p. 129-130 ‘Finding the truth a little dry, he decided to embroider a bit on the historical Council of Salamanca, which had been conveyed to judge whether Columbus’s proposed voyage to discover a western route to India was a good risk of the king’s money.’
p. 130 ‘They threw the heretic Lactantius at him, Irving claims, as well as Saint Augustin’s view of the Antipodes. “To his simplest proposition, the spherical form of the earth, were opposed figurative texts of Scripture”, Irving writes: The Psalms and Saint Paul describe the heavens as being like a tent, ipso facto the earth was flat like the floor of a tent.’
p. 130-131 “Why does the Flat Earth Error remain so popular? Americans like to think that before we were discovered, all the world was sunk in darkness.”
http://blog.rudnyi.ru/2013/10/inventing-the-flat-earth.html