274Chapter 15
advantage of winds and currents that he could not fully
have understood. In spite of the season he encountered
no hurricanes and, on October 12, sighted what he be-
lieved to be an island off the coast of Japan. It was one
of the Bahamas.
Columbus made three more voyages before his
death in 1506, insisting until the end that he had found
the western passage to Asia. The realization that it was
a continent whose existence had only been suspected
by Europeans was left to others. One of them, a Floren-
tine navigator named Amerigo Vespucci (1454–1512),
gave it his name. The true dimensions of the “New
World” became clearer in 1513 when Vasco Núñez de
Balboa crossed the Isthmus of Panama on foot and be-
came the first European to look upon the Pacific.
The achievement of Columbus has been somewhat
diminished by his own failure to grasp its significance
and by the fact that others had no doubt preceded him.
The Vikings visited Newfoundland and may have ex-
plored the North American coast as far south as Cape
Cod. Portuguese and Basque fishermen had almost cer-
tainly landed there in the course of their annual expedi-
tions to the Grand Banks, but being fishermen, they
kept their discoveries secret and these early contacts
came to nothing.
The voyage of Columbus, however, set off a
frenzy of exploration and conquest. By the Treaty of
Tordesillas (1494), the Spanish and Portuguese agreed
to a line of demarcation established in mid-Atlantic by
the pope. Lands “discovered” to the east of that line be-
longed to Portugal; those to the west belonged to
Spain. The inhabitants of those lands were not con-
sulted. This left Brazil, Africa, and the route to India
in Portuguese hands, but a line of demarcation in the
Pacific was not defined. Much of Asia remained in
dispute.
To establish a Spanish presence there, an expedi-
tion was dispatched in 1515 to reach the Moluccas by
sailing west around the southern tip of South America.
Its leader was Fernando Magellan, a Portuguese sailor in
Spanish pay. Magellan crossed the Pacific only to be
killed in the Moluccas by natives unimpressed with the
benefits of Spanish sovereignty (see document 15.1).
His navigator, Sebastian del Cano, became the first
captain to circumnavigate the globe when he brought
the expedition’s only remaining ship back to Spain with
fifteen survivors in 1522. The broad outlines of the
world were now apparent (see map 15.1).The First Colonial Empires: Portugal
and Spain
Conquest and the imposition of European government
accompanied exploration from the beginning. The Por-
tuguese made no effort to impose their direct rule on
large native populations, in part because they lacked
the manpower to do so and in part because the primary
purpose of Portuguese expansion was trade. Instead
they established a series of merchant colonies to collectDOCUMENT 15.1
The Hazards of a Long Voyage
This extract is taken from a firsthand account of Fernando
Magellan’s voyage around the world by Antonio Pigafetta,
but similar conditions might be expected on any sea journey if
it lasted long enough. The disease described is scurvy, which
results from a deficiency of vitamin C. It was a serious prob-
lem even on transatlantic voyages. The cause was not under-
stood until the eighteenth century, but captains could usually
predict the first date of its appearance in a ship’s company
with some accuracy.Wednesday, November 28, we debauched from
that strait [since named after Magellan], engulfing
ourselves in the Pacific Sea. We were three months
and twenty days without getting any kind of fresh
food. We ate biscuit, which was no longer biscuit,
but powder of biscuits swarming with worms, for
they had eaten the good. It stank strongly of the
urine of rats. We drank yellow water that had been
putrid for many days. We also ate some ox hides
that covered the top of the mainyard to prevent
the yard from chafing the shrouds, and which had
become exceedingly hard because of the sun, rain,
and wind. We left them in the sea for four or five
days, and then placed them on top of the embers
and so ate them; and we often ate sawdust from
boards. Rats were sold for one-half ducat a piece,
and even then we could not get them. But above
all the other misfortunes the following was the
worst. The gums of both the lower and upper
teeth of some of our men swelled so that they
could not eat under any circumstances and there-
fore died. Nineteen men died from that
sickness.... Twenty-five or thirty men fell sick.
Pigafetta, Antonio. Magellan’s Voyage Around the World,ed.
and trans. J. A. Robertson. Cleveland: 1902.