A Hoax

 At the end of the notes to Chapter III, "Columbus's First Voyage of Discovery", of Samuel Eliot Morison's The European Discovery of America: The Southern Voyages 1492-1616, appears

One of the most amusing hoaxes of our day is the story about Columbus submitting his great enterprise to the Senate of Genoa, all of whom turned it down (in a 964-page report) as impractical, impossible, and incredible, except the junior member, none other than Leonardo da Vinci! After seeing this squib given the dignity of print in the Congressional Record for 28 June 1971, p. S 10, 107, I ran it to ground. Through my friend Robert Sherrod I found that it was written as a satire by Dr. Ralph S. Cooper of the Scientific Laboratory at Los Alamos, to whose dismay it was taken seriously in many quarters.

Though I like as well as the next citizen to make fun of elected officials, I infer from the context provided in the Congressional Record that the Senate was not one of the many quarters that took the story seriously. Senator Sparkman of Alabama read the story into the record during a consideration of the NASA Authorization Bill, in particular whether the space shuttle should be funded.

I had opened Morison to refresh my memory on the date of Columbus's landfall in the Bahamas: it was, as I had thought, October 12, 1492.