The Americas

On an autumn morning in 1492, Christopher Columbus first set foot on what he believed to be Asia. His long and difficult voyage had been for the purpose of finding a new route to India.


Previous routes had been forced to sail east around the whole continent of Africa. But Columbus had instead journeyed west, across the vast expanse of the Atlantic Ocean.

Standing finally on land, Columbus assumed his mission had succeeded.

What no one yet knew was that an entire continent stood between Europe and East Asia.

This realization would begin a new era of European exploration and, eventually, almost total colonization of the Americas.

The first transatlantic voyages were undertaken by the Norsemen, who sailed from Scandinavia to North America in the 11th century.


Leif Eriksson is credited with being the first European to set foot on American soil, and his journey was documented in Icelandic sagas such as The Saga of Erik the Red. These stories tell of a land called Vinland which was discovered by Eriksson and his crew during their voyage.

It is believed that this land may have been located somewhere along the coast of Newfoundland or Labrador in Canada.

These early voyages did not lead to any permanent settlements, with colonization beginning with the famous voyage of Christopher Columbus in 1492.

So who was Christopher Columbus, and how did he come to take the voyage that would change the world forever?

Born in Genoa, Italy in 1451, Columbus had a passion for the sea from an early age. He worked as a sailor on merchant ships before joining the Portuguese Navy – at that time, one of the most powerful navies on earth.

In this role, he developed his navigational skills and knowledge of geography, as well as an itching desire to explore.

In 1484, Columbus presented a daring plan to the Portuguese royal family: to reach Asia by sailing westward across the Atlantic Ocean

King John II of Portugal, however, was sceptical.

The King believed that Columbus had vastly underestimated the distance of his voyage, and so promptly rejected the proposal.

Undeterred, Columbus continued searching for support, and finally received the backing of Portugal’s major rival: Spain.

The Spanish court shared King John II of Portugal’s doubts. But keen to gain a competitive edge over the Portuguese, during a time of frenzied exploration, they were willing to take the risk.

The recent historical context sheds light on their decision. In 1479, 4 years before Columbus’s first proposal in Portugal, the marriage of two new Spanish monarchs, Ferdinand II and Isabella, unified the formerly separate Spanish regions of Aragon and Castile.

Their rule also oversaw the end of the “Reconquista”, a centuries-long struggle between Christian and Muslim forces in the Iberian Peninsula. The fall of the Islamic city of Granada in 1492 marked the end of Islamic rule in Spain.

The new Spanish monarchs were eager to capitalize on their newfound freedom and provided Columbus with money, three ships, supplies, and crew members for his journey.

In return, Ferdinand and Isabella expected to gain access to new lands that could be colonized or used as trading posts.

After a long journey across the Atlantic, with three ships (named the Niña, Pinta, and Santa Maria) in October 1492, Columbus and his crew of 100 men spotted land.

They had landed on an island in the Bahamas, which Columbus named San Salvador (‘Holy Savior’), and began to explore several other islands in the Caribbean, including Cuba and Hispaniola (present-day Haiti and the Dominican Republic), encountering the indigenous Taíno people.

On December 25, 1492, the Santa María ran aground on a reef off the coast of Hispaniola. Columbus ordered the ship to be dismantled, and he left behind a group of men to establish a settlement, which he named La Navidad (“The Nativity” or “Christmas”).

La Navidad was the first European settlement on the American continent.

The Portuguese had perceived Columbus' voyages west to 'India' to encroach on their empire, and it became necessary to agree upon how to divide the world.

The Treaty of Tordesillas, signed in 1494 between Spain and Portugal, did just that, giving Portugal exclusive rights to explore and colonize lands east of a line drawn 370 leagues west of the Cape Verde Islands.

As a result, Portuguese explorers began to venture further south along the African coast. In 1500, Pedro Álvares Cabral reached Brazil after being blown off course to India.

Claiming this land for Portugal, mistaking it for an island which he named it 'Ilha de Vera Cruz' (meaning 'true cross').

The Portuguese quickly settled here and exploited natural resources, setting up trading posts for the Brazilian timber tree.

They also brought enslaved Africans over from Africa to work on their plantations which would become an integral part of Brazilian society for centuries.

By 1532 they had founded São Vincente, south of today’s São Paulo.

While the Spanish and Portuguese began to wield great power in the Americas, they did not do so without resistance. Nor were the Americas lacking indigenous empires of their own.

One such empire was the Aztec Empire, an alliance of three states from the region of the Valley of Mexico which existed in central Mexico during the 15th and early 16th centuries.

The 'Mexica', as the empire's people were termed, had gained a reputation as fierce warriors in the 14th century. Under the leadership of rulers like Moctezuma I, the Aztecs expanded their empire through conquest, forming alliances with other city-states, and demanding tribute from subjugated peoples.

Despite their military prowess, the Aztecs were ultimately brought to an end by the arrival of the Spanish conquistadors in 1519 - both on account of military defeat and through contracting European diseases.

The Spaniards, led by Hernan Cortes, allied themselves with enemies of the Aztecs and mounted a campaign of conquest that ultimately led to the fall of Tenochtitlan, the empire's capital, in 1521.

Although Columbus has gone down in history for his discovery of ‘America’, On his subsequent voyages across the Atlantic, he continued to believe that he had reached an uncharted eastern edge of Asia.

Part of the problem was that Columbus had miscalculated the size of the earth, believing it to be considerably smaller than it actually is, while at the same time. overestimating the size of the Eurasian continent.

In this sense, the King of Portugal had been right to doubt Columbus’s plans.

By Columbus's calculations, the distance from Spain to Japan, sailing westwards, was only around 2,400 miles. In reality, the distance was closer to 11,000.

It is for this reason that, believing he was in Asia, and when encountering the native Taino peoples, it made sense for Columbus to refer to them as “Indians” – a name that would mistakenly persist for centuries to come.

It wasn't until the voyages and studies of other explorers over the next few decades that an understanding of the lands Columbus described as an entirely separate continent began to form.

Amerigo Vespucci, an Italian explorer, is often credited with the realization that explorers had stumbled upon an entirely new continent.

Born in Florence, Italy, in 1451, Vespucci came from a prominent family and received an education that included geography and astronomy, crucial for his future career as an explorer.

His first voyage on behalf of Spain was in 1499, setting sail from Cadiz and reaching the northeastern coast of South America, before venturing south to coastal Brazil.

Vespucci's journey took him along the coast of Venezuela and then south to Brazil, where he made detailed observations of the diverse flora and fauna and the indigenous tribes he encountered.

He incorrectly thought he had found the Ganges River, which turned out to be the mouth of the Amazon River​​​​.

In a letter recounting his journey, Vespucci expressed wonder at the exotic flora and fauna and described his experience as entering an earthly paradise.

He made note that the nature he witnessed was starkly different from anything he had read about in his research of Asian sea voyages.

Graph

Vespucci undertook another long voyage in 1501 under the patronage of King Manuel I of Portugal.

He explored further along the Brazilian and Argentinian coasts, venturing as far south as present-day Rio de Janeiro and the La Plata River.

It was here that Vepspucci encountered unfamiliar constellations in the night sky – unlike any ever recorded – as well as unusual equatorial currents.

Vespucci became convinced that he was not in Asia at all.

His detailed observations and the absence of Asian-like riches led him to the realization that he was on a separate continent across the Atlantic Ocean, which he called ‘Mundus Novus’: Latin for ‘New World​’.

The term "America" first appeared in 1507 when German cartographer Martin Waldseemüller labeled the newly recognized continent "Americus" in Amerigo’s Vespucci's honor on a world map.