The Man Who Found America Died Thinking It Was Japan

At some point you've looked at a map of the world and seen exactly what's there. The Americas. The Pacific. The whole thing, complete.It wasn't always known. For most of human history, the ocean didn't have an other side. It had an edge. Or monsters. Or paradise. Or nothing at all — just water, going forever, until you fell off.This video follows that idea from 500 BCE to 1507. From the Greeks who drew a river around the edge of the world, to medieval cartographers who put dog-headed men in the blank spaces, to Christopher Columbus — who sailed west to reach Asia, got his math wrong by a factor of four, hit an entire continent nobody knew existed, and died insisting he'd found Japan.The monsters on the old maps weren't entirely wrong. They were just in the wrong place.It's longer than you'd expect for something that turned out to be just more world. That's the point.