as harbors, political turmoil, and anchorage. But navigating the Atlantic depended on
more; it required methods for exploiting the powerful ocean wind systems. New ship
designs—the light caravel, the heavy galleon—featured the rigging and sails needed to
harness the wind.
VOYAGES
As we have seen (p. 245), already in the thirteenth century merchants and
missionaries from Genoa and Majorca were making forays into the Atlantic. In the
fifteenth century the initiative that would eventually take Europeans around the Cape
of Good Hope in one direction and to the Americas in the other came from the
Portuguese royal house. The enticements were gold and slaves as well as honor and
glory. Under King João I (r.1385–1433) and his successors, Portugal extended its rule
to the Muslim port of Ceuta and a few other nearby cities. (See Map 8.6.) More
importantly, João’s son Prince Henry “the Navigator” (1394–1460) sponsored
expeditions—mainly by Genoese sailors—to explore the African coast: in the mid-
1450s they reached the Cape Verde Islands and penetrated inland via the Senegal and
Gambia rivers. A generation later, Portuguese explorers were working their way far
past the equator; in 1487 Bartholomeu Dias (d.1500) rounded the southern tip of
Africa (soon thereafter named the Cape of Good Hope), opening a new route that
Vasco da Gama sailed about ten years later all the way to Calicut (today Kozhikode)
in India. In his account of the voyage he made no secret of his methods: when he
needed water, he landed on an island and bombarded the inhabitants, taking “as
much water as we wanted.”^17
Da Gama’s cavalier treatment of the natives was symptomatic of a more
profound development: European colonialism. Already in the 1440s, Henry was
portioning out the uninhabited islands of Madeira and the Azores to those of his
followers who promised to find peasants to settle them. The Azores remained a grain
producer, but, with financing by the Genoese, Madeira began to grow cane sugar.
The product took Europe by storm. Demand was so high that a few decades later,
when few European settlers could be found to work sugar plantations on the Cape
Verde Islands, the Genoese Antonio da Noli, discoverer and governor of the islands,
brought in African slaves instead. Cape Verde was a microcosm of later European
colonialism, which depended on just such slave labor.
