Famous people X. Columb

Columbus Day celebrates Columbus’ legacy in the Americas.
Spain also celebrates it on October 12, as do most countries in the Americas. In the USA, however, it’s always on the second Monday of October, while Canada doesn’t celebrate Columbus Day at all.
Columbus wasn’t actually the first European to discover the Americas.
That honor goes to Leif Erikson, a Norse explorer from Iceland, who arrived in North America around 1000 AD. He and his fellow Norsemen even founded a small colony of their own, which they called Vinland. Modern archaeologists continue to look for the colony, with a ruined Norse settlement in Newfoundland, Canada, as the prime site.
Columbus never believed the Flat Earth theory.
The idea that Columbus doubted the Flat Earth theory comes from an 1828 biography, which claimed that Columbus found it difficult to find support because the Catholic Church also believed in the Flat Earth theory.
This, in turn, goes back to 17th Century Protestant propaganda against the Catholic Church. In reality, the Catholic Church actually preserved the theoretical knowledge going back to ancient times when Greek mathematicians used geometry to prove and calculate the Earth’s roundness.
That said, Columbus’ own grasp of geography had its fair share of fantasy. For one thing, on noticing how the North Star’s position wasn’t actually fixed, he came to the conclusion that the Earth actually had a pear-like shape. Columbus even believed towards the end of his life that South America was actually the legendary Earthly Paradise.
He did have strange Biblical beliefs, however.
He frequently quoted the Bible and various prophecies in his records, but this isn’t especially unusual for people of his time. The strangeness comes from Columbus’ own sense of destiny. In particular, he saw himself on a divine mission to find wealth in the Americas. That wealth would then allow Christendom to launch new crusades in the Middle East. First, they would retake Jerusalem, and then rebuild the Temple of Solomon.