In a word, no.

This is a persistent myth, regularly and derisively used by anyone still under the evolutionist impression that modern science had to save the old world from ignorance.

Famous historian Samuel Eliot Morison, firmly in the camp of conventional, evolutionist-influenced scholars, clearly bristled at the idea that Columbus had to prove the world was round. In his popular 1942 biography of Columbus, Admiral of the Ocean Sea, Morison emphasized:

…of all the vulgar errors connected with Columbus, the most persistent and the most absurd is that he had to convince people ‘the world was round.’ Every educated man in his day believed the world to be a sphere, every European university so taught geography, and seamen…knew perfectly well from seeing ships ‘hull-down’ and ‘raising’ mountains as they approached, that the surface of the globe was curved. (pg 33)

Note that was written in 1942. How many students have been — and still are — taught the “vulgar error connected with Columbus” long since Morison railed against it?

In his marvelously written Oxford History of the American People (1965), Morison continued to assert that the Greeks (c. 300s BC) and medieval theologians (AD 600-1500) taught that the world was a sphere and “Columbus never had to argue for it.” (pgs 17-19)

British author and researcher Ian Wilson, famous for his books on the Shroud of Turin, published an intriguing book on Christopher Columbus and the fishermen of Bristol, England, in 1991. Called The Columbus Myth, it examines a number of interesting possibilities regarding Columbus himself, his previous knowledge of America, maps, documents, and fishing trips by Bristol seamen across the Atlantic at least as early as the 1480s. We’ll blog more on that later.

But here’s a quote from the book (pg 6) regarding the opposition Columbus faced in getting backing for his expedition:

Nor, despite popular supposition, was it his [Columbus] belief that the world was round that attracted such opposition. This [belief] was accepted by most educated people. It was his estimates of the distance to ‘Asia’ that were so hotly derided.

But that’s medieval Europe. What about the ancients?

Didn’t the earlier civilizations believe the Earth was flat, surrounded by water, sitting on pillars (or a turtle) and covered with a dome? John Byl, Ph.D. in astronomy, notes at his bylogos blog that such a picture is

more a reflection of the ignorance of modern scholars than of ancient civilization. Ancient man was a much keener observer of the night sky than modern desk-bound scholars. They were well aware that the stellar sky rotates daily. Hence it cannot be a solid hemisphere held up by pillars fixed on the earth. Further, they were well aware of months and seasons. Hence the sun and moon were not fixed in a stellar shell. They were also well aware that the sun and moon were much more distant than flying birds. [See Dr. Byl's interesting post on this subject at bylogos.blogspot.com in "Genesis and Ancient Cosmology"]

We go even further on the cosmological expertise of “ancient man.” The issue of earliest man’s intelligence and knowledge of the Cosmos was something we tackled head-on in our 1994 work They Came From Babel. [See our blog(s) on the flat-Earth subject at the new TCFB site] Throughout history, men certainly have descended into various forms of ignorant and idolatrous beliefs. As Peter Tompkins discusses in his Secrets of the Great Pyramid (1971, 1978), there was a decline of ancient knowledge. The Greeks were “mainly handling and mishandling traditional data of an advanced science that preceded them, and which they only understood in part.” (Tompkins, pg. 215)

For more on the extent of ancient knowledge and biblical accuracy regarding the Cosmos, see TheyCameFromBabel.com.