upheld despite the fact that he had been
beaten to Brazil in January 1500 by the
Spanish explorer Vicente Yáñez Pinzón
(ca. 1460–ca. 1523). Hence Brazil became
a Portuguese, colony, with Salvador
founded in 1549, São Paulo in 1554, and
Rio de Janeiro in 1567. It remains to this
day a Portuguese-speaking nation.
During the years 1492 to 1500, one
other European nation, England, sent an
expedition to the New World. Heading
that expedition was Italian-born English
navigator Giovanni Caboto, or John
Cabot (ca. 1450–1499), who explored the
coasts of Labrador, Newfoundland, and
New England in two voyages in 1497 and
- Like Columbus, he was searching
for a short route to Asia and was con-
vinced that Japan and China lay right
around the bend. France sent expeditions
for the same purpose in the early 16th
century. Italian explorer Giovanni da
Verrazano (ca. 1480–1527) explored
North America’s Atlantic coast for France
in the 1520s, and French explorer Jacques
Cartier (1491–1557) explored Canada in
the 1530s and 1540s.
Despite this budding foreign compe-
tition, exploration of the New World in
the late 15th and early 16th centuries
was almost entirely a Spanish affair. Spain
moved so rapidly to capitalize on
Columbus’s discoveries that vast regions
of the American interior were already
shipping wealth to Spain while European
rivals were still skirting the coasts. Spain’s
first holdings were in the place Columbus
had first colonized: Hispaniola.SPAIN IN THE AMERICAS 27Spanish Settlements in the Caribbean, 1496–1533
Within the first few decades after Columbus’s arrival in the Caribbean, the Spanish began building defensive garrisons to protects
Spain’s colonists and also to safeguard Spain’s treasure ships. While the era of English and French pirates in the Caribbean did not
begin in earnest until the late 16th century, as early as 1525 word had spread throughout Europe of the riches Spain was shipping
out of its new American lands. In 1505, a fort was constructed at Santo Domingo, followed by others in San Juan (1511), Havana
(1519), Santiago (1522), and Cartagena (1533).