European Exploration and Maritime Empires

Why would anyone sail into the unknown?

In 1488, the Portuguese captain Bartolomeu Dias was blown far to the south by storms, turned east and found that the coast of Africa now ran northeast: he had rounded the tip of Africa. Ten years later, Vasco da Gama followed that route to Calicut in India. The same decade, Christopher Columbus, sailing for Spain, reached the Caribbean, believing he was near Asia.

Why did small, relatively poor kingdoms on the Atlantic edge of Europe launch these voyages, when the Ming had stopped theirs? This is a cause and consequence question with several answers.

Motives: "God, gold and glory" and more

• Gold and trade: Europeans wanted spices (pepper from India; cloves, nutmeg and mace from islands in what is now Indonesia), silk and gold. These reached Europe through many middlemen (Indian Ocean traders, then Egyptian and Ottoman lands, then Venice), each adding costs. A direct sea route promised huge profits.
• God: a crusading mindset shaped by the Reconquista (Christian conquest of Muslim Iberia, completed with the fall of Granada in January 1492); a wish to spread Christianity and to find allies, such as the legendary Christian king "Prester John", against Muslim powers.
• Glory: rulers and adventurers sought fame, titles and land.
• Competition: Portugal and Spain, then the Dutch, English and French, raced each other.

Older textbooks often said the Ottomans "blocked" trade with Asia after 1453, forcing Europeans to find new routes. Historians now doubt this: Venice kept trading with the Ottomans, and Portugal's African voyages had begun decades before 1453. The desire to cut out middlemen fits the evidence better.

Technology borrowed and improved

• The caravel: a small, fast ship combining square sails (for running before the wind) and triangular lateen sails (from Mediterranean and Arab sailing, good for sailing closer to the wind).
• The magnetic compass, first used for navigation in China, and the astrolabe and quadrant (refined in the Islamic world) to measure the height of the Sun or Pole Star and so find latitude.
• Knowledge of winds: Portuguese sailors learned to swing far out into the Atlantic (the volta do mar) to catch winds that carried them home.
• Ship-mounted cannons let small European fleets outgun larger trading fleets in the Indian Ocean.

Much of this technology came from Asia and the Islamic world: Europeans combined and adapted it.

Portugal: around Africa to Asia

• Prince Henry "the Navigator" (1394 to 1460) sponsored voyages down the African coast, though he never sailed far himself. Portugal colonized Madeira and the Azores, and set up trading forts on the African coast.
• 1488: Dias rounds the Cape of Good Hope. 1498: da Gama reaches Calicut. In Calicut, local merchants found Portuguese trade goods poor; the Portuguese soon turned to force.
• 1500: Pedro Álvares Cabral, heading for India, reached Brazil and claimed it for Portugal.
• Under Afonso de Albuquerque, Portugal seized Goa (1510), Malacca (1511) and Hormuz (1515), building a network of fortified ports (the Estado da Índia). Asian ships were required to buy a Portuguese pass (cartaz) or risk attack. Portugal never ruled large Asian territories: it controlled sea lanes and ports, not empires on land.
• Portuguese traders reached Japan in 1543, bringing firearms that Japanese warlords quickly copied.

Spain: west to the Americas and the Pacific

• 1492: Columbus, funded by Isabella and Ferdinand, reached an island in the Bahamas inhabited by Taíno people, then Cuba and Hispaniola. He made four voyages and always insisted he had reached Asia.
• 1494: the Treaty of Tordesillas, following a papal decision, divided the newly claimed non-European world between Spain and Portugal along a line west of the Cape Verde islands. Brazil fell on Portugal's side. No Indigenous nation, African state or Asian ruler was consulted.
• 1519 to 1522: an expedition led by Ferdinand Magellan crossed the Pacific. Magellan was killed in the Philippines in 1521 in a battle with forces of the local leader Lapulapu, honoured in the Philippines today. Juan Sebastián Elcano brought one ship, the Victoria, home with about 18 European survivors: the first circumnavigation of the globe.
• 1571: Spain founded Manila, starting the galleon trade that carried American silver to Asia (see Ming China and East Asia).

Latecomers: the Dutch, English and French

From around 1600, joint-stock companies let many investors share the risks and profits of long voyages. The English East India Company (1600) and the Dutch East India Company (VOC, 1602) were private companies with the power to make war and treaties. The VOC built its Asian headquarters at Batavia (Jakarta) in 1619, and in 1621 its forces conquered the Banda Islands, killing, enslaving or driving out most of the Bandanese people to control nutmeg. The French and English explored North America (Cartier, Hudson) looking for a Northwest Passage to Asia (see First Nations, Inuit and Early Contact in Northern North America).

Encounter, not "discovery"

Calling these voyages "discoveries" takes the point of view of Europeans. The people of the Caribbean, Brazil, East Africa and India knew exactly where they were. In the Indian Ocean, Europeans entered an old, busy trading world run by Gujarati, Arab, Swahili, Malay and Chinese merchants. Encounter or contact describes the events more accurately, and lets us ask how both sides saw them.