The Great Events by Famous Historians [Volumes 1-14]

The Portuguese from their Atlantic seaboard had already begun to explore southward along the African coast. In 1402 they had settled the Canary Isles. In 1443 they reached southward beyond the sands of the Sahara and saw Cape Verd, discovered that Africa was not all burning desert, that heat would not forever increase as they went southward. In 1487 Bartholomew Diaz, after almost a year of sailing, reached the Cape of Good Hope, the southern point of the vast African continent; and in 1497 Vasco da Gama rounded the cape and sailed on to India[16]. He had found a way of bringing Indian spices, silks, and jewels to Europe, bringing them in quantities and without paying tribute to the Turks, without crossing the deadly deserts of Arabia. He had made his little country wealthy.

Meanwhile, stimulated by Portuguese success, the mariners of other nations began to brave the giant storms of the Atlantic. The Turks had made trade with the far East wellnigh impossible. Portugal was not the only land to seek a sea-route to India. Venice and Genoa saw before them the threat of ruin to their most profitable commerce. So we may even say that it was the Turks who set the Genoese captain Columbus to planning his great voyage; it was the conquest of the Moors that set Isabella free to listen to him, and offer her crown jewels for the expedition which should convert other heathen, establish other inquisitions; and it was the downfall of the Moors which left the Spanish warriors so eager to throng to adventure and warfare in the West, once Columbus had shown the way.

For a time the theatre of great events shifts to the new continent. The Portuguese explorers had doubled the size of the known world. The Spaniards doubled it again. But the credit must not be given wholly to Spain. Though it was the liberality of her monarchs which had made discovery possible, and though it was the daring of her warriors that laughed at danger and made conquest sure, yet the Spaniards were not sailors. It was to Italy, the home of commerce, that they turned for their captains and their pilots. Columbus, the Genoese, had discovered the islands along the coast. England, wishing to have a share in this world of wonders, sent a Venetian mariner, John Cabot; and he and his son sailed along our northern mainland in English ships.[17] Columbus touched the coast of South America in 1498.[18] A Florentine, Amerigo Vespucci, was the first to cruise far along this southern coast, probably in 1499, and it was his name which Europe gave to the new lands.[19]

Following the discovery came settlement, warfare with the unhappy Indians, a fierce and frantic search for gold. It was while engaged in this work that Balboa crossed the Isthmus of Panama, saw the vast waters of the Pacific, and riding out into them upon his warhorse took possession, in the name of Spain, of the largest ocean of the globe.[20] Men recognized at last that these were not the Asiatic shores, but a wholly new continent which they had found.