What if Columbus Was Right? 

RIP

Please make a video about what if South Africa still had nukes.

I seriously believed this whole video (it's announcements included) was just a joke. And that there was no way it was going to be an actual video.

It’s fine it happens you are forgiven

7 minutes after upload.

It's inertia. People still using the same old maps of their own continent and never really updating them because those are the ones they've always used and so they had to be correct, right? Then making newer ones with better skill and technology for their later discoveries.

@@Kasaaz You would still expect the Swedish to notice there was a gigantic ocean missing from the middle of their country.

@@prestonjones1653 Eh, up in those mountains, anything could happen. Maybe it's just a larger than average snowmelt.

the big island of the old map (near Africa) is said to be a badly drawn Cuba lol. But it looks similar to some landmass in the Carribean looked like that 12000+ years ago approximately. (end of the last ice age)

I believe that had something to do with trading existing maps, especially with tribes that existed 1000s of years before European colonization.

Earth has a lead core, perhaps?

At least Wikipedia certainly seems to think so as well: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Christopher_Columbus#Geographical_considerations Although according to that article, at least Columbus himself believed this different structure as well, believing the distance from the Canary Islands west to Japan to be about 4400 km instead of 19600 km, and if the experts in Spain did not hold those misconceptions, it becomes clear why they advised the crown not to support this folly.

He envisioned both.

You're right. Columbus did think the world was smaller. That's why he had critics. They knew his math was off.

@@captmoroni thing is, not everyone thought he was wrong. That belief came from Ptolémée, who took accurate calculation of Earth's size (difference of 500ish km) and redid the math wrong, which lead to a planet 1/3 smaller And then his calculation and maps were considered "the right ones" by the church and it became the defacto mesures and representation of Earth. The only reason that it would get corrected further down the line was through was with the Muslims and access to their maps which were much more detailed than what Europe ever had at that point (whole still being wrong) because the Muslims had used the original Greek texts and calculations to base their models. Also helps that Muslims went really far down on the western African coast and also had contracts with Asia much more often than Europe, so they continuously corrected and updated their maps. Had a really fascinating class in university about the development of geography in Europe and Northern Africa from the Greeks all the way to modern days

same

Would've preferred if it was that

Yeah, Imagine a Futuristic Fantasy story in this world or a Retrofuturistic Fantasy story. That would be amazing ;)

woulda been a better video

Same

That's actually a good theory tbh and it makes sense.

@@K3t4k4t No. No it really doesn't. Because Columbus' contract was voided when he was arrested and stripped of all titles, besides which, the crown of castille recognized the new world long before said arrest, and didn't consider it at all part of the contract. Which is actually why it was named after Americo Vespuci, as he was the first scholar to actually describe it. So had columbus accepted the truth, it's likely America would be called Colombia. Yes like the country. So no, he wasn't bound by contract, at all, indeed part of what led to his arrest was how uncooperative and close minded he was. Another big part was just how thoroughly he ignored spanish laws giving rights to the natives and banning practices like enslaving them... He was a very particular man.

@@thespanishinquisition4078 well it wasn't just the contract it was his reputation as well. If he stated he was wrong he'd look like an idiot, so he'd have to make the thing look bigger than it was once he landed in the Caribbean.

@@thespanishinquisition4078 your phrasing of the second paragraph might be easy to misinterpret, the spanish were the ones giving rights to the natives and banning the enslavement of them, and columbus ignored that

That reminds me of the Portuguese who were instructed to find Christians in India, so when they finally went beyond Muslim territory and discovered a Hindu temple, they reported that it was a church and that the statues of their gods were really of Mary and the saints

Chinese and Roman people visited each other.

I especially like the large lake (equivalent to great lakes) in Georgia that existed for decades

same, they give me great inspiration for DnD games

@@NaughtiusMaximu5 this map is probably perfect for DnD close enough to our own to add some of our worlds influences, but far bizarre enough you could add your own

Agreed. Antillia is super interesting to me, an island in the middle of the Atlantic colonized by eight Visigothic priests escaping the Moorish conquest of Spain.

Love Thailand 🇹🇭🇬🇧

Thailand is fascinating but legit criminally underrated

​@@Joker-yw9hl shoutout to Thailand. Gotta be my favorite gender out there

oh boy, wait till you learn about passport bros...

@@theenjoyer1445 Was gonna say, there's a subset of guys out there who have a strong appreciation for Thailand

EU4 mod?

@@charliescales6398 I don't play EU4 but that would definitely work

same here

I thought the circumference of the world had been calculated with great accuracy by this point? Wasn't there that Greek bloke with his pillars and their shadows?

@@archiegrishipol That is true, but the calculations of Eratosthenes were not undisputed at the time. More modern measurements have revealed them to be accurate, but in the time of Columbus it was more difficult to ascertain these calculations, allowing others like Toscanelli to present contrary measurements for the size of the Earth.

@@Huojunta My understanding was that the measurements were known and accepted, but there was a confusion between different cultures' definitions of a 'mile' which caused the error, and no-one repeated the experiment to discover it.

I Heard Columbus thought the World was smaller because for him Vegetatation wouldnt come up ashore so often if Asia was that far Away. What he didn't know Is that it actually came from America

It's interesting to see if the earth was smaller, maybe we'd get to space earlier as single-stage orbital rockets would be possible.

Africa is surprisingly accurate

Medieval maps aren't supposed to be satellite images anyway. The most important part is direction and distance. Like a land map would just be a chain of towns/cities/roads to get somewhere.

@@lennysmileyface Yes, the Romans created maps as a metroline, just cities conected by rodes with the distance (in time) writen.

Getting your anything from Silk Road was quality assurance though ;)

It got some areas mostly correct. Back then the silk road was one of the more reliable sources of information.

No stfu

I?m an atheist. He didn'tcreate it. It exploded into existence. Atheism wins again. Mindlessness-of-the-gaps wins again.

Do you come from a land down under?

why, did he pronounce it wrong?

@@Enyavar1 It's pronounced more like "breeze bun"

@@joejoonhoyang With a long -eeze? Wow, but I can't argue, we people are picky about pronounciations since the stone age apparently. Also, I still try to wrap my head around Kansaw and Arkansace.

@@joejoonhoyang I thought it was "brizz-been".

Also as an Australian, Bris-Bane

@@InnesTahtinen I was willing to let it slide for the fire bit.

@@InnesTahtinen All Aussies collectively cringed

@@InnesTahtinen I couldn't help but cringe like nails on a chalkboard

@@InnesTahtinen As a Bris-Bane resident, Please kill me.

Learn about Black Legend anti-Spanish propaganda.

Yeah the guy was so nuts the Spanish crown imprisoned him, because even the Spanish thought his level of colonies and enslaving was too far

Since the islands of “Polynesia” would be really close to each other, I doubt they would develop or invest as heavily into blue water exploration. It would be really interesting to see though

@@bamfingerguns2754 You could say the same for Europe too though, nothing about Geography suggests Blue Water Exploration, but both Inland Seas, Peninsulas, and Archipelagos do make developing naval technology rather important if you want to defend yourself from and compete with your neighbors.

​@@bamfingerguns2754 it's funny when you say this because Europe doing blue water exploration is even more unlikely base on geography 😂

Also the land you can see in the fog of war is incorrect

@@4realm8rusirius fog of war do be crazy

As an RTS fan, I approve of this comment.

Also similar to ubisoft games like Assassin's Creed and Farcry where you have to climb to a vantage point to unlock that area on the map. Lol

see my banner for Columbus !?!?!?!?!

It is more of an Asiacentric map, I'd say

@@dontcomply3976 It's more of a Eurasia centric map

@@sadiqahmed4143 Or perhaps an Indian Centric considering how Cody Stated the Indian Ocean would be the center of the world in this timeline

@@wires-sl7gs true enough

see my banner for Columbus ?!?!?!?!!

Felt

Mood.

see my banner for Columbus !?!?!?!?!

Yeah, most east asian languages are flat out nonsense to compare to one another unless you're looking at individual vocabulary moments due to Chinese influence. The way the language is spoken and the various intonations between them are very different. Korean and Japanese have surprisingly similar words with words like "contract" and many more, but that's about it. It's vocab, but not language similarities itself.

Thank you completely skipped my mind

@@AlternateHistoryHub No prob.

It's fascinating how the Spanish could build an empire of that size and the indians fought along side them. I wonder why the scandinavians couldn't do it.

@@AlternateHistoryHub lol

Didn't have to do that there's already chapters -_-

Columbus also thought the Earth was shaped like a pear. What if *that* had been true?

@@cocacola4blood365 Technically Magellan only proved that the world was round, not necessarily a sphere. So it could have been banana shaped. Or we're inside a hollow sphere (gulp).

@@sillypuppy5940 Gulp indeed. I'd prefer Minecraft, or a rubix cube.

Heck yes I enjoyed the viddie

AaayaE Eye CAPTIANO #CODY More #MOO PLEACE ‼️😂❤️

Agreed

see my banner for Columbus !?!?!?!??!!

@Eye I havent

Yes

Lol

Just another wacky Ben Franklin fact

what a whacky little guy he was

good luck

I like the idea of a political story (aka the fall of Rome) set in a huge city on the north coast of the India Isle. That would be the capital and have schemers from all over the place trying to gain an advantage. The city would be the last vestige of a once mighty continent spanning empire

Agreed. Might base a NationStates nation off of it.

Where? I really wanna see this

Make a video

Same

Yeah. Gotta be honest, I don't know what the "oh, you thought I meant..." part was supposed to be. Being the only explorer to be half-a-planet off course is kind of what Columbus is known for.

Me too. I expected a video about a world where the New World is never colonized or something

@@starkillersneed I expected a video where the Americas simply didn’t exist.

@@Merennulli Yeah I'm pretty confused rn tbh

Ck2 Sunset Invasion DLC be like:

or a screwball comedy/psychological thriller.

I feel like Mount And Blade does this

Yeah probably some indian empire, but way more thalassocratic I guess.

see my banner for Columbus !?!?!?!??!!!

@@weirdyoutubechannels You made a banner for him? Sure I wanna see that

If anyone likes Age of Empires, and maps, I did 2 videos comparing the best maps of the world.

Or if Mars stayed wet and we actually evolved there instead of here. The maps of a wet Mars is really strange looking and a civilization evolving there would be really strange.

Based on a certain anime: "What if the continents were flipped upside-down?"

I once saw a map (I have it saved but, at least now in 2023, RU-vid doesn't let you share image files on the comments haha) exactly about that Climate zones reverse - the Sahara straight up disappears and is replaced by a temperate savanna; with no Gulf current, Europe and eastern North America are frozen, while the exact opposite happens in eastern Asia - temperate climates extend all the way into Chukotka, while southern China is a desert. South America sees the Atacama desert switch places with the Patagonia, while the Amazon rainforest is afaik largely untouched (but WAY larger because the southern Pampas becomes way more humid); up north, everything from North Carolina to Venezuela is one massive desert, essentially a literal reverse Sahara. Australia also flips It's pretty fascinating *I love alternate geography lmao*

It might be. The science is inconclusive as of now.

@@DodgeDartbro we can see the earth.

The translation on his statement isn’t great and a little out of context. What he was trying to say was that the earth wasn’t entirely spherical because of what he has observed with star positions on his journeys and he believed there was a bulge of some sort somewhere near the equator… which is true.

@@DodgeDartAre you joking or just stupid?

History and humanity are doomed to be judged by the far future

No Google?... Pfff. Plebs! Next you are going to tell me they didn't have GPS.

@@ngrader apparently some people in the modern age are too arrogant to understand that they didn’t automatically know which continent they were on back then so I felt the need to state the obvious to those people

see my banner for Columbus !?!?!?!?

see my banner for Columbus !?!?!?!??!!!!

Italians discovered Cape Verde, not the Porko geese.

see my banner for Columbus !?!?!?!??!!!

@@weirdyoutubechannels That small one?

True

Oh Terra Australis Can just say hi I am interested in the Arctica this world has a strange Greenland place

If the planet were smaller that would have WAY bigger effects. And no, he didn't think the Earth was smaller.

@@PlatinumAltaria If the core has more lead in it, that would help. But then we'd have more lead on the surface anyway, and that's a problem.

Sure he did and people told he was wrong to....

Yes, Columbus did think the Earth was smaller in addition to having the east coast of Asia off by a ludicrous amount. He used Al-Farghani's estimates of the Earth's circumference then converted them as if Al-Farghani were using Roman miles (1.48km/0.92 miles) but Al-Farghani was using Arabian miles (2.16km/1.34 miles). And he picked Al-Farghani's estimate because it was 56.67 (Arabian) miles at the equator instead of the more widely accepted (and accurate) 59.5 nautical miles. Then he converted the outcome he got to nautical miles, resulting in an imaginary Earth 25% smaller. And it wasn't entirely accidental either. He WANTED to believe the journey was possible so he cherry picked what estimates gave him the best sounding result. Paolo dal Pozzo Toscanelli separately had used the writings of Marco Polo to modify the work of Ptolemy, but also incorporating earlier work by Marinus of Tyre to sort of un-correct what Ptolemy had corrected. The sum of those changes was Asia growing 5,000+ miles eastward. Toscanelli corresponded with Columbus and was also a major proponent of the expedition Columbus would eventually go on.

@@Merennulli The way you should have been tipped off that this isn't correct is that you just said that the guy knowingly sailed to his death... You said he wanted to believe it was possible, and I guess he was willing to die to prove it? The size of the Earth has been known accurately for thousands of years, and has never been in serious dispute due to how easy it is to calculate. On the other hand, measuring a continent that barely any Europeans have visited is hard.

He would continue discovering America in the same way, but embark on a different place further south. Maybe in Brazil? (If the map didn't have the Americas)

Would it change something? He got to the americas in real life tho

Is it the bane of your existence? I'll see myself out

Well history pretty much did happen the way vikings portrayed it

@@ado6693 for start, kategat never existed, ube wasnt the one to discover vinland, the rus never invaded norway, vikings knew about the existance of britain long before ragnar, in the show bjorn never becsme the king of sweden, etc

Romans be like: Them barbarians are changing, what the fuck did we do that the Christ has forsaken us

Do you mean the Erastothenes map? You can find it on Wikipedia. Sounds equally interesting: No China or Scandinavia, tiny Africa, Northeast passage into India around Tartaria-Scythia-Sarmatia is possible. Alexander conquered half the old world, too. Eurasia would be so much smaller, allowing for much closer cultural connections and rivalries. Land war in Asia would be possible, even. And on the other side of the world there would be the huge unexplored and unsettled Americas. So imagine Columbus landing in a truly empty continent... where no natives ever eradicated the megafauna. The new world would be known as the land of monsters. With nobody to exploit or trade with, and dangerous untamed monsters "everywhere" the Europeans would be hesitant to establish colonies or outposts. What for? None of the plants would have been known, so even if there was an ur-potate or ur-maize: Guys like Columbus wouldn't have been patient enough for that. The only people interested in colonizing would have been.... hm... Pilgrim-like people, but not the wimps from the mayflower. Maybe "dragonhunters", going for megafauna trophies.

GA is actually the center of the zone least likely place on America for someone to first discover from Europe; it's both too close to 30 degrees latitude (which was avoided due to frequent calm winds) and also further West. Basically the major alternate to the Caribbean was Newfoundland and then sail west from there to Canada and then Southwest; but that was much easier to travel under sail the opposite direction.

Doesn't Cipangu look more like Taiwan than Japan?

see my banner for Columbus !??!?!?!?!!

@@dontcomply3976 You mean China proper?

Seconded.

Thirded

Not only taste but also nutrients. Potatoes are a total game-changer. When the Irish under British subjugation were in extreme poverty and dependent on potatoes as almost their only food, they were still some of the healthiest, strongest people in Europe. Tons of wars were only possible because potatoes could travel farther than any other vegetable. The Inca bred potatoes to grow in almost any kind of soil, opening previously barren swathes of Afro-Eurasia to cultivation. Potatoes are magic.