Like Columbus, he failed. He did, however, discover Newfoundland. Not until Vasco da Gama sailed around the southern tip of Africa and arrived near Calicut, India, in , did Europeans navigate by sea to the actual Indies—a place, as it happens, where their trade goods were of only mediocre value.
These western voyages, especially the four led by Columbus, were important for several reasons. By following the northeasterly trade winds south and then west, and the westerly trade winds back east, Columbus demonstrated how others might make the round trip in the future. This strong ocean current, caused by the sinking of cold water and the rising of hot, allowed Spanish captains an even quicker route to the westerly trade winds and back home.
Prior to Columbus, there had been virtually no biological interaction between Europe and Asia on the one hand and North and South America on the other. With Columbus and his followers arrived new people, new plants and animals, and new diseases in what the scholar A.
Crosby has dubbed the Columbian Exchange. The exchange went both ways, of course, but for various reasons Europeans were much less vulnerable. Scholars estimate, for instance, that between and , 95 percent of all the inhabitants of the Neotropic ecozone, an area covering Central and South America, died of disease.
This massive depopulation resulted in significant changes in the environment and may even have led, according to at least one scientist, to a cooling of worldwide temperatures. He decreed that all newly discovered lands west of a line of longitude running through the eastern part of present-day Brazil belonged to Spain, and everything east to Portugal.
The two nations confirmed the ruling at the Treaty of Tordesillas, signed the next year. On their side of the line, the Spaniards conquered the Aztecs, Mayas, and Incas. Those American Indians they did not kill, they enslaved and attempted to convert to Christianity.
Within the decade they were unearthing hundreds of metric tons of pure silver annually and transporting it in galleons back to Europe, where King Charles V and later his son, King Philip II, used it to pay for Spanish wars against Muslims and Protestants.
In the meantime, exploration continued. He claimed it for Portugal. Ferdinand Magellan, a Portuguese captain sailing for Spain, led a crew that circumnavigated the globe in a voyage that lasted from until As Columbus did with the Atlantic, Magellan showed the way across the Pacific Ocean before being killed in the island group now known as the Philippines.
By the s the Spanish had claimed these islands, named them for their king, and established ports connecting the spice trade of the East with the resources extracted from the New World. Western Europeans were finally at the hub of a new and fully global economy. In , for instance, printers in Venice, Paris, and Antwerp all published Mundus novus , a Latin pamphlet that served as a highly exaggerated, some have argued even fictionalized, version of several genuine letters written by Amerigo Vespucci after his voyages to the New World.
By the logic of the age, lands on the same latitude should have similar climates and produce similar natural resources. In what has come to be known as the Chicora Legend, this bit of deception found a home in De Orbe Novo.
Meanwhile, in Giovanni da Verrazzano, a Florentine working for France, sailed along the Atlantic coast but apparently did not notice the Chesapeake Bay. In the Outer Banks region of present-day North Carolina, however, he claimed to have seen the Pacific Ocean in the distance. It began in unpromising fashion, however.
From there he marched west instead of north, and by the spring of he had reached the Mississippi River. The colony failed before an attack could be made. But there were no major expeditions until, as it happens, the French spurred Philip II to action.
Worried that his European rival planned to stake a claim in La Florida, he ordered that a settlement be established at the Point of Santa Elena, near present-day Parris Island, South Carolina. In , the Spaniards introduced el Requerimiento , a document to be read to Indians in Spanish introducing them to church doctrine. Indians were not compelled to convert, but if they did not, they were immediately subject to Spanish invasion. He then set his sights to the north. The Spanish had always been interested in finding the Northwest Passage for commercial reasons, but by this time, the Jesuits were interested in it, too.
They had largely written off La Florida as a place to evangelize and hoped that such a passage could quickly take their priests to the more promising land of China. After the Spanish presence in the Chesapeake Bay had been eliminated, the English moved in.
They had been bit players in the New World up to that point, unsuccessfully attempting to save the French settlement at Charlesfort in and looting the Spanish galleons transporting gold and silver back to Spain. In three voyages from to , Martin Frobisher explored the icy waters between Greenland and Canada, searching for that ever-elusive passage to China.
Raleigh assembled an elite group of would-be colonizers. These included the brilliant mathematician Thomas Hariot , who instructed sailors on the art of open-sea navigation, and Richard Hakluyt the younger , an Anglican minister and enthusiastic geographer, who provided compelling arguments in favor of the English settlement of America. Accused of treason by King James I, Raleigh was imprisoned and eventually put to death. James Cook was a naval captain, navigator and explorer.
After serving as an apprentice, Cook eventually joined the British Navy and, at age 29, was promoted to ship's master. In , he took command of the first scientific expedition to the Pacific. This area has since been credited as one of the world's most dangerous areas to navigate. He later disproved the existence of Terra Australis, a fabled southern continent. Cook's voyages helped guide generations of explorers and provided the first accurate map of the Pacific.
During their journey, Balboa and Pizarro discovered what is now known as the Pacific Ocean, although Balboa allegedly spied it first, and was therefore credited with the ocean's first European discovery. Pizarro was to conquer the southern territory and establish a new Spanish province there. In , accompanied by his brothers, Pizarro overthrew the Inca leader Atahualpa and conquered Peru. Three years later, he founded the new capital city of Lima. Over time, tensions increasingly built up between the conquistadors who had originally conquered Peru and those who arrived later to stake some claim in the new Spanish province.
This conflict eventually led to Pizarro's assassination in Explore the real Marco Polo and decipher the man from the many myths. The 28 month-long trip was the first American expedition to cross west of the Mississippi River. Isolated during the Great Plague of London, the philosopher engaged in the groundbreaking discoveries that marked his "year of wonders.
Columbus Day churns up a stormy sea of controversy every year: Was Christopher Columbus a gifted navigator or reckless adventurer? From hair care products to the ironing board, the creations from these African Americans still impact your everyday life.
Credited as one of the great minds of the Scientific Revolution, Newton's 17th-century findings have molded our modern world. These children of the 'Bel Paese' left behind an indelible imprint with their contributions to humanity, sports, science and popular culture.
We pause to remember the events of that tragic day, as well as honor the victims and the heroism of first responders. The scientist's discoveries and theories laid the foundation for modern physics and astronomy. Learn more about some of the history's most famous explorers and their revolutionary discoveries: Marco Polo.
In the News. By Paulette Cohn. By Hadley Meares. French fur traders and missionaries, however, ranged far into the interior of North America, exploring the Great Lakes region and the Mississippi River.
These pioneers gave France somewhat inflated imperial claims to lands that nonetheless remained firmly under the dominion of indigenous peoples. New France and New Netherland remained small commercial operations focused on the fur trade and did not attract an influx of migrants.
Dutch trade goods circulated widely among the native peoples in these areas and also traveled well into the interior of the continent along pre-existing native trade routes. Cabot explored the North American continent, correctly deducing that the spherical shape of the earth made the north—where the longitudes are much shorter—a quicker route to the New World than a trip to the South Islands where Columbus was exploring.
Encouraged, he asked the English monarchy for a more substantial expedition to further explore and settle the lands. He was successful in obtaining the expedition and the ships departed, never to be seen again. In the north, the Hudson Bay Company actively traded for fur with the indigenous peoples, bringing them into competition with French, Aboriginal, and Metis fur traders.
At the start of the 17th century, the English had not established a permanent settlement in the Americas. Over the next century, however, they outpaced their rivals.
The English encouraged emigration far more than the Spanish, French, or Dutch. They established nearly a dozen colonies, sending swarms of immigrants to populate the land. England had experienced a dramatic rise in population in the 16th century, and the colonies appeared a welcoming place for those who faced overcrowding and grinding poverty at home.
Thousands of English migrants arrived in the Chesapeake Bay colonies of Virginia and Maryland to work in the tobacco fields. Another stream, this one of pious Puritan families, sought to live as they believed scripture demanded and established the Plymouth, Massachusetts Bay, New Haven, Connecticut, and Rhode Island colonies of New England.
European exploration and invasion of the Americas brought with them many foreign diseases, causing widespread depopulation among indigenous cultures. Different European colonial settlements in the New World exposed indigenous populations to Christianity, forced labor, expulsion from their lands, and foreign diseases. Rampant epidemic disease, to which the natives had no prior exposure or resistance, was one of the main causes of the massive population decline of the indigenous populations of the Americas.
As Europeans and African slaves began to arrive in the New World, they brought with them the infectious diseases of Europe and Africa. Soon after, observers noted that immense numbers of indigenous Americans began to die from these diseases.
This death toll was initially overlooked or downplayed because once introduced, the diseases raced ahead of European invasion in many areas. Disease killed off a sizable portion of the populations before European observations and written records were made. After the epidemics had already killed massive numbers of indigenous Americans, many newer European immigrants assumed that there had always been relatively few indigenous peoples.
One of the most devastating diseases was smallpox; other deadly diseases included typhus, measles, influenza, bubonic plague, cholera, malaria, mumps, yellow fever, and pertussis whooping cough. The indigenous Americas also had a number of endemic diseases, such as tuberculosis although once believed to have been brought from Europe, skeletal remains found in South America have since provided evidence of tuberculosis before the Spanish arrival and an unusually virulent type of syphilis, which became rampant when brought back to the Old World.
The transfer of disease between the Old World and New World was part of the phenomenon known as the Columbian Exchange. The diseases brought to the New World proved to be exceptionally deadly to the indigenous populations, and the epidemics had very different effects in different regions of the Americas. The most vulnerable groups were those with a relatively small population and little built-up immunity. Many island-based groups were annihilated: the Caribs and Arawaks of the Caribbean nearly ceased to exist, as did the Beothuks of Newfoundland.
While disease swept swiftly through the densely populated empires of Mesoamerica, the more scattered populations of North America saw a slower spread. Estimates of the pre-Columbian population have ranged from 8. In Peru, the indigenous pre-contact population of approximately 6. Storming of the Teocalli by Cortez and His Troops : While epidemic disease was by far the leading cause of the population decline of the American indigenous peoples after , there were other contributing factors—all of them related to European contact and colonization.
One of these factors was warfare. From the 15th century onward, European nations invaded the New World and began establishing empires throughout the continent. While the Americas remained firmly under the control of indigenous peoples in the first decades of European invasion, conflict increased as colonization spread and Europeans placed greater demands upon the indigenous populations, including expecting them to convert to Christianity either Catholicism or Protestantism.
The Spanish, English, and French were the most powerful nations to establish empires in the new lands. Beginning with the arrival of Christopher Columbus, the Spanish Empire expanded for four centuries — across most of present-day Central America, the Caribbean islands, Mexico, and much of the rest of North America.
The empire also claimed territory in present-day British Columbia; the states of Alaska, Washington, and Oregon; and the western half of South America.
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