Saturday, February 21, 2015

Did Columbus believe that he had reached Asia up until his death?

Throughout his lifetime, and despite some disagreement from his contemporaries, Christopher Columbus never abandoned the belief that his voyages had reached Asia. He believed that East Asia, the region then called "the Indies," was much closer to Western Europe than it was, and that this region was more easily reached by traveling westward than eastward. Prior to his travels, Columbus read extensively about the Indies, particularly Marco Polo's account of the indigenous people, which were sometimes untrue or exaggerated. When he reached the Canary Islands in 1492 and discovered that the people there were naked and wore gold jewelry in their noses, just as Marco Polo described Asian people, he concluded that he must have reached the Indies, and there is no record of him giving up on this conviction at any point before his death.

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