Article 4128 of net.space: From: stolfi@magic.DEC.COM (Jorge Stolfi) Newsgroups: net.space,net.columbia Subject: Columbus = Shuttle? Message-ID: <1062@magic.DEC.COM> Date: 4 Sep 86 01:35:02 GMT References: <1931@mtgzy.UUCP> <1014@magic.DEC.COM> <20216@rochester.ARPA> <1041@magic.DEC.COM> Reply-To: stolfi@magic.UUCP (Jorge Stolfi) Followup-To: net.space,net.columbia Distribution: net Organization: DEC Systems Research Center, Palo Alto Keywords: no, Keynumbers! also Columbus, NASA, shuttle, budget Summary: Columbus budget X-Edited: Last modified on Sat Sep 20 05:12:52 1986 PDT by stolfi ================================================================= Lawrence Crowl demanded in <20216@rochester.ARPA>: > > Show me the cost of Columbus's voyages as a > percentage of the Spanish governmental budget, as a percentage > of the Spanish Gross National Product, and as a percentage of > median individual income. I quickly scanned a couple of books at the nearest library, and the following numbers caught my eye: The total budget for Columbus first voyage was 1,900,000 maravedis (mv). The Spanish Court contributed 1,400,000 mv, and Columbus himself pitched in 500,000 mv, which he borrowed from a private banker. [1,2] In 1492 a maravedi was worth 0.0096 grams of gold [1]. We could figure out the dollar equivalent from this, but the result would be misleading, since the purchasing power of gold itself (compared to the cost of living) dropped a lot (fifty-fold?) in the last five centuries [2]. A better estimate can perhaps be obtained from the following data. Total wages for the 90 officers and seamen who accompanied Columbus were about 250,000 mv a month. Ship capitains were paid 2500 mv a month; seamen got 1000 mv, and ship boys 666 mv. These were standard goverment-regulated wages for long-duration exploratory voyages [1]. A bushel of wheat cost 73 mv; 360 mv bought enough provisions to feed a sailor for one month [3]. It is reported that when Queen Isabella was convinced by one of her religious advisers that Columbus (who was out of town at the time) was worth listening to, she sent him a summons, and a gift of 20,000 mv ``to buy a horse and appropriate clothes'' for the trip back to the capital [1]. The population of Spain (Castilla+Aragon) at the time is estimated as some 9,600,000 people [4, p.13]. Laborer wages were around 450--600 mv per month [4, p.106]. Columbus first voyage cost then 0.20 mv per capita, or 1/2200 of a worker's monthly paycheck. The people directly working for the `program' were less than one 1/100,000 of the total population. How do these numbers compare to the Shuttle? If we take $1 billion as the average yearly cost of the Shuttle program so far, we get $4 per capita, or 1/750 of a `laborer's' $3000 monthly paycheck. If I am not mistaken, the Shuttle program was using up more than 20,000 full-time jobs; that is more than one American in 13,000. (No, I have no references for those numbers. They are the best I could make up at the end of a rather long day. Please do provide your own.) At the other end of the spectrum, annual income (from land rent only?) of the topmost 82 households in the Spanish nobility, excluding the royal family itself, was about 550,000,000 mv a year, or 6,700,000 mv a year per household on the average [4, p.101]. That is about three times Columbus' first trip budget. Just for curiosity, the total amount of gold and silver (owned by the Crown and by private citizens) that arrived in Spain from the Americas between 1503 and 1660, according to customs' records, was about 250,000,000,000 mv, or about 1,600,000,000 mv a year on the average. REFERENES [1] B. Landstr\"om, "Columbus". McMillan (1966) [2] C. Duff, "The truth about Columbus". ??? (1957?) [3] S. E. Morison, "Admiral of the Ocean Sea: A Life of Christopher Columbus", Little, Brown & Co. (Boston, 1947). [4] J. H. Eliott, "Imperial Spain: 1469--1716" ??? (???) (Sorry for the ???'s, but I forgot to note down the publisher and stuff. Is that grounds for disqualifying my evidence? :-) ============================================================================ ARPA: stolfi@src.dec.com UUCP: ..{..decvax,ucbvax,allegra}!decwrl!stolfi DISCLAIMER: Any inaccuracies in the numbers above are due to floating point rounding errors. Any inaccuracies in the words above are due to sinking comma squaring errors.