classical geographer Claudius Ptolemy alongside the living
explorer Vespucci.
Within a few decades it became clear that what lay westof the Atlantic Ocean was a land heretofore unknown to
Europeans, and subsequent maps show the effort to assess
the western hemisphere. Sebastian Münster’s map on
page 24 was among the first to definitively separate North
America from Asia, using knowledge gleaned from Ferdinand
Magellan’s circumnavigation of the globe. Once the Americas
had been established, however, European explorers and their
patrons continued to seek a portage or waterway that would
enable them to pass through these continents to the Far East.
For the next three centuries, exploration of North America was
informed by a drive to find the fabled Northwest Passage.
Maps in the early chapters of this book reveal thesimultaneous quest to exploit the riches of North America and
also to reach beyond it. While the Spanish invested heavily in
the extraction of resources from South and Central America
in the sixteenth century, colonization efforts in North America
by the French, Dutch, and English would not begin until the
seventeenth century. As such, the maps in this chapter focus
primarily on exploration rather than on settlement. They
are wildly erroneous, but in those errors we find the motives
behind the early voyages of discovery.
Historians use the phrase “Columbian exchange” todescribe the complex interplay between the Americas and the
Old World across the 1500s. That exchange brought new crops
to the New World such as wheat, barley, and sugar, as well as
horses, cattle, swine, and sheep. But the arrival of Europeans
also devastated the Americas. Through forced labor and
violent subjugation, but also through the transmission of
smallpox, typhus, cholera, and measles, indigenous life
was fundamentally altered. Not all Europeans accepted this
arrangement. Bartolomé de las Casas devoted his life to
exposing the iniquities of the Spanish colonial system. He
rejected the belief that natives were savages, and instead
portrayed them as victims of Spanish cruelty and theft.
When Columbus arrived on San Salvador in 1492, heregarded the Taíno people as little more than subjects, and
failed to appreciate their religion, social structure, farming
system, or navigation skills. Within a half century, the Taíno
population had plummeted from thousands to fewer than- In 1519 Hernán Cortés brought 600 men from the Gulf
Coast inland to the Aztec city of Tenochtitlan (page 22).
The Spanish were greeted by the Aztec king Montezuma,
but relations grew hostile once Cortés demanded gold. The
Aztecs resisted Spanish control for nearly two years, but they
were severely weakened by European diseases and their
weapons were no match against European technology. In
1521 the Spanish conquered and destroyed Tenochtitlan,
which became the site of Mexico City and the base of New
Spain. The maps on pages 26 and 30 illustrate this long period
of Spanish dominance in the sixteenth century. Historians
and anthropologists have estimated that by 1600 the native
population of the Americas had been reduced by as much
as 80 percent.
We close this chapter with a map by John Dee, an advisor
to Queen Elizabeth who strongly advocated an expanded role
for the English in North America. The ink on Dee’s chart of the
northern hemisphere on page 32 has faded, yet his dogged
and forceful endorsement of English power stimulated a
wave of voyages at the end of the sixteenth century. Though
Dee would not live to see the realization of English control
in the New World, his map reminds us that throughout the
sixteenth century, geographical knowledge was gained first
and foremost through imperial rivalry.