mocosoft
31148
1054
24
It looks a lot crazier and more daring when you see it as a trip into the unknown.
Source: https://x.com/Mcuquerella/status/2094455318319169734
Sep 1, 2026 1:49 PM
mocosoft
31148
1054
24
It looks a lot crazier and more daring when you see it as a trip into the unknown.
Source: https://x.com/Mcuquerella/status/2094455318319169734
Dimestream
Not pictured: all the rape, murder, and theft done along the way!
swedeonamoose
O oh looks like someone caught europeans.
swofromtherock
If you like this video, might I recommend Sid Meiers Civilization
hellothisispeggy
I'd also recommend the age of empires series, it's got the same fog of war mechanic.
SmashySashimi
Neat way to depict mapping.
newwoolmonosta
fuck Columbus!! murderer
Almaadin
You're going to blow a lot of people's minds that the America Columbus "discovered" was South America and the Caribbean.
cousteau
Wait till they learn that the name "America" was originally given to, well, South America.
MissDeeMeanor
He always believed he landed in Asia.
Gerdalearnedme
Actually, in his notes he wondered if he had reached India or modern day Japan. The next day he recalculated and decided he had reached India.
RobertAG25772
He was looking for the Indies (Indonesia), not India—which was known to the west as Hindustan at the time anyway. That’s why Indonesia is the East Indies, and the Caribbean islands are the West Indies. When he reached South America, he thought it was Cathay (China).
Gerdalearnedme
Oh I thought Cathay was Japan.
So he was searching for spices?
RobertAG25772
Might have been
RobertAG25772
He reached the wrong “Indies”’
ThePostPenultStraw
There was a video game on the commodore 64 we’d play where the map was completely blank and you’d explore. As you travelled just on the edges it would light up away from you. When you found a village it would fill out with all the places they knew and you’d see little light ups on the map. It also involved a lot of “converting” the natives through pacification methods (religion or military). This was in the mid 80’s.
Gunslinger2071
I remember that game!
Tarmaccian
The Seven Cities of Gold?
ThePostPenultStraw
That was it! Good memory. I couldn't recall the name until you just said it. Thanks.
Tarmaccian
I will admit that I cheated with a bit of Google and searching through lists of old games.
I’ma gonna go fire up an emulator now…
Rijacki
Many video games have blank maps you need to explore. Some call it the 'fog of war' or similar. In my opinion, it's a great mechanic to promote exploration to 'clear the map'.
cousteau
Terraria? :) (or any other modern map-based game really; I wouldn't be surprised if they were all inspired in the one you mention)
cousteau
("Terraria" was a joke btw; I know that one wasn't released in the 80s)
RogueCorp
Cool story. Still a fucking genocidal monster.
AyatollahBahloni
This reminds me of a couple of ancient Macintosh games that my kids used to play.
svga
is it the tank one where you could see the bullet paths?
thedeadmarchhare
Scorched Earth
svga
https://www.retroplayonline.com/game/scorched-earth/ enjoy!
ThisIsAllYouCouldComeUpWith
I'll care about Columbus' legacy when he unmurders all those indigenous people
Uskaanax
Unknown.*
cousteau
Lol, didn't notice "Unkown"
pinkmansaidthebest
Just on a journey to conquer, rape, assimilate, steal, and spread disease.
PercyClevinger
A trip into the unknown. Or, according to the video, "Unkown".
AeonexAshaxei
Also saw this. Obligatory: there are dozens of us
CallMeCourierSix
More daring, @OP? You make him sound like a hero.
He was a pedophile and a rapist, who enslaved and traded preteen girls. He was so fucking horrendous that his own country locked him up when he went back home.
Fuck this shit. The only thing he accomplished was killing fucktons of natives through disease, and raping women and children.
jqubed
It’s been a long time since high school history, but hadn’t the Portuguese made it around the southern tip of Africa and into the Indian Ocean by that point?
Subwayfootlong3
1488 Bartolomeu Dias
trigaranus
Which was a really long route. But old Christobal thought (due to the bad numbers he was using) that there was a much shorter, direct route East, by going across the Atlantic.
Cayowin
Yes, but not to any real practical end.
1488 Bartholomew Dias had discovered the southern end of Africa and deduced you could make it to india from there.
1492 Columbus
1499 Vasco de Gama actually sailed round Africa to India.
ironymus
Yeah, but still
graehall
"A trip into the unknown*" note: millions of people had been living there already for tens of thousands of years
poochyena
And where any of those people on the boat trip?
EverNotRelevant
Civ scout set to auto explore
TheFastpaws
They eventually do come back. https://youtu.be/G4Mwt0XIw00
GuysJustWannaFish
Hmm a village of natives.... wololo wololo.
thedeadmarchhare
AoE villager : "I didn't sign up for this." Gets killed in the FoW by a random animal.
EverNotRelevant
You mean you didn't send out a sheep? You barbarian!
BobRossHB
No no you send monks out to get eaten by wolves or find relics
svga
gosh was that civ 3 when that became normal?
LordStevenDanger
Sometimes do that in civ2 but I like controling it myself
MuffinProof
C&C harvester
RobertAG25772
Newfoundland—maybe bits of New England—should be counted as Previously Known Territory, just like Greenland and Iceland, on account of the Vikings.
trigaranus
The video does count Greenland as "known", but rightly has Newfie blacked out since people back in Europe were not really aware of it anymore in the late 1400s.
3dartwork
I thought we hated Columbus and ignored everything he did?
CallMeCourierSix
We do. This is a sad, pathetic, loser attempt by @OP to make Columbus seem cool.
In reality he enslaved native peoples, and raped women and children.
3dartwork
Even sadder, over 1,000 people agreed with OP thinking Columbus was cool
Breadfordloaves
Part of me was expecting the territory reveal at the end to be dickbutt
VinnyVeritas
Why should we be impressed that Columbus had his head up his ass? The Vikings did it earlier - and better. BTW.. Columbus trafficked teen girls to his sailors for a price = Columbus/Epstein's Island ?
Gambierbay
In this house we Celebrate Leif Erickson and his journeys for lumber.
Rakoth
Looking like Seven Cities of Gold out here. Probably just as much accidental and intentional killing and looting.
duktayp
Reminds me of some video game maps, that only appear when you travel there
maqp3
marco
skyfishgur
polo
maqp3
cheater
OldnSpicey
I've always heard it called "Fog of War" at least in RTS games like StarCraft and such.
svga
"shroud" in command and conquer
Traquaire
"Fog of war" in video games is not the unexplored portion of the map, it is the explored portion that you cannot monitor because you have nothing close enough to see it. You know the lay if the land, just no idea what's going on there. They grey it out a little bit (I.e. fog) to give visual distinction to explored parts you can see activity on.
Ree81
You mean Warcraft..... one.... in like 1995.
Traust
Warcraft was not the first game to have it
Munchman347
Which of those return voyages was the one where her was brought back in chains for being a rampaging murderer? Why do none of his 'heroic' statues depict the fetters?...
CallMeCourierSix
Let's not forget. He also enslaved native peoples, raped the women and children, and traded preteen girls like they were currency.
He was one of the most disgusting pieces of shit in history.
InitHello
Not pictured: All the people he enslaved and trafficked on those voyages. I wish there was a hell for Columbus to be burning in.
Legomaniac91
PennysWorthOfTea
To say nothing about all the rape & murder. Soooo much rape & murder.
BallsToYouMyGoodSir
missing the word child before that
navyjeff
Here's the crazy part: Columbus thought the globe was less than half the size that everyone else did. He died convinced he had reached India.
Srcsqwrn
What a dumbass
thoushaltnotpass
"India" was the name Europeans gave to all oriental lands, from India to Indonesia and China
woodworkerf
Even Indiana
newwoolmonosta
so, he figured he was murdering one group of people and it turned out he was murdering another.
SofaH3ro
About 3k miles circumference vs several royal court scholars who estimated it pretty closely to the actual value, though were still off by about 10% if I recall.
Arcanum3000
It was basically dumb luck that his first expedition reached land before everyone starved to death.
noWhiteHorseHereJustBatturuPrinsu
In his defense, many others at the time were convinced he would sail off the flat planet and drop into the void at some point
bricePlanetDiver
No.
FaeVikingPrincess
Not really. Most people knew the world was round since antiquity
Marsupialmessiah
Sice the ancient egyptioans that were there 5000 years before tge egyptioans you know about
Kaze54
In this guy's defense, too many people still belive the earth is flat.
hoefty
Really fun fact. Modern flat earth is distinct from the old beliefs in a flat earth. In my opinion it's a reaction to our secular scientific process. These believers take issue with the copernican principle that earth is not special. They seek anyway to assert that earth follows a different set of rules. This is why they are near impossible to convince. The flat earth is discussed in scientific terms but to them it's a faith issue. If the earth is flat then god must exist.
kirmokum
no they where not.
Hevach
Even the Catholic Church, which at the time was fighting against dual-centric cosmology and the idea that maggots turn into flies acknowledged that the Earth was a sphere almost a thousand years before Columbus was born.
Arcanum3000
No they weren't. It was widely known the Earth was round, and there were even good estimates of its circumference.
noWhiteHorseHereJustBatturuPrinsu
Widely known? Only 10 to 20% of people could read or write back then. Sure, the SCHOLARS knew, but that was still a relatively small and privileged group
Arcanum3000
Arguably random farmers may not know, but it wasn't just scholars. Sailors absolutely knew. The nobility and other educated leadership knew. All of which are people Columbus would've been interacting with and trying to sell his expedition to. It was not secret esoteric knowledge.
noWhiteHorseHereJustBatturuPrinsu
It's not secret esoteric knowledge now that vaccines protect against diseases. But assume it's widely known and you'll miss the many people that drag their plague child into your kids school and kill it.
SergeyPrkl
Yeah, they knew exact measures, less than 1% wrong.
Tarmaccian
To be fair there, the 1% was kinda dumb luck… the methods they used were rather imprecise (error margin of like 5-10%, as I recall), but happened to get ridiculously close.
SergeyPrkl
yeah, I read somewhere that they had several years discussion and settled for this. :D but hey, it was 2200 years ago, so the story might have minor changes.
JarJarDrinks
Why everyone in the Western Hemisphere got labeled as Indians.
choppedliveraldente
The natives in America call them red dots. Simple. Explains everything.
choppedliveraldente
I've lived on the navajo reservation in tuba city because my dad had a government job. Forty three years I've lived next to reservations you fucking fucks.
rusrsdude
Live or lived? Are you a native?
choppedliveraldente
Lived. My dad was the health inspector in tuba city on the navajo reservation while i was in grade school.
KrowWithAK
What? Who fed you such bullshit and why didn't you ever bother to question it? They most certainly do not call Indians by a slur.
choppedliveraldente
I live next to the Dine' (navajo) reservation. My friends call them red dots. Its not a slur it just makes things less confusing. You should ask questions before you accuse people of being wrong.
Z0op
Its like a black man not minding to be called the n-word, doesn’t mean white people should be flaunting it because a guy said it was ok
SecondSince
They are slurs. That you think they are not is troubling.
KrowWithAK
My friend... Dot heads, red dots, sniper targets... Those are all slurs used against Indians. Maybe your "friends" don't mean it that way, but that doesn't change the fact that it's a slur. Or maybe your friends are just assholes. I've never heard the Ojibwe and other Three Fires tribes people refer to Indians as anything but Indians or, if there's chance of confusion... Indians from India.
vicvalour
Explains what? That's a recent racial slur that I said as an ignorant 12 year old, native Americans didn't have boats to discover India, they leaned "red dots" from us racist white men
vicvalour
And by recent, I mean in the last 100 years
vicvalour
Also, I've since realized after I was a kid that calling people pakies and retards and gay and other things isn't cool
darthnerdus6236
That's the reason there was such a hard time getting any financial backing. It's not because people thought the world was flat or that it couldn't be done.
ChazzK
"So this idiot thinks he can make a 6 month voyage in 2 and a half months, and he's looking for money."
maqp3
Yeah people knew about Earth being a sphere about 2000 years earlier, when they watched ships disappear hull first and appear sails first.
Z0op
And plenty civilisations (like ancient Egyptians) figured it out without boats, by calculating circumference based on observable curvature, 240 bce less than 2% margin of error on the actual size.
RobertAG25772
Actually, Indonesia and the Orient
RobertAG25772
THAT’S what he thought he’d found. He found LAND where he expected it to be, not realizing that one had to pass through that & another ocean to get where he wanted. That’s why the Caribbean islands—which he reached—are the West Indies and Indonesia—which he sought—are the Easy Indies. Formerly, they only talked about “Indies” (not India!).
RobertAG25772
East Indies, not “Easy” Indies
arlow54
For a while there I thought I had a chance of scoring.
Tarmaccian
It’s worse than that, though… Not only did he sail into completely-unknown water, but he did it with bad math.
Scholars knew the Earth’s circumference to be 27,000 miles, and knew what supplies would be needed to circumnavigate. Columbus, though, had read Alfraganus’ estimate of only 20,000 miles, so he planned his trip based on that distance, not knowing that Arab miles and Roman miles were different.
So he went into unknown territory with 1/3 less supplies than experts said he’d need.
cousteau
I thought it was more in line with "oh, radius? I thought you said diameter!"
Hevach
It was a unit issue. A lot of counties used units with the same names but not the same size or conversion ratios. Alfragranus made the most accurate measure of the Earth's diameter of the time, but he did it in 10000 foot miles that would be over 7000 modern US feet. Columbus used this number but used 5000 foot Roman/Italian miles, which are 4855 modern US feet. This resulted in the known world wrapping much farther around so that Indonesia ended up where Cuba really is.
CptRobotNinja
Morons do be doing shit
anotherpers1
Reminds me of Trump
cytherians
Yeah, there was a lot of luck involved. While nobody died on the voyage across (they probably fished a lot during the trip), 39 sailors from the original trip died as Columbus had left them behind to staff a make-shift fort built as he sailed back to restock supplies. They died at the hands of indigenous people, whom they failed to engage with peacefully.
BeaverOnFire
But.... The billionaires were ok, right?
hellothisispeggy
Which is an **extremely** charitable interpretation of events considering the men he left behind tried to take the local populace as slaves.
CALAMOSCOPYJANE
As per usual, the privileged take their advantage to be moral superiority, instead of dumb luck.
mocosoft
mocosoft
To be honest, I think this is far more commendable.
Bystandr
Theres some speculation that they utilize more than that, and that they may have been able to use field line memory, too, being observed to
Bystandr
be able to point the way home by day without the aid of stars, too.
LostCaterpillar
Fuck off with your AI slop. If you have nothing to say why bother commenting at all?
crypticorb
COOLGUY68
People saw “AI overview” and were like DOWNVOTE
cousteau
Honestly, with all my respect to @OP because they made an otherwise neat post, I don't blame them. Fuck Google's AI overview.
cousteau
(And to prove that I'm not just jumping on the AI hate bandwagon - I hated Google's highlighted fragments even before they were AI.)
Subwayfootlong3
The older I get, the more I believe that he really was just a Portuguese spy misguiding the Spanish. That's why he kept insisting that he landed in the Indes so that they would waste their time going back.
Doismellbacon
What were the Portuguese protecting? https://media3.giphy.com/media/v1.Y2lkPWE1NzM3M2U1emJ2dHY5cDlqdXVybGVvdmViOGI2OGNjZWloZXZtb245b3hvZHRkcCZlcD12MV9naWZzX3NlYXJjaCZjdD1n/cNlY9iGASoPsxNjJoI/200w.webp
Subwayfootlong3
The actual "Indes". There's a book about it. Unfortunately, Portuguese policy was to keep everything secret and those records were destroyed in 1755 so we'll never know what really went on.
Doismellbacon
I'm very interested. Any idea the name of the book?
HillOfBeans
Yes. It’s called “Psych! How Columbus Led Spaniards Astray”.
Subwayfootlong3
I don't know but I think this might be it. It was originally written in Portuguese. Long story short, there's a lot of discrepancies in Columbus's past.
https://books.google.ca/books/about/Christopher_Columbus_was_Portuguese.html?id=6J8WQwAACAAJ&redir_esc=y
ThatOtherGirlYouKnow
It wasn't unknown... it was just unknown to Europeans. There were plenty of people living there.
glovelyday
Who knew less about the world than he did.
JustSomePersonThere
Thank you. Also, if you don’t spit on the floor every time you utter the name of that hideous rapist, then you either don’t know enough about Columbus or you think it wasn’t rape because his victims weren’t people in your eyes.
I hate him, he was considered loathsome and contemptible EVEN BY his repugnant colonist contemporaries.
Srsly fuck Columbus.
TrilithonStone
These are the voyages of the Niña, the Pinta, and the Santa María. Its mission: to explore strange new worlds; to seek out new life and new civilizations; to boldly go where no man has gone before, spead disease, enslave, murder and pillage.
JustSomePersonThere
Literally their mission statement. But in ye olde Spanish.
4Astaroth
Others who knew about it was the sea folk, Scandinavians and some Russians I guess.
swedeonamoose
In other words, completely unknown and unclaimed /s
Harm
Free real estate really.
Rosfmmmhzdrozzley
You understood the meaning of the sentence though
ckarpenchuk1
The Portuguese already had maps of that area, but they weren't sharing, especially not with someone sailing for the Spanish crown.
Doctorfatherson
It was completely unknown to the people on the ship. Just as Spain would have been unknown to the folks he encountered. That doesn't mean he wasn't a cunt
frakkingcylon
It was unknown to Columbus.
ThatOtherGirlYouKnow
So is every trip I take to a new place.
TheAuthorOfTheJournalsMyBrother
If it's new to you then yes?? That's how 'new' works. It's all just star dust if you get down to it.
Does a blind man have no reason to be careful in stride since the room they're in has been fully explored?
LanceCharisma
It was unknown to his civilisation. It's not like he could ask the people who lived there what was there prior to making the journey himself. Columbus was a piece of shit but i think it's reasonable to classify him as journeying into the unknown. If someone had sailed from the Americas to Europe in that era it would have been equally unknown to their civilisation. If you went to another solar system that would be a journey into the unknown even if it turned out life was already there.
poochyena
It was Europeans who took the trip.. so it was indeed a trip into the unknown.
Whoisthisdoctorwho2000
"Europeans" had already been to North America long before that filthy dog made it to the Caribbean
poochyena
Did they bring back a map or written knowledge that was passed on to Columbus?
Whoisthisdoctorwho2000
Thats is not relevant, the statement was that "America" was unknown to "Europeans" which is a demonstrably incorrect statement, thank you for coming to my Ted talk
poochyena
Would you say that the interior of my house is known to America because maybe like 10 Americans have seen it?
lostlittletimeonthis
Technically the portuguese already knew that south America or a large body of land was situated there
Whoisthisdoctorwho2000
Knew...? A lot of people "knew" there was a large continent or 2 at the arse end of the earth but rhat didnt really mean anything until the Dutch arrived in 1606 and said "this'd be a great place to throw a few shrimp on the barbie!"
smellsmiketeenspirit
Really cringe centric point of view. It was also unknown to Chinese at the time.
ThatOtherGirlYouKnow
I saw a squirrel today.
Whoisthisdoctorwho2000
Thats actually awesome, I haven't seen a squirl for ages
MakeUpSomethingNoOneHasUsedYet
Did you claim it for Spain?
ThatOtherGirlYouKnow
Of course not, I'm not a monster.