HISTORY88 - Ten Historical Myths

This is my 88^th blog article on some aspect of history.  During my research and writing, I have come across many historical myths, which though not true, persist in our general discourse today.  So, at Pat’s suggestion, this blog will be about historical myths, and truth behind them.

  

After a short introduction, I will discuss 10 historical myths - in historical order.

My principal sources include: “The 20 Greatest Historical Myths,” writespirit.net; “Myths Debunked: 5 Widely Believed Tales about Historical Figures,” blog.gale.com; “Myths of the Flat Earth,” “Christopher Columbus,” and “Magellan Expedition,” Wikipedia.com; “Shakespeare Sources,” thoughtco.com; “The Myths of the Thanksgiving Story and the Lasting Damage They Imbue,” smithsonianmag.com; “Salem Witch Trials,” and “Did George Washington Have Wooden Teeth?,” history.com; “Was Napoleon Short?;” britannica.com; “Gunfights in the Wild West,” whatculture.com; “Who actually invented the light bulb?,” endesa.com; plus, numerous other online sources.

Introduction

Myth and history have been intertwined for as long as humans have walked the earth.  In ancient times they were often hard to separate, and in several persistent cases we have done no better in modern times. Sometimes it is the result of laziness (on the part of both scholars and students) and sometimes it is the result of people wanting to believe something so badly that they do not let facts get in the way.

In this blog, I will discuss ten common myths (my choice from long list) that have persistently endured.

Medieval people believed the Earth was flat.

European scholars and educated people in the Middle Ages (500 to 1500 AD) supposedly believed that the Earth was flat, and that if a sailing vessel at sea went far enough, it would fall off the edge of the Earth.  But, the myth of the flat Earth is a modern historical misconception. 

Illustration of flat Earth.

 

The earliest clear documentation of the idea of a spherical Earth comes from the ancient Greeks.  Aristotle, Pythagoras, Euclid, and Ptolemy all wrote about the Earth being round.  The belief was widespread in the Greek world when Eratosthenes calculated the circumference of Earth around 240 BC.  This knowledge spread with Greek influence such that during the Early Middle Ages (~600 - 1000 AD), most European and Middle Eastern scholars believed that the Earth was spherical.  

Additionally, medieval sailors (including Columbus) knew that the Earth was not flat, because when, say, a mountain would come into sight, its peak would be the first thing over the horizon, indicating some degree of planetary curvature.  And during times of partial lunar eclipse, the round shadow of Earth could be seen on the Moon.

Historians of science David Lindberg and Ronald Numbers point out that "there was scarcely a Christian scholar of the Middle Ages who did not acknowledge [Earth's] sphericity and even know its approximate circumference.”  The Catholic Church never made an authoritative claim that the Earth was flat, and most of the fathers of the Catholic Church from early times all believed and taught that the Earth was a globe.  Belief in a flat Earth among educated Europeans was almost nonexistent from the Late Middle Ages onward.

Historian Jeffrey Burton Russell says the flat-Earth error flourished most between 1870 and 1920, and had to do with arguments over the theory of biological evolution.  He ascribes popularization of the flat-Earth myth to inaccurate histories such as John William Draper's History of the Conflict Between Religion and Science (1874) and Andrew Dickson White's A History of the Warfare of Science with Theology in Christendom (1896) - with both books strongly pushing the flat-Earth myth.  Historical research gradually demonstrated that Draper and White had propagated more fantasy than fact in their efforts to prove that science and religion are locked in eternal conflict.

Since the early 20^th century, several books and articles have documented the flat-Earth error as one of a number of widespread misconceptions in popular views of the Middle Ages.  Although the misconception was frequently refuted in historical scholarship since at least 1920, it persisted in popular culture and in some school textbooks into the 21^st century. 

Today, beliefs that the Earth is flat, contrary to over two millennia of scientific consensus that it is roughly spherical, are promoted by several organizations and individuals.  Such beliefs are pseudoscience - not based on scientific knowledge.  Flat Earth advocates are classified by experts in philosophy and physics as science deniers.  I would go as far to classify them as “kooks.”

 

Columbus discovered America.

It is commonly said that "Columbus discovered America."  It would be more accurate, perhaps, to say that he introduced the Americas to Western Europe during his four voyages to the region between 1492 and 1502.  It is also safe to say that he paved the way for the massive influx of western Europeans that would ultimately form several new nations including the United States, Canada, and Mexico.

Engraving depicting Christopher Columbus receiving gifts from the native king in Hispaniola.

 

But to say he "discovered" America is a bit of a misnomer because there were plenty of people already here when he arrived.

So, who were the people who really deserve to be called the first Americans?  They came from Asia, probably no later than about 15,000 years ago.  They walked across the Bering land bridge that back in the day connected what is now the U.S. state of Alaska and Siberia.  (Fifteen-thousand years ago, ocean levels were much lower and the land between the continents was hundreds of miles wide.)  By Columbus’ time, descendants of these Paleo Indians (ancient ones) had spread over the entire western hemisphere and had evolved into what we call today in the U.S., Native Americans.  (Pre-Columbian population figures for the Western Hemisphere are difficult to estimate due to the fragmentary nature of the evidence. Estimates range from 8 - 112 million.)

Meanwhile, on the eastern shores of North America, the most certain, best-documented evidence for European contact with America before Columbus is the Vikings.  The first Viking settlements in North America were in Greenland, established sometime in the 980s, according to the Sagas of the Icelanders.  (The Vikings originally came from northern Europe, settling first in Iceland, then Greenland.)  This settlement lasted for 518 years, over 160 years longer than the U.S. has existed.   Icelandic sagas also record that Lief Erikson took a ship west from Greenland in the year 1001, and set up a settlement in an area they called Vinland, which is assumed to be coastal Canada.  They eventually fled the continent, due in part to battles with Native Americans.

Christopher Columbus was an Italian explorer (sailing for Spain at the time) who completed four voyages across the Atlantic Ocean to the New World, opening the way for the widespread European exploration and colonization of the Americas.  His expeditions were the first known European contact with the Caribbean and Central and South America.  (Columbus never saw North America and didn’t know he had discovered a new continent.)

Columbus has been criticized both for his brutality, and for initiating the depopulation of the indigenous peoples of the Caribbean, whether by imported diseases or intentional violence.  According to scholars of Native American history, George Tinker and Mark Freedman, Columbus was responsible for creating a cycle of "murder, violence, and slavery" to maximize exploitation of the Caribbean islands' resources.

 

Magellan circumnavigated the world.

Many people believe that Portuguese explorer Ferdinand Magellan was the first man to circumnavigate the world in 1519 - 1522.  But, half-way around the world, Magellan was killed by natives in the Philippines.  Magellan’s second-in-command, Juan Sebastian Elcano, completed the circumnavigation.

The Magellan expedition was funded mostly by King Charles I of Spain, with the hope that it would discover a profitable western route to the Moluccas (Spice Islands), as the eastern route was controlled by Portugal under the Treaty of Tordesillas. 

A fleet of five ships and about 270 men left Spain on 20 September 1519, sailed across the Atlantic Ocean and down the eastern coast of South America, eventually discovering the Strait of Magellan, allowing them to pass through to the Pacific Ocean (which Magellan named).  The fleet completed the first Pacific crossing, stopping in the Philippines for about six weeks.

On the Philippine Island of Mactan, while ashore, seeking to convert the natives to Christianity and accept the King of Spain as their ruler, Magellan was killed in a fierce battle.

Magellan was succeeded as captain-general by a series of officers, with Spanish navigator Juan Sebastian Elcano eventually leading the expedition to the Moluccas and across the Indian Ocean, then around the Cape of Good Hope through waters controlled by the Portuguese, and north along the West African coast to finally arrive in Spain on 6 September 1522, completing the first circumnavigation of the world.

The route of the first circumnavigation of the world, 1519 - 1522.

 

The expedition faced numerous hardships including sabotage and mutinies by the mostly-Spanish crew, starvation, scurvy, storms, and hostile encounters with indigenous people. Only 18 men and one ship completed the return trip to Spain. 

The expedition accomplished its primary goal - to find a western route to the Moluccas.  But the route was much longer and more arduous than expected, and was therefore not commercially useful.  Nevertheless, the expedition is regarded as one of the greatest achievements in seamanship and had a significant impact on the European understanding of the world.

There was quite a celebration when Elcano completed the voyage in 1522, bringing home a wealthy cargo of cloves.  But, when Elcano tried a second time to sail around the globe, he died crossing the Pacific Ocean.  Over time, Elcano’s fame faded - and the myth of Magellan grew.  Historians today can’t help but give a lot of credit to Ferdinand Magellan.  He was a brilliant navigator and a fine leader.  He was certainly persistent in following his dream and making it happen.  But historians and storytellers are inaccurate when they say that Magellan “circumnavigated the world.” 

 

Shakespeare’s plays were original stories.

William Shakespeare (1564 - 1616)  is generally known as the greatest playwright who ever lived, even though most of his plays were not original.  

Shakespeare only wrote two plays with original plots: Love’s Labor’s Lost and The Tempest.  For all his other works he borrowed plots from other writers, often re-ordering events, inserting subplots, and adding or removing characters.

Shakespeare was well-read and drew from an extensive range of texts - not all of them written in English!  He sourced his plots and characters from historical accounts and classical texts.  It is often difficult to prove a direct link between Shakespeare’s plays and the original sources, but there are some writers that Shakespeare came back to time and time again.

Most of Shakespeare’s plays were not original stories.

 

Below are some of the most important sources for Shakespeare’s plays:

Giovanni Boccaccio

This Italian prose and poetry writer published a collection of stories entitled the Decameron in the mid-14^th century. It is believed that, in parts, Shakespeare would have had to work from the original Italian.
Source for: All’s Well That Ends Well, Cymbeline, and The Two Gentlemen of Verona.

Arthur Brooke

Although the plot behind Romeo and Juliet was well-known in Shakespeare's time, it is believed that Shakespeare primarily worked from Brooke’s 1562 poem entitled The Tragical History of Romeus and Juliet.
Source for: Romeo and Juliet

Saxo Grammaticus

In around 1200 AD, Saxo Grammaticus wrote Gesta Danorum (or “Deeds of the Danes”) which chronicled Denmark’s Kings and told the story of Amleth - the real-life Hamlet!  Hamlet is an anagram of Amleth.  It is believed that Shakespeare would have had to work from the original Latin.
Source for: Hamlet

Raphael Holinshed

The book Shakespeare relied on most heavily for plot ideas was Holinshed’s Chronicles, published in 1577, which records the history of England, Scotland, and Ireland and became Shakespeare’s primary source for his historical plays.  However, it should be noted that Shakespeare did not set out to create historically accurate accounts - he reshaped history for dramatic purposes, and to play into the prejudices of his audience.
Source for: Henry IV (both parts), Henry V, Henry VI (all three parts), Henry VIII, Richard II, Richard III, King Lear, Macbeth, and Cymbeline.

Plutarch

Shakespeare’s second most important source was a book by the Roman historian Plutarch, titled Lives of the Noble Greeks and Romans.  Shakespeare may have read the book in the original Latin, but he definitely read Thomas North’s English-language translation.  We know this because Shakespeare clearly based Julius Caesar, Antony and Cleopatra, Coriolanus, and Timon of Athens on North’s translation.  Indeed, sometimes Shakespeare followed North’s wording so closely that a reader can figure out which page of Lives he drew on for particular scenes.

Aside from these major works, Shakespeare also borrowed from dozens of other writers.  He borrowed from Roman writers, especially Ovid, Seneca, and Plautus, and from the great medieval English poets Geoffrey Chaucer and John Gower.  He even updated stories that had been popular just a few decades earlier. 

In the 17^th century, it was felt that Shakespeare was an outstandingly “natural” writer, whose intellectual background was of comparatively little significance: “he was naturally learn’d; he needed not the spectacles of books to read nature,” wrote John Dryden in 1668.  Though subsequent research proved that Shakespeare sourced most of his plays, the myth had taken hold.

 

Friendly Indians welcomed the Pilgrims to America, taught them how to live in this new place, sat down to Thanksgiving dinner with them, and then disappeared, handing off America to white people so they could create a great nation dedicated to liberty, opportunity, and Christianity.

One part of the Thanksgiving myth is that the arrival of the Mayflower was some kind of first-contact episode.  It was not.  The local Native Americans, the Wampanoags, had already had a century of contact with Europeans - it was bloody and it involved slave raiding by Europeans.  The Wampanoags were decimated by epidemic disease.  (Native Americans had little resistance to European diseases like bubonic plague, measles, smallpox, mumps, chickenpox, influenza, cholera, diphtheria, typhus, malaria, leprosy, and yellow fever.)

When the pilgrims landed at Plymouth in 1620, the Wampanoags chief offered the new arrivals a friendly alliance, primarily as a way to protect the depleted Wampanoags against their rivals, the Narragansetts. 

In the fall of 1621, after the Pilgrims’ first corn harvest proved successful, Pilgrim leader, Governor William Bradford organized a celebratory feast.  (The exact date of the harvest feast is not known, but thought to be between September 21 and November 11.)  The celebrants included 50 Pilgrims who were on the Mayflower (all who remained of the 100 who had landed) and 90 of the fledgling colony’s Native Americans allies, the Wampanoags.

Popular depiction of the “first Thanksgiving.”

 

The peaceful harvest festival that brought the Pilgrims and the Wampanoag together at the “first Thanksgiving” wasn't as lasting as is popularly reported.  The Thanksgiving myth doesn’t address the subsequent deterioration of the Wampanoags - Pilgrim alliance.   For 50 years, the alliance was tested by colonial land expansion, the spread of disease, and the exploitation of resources on Wampanoag land.  Then, tensions ignited into war.  Known as King Philip’s War, the conflict devastated the Wampanoags and forever shifted the balance of power in favor of European arrivals.  Wampanoags today remember the Pilgrims’ entry to their homeland as a day of deep mourning, rather than a moment of giving thanks.

See my November 2022 blog on the history of Thanksgiving at https://bobringreflections.blogspot.com/2022/11/history65-thanksgiving.html

 

Witches were burned at the stake in Salem.

The Salem, Massachusetts witch trials of 1692 - 1693 led to the arrests of 150 people, of whom 31 were tried and 20 were executed.  But just as these trials were based on ignorance, there are many misconceptions about them.  For starters, the 31 condemned “witches” were not all women.  Six of them were men.  Also, they were not burned at stake.  Hanging was the usual method - though one was crushed to death under heavy stones.

Belief in the supernatural - and specifically in the devil’s practice of giving certain humans (witches) the power to harm others in return for their loyalty - emerged in Europe as early as the 14^th century, and was widespread in colonial New England.  In addition, the harsh realities of life in the rural Puritan community of Salem Village (present-day Danvers, Massachusetts) at the time included the after-effects of a British war with France in the American colonies in 1689, a recent smallpox epidemic, fears of attacks from neighboring Native American tribes, and a longstanding rivalry with the more affluent community of Salem Town (present-day Salem). 

Amid these simmering tensions, the Salem witch trials would be fueled by residents’ suspicions of and resentment toward their neighbors, as well as their fear of outsiders.

The infamous witch trials began during the spring of 1692, after a group of young girls in Salem Village claimed to be possessed by the devil and accused several local women of witchcraft.  As a wave of hysteria spread throughout colonial Massachusetts, a special court convened in Salem to hear the cases; the first convicted witch, Bridget Bishop, was hanged that June.  Eighteen others followed Bishop to Salem’s Gallows Hill, while some 150 more men, women, and children were accused over the next several months. 

Depiction of one of the Salem witch trials.

 

By September 1692, the hysteria had begun to abate and public opinion turned against the trials. Though the Massachusetts General Court later annulled guilty verdicts against accused witches, and granted indemnities to their families, bitterness lingered in the community, and the painful legacy of the Salem witch trials would endure for centuries.

The Salem witch trials are a defining example of intolerance and injustice in American history.  The extraordinary series of events led to the deaths of 14 innocent women and five innocent men. 

 

George Washington had wooden teeth.

The famous claim that George Washington sported a set of wooden teeth is little more than a myth, but America’s first president was certainly not a shining example of oral hygiene.

Dental issues plagued Washington for most of his adult life.  He began losing teeth as early as his twenties, and was eventually forced to wear several sets of unsightly and painful dentures.  Rather than wood, Washington’s many false choppers were made out of varying combinations of rare hippopotamus ivory, human teeth, and metal fasteners.  The false teeth were embedded in a base of lead and made flexible with steel springs. 

He got his first set before the Revolutionary War, and may have also undergone a “tooth transplantation” procedure - perhaps even using teeth purchased from his own slaves - in the mid-1780s with the help of his personal dentist and friend, Jean-Pierre Le Mayeur.

Nevertheless, by the time he was inaugurated as president in 1789, Washington only had a single natural tooth left.  He took the oath of office while wearing a special set of dentures made from ivory, brass, and gold, built for him by dentist John Greenwood.  After Washington lost his sole surviving tooth, he gifted it to Greenwood as a keepsake.

Though Washington’s dentures were fashioned by some of the best dentists the late 18^th century had to offer, they still left him disfigured and often in pain.  Keeping his false teeth looking pearly white was a constant chore, and Washington often shipped them off to Greenwood to keep them in working order.  The teeth would easily turn brown without regular care and cleaning, and their occasionally unsightly appearance may have first jumpstarted the rumor that they were made from wood. 

Worse still, the dentures caused jaw discomfort and forced the President’s lips to, as he once wrote, “bulge” in an unnatural fashion.  This facial disfigurement is particularly apparent in artist Gilbert Stuart’s famous unfinished painting of Washington from 1796 - the same portrait that appears on the one-dollar bill.

George Washington's face in the Gilbert portrait and the one-dollar bill.

 

Napoleon Bonaparte was short.

Napoleon Bonaparte was a military leader who ascended to the French throne, launched the Napoleonic Wars, expanded the French Empire, implemented the Napoleonic Code, brought liberal policies and reforms to many of his conquered territories, and earned himself a place in the pantheon of the most revered military minds in human history.

Some people believe that Napoleon’s domineering ambitions were to compensate for being so physically small.  Not so. 

Napoleon was called Le Petit Corporal, but the nickname, translated as “The Little Corporal,” was not meant as a reflection of his stature.  It was intended as a term of affection by his soldiers.  Indeed, many contemporary French paintings, suggest that the general was not short but of average stature. 

The English, however, were not so generous: their artists depicted Napoleon as diminutive.  Around 1803 the celebrated cartoonist James Gillray introduced the character of “Little Boney,” who resembled a childish Napoleon.  Gillray played up juvenility through smallness, whereby Napoleon was represented wearing huge boots and, as one source put it, “trying to talk tough beneath an enormous two-horned hat dwarfing his entire body.  Or struggling to pull a sword from an unwieldy scabbard that dragged along the ground as he walked.”  Soon Napoleon was just depicted as being short.  In “The Empress’s wish or Boney Puzzled!!,” another cartoonist, Isaac Cruikshank, depicted a peevish Napoleon at about half the height of his wife and troops.   A short Bonaparte thus became the standard for representing the emperor in English newspapers.

James Gilray cartoon showing British Prime Minister, William Pitt, carving up the globe with a diminutive Napoleon Bonaparte.

 

Today, experts estimate that Napoleon was probably close to five feet, six inches or five feet, seven inches tall.  Although the range may seem short by 21^st- century standards, it was typical in the 19^th century, when most Frenchmen stood between five feet, two inches and five feet, six inches tall.  Napoleon was thus average or taller.

 

The Wild West was a hotbed of murders and thievery.

The myth of the lawless, wild American western frontier has been spread across virtually every artistic medium.  Whether it's movies like Tombstone, or the Dollars trilogy, or video games like the Red Dead series, the myth of the Western gunslinger - someone who is good at shooting guns and uses them for murder or robbery - has been solidified in the popular imagination.

The reality was much less romantic, and much less violent.  For example, the notoriously "lawless" town of Dodge City, Kansas, averaged only 1.7 murders a year between 1876 and 1888.  Furthermore, there were only about eight recorded bank heists in the entirety of the American West from 1859 to 1900.

Then there's the iconic duel.  Two rough-and-tumble gunslingers take their places in a dusty street, so many paces from one another.  They narrow their eyes, draw their revolvers, and fire.  One man drops to the dirt, while the other spins his revolver and slips it back into its holster.  What of that popular Western metaphor?  It only happened once or twice, at least that historians know of.  Even the term "gunslinger" isn't accurate. That term didn't come into the popular lexicon until the 1920s.  Before then, they were called “shootists” or “pistoleros.”

One on one gunfights rarely happened in the so-called Wild West.

 

The Wild West is a carefully constructed myth, one that we still cherish and refuse to let die.

 

Edison invented the electric light.

Thomas Edison is known as the world’s greatest inventor.  His record output - 1,093 patents - still amazes us, over a century later.  Astonishing, except for one thing: he didn’t invent most of them.  Most Edison inventions were the work of his unsung technicians - and his most famous invention, the electric light, didn’t even belong to his laboratory.  Four decades before Edison was born, English scientist Sir Humphry Davy invented arc lighting (using a carbon filament).  For many years, numerous innovators would improve on Davy’s model.  The only problem: none could glow for more than twelve hours before the filament broke.  The achievement of Edison’s lab was to find the right filament that would burn for days on end.  A major achievement, but not the first.

Long before Thomas Edison’s work, British inventors were demonstrating that electric light was possible with the arc lamp.  Here are the principal milestones:

1809: Humphry Davy attached a fine charcoal strip between the ends of the wires connected to a battery. This is considered to be the first light bulb.

1840: Warren de la Rue put a coiled platinum filament inside a sealed vacuum tube. He created a long-lasting light, but it was far too expensive.

1875: Henry Woodward and Matthew Evans patented the light bulb, which was basically the same as that of three decades before.

1878: Joseph Wilson Swan presented an enclosed glass bulb, from which all air had been removed, platinum lead wires, and a light-emitting element made from carbon, which did not last very long when installed.

1880: Thomas Edison, having purchased Woodward and Evans’ patent, presented a light bulb with a carbonated bamboo filament with a lamp life of 600 hours.  This was the first real commercial model.

Joseph Swan’s 1878 lightbulb (left) and Thomas Edison’s1880 lightbulb (right).

 

What makes Edison’s contribution to electric lighting so extraordinary and contributes to the myth that he invented it, is that he didn’t stop with improving the bulb - he developed a whole suite of inventions that made the use of light bulbs practical. 

 

The great enemy of truth is very often not the lie, deliberate, contrived, and dishonest, but the myth, persistent, persuasive and unrealistic.

John F. Kennedy