Ran into a situation exactly like this on a Flat Earth You Tube channel. I was saying the the present day Flat Earth Enthusiasts (gotta be nice!) are the first organized group of people in 3,000 years to try to teach the Earth is flat. No Christian and no Jew for that long has taught Flat Earth.
Of course, some bright guy pops up (they always do) and posts "Yeah, redacted, redacted, you're just a redacted redacted. If you had a brain in your redacted strange part of the human body, you'd know that in Christopher Columbus' day everybody thought Columbus would sail off the edge of the redacted world. You redacted redacted. You're a shill for the redacted redacted."
Well, I said. The journey du jour for that time was to sail around Cape Hope, into the Indian Ocean and across to China. This took celestial navigation. Celestial navigation demands a spherical earth, of a known size, spinning on its axis at a known rate, and an astrolabe or sextant, which also can't work on a flat earth. Believe me when I say they did not believe in a flat earth at all! That's a fairy tale introduced into American textbooks in the 19th century.
What did happen was Chris went to Ferdinand and Isabella to hawk the idea that maybe the earth wasn't 7900 miles in diameter. What if we could go the other way around and get to China before we starved to death. That was what they were REALLY afraid of. But Christopher Columbus was pushing a number more like 2,000 miles. If true he's sail west for three weeks and shazaam! Everybody's rich! Easy peasy!
It wasn't that Ferdinand and Isabella really bought the story so much as how cheap it was to verify, and if, on the off-chance, crazy Chris was right, kaching!!! Everybody's rich!! Little downsize and huge upside, it's the ultimate gamble.
Of course Chris was wrong. The earth really is 7900 miles in diameter just like they already had known since 300 BC. Two kinda large continents blocked Columbus' way to China. Nobody got rich. On his third journey, Chris' crew sent him back to Europe in chains, disgraced. Maybe now some people celebrate Christopher. In his day he was about as popular as typhoid fever.
So today all the Flat Earth Enthusiasts are parotting the story about the ships sailing off the edge of the ocean. The real danger was starving to death at sea for six months.
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