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Exploration

During the Middle Ages, Europeans knew little about the world beyond their lands and the seas around them. The Renaissance brought a great leap forward in geographic knowledge and interest in the rest of the globe. Beginning in the 1400s, Europeans made a series of remarkable voyages to Africa, Asia, the Americas, and the Pacific Ocean. This exploration led to the opening of new trade, the conquest of foreign territories, and the founding of colonies. From these colonies grew the overseas empires of Portugal, Spain, the Netherlands, Britain, and France.

Driven by economic, religious, and political forces, the great age of European exploration was unlike anything before or since. As Spanish chronicler Francisco de Jérez asked in 1547: "When, among the ancients or the moderns, have been seen such great undertakings of so few individuals to go conquering the unseen and the unknown ... in such diverse climates and reaches of the sea or across such distances?"

ORIGINS OF EXPLORATION

Why did the great age of world exploration begin in Europe in the early 1400s? Some historians argue that new techniques and tools of shipbuilding and navigation launched a wave of ambitious voyages. However, before this time, three practical problems would have discouraged Europeans from sailing beyond the familiar Mediterranean Sea or the Atlantic coast. The problems involved maps, navigation, and ships.

First, mariners lacked maps and charts of foreign waters and possessed little useful knowledge of winds and currents. The only way to gather information and create maps was through voyages of discovery. Charting unfamiliar shores would be one of the great accomplishments of Renaissance explorers.

Second, mariners did not have much experience sailing out of sight of land, and their navigational tools and methods were primitive. They had crude compasses but did not really understand the differences between magnetic north and true north until the 1500s. They could measure latitude with instruments called astrolabes and quadrants, but using these instruments aboard moving ships was difficult. As the age of exploration progressed, sailors devised more efficient methods of measuring latitude. However, the accurate measurement of longitude at sea did not occur until the 1700s.

Third, few ships were well equipped for long ocean voyages or unfavorable winds. Explorers in the early 1400s used caravels—small, triangular-sailed ships built for coastal cruising. Over time, Atlantic sailors adapted caravels to handle square sails as well, making them better suited to wind conditions on the high seas. As voyages became longer, the need for bigger storage areas led to the development of a larger ship called the nao or carrack. By 1500 carracks might be as much as four times as large as caravels.

Solutions to the problems of maps, navigation, and ships arose during, not before, the age of exploration. The Europeans of the early Renaissance pushed out into the unknown with inadequate equipment from the past. The spark that drove them did not come from advances in technology but from forces within society.

European exploration during the Renaissance grew out of various motives and factors. One was simple curiosity, the growing interest in the world that was a key feature of the dawning Renaissance. Economic motives played a key role as well. Contact with the Muslim world had given Europeans a taste for the spices, silks, and other luxury goods of Asia. When the city of Constantinople fell to the Ottoman Turks* in 1453, the overland trade route to the East was disrupted. The European demand for luxury goods fueled the search for a sea route to Asia.

Religion also played a part in the growth of exploration. Some European rulers who sponsored voyages felt a sincere duty to carry Christianity to other parts of the world. Others wanted to gather allies to fight the growth of the Muslim empire. Finally, political ambition was an important force that propelled exploration. European nations that discovered new territories could acquire great riches, power, and prestige through trade and colonial outposts.

THE PORTUGUESE AND THE EASTERN ROUTE

Historians date the great age of exploration from 1415, when a Portuguese prince named Dom Henry helped capture Ceuta, a Muslim city in North Africa. This adventure inspired the prince, later called Henry the Navigator (1394–1460), to sponsor a series of voyages of exploration. Over the next century, such expeditions would eventually bring Portugal colonies in Africa, Asia, and South America.

Prince Henry the Navigator. In 1419 Henry began outfitting ships for missions into the Atlantic. Some of these voyages led to the establishment of colonies on the islands of Madeira and the Canaries. Other expeditions probed southward along the west coast of Africa. By 1434 one of the prince's navigators had passed Cape Bojador, the southernmost point reached by Europeans. From then on the Portuguese were venturing into unknown waters.

In a series of voyages from 1444 to 1460, the Portuguese found the mouth of the Senegal River, explored the Cape Verde Islands, and reached Sierra Leone. During that period, they began trading with Africans along the coast for ivory, gold dust, and slaves. By the time of Henry's death, Portuguese mariners had made at least 35 voyages to western Africa. Historians debate how many of these journeys Henry directly sponsored, but clearly he played the leading role in the nation's drive to explore other lands.

Later Portuguese Exploration. A succession of Portuguese kings sponsored voyages along the African coast to the mouth of the Congo River and beyond. These expeditions resulted in increased trade in gold, pepper, and slaves—one expert estimates that Portugal brought back 150,000 slaves from western Africa before 1500.

The voyages raised questions about the geography of Africa that led Portuguese king John II (ruled 1481–1495) to launch several expeditions in 1487. One group of explorers traveled by land in search of a route across Africa. Others went to India to learn about the commerce and navigation of the Indian Ocean. Most importantly, Bartolomeu Dias sailed off to find the southern tip of Africa and a route around it. In 1488 Dias returned to Portugal and reported that he had rounded the tip of Africa, which the king named the Cape of Good Hope. These trips produced two valuable pieces of information: that ships could sail around Africa and that regular commerce existed between eastern Africa and India across the northern Indian Ocean.

Nearly nine years passed before another Portuguese expedition set out to take advantage of these discoveries. In 1497 Vasco da GAMA left Portugal with four ships. The fleet rounded the Cape of Good Hope and stopped at several ports in eastern Africa before landing on the coast of India. Gama returned to Portugal in 1499, having found the basic sea route that would open to Europeans the trade of India and the Asian lands beyond.

About six months later, a much larger fleet under the command of Pedro Álvares Cabral sailed from Portugal for India. However, on the way the ships were blown westward by storms and ended up on the coast of Brazil. Cabral claimed the land for Portugal. After a few weeks he resumed his journey, reaching India in September 1500, and he set up several trading posts. Within a few years, other expeditions had built fortified trading posts along the eastern coast of Africa, at the entrances to the Red Sea and the Persian Gulf, and along the shores of the Indian peninsula. The Portuguese also created settlements farther east, eventually gaining control of the trade of the Spice Islands (now called the Moluccas).

OTHER EXPEDITIONS

While the Portuguese were opening and exploiting* the sea route that led eastward around Africa to the Indian Ocean and Asia, others turned westward. Christopher COLUMBUS hoped to reach Asia by sailing west across the Atlantic Ocean but landed instead in the Americas. His historic voyage across the ocean and back in 1492–1493 was just the beginning of transatlantic exploration.

The Americas and Beyond. Columbus made three more voyages, determined to find a passage to the markets of Asia. Even before his death in 1506, however, other navigators had visited the Americas. Although many of them focused their efforts on finding a way through or around the continents to Asia, others were interested in the geography, people, and resources of the uncharted lands. Mapmakers had begun to realize that these lands were part of the world previously unknown to Europeans. As early as 1493 Pietro Martire d'Anghiera, an Italian scholar in Spain, called Columbus's discovery "the New World."

One of the first to venture into that world was John Cabot, an Italian navigator working for England. In 1497 he sailed from Bristol to the island of Newfoundland, now part of Canada. On a second expedition a year later Cabot was lost without a trace. Soon afterward Portuguese mariners explored the region around Newfoundland; by 1506 they had begun fishing for cod in nearby waters.

Meanwhile, several Portuguese expeditions along the northern and eastern coasts of South America began to reveal the vast size of the continent. Spanish navigators looked along the coasts of Central America and the Yucatan Peninsula for an easy water passage through the Americas.

Geographers realized that these continents lay between Europe and Asia. It might be possible, however, to sail around the southern tip of South America as the Portuguese had sailed around Africa. In 1519 Portuguese navigator Ferdinand MAGELLAN led an expedition for Spain that would test that idea. Magellan, who believed that a narrow sea separated South America from the Spice Islands (Moluccas) and Asia, managed to find a route through the turbulent waters at the tip of South America and into the Pacific Ocean. Although Magellan had greatly underestimated the distance to Asia, he landed in the Philippines with his fleet after 106 days at sea. Magellan died in the Philippines in 1521, but Juan Sebastián del Cano took command of the remaining ship and returned to Spain in 1522. He was the first navigator to sail around the world. As a result of Magellan's voyage, Spain claimed the Philippines as a colony.

Phantom Passages and Golden Cities. During this first phase of Renaissance exploration, Europeans learned the shape and size of Africa, mapped many Asian islands and coasts, discovered new continents, and established European colonies in the tropics. Many later voyages and expeditions failed to reach their goals but still added to the accumulation of geographic knowledge.

One of the most frustrating goals was to find a Northwest Passage, a waterway that would enable ships to sail through North America to the Pacific Ocean. Between 1524 and 1610, Giovanni da Verrazano and Jacques Cartier for the French, Martin Frobisher and John Davis for the English, and Henry Hudson for the Dutch all tried to find the route and failed. However, Cartier's voyages up the St. Lawrence River launched French exploration and colonization in Canada, and Hudson's voyage into the bay that carries his name led to later expeditions and the establishment of the English fur trade in the region.

Far to the south, stories of legendary golden cities and kingdoms lured explorers. Such rumors drew adventurers such as Walter Raleigh and Francisco Vásquez de Coronado into the interior of South America and the North American southwest. No such cities were found, but each expedition resulted in more information about the American continents. Spanish military leader and conqueror Hernán CORTÉS and other conquistadors* went deep into the interior and captured the fabulously wealthy empires in Mexico and Peru. By the mid-1500s Europeans had some knowledge of all the major river systems of South America and had traced most of the continent's coast.

The mammoth Pacific Ocean was the great unknown. A Spanish expedition meant to follow Magellan's route around the globe ended in disaster in the 1520s. Fifty years later, England's Sir Francis DRAKE made the second complete trip around the world, pioneering an alternate route around the tip of South America and possibly exploring part of the California coast. Perhaps more significant, though, was the achievement of Spanish navigators Felipe de Salcedo and Andrés de Urdaneta. In 1565 they established a practical east-west sailing route across the Pacific that took advantage of winds and currents. It became one of the world's great trade routes. Europeans could now travel and trade regularly across all the oceans of the world.

EFFECTS OF EUROPEAN EXPLORATION

The age of European exploration yielded enormous improvements in geographic knowledge, travel, and trade. It had darker results as well. Many of the peoples that Europeans "discovered" in other continents had their lives violently disrupted. Whole civilizations in the Americas were conquered and wiped out, and millions of Africans became merchandise in a growing international slave trade.

Earlier historians tended to celebrate the heroic achievements of Renaissance explorers. They also presented a positive view of the colonizers and missionaries whose work followed on the heels of exploration. In recent years, scholars have instead portrayed the legacy of Renaissance exploration as cruelty, environmental destruction, and the inability of cultures to communicate. Both views contain elements of truth, and each is one-sided and incomplete without the other. For better or worse, the explorers of the European Renaissance brought the various branches of the human family together and laid the foundations of the modern world.

(See also Africa; Americas; Asia, East; Geography and Cartography.)

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* Ottoman Turks

Turkish followers of Islam who founded the Ottoman Empire in the 1300s; the empire eventually included large areas of eastern Europe, the Middle East, and northern Africa

See color plate 2, vol. 4

* exploit

to take advantage of; to make productive use of

Naming the New World

Christopher Columbus "discovered" the Americas for Europe but thought they were part of Asia. Fifteen years later the Americas were named for a traveler who insisted that they were a "new world." Between 1501 and 1504, Amerigo Vespucci of Italy accompanied two Portuguese voyages of exploration along South America's coastline. His popular, colorful accounts of these missions greatly exaggerated his own importance in the expedition but made him famous. On his world map of 1507, Martin Waldseemüller labeled the new southern continent America (for Amerigo) and the name stuck.

* conquistador

military explorer and conqueror

See color plate 3, vol. 4