>>The reason Columbus' sailors got scared and almost mutinied was not that they thought they would fall off the edge of the world! It was because they were afraid they would run out of drinking water before they ever reached landfall in Asia...which is where Columbus thought he was going. Columbus was under the impression that the globe was significantly smaller than it is. Some other authorities at the time thought he was wrong about that, and he was, of course. If there had been no American continent and no Caribbean islands for Columbus to run into on his way west to Asia, he would have indeed run out of fresh water supplies less than halfway there, and he and all his men would have died.<<

This is correct. What's odd, though, is that Columbus hit land right down to the very day he said he would before he left Europe. This would indicate the route-to-Asia story was a ruse that Spain was already aware of a vast unknown continent on that side of the world. Rather than spur competition, they developed a ridiculous cover story meant to make informed people sneer so that other countries would not try to get their own expeditions out there to claim this new, unknown land as their own before Spain. The question is, who sailed these secret expeditions, when and using what maps?