interestingasfuck

Cocaine seems like it would be a new world crop. Meaning Columbus would have to find and develop a source of coca from South America first.

Columbus did have a bit of a dumbass streak to him. It is my understanding that the entire basis for his voyage was bad math. That he somehow converted Arabic miles to European miles wrong, or nautical cubits to metric cubits...He did some faulty unit conversions that convinced him that the Earth was about a third smaller than it actually is. He then pestered Queen Isabella to fund his "go east by sailing west" idea until she did just to shut him up.

By the most fateful stroke of dumb luck in the history of humanity, the America's exist about where Columbus thought Asia was. He landed in the Caribbean thinking that he'd found the Philippines.

Now, I want you to imagine you're in Columbus' position. You don't have accurate nautical charts, nobody's seen the planet from orbit, the sextant hasn't been invented yet, you have a quadrant, an astrolabe, a dry compass, an hourglass, and a plank with some knots tied in it. Almost everything you know about the hemisphere you think you're in is Marco Polo's writing and this map:

After traveling for months across open ocean, experiencing phenomena no European has seen before, to include the eyewall of a hurricane and your compass misaligning with the North star, you make landfall on some scattered sub-tropical islands. Ah those must be the Philippines. Keep going east and you hit a large continental peninsula. Ah, that must be Thailand. Follow it south trying to find the Singapore straight, and you encounter another large landmass, which must be Indonesia.

Now, Columbus' job was to find a route to the spice islands, not discover new lands. It's difficult to get a man to understand something that his job requires him to not understand. But even then...I can see how you'd mistake the Caribbean for the South China Sea, especially if you had no reason to imagine one of those places existed in the first place. Anything that matched the map was confirmation he was in the Far East, anything that didn't match the map meant he found an uncharted remote area of the Far East.

And I love this mental image: In 1494, Columbus kicks open the throne room door back in Spain, he's got a tan, a macaw on his shoulder, a cob of corn in one hand and a chili pepper in the other and he says "Your majesties! I didn't find any pepper or cloves but I did get some wild shit!" and Isabella is just gabberflasted, she thought she left this guy for dead, so she keeps asking questions meaning "How weren't you killed?" but he keeps interpreting them as prompts to tell the tale of his adventure in Asia. And Ferdinand is over there, purple in the face, lips pressed to fist because it's the funniest shit he's seen in months but if Isabella hears him laughing there'll be no living with her.