10 Films With Glaring Historical Inaccuracies

Oh look, it's Ridley Scott again, and this time he's back to try and cover up a man that would be a war criminal in the modern day.

Following the exploits of Christopher Columbus as he attempts to discover Asia, Conquest of Paradise decided not to follow the real story of one of the most terrible human beings in history. Instead, the film was based on outdated misconceptions and outright lies, romanticising Columbus' expedition.

Let's get something out of the way first: Christopher Columbus didn't prove that the world was round. That had already been discovered by Eratosthenes of Cyrene over 1500 years before Columbus was even born. Eratosthenes also correctly worked out that the world had a circumference of 40,000 miles. Ridley Scott's attempt to portray Columbus as a man ahead of his time is completely false, and most of his assertions (such as believing that Asia was three thousand miles away from Spain) were based on shoddy mathematics.

The worst part of the film is when it gets to America. Unlike the in the film, the real Christopher Columbus had no respect for the Native Americans. He believed that he could use the innocence of the indigenous peoples in order to subjugate them, which he promptly did after discovering there was no gold.

Conquest of Paradise also takes a completely reversed view of Columbus when it comes to his brutality to the Native Americans, and passes these off to other film characters, such as cutting off hands for stealing (a practice Columbus introduced).