Even that phrase "circle of the earth" was interpreted differently by different bible readers.
Some took it to mean that the earth was a disc rather than a sphere. One such person was Paul Kruger, who, during the late 19th Century, served as president of what was then the Transvaal Republic (now a province of South Africa). Furthermore, Kruger was by no means alone amongst his people (a people whose formal education often amounted to no more than reading the bible) in thinking the world was flat.
Contrast that with the knowledge held by certain other peoples whom Europeans would have regarded as "uncivilised". One such group were the Polynesians. They knew that the earth was a sphere, and knew how to navigate by using the sun and the stars as guides. This enabled them to populate that whole vast triangular-shaped expanse of the Pacific Ocean - from Hawaii in the north, to Easter Island in the south east, to New Zealand in the south west.
Polynesian feats of navigation were so impressive that early European explorers speculated that originally, the Pacific Islands of Polynesia must have all been part of one great landmass. They figured that after being populated by humans, this landmass then sank into the ocean, just leaving the mountain tops behind and thus forming the Pacific Islands.
More recent commentators such as Professor Keith Cumberland put Polynesian migration down to "tropical voyages that went wrong" - i.e. according to him, Polynesian migration consisted of boatloads of people who got lost and somehow washed up ashore on the next island group along.
The fact is, though, that these seafarers knew exactly what they were doing when they migrated across the Pacific, between 1200 BC and 1300 AD. Not bad for a group of "primitive" peoples!
