China and India

Columbus’ first voyage is connected in the most straight-forward way with the calculations of Eratosthenes.Columbus was fascinated by what he called the Enterprise of the Indies,’ a project to reach Japan, China and India not by following the coastline of Africa and sailing East but ratherby plunging boldly into the unknown Western ocean - or, as Eratosthenes had said with startling prescience, to pass by sea from Iberia to India.’Columbus had been an itinerant peddler of old maps and an assiduous reader of the topics by and about the ancient geographers, including Eratosthenes, Strabo and Ptolemy.