Irving's Columbus: Source Reliability and Confirmation Bias
This paper evaluates Washington Irving's A History of the Life and Voyages of Christopher Columbus on two distinct levels: the adequacy of the primary sources Irving used and the reliability of the resulting book as a historical source. The analysis then turns to Chapter V of Book I, examining whether Irving demonstrates that Columbus committed the reasoning error known as confirmation bias. Finally, the paper reflects on the quality and objectivity of the secondary sources used throughout the project, including works by William L. Hedges and J. B. Russell, noting potential bias in their respective treatments of Irving and Columbus.
- Irving's Book vs. His Sources: A Critical Distinction: Irving's hasty writing undermines his book's reliability
- The Flat Earth Myth and Irving's Romantic Bias: Irving perpetuates myth over historical fact
- Confirmation Bias and Columbus's Reasoning in Chapter V: Irving does not fully establish Columbus's reasoning error
- Columbus's Miscalculation of Earth's Circumference: Columbus's faulty math led to accidental discovery
- Evaluating the Sources Used in This Project: Secondary sources are expert but carry potential bias
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What makes this paper effective
- The paper draws a clear and analytically useful distinction between the quality of Irving's sources and the quality of Irving's book as a source — a nuanced point that many students overlook.
- The discussion of confirmation bias is grounded in the specific chapter assigned, and the paper offers a reasoned position rather than a superficial answer.
- The self-reflective final section, evaluating the paper's own sources for bias and expertise, demonstrates intellectual honesty and critical thinking.
Key academic technique demonstrated
The paper models source criticism — the practice of evaluating not just what a source says but who produced it, under what circumstances, and with what potential biases. This is applied both to Irving's book and to the secondary scholarship used to analyze it, showing that source evaluation is recursive and applies at every level of research.
Structure breakdown
The paper is organized into three parts corresponding to a multi-part assignment. Part I addresses the adequacy of Irving's sources versus his book. Part II applies the concept of confirmation bias to Chapter V of Irving's Columbus. Part III turns reflexively to assess the reliability of the paper's own sources. Each section builds on the previous one, moving from external critique to self-critique.
Irving's Book vs. His Sources: A Critical Distinction
Washington Irving's A History of the Life and Voyages of Christopher Columbus cannot be considered an adequate or authentic historical source. Irving assembled the book speedily and impulsively, sacrificing the careful deliberation required to produce an accurate, reliable, and original work of the kind historians prefer. He was persuaded from time to time — perhaps to compensate for the impracticality of conducting comprehensive and far-reaching research — to let his imagination wander freely. As a consequence, he reenacts imaginative scenes drawn not only from what prevailing accounts and records evidently indicated had happened, but from what his familiarity with and understanding of the age of discovery led him to believe might have happened (Hedges, 1956).
On the other hand, the sources Irving used for the book project can be deemed adequate. Alexander Everett, the Minister Plenipotentiary of the United States to Spain at the time, summoned Irving to Madrid to translate a collection of documents about Christopher Columbus that had recently been published. Those documentary sources were therefore primary in nature and adequate for the purpose of historical research.
The Flat Earth Myth and Irving's Romantic Bias
The reason for the difference between the adequacy of Irving's sources and the adequacy of his book as a source on Columbus lies in Irving's identity as a popular author writing for American readers. His biography of Christopher Columbus is largely composed of theatrical and studied episodes, most of which are founded on myth rather than dependable and reliable evidence. A key shortcoming of the book as a historical source is its persistent promotion of the myth that Columbus's voyages alone convinced the European people of his era that the Earth is not flat. In fact, Aristotle had already convinced educated people that the Earth was spherical long before Columbus set sail (Russell, 1991).
Nevertheless, Irving's underlying sources for the book did originate from primary documents — materials with which he had direct, first-hand engagement relating to navigation and to Columbus himself. In addition, those sources encompassed information from navigators who had spent many years at sea, charting routes and observing different lands. On those grounds, the original documentary sources can be considered reliable and dependable, even if Irving's treatment of them was not.
Confirmation Bias and Columbus's Reasoning in Chapter V
Confirmation bias is the tendency to interpret new evidence and information as confirmation of one's existing beliefs or assumptions. In particular, confirmation bias can prevent an individual from taking significant contrary information into account when making decisions, because one relies on pre-existing beliefs rather than the key facts at hand.
Columbus assumed that by sailing a direct course from east to west, a navigator would reach the farthest extremity of Asia and thereby discover all intervening regions. In Chapter V of Book I of his work, Irving has not comprehensively established that Columbus made this mistake in reasoning. This is largely because the achievement of Columbus's great undertaking was dependent on errors initially made by earlier philosophers regarding the imagined size of Asia and the assumption that the Earth was far smaller than it actually is. It was not faulty reasoning in isolation, but rather these two compounding misconceptions, that caused Columbus to pursue his chosen direction (Irving, 2013).
References
Hedges, W. (1956). Irving's Columbus: The problem of romantic biography. The Americas, 13(2), 127–140. https://doi.org/10.2307/979635
Irving, Washington. (2013). A history of the life and voyages of Christopher Columbus (Vol. 1). Forgotten Books.
Kelly, J. (2005). William L. Hedges, 82, professor and English chairman at Goucher. Baltimore Sun.
Russell, J. B. (1991). Inventing the flat earth: Columbus and modern historians. Praeger.
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