Not long
after Columbus set sail with his three ships in 1492, a number of other explorers, particularly
from Portugal, set out on their own voyages. Spain and Portugal led the world in the fifteenth
and sixteenth centuries in the number of explorers that each nation sponsored.
From 1497 to 1524, the Portuguese explorer Vasco da Gama opened up a sea route from
Europe to the East after sailing around the Cape of Good Hope, at the southern end of South
Africa. The cape had first been sighted by fellow Portuguese navigator Bartolomeu Dias, who led
the very first expedition around the Cape of Good Hope in 1488 and opened up a sea route to Asia
via the Atlantic and Indian Oceans four years before Columbus's first journey to find a direct
route west from Europe to Asia.
These explorers journeyed further than
Columbus did, and, unlike him, they were relatively successful in reaching their intended
destinations. Columbus's discovery had less to do with his being a pioneer in
navigationarguably, he was not, given that he got lostthan with his accidental sightings of
Dominica and Hispaniola. These sightings, and particularly the reports of the natives who lived
on these islands, made other explorers curious about the mysterious lands west of Europe and
about the mysterious people who inhabited them.
The Italian explorer Amerigo
Vespucci toured South America and the Caribbean under the sponsorship of the Spanish and then
the Portuguese between 1499 and 1502. He is notable for being the first explorer to realize that
he was on a separate continent, which is why both North and South America are named after him.
In 1503, Ferdinand Magellan, a Portuguese navigator who sailed for Portugal, made the first
circumnavigation around the world.
Succeeding explorers focused more on
conquest than on exploration. These included Francisco Pizarro, who conquered the Inca Empire in
Peru, and Hernan Cortes, a conqueror of Mexico's Aztec Empire and the capturer of its capital,
Tenochtitlan.
No comments:
Post a Comment