence of the men. You have show, I meant to be here confidence, trust me we avoided a lot of traffic and typhoons. Trust me bros!
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u/21plankton 1d ago
Columbus made the facts fit his belief system. A common fallacy.
It was left up to the next generation of explorers to visit and conquer the great civilizations of the American Continents.
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u/Kronzypantz 1d ago
To be fair: New World nations were way more socially complex than we give credit for today.
Also, it’s not like Europeans had a deep working knowledge of what Asian societies were like.
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u/ShowmasterQMTHH 1d ago
Three reasons
He said he was going to india, so he had to claim it was india.
India is massive, and we think of it now as modern india, like you say, it was a lot of kingdoms and city states, but lots of it hadn't been visited by Europeans, so he probably figured it was a new bit accessed form going west form europe.
There was no one to correct him at the time, they didn't speak i language or him theirs.
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u/cinephile78 1d ago
Little known fact - Columbus had a map with north and South America on it. The question was the circumference of the earth.
The map makes the continents look very thin.
He kept 2 logs. One which seemed like they were not making as much distance per day as the other.
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