3 - Christopher Columbus and the Discovery of the “Indies”: It Can Be Disastrous to Stubbornly Refuse to Recognize That You Have Falsified Your Own Hypothesis

Abstract

Christopher Columbus fabricated a complete plan for his “enterprise of the Indies,” a voyage west from the Canary Islands to Japan, which was deeply flawed by a series of assumptions seriously underestimating the sailing distance. Remarkably, his projected distance to Japan corresponded closely to the distance he actually sailed to make his first landfall in San Salvador. In his series of four voyages of exploration, Columbus obsessively tried to prove that he had arrived in the East Indies rather than accommodating himself to his real achievement of discovering a new world. His failure to modify his initial hypothesis allowed the credit for his discoveries to be claimed for many years by Amerigo Vespucci.