Discovery and Settlement of the New World 5the Catholic church was supplanted by that of ruling monarchs and
titled noblemen in emerging nation-states. And after Martin Luther
posted his list of ninety-five theses on a cathedral door, the Christian
religion no longer consisted of a single set of beliefs.
Capitalism, Protestantism, and the nation-states ruled by ambitious
sovereigns combined to bring about modern Europe.
Once the astrolabe allowed navigators to determine the longi-
tude of their ships at sea by measur ing the angle between the sun and
the horizon, daring explorers ventured farther down the coast of Af-
rica. Prince Henry of Portugal, known as Henry the Navigator, subsi-
dized expeditions that ultimately crossed the equator and sailed down
the length of Africa. In 1498 , Vasco da Gama rounded the Cape of
Good Hope, crossed the Indian Ocean, and reached India, where he
announced to the natives that he had come to trade.
Reaching the East by the shortest possible route and returning home
with gold, silver, spices, and other exotic products became an ambitious
quest for many seamen. An Italian navigator, Christopher Columbus,
believed he could reach the Orient faster by sailing due west, not
around the continent of Africa. Despite the objections of her advisers,
who felt that the long voyage by small caravels into the unknown posed
dangerous risks, Isabella the Catholic, queen of Castile, who married
Ferdinand, king of Aragon, to form the nation-state of Spain, agreed
to finance the trip. On August 3 , 1492 , three ships, the Nina, Pinta, and
Santa Maria, manned by about ninety sailors, left Palos, Spain,
and—after a brief stop at the Canary Islands off the coast of Africa—
headed toward the setting sun. It took enormous courage and superb
seamanship to undertake this voyage, but on October 12 at around two
AM, Columbus and his crew made landfall on what he called San Sal-
vador (it was later named Watlings Island), in the Bahamas. He next
sighted a much larger island, Hispaniola, and called the natives who
greeted him Indians, in the mistaken belief that he had arrived in India
and that China was just a short distance farther west. He returned
home to a hero’s welcome and made three further trips to this New
World, but he never found the treasures and spices he desired, and he
died still convinced that he had reached Asia.
The subsequent exploration of a New World by Portuguese and