Did Christopher Columbus know that he didn't discover the Indies, but that he discovered the New World?

Actually, recent scholarship suggests that Columbus did in
fact know  that he was no where near India. He was a Cartographer by trade, and well
versed in navigation. It is highly unlikely that he could have made so drastic a
mistake. The idea that it all happened completely by accident was the theory advanced
sixty years ago by Samuel Eliot Morrison. That theory has now been
discounted.

Columbus was not only trained in map making, he
was trained in Latin, so he was no-one's fool. He did, however, make extravagant
promises to his investors (only his flag ship, the Santa Maria  was funded by by
Ferdinand and Isabella; he raised the money for the other two ships from private
investors in Palos, Spain). He had promised to return gold, (not spices) from the
Orient. He sold the venture to his investors by using information on the size of a
degree of the earth and the size of the Eurasian landmass which he knew to be
inaccurate, but which he used to make the venture seem easier than it really was. It is
also a known fact that he deliberately faked his captain's logs to keep his crew
deceived. He could not tell those who had invested large sums in his venture that he had
failed; so he insisted that he had landed off the coast of China in the Indies, hence
the whole Indian business. It is noteworthy that Columbus made four more voyages, all to
the same area. If he was capable of that precise navigation, he was capable of knowing
that he was not in Asia.

Amerigo Vespucci disproved
nothing; in fact he helped Columbus raise funds for his second and third voyages. He was
the first known European to land on the coast of South America. Later, a German
cartographer, Martin Walseemueller, believed that Amerigo deserved the credit for being
the first to land here, since he had landed on the mainland and Columbus only on islands
in the Caribbean. Hence, he wrote "America" on his maps, and the name
stuck.