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In fourteen hundred ninety-two
Columbus sailed the ocean blue

Movies such as The Golden Compass should by all means be criticized, and criticized vigorously. For Christians, to do otherwise would be the height of irresponsibility. Although the movie's release is now more than a year-and-a-half in the past, the potential damage from such a production is not. But before we look at the reasons why, let's squeeze aboard the Nina, the Pinta, and the Santa Maria, and sail off to India with Christopher Columbus.

Now, what in the world could Christopher Columbus have to do with The Golden Compass, other than using a compass to get where he wanted to go? Well, let's all recall what we were taught, during our carefree school days, about Columbus' voyage.

If you were taught what I was, Christopher Columbus wanted to sail around the world for two reasons. First, he wanted to connect Spain to India, and thus to the East, to establish trade with that part of the world. Second, he wanted to prove the world was round, to overturn the prevailing viewpoint of scientists and the church - especially the latter- that the earth was flat, and any such voyage would sail right off the edge. And we were told he failed at the first, discovering America instead, but achieved the second. We were told wrong.

While researching his 1991 book, "Inventing the Flat Earth: Columbus and the Historians", professor and historian Jeffrey Burton Russell went in search of the earliest belief in a flat earth. He searched medieval Europe to no avail. He marched on back through the sands of time - all the way back to the 3rd century B.C. And he found that even that far back, a spherical earth was the rule among those with an education. But that surprise was nothing like the shock that awaited him when he tracked down the true source of the error.

Russell discovered that Christopher Columbus' quarrel with flat-earthers dated all the way back to ... um ... 1828. And its main promulgator was none other than a pioneer of the American historical novel, Washington Irving. How could this be? How could the author of such whimsical tales as "Rip Van Winkle" and "The Legend of Sleepy Hollow" have launched an error that is still often taught today, even though most encyclopedias have long since excised it from their pages? The truth is, he had some help, and here it turns a little ugly and quite sinister.

The story of Columbus and the flat-earthers is contained in Irving's historical novel "The Life and Voyages

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