When Columbus was 25 years old, that is, 1476, he was tall with red hair and swam safely to Portugal with the wreck. In the next few years, he lived in Portugal, got married and had children. Unfortunately, his young wife passed away soon. Columbus, who could have continued to be a sailor in a merchant ship off the coast of Portugal, has always dreamed of wealth and honor and looked forward to the mysterious place in the west.
The Travels of Marco Polo was a book that Columbus liked to read when he was a teenager. Later, he not only read the book intensively, but also did research. The Columbus Memorial Hall in Seville, Spain, still holds a Latin book "Travels of Marco Polo", and many Columbus' eyebrows are also preserved in the book. Columbus likes reading this book, not only because it is as interesting as Arabian Nights, but also because it conforms to his ideal of being a gold digger. He appreciates the places described in the book. He appreciates the jewels, gold and silver of China and India, but what he appreciates most is the description of Japan.
Kyle Poirot, who hasn't been to Japan, wrote several chapters about Japan according to rumors. According to his account, Japan is located 2400 kilometers off the coast of China, and China has inexhaustible gold. However, because the king is not allowed to export gold, few businessmen go there to do business. In arachis duranensis, Japanese palaces are made of gold. In the palace, roads and rooms are paved with 4 cm thick bricks, and even the window frames are made of gold. Rose pearls can be collected everywhere, and people should put a pearl in the mouth of the dead when burying them. According to the book, Yuan Di started the war against Japan because of listening to rumors.
Columbus deliberately wanted to find a way to reach the East first, and dreamed of achieving the goal that Kublai Khan failed to achieve. In a letter, he said that he prayed day and night to get the land that produced gold from God. He wrote in the letter: "Gold is the most precious of all commodities, and gold is wealth. Whoever owns gold will get everything he needs in the world, and at the same time he will get the means to save his soul from purgatory and make it enjoy the joy of heaven again. "
In addition, Columbus's curiosity was also promoted by his extensive reading and long-term sailing practice. There is a passage in his diary: "I have never left my life at sea since I was young." This profession seems to make everyone in this line feel that they want to know the secrets of the world. "
1476, Columbus joined a French pirate fleet. His ship caught fire and sank in the battle with an Italian ship. He jumped into the sea to escape, swam in the sea for a long time and arrived in Portugal. Columbus thought it was God's plan that he could survive and reach Portugal.
In Portugal, an "explorer" country, Columbus learned a lot about navigation, how to use compasses, charts and various new navigation instruments, how to use the positions of the sun and stars to determine the position of ships, and participated in many ocean voyages with the ship. Once, he got a chance to sail to Iceland. After he arrived in Iceland, he continued to sail 160 km, which greatly affected Columbus's ambition to sail west. But what may attract him more is the story about Viking.
The original meaning of Viking is "people living in the bay". Because Viking's original word is Viking, many books are also translated into Viking. During 800 ~ 1500, due to the rapid population growth and internal political turmoil, some Swedes, Danes and Norwegians who were good at sailing in northern Europe often went out to sea in droves to seek a new life. They wandered around the sea for some time, intercepting merchant ships, attacking other countries' coasts for plunder, and some people engaged in business and exploration. The so-called "pirate era" is what European medieval historians call this period.
Around 900 AD, Norwegian vikings arrived in Greenland and established settlements on the west coast, which was one of their many expeditions. Around the year 1000, a group of Icelandic people led by Leif ericson set out from Greenland and arrived at the North American coast. Because they found a vine that looks like a grape there, they called it "the land of wine" and transliterated it as "Brunei". Now the mouth of the St. Lawrence River may be the "Brunei" area at that time. Due to the attack of the local indigenous people, their plan to build a settlement there failed to come true.
For many people, Eriksson's trip to Brunei is just a story, but Columbus is convinced. He firmly believes that land can be reached across the Atlantic Ocean, and that "Brunei" is a country in East Asia. From some rumors, Columbus strengthened his ideas. Even during the continuous strong westerly winds, there are sometimes some bodies floating on the sea, which are neither European nor African. In this regard, Columbus thought it was the body of an Asian living on the other side of the ocean.
In addition to Columbus's mysterious and arrogant inspiration that he was chosen by God as Shenzhou, the carrier of Christ, to complete the mission of discovering "a new heaven and a new earth", more importantly, Poseidon, an ancient Greek scholar, pointed out the spherical theory of the earth, and Bacon, a medieval thinker, influenced him to take risks.
1474, Columbus wrote a letter from his hometown to the famous astronomer and geographer Toth Conneely, asking about the shortest route from the sea to India. The scholar pointed out: "Compared with the road along the west coast of Africa discovered by the Portuguese, it is a shorter road to reach the kingdom of gold and spices through the Atlantic Ocean." The letter also sent him a schematic diagram and calculated the distance. Columbus recorded in the Foreign Book according to the Old Testament: "On the third day, you will gather water in one seventh of the earth, and the other sixth will dry up." Vito and Conneely made a much smaller judgment on the size of the earth. Columbus thought that Europe, Asia and Africa accounted for 6/7 of the total area of the earth, while the ocean was only 1/7. After studying the works of Ptolemy, Kyle Poirot and Da 'ai (1350 ~ 1420), Columbus came to the conclusion that the longitude of the whole earth is 360 degrees, and it takes 280 degrees to reach the vast Asian land from west Africa to the east (according to Ptolemy's idea, the southern tip of Africa is connected with the Asian continent), and the ocean from west Africa to the east coast is less than 80 degrees.
Because the "sea" in Ptolemy's Translation of Geography is the Arabic unit of measurement, Columbus did not convert it into the European "sea" when calculating, so Columbus made another mistake. If we sail west from the Canary Islands, the distance at each longitude will be reduced to 50 nautical miles (80 kilometers) because the longitude there is shorter than the equator. In this way, it sailed 6400 kilometers due west from the Canary Islands, and then China, Japanese and Indian arrived.