this post was submitted on 22 Aug 2025
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I kind of wonder how accurate that depiction would be as I don't think Columbus ever actually saw or mapped the American mainland, he ended up in the Caribbean landing on Cuba, Hispaniola and San Salvador, briefly mistaking these lands for the Philippines or, I've seen a depiction of Columbus sailing the length of the South coast of Cuba, stopping just short of the island's tip before declaring it the Indian mainland, though let's also take that with a grain of salt.
It's not like he had a god's eye view of the area around his ships. Mind you, Columbus' voyages predate the invention of the sextant. He had a quadrant and an astrolabe for determining latitude, an hourglass rather than a chronometer, and a plank of wood tied to a knotty rope as a speedometer. He had a magnetic compass for determining heading, and was the first known European to document the phenomenon of magnetic declination. And that's kind of it; he was wacky enough to attempt a transatlantic voyage navigating by dead reckoning with an incomplete chart, and got monumentally lucky there was an archipelago about where he thought he was going.