When Columbus sailed the ocean blue in 1492, people were fearful that he would just sail right off the Earth. But Chris proved them all wrong by discovering the new world and convincing everyone that the world was indeed round. At least that is the story. But that is all it is a story. More specifically it is a story written by Washington Irving. Irving’s most famous stories might be Rip Van Winkle or The Legend of Sleepy Hollow but his most enduring one might have been his 1828 history book about Columbus. In the first chapter, Irving described a dramatic confrontation in which Columbus sought to win over a gathering of disbelieving Spanish scholars who argued that the world was flat. Only that isn’t what happened. The truth is that Aristotle proved the earth was round two thousand years earlier by pointing out the curved shadow it casts on the moon. By Columbus's time, virtually all learned people took that ...
The Preacher sought to find delightful words and to write words of truth correctly.