Lemmings Don't Leap: A podcast about things you likely know but are probably wrong about
About Us
The Lemmings Don’t Leap podcast is developed, researched, written, and narrated by Allan Britnell. Allan studied journalism at Toronto Metropolitan University (back when it was called Ryerson Polytechnic). It was there that he first learned about and grew to love the idea of substantive fact-checking. In short, for publications that follow the practice, every single factual detail within a story is verified, ideally by at least two or three different sources, before it is published. This ranges from the spelling of a quoted source’s name and their age and job title, if given, to stats, figures, and even facts shared within a quote.
Early in his career, he did a lot of fact-checking work for various Canadian magazines (Toronto Life, Cottage Life, Homemakers, etc.) While checking a nature article for Cottage Life, he first stumbled upon a 1981 episode of CBC’s Fifth Estate, which exposed how a Disney documentary crew faked the filming of lemmings suicidally leaping off a cliff into the ocean.
Probably from seeing the original Disney documentary, Allan thought he knew for a "fact" that lemmings committed mass suicide when faced with food shortages. But it turns out it simply wasn't true. Which got him wondering what other "facts" he'd be told that were wrong.
That kernel stuck and slowly grew until now, when it finally leaps forth as Lemmings Don’t Leap: A podcast about things you probably know, but are likely wrong about.
Why make the Lemmings Don’t Leap podcast?
Does knowing that lemmings don’t really commit mass suicide change anything in your day-to-day life? Probably not.
Does learning that Christopher Columbus had nothing to do with proving that the Earth was round have an impact? Not really, but it does give you a quick roundup of facts to spew if you ever find yourself trapped in conversation with a Flat Earther.
Will it change anything in your life knowing that Vikings didn’t wear horns on their helmets? Unless you’re planning on making a historically accurate Halloween costume, not likely.
But I firmly believe that facts matter. And in our increasingly digital, social media-obsessed, AI-driven world, it can be hard to sort out truth from fiction. My goal with Lemmings Don’t Leap is to encourage people to think twice about the “facts” they take for granted, and cast a critical lens on the information that they’re bombarded with on a daily basis.
I also hope you enjoy learning these little tidbits of history and culture as much as I do.
Disclaimer
This podcast is for informational and entertainment purposes. Every factual element of each episode is cross-checked using credible sources and verified to the best of our ability.
Lemmings Don't Leap: A podcast about things you likely know but are probably wrong about
The Christopher Columbus Episode
Use Left/Right to seek, Home/End to jump to start or end. Hold shift to jump forward or backward.
In the Christopher Columbus episode of Lemmings Don’t Leap we debunk a few myths about the Italian explorer, most notably that his trip to the New World in 1492 didn’t finally prove that the Earth was round. Find out more by listening to this episode and exploring the Show Notes at the end of the Transcript.
The Christopher Columbus episode
Welcome to the Christopher Columbus episode of Lemmings Don’t Leap, the podcast about things you probably know, but are likely wrong about.
I’m your host, Allan Britnell.
In fourteen hundred and ninety-two, Columbus sailed the ocean blue.
That’s the opening line from a poem called, appropriately enough, “In 1492.” It recounts Christopher Columbus’ journey leading three sailing ships from Spain to the New World.
It’s a story that we all grew up hearing in various forms. It’s also a story that’s typically riddled with errors and misconceptions.
First off is the idea that Columbus and the sailors who joined him, quote/unquote “discovered” the New World.
Before we even leave port, let’s confirm that Columbus didn’t “discover” anything. The various Indigenous peoples who resided in North, Central, and South America, and the islands off their eastern shores, certainly knew about these places.
He wasn’t even the first European to reach the Western Hemisphere. In the 1960s, researchers confirmed that Norse explorers had landed and established a settlement on the northern coast of Newfoundland roughly 1,000 years before Columbus and crew set sail. The site, known as L’Anse aux Meadows, is now a Canadian national park and UNESCO World Heritage Site.
But back to Columbus.
Misconception number two revolves around his name.
It’s generally thought that he was born around 1451 in the city-state of Genoa. That would make him Italian. As such, to his friends and family, he would have been known as Cristoforo Colombo.
The patrons who funded his trip –King Ferdinand and Queen Isabella of Spain – knew him by the Spanish pronunciation, Cristobal Colon.
English speakers know him as Cristopher Columbus. And a variation on his Anglicized name, “Columbia,” litters the hemisphere as place names, including the United States’ capital city – Washington in the District of Columbia, the Canadian province of British Columbia, and the entire South American country of Colombia. There’s even a U.S. holiday called Columbus Day.
What do these places all have in common? Columbus never set foot anywhere near them.
His initial landing place in October of 1492 was an island known by its native inhabitants as Guanahani [gwa-na-HA-ni]. Most scholars think that it was the Bahamian island of San Salvador, though several other locations claim to be his landing place. Incidentally, Columbus Day is held on October 12th, the day his crew first landed.
He then visited the islands of Cuba and Hispaniola, establishing a colony in what is now Haiti, before heading back to Spain to confirm that he’d made it to, checks notes, India.
Yes, the whole reason for this epic voyage was to find a shortcut for purchasing spices, including peppercorns, from India.
He thought at the time and until he died that he had, in fact, landed on islands off the east coast of India. That’s why he dubbed the locals, regardless of different tribal affiliations, as “Indians.” That’s also why he called the spicy chilis he brought back with him: “peppers.”
And, to this day, the whole region is still known as the “West Indies.”
On his three subsequent trips from Spain to the “new world” Columbus visited several other Caribbean islands and made landfall at unconfirmed locations in Central and South America. But he never landed anywhere in North America.
The third and most significant misunderstanding about Columbus is that his trip in 1492 finally proved that the world was round.
If you grew up watching Saturday morning cartoons, this idea might originate in your head with a 1951 episode of Merrie Melodies starring Bugs Bunny and Christopher Columbus called, Hare We Go.
The show opens with a title card stating: “1492 the King of Spain and Christopher Columbus discuss the shape of the world.”
[Audio clip from Hare We Go Again. See Show Notes.]
Later in the episode, Queen Isabella offers Columbus her jewels if he can conclusively prove that Earth was round.
But this idea that Columbus’ trip finally settled the science predates Bugs by generations, most notably in a highly fictionalized novel from 1828 called “A History of the Life and Voyages of Christopher Columbus,” by Washington Irving.
The truth is that scientists had known the world was round, and had even surprisingly accurately calculated its diameter, centuries before Columbus’s Caribbean cruise.
The realization that our globe was round dates back to Greek philosophers including Aristotle and Plato, with the earliest documented records dating from 500 B.C.
This scientific fact was so common knowledge in the ancient world that, sometime around AD 77, Roman writer Pliny the Elder wrote in his book “Natural History”: “We all agree on the earth’s shape. For surely we always speak of the round ball of the Earth.”
Sorry Flat Earthers. And Christopher Columbus fans.
If it’s any consolation, Bugs Bunny isn’t interested in splitting hairs:
[Audio clip from Hare We Go Again.]
My parting punny advice: Always do your own research before you sail off into the sunset.
Find all episodes along with transcripts and show notes at Lemmings Don’t Leap dot Buzzsprout dot com, or wherever you get your podcasts.
Share your comments, critiques and suggestions for future episodes at LemmingsDontLeapPodcast@gmail.com.
Show Notes
Here’s a Britannica overview of the many Indigenous Peoples who lived in the Western Hemisphere long-before Columbus set sail, and you can take a deep-dive on Taino culture on this Smithsonian National Museum of the American Indian project.
The Norse landings in Newfoundland are not particularly well-known, but are well documented, including this Parks Canada site and this UNESCO World Heritage page.
You can watch the opening and closing clips of Bugs Bunny’s trip with Columbus from the Hare We Go episode on YouTube.
There are countless online biographies of Columbus, including his Wikipedia page and this one on Biography.com.
Here’s a list of all the places named after him, and a Wikipedia page with the long history of the Columbus Day holiday.
Finally, in this clip from his 1980 documentary, Cosmos, American astronomer Carl Sagan demonstrates the ingenious way the ancient Egyptians concluded that the Earth was round.
