UNIT NINE

THE AGE OF EXPLORATION

THE GREAT DISCOVERIES

Introduction

In 1400 A.D., there were four main centers of civilization - Europe, China, India, and the Middle East. There were also civilized kingdoms in Africa. These centers of civilization knew little about each other. Their only contact was trade. European lack of knowledge about these places was made evident by the fantastic things they thought about them. For example, they called Europe 'the region of light'; Asia was 'the region of mystery' and Africa was the 'region of darkness'. In India, which fascinated them, they thought there were sweet scented bushes, strange-colored birds and tall forests that touched the sky. Precious stones, spices and a mountain of solid gold were there. The inhabitants were thought of as queer pagans, maybe cannibals; some of the inhabitants had heads of dogs. China, known then as Cathay, was more wonderful still. It had a gigantic harbor, Zaitun, and its capital Quinsay was surrounded by miles of walls. Japan was known as Zipangu. The area we call Indonesia today the Europeans called the "Spice Islands" and they were pretty vague about where that was exactly!

Unfortunately, on the European side, there wasn't much desire to learn about the cultures of these places. They wanted goods from them, that's all. Europeans believed they were the best culture; after all, weren't they the Christian culture? Europeans believed that they were the 'children of light', and they did not need to learn from anyone else. They will take this unfortunate attitude with them wherever they go.

During the Crusades, as we have learned, Europeans found out about the goods the Arabs had for sale in the Middle East. The problem was getting the goods. Most of them were things native to Africa or the Far East. At the beginning of our story in this chapter, Europeans had two options: they could trade with Arabs for them or they could travel to the Far East themselves. The reason that Europeans had to go get these goods was that Middle and Far Eastern merchants had little reason to come to Europe to sell the things. To them, Europe was "backward" and there was nothing they particularly wanted in Europe. It wasn’t worth the effort to go there. For the Europeans, neither the option of trading with Arabs or the option of going to the Far East was very satisfactory. Let us see why.

As you learned earlier, Arabs did business by setting up booths in the town squares of Middle Eastern towns. They called this the bazaar. They expected people to come shop the different booths at the bazaar, and if they wanted to buy something, the customer bargained with the booth's owner to find a reasonable price for the items he wished to buy. European merchants did not know this when they went to the Middle East to buy from Arabs. As you know from the chapter on guilds, the guilds set prices. You might be able to do a little price changing between towns, but not in towns. Merchants had to pay what was asked, and that's what they were used to. When the European merchant did business in the Middle East, he got cheated because he didn't understand how the Arab did business. He got royally ripped off! He paid fantastic prices for the spices, jewels, pepper, ivory, and so on that he bought. When he went back to Europe with his goods to sell, he naturally marked them up to cover his costs. This meant that his customers also got royally ripped off. However, his customers wanted the goods so badly that they'd pay the prices. Let's say the merchant paid $500 for a bushel of peppercorns. If he marks that up even as low as 50%, the same bushel will cost you, the customer, $750! Besides, there was the religion thing. Christians didn't really want to do business with the Arabs because they were Muslim.

The merchants who took this option were mainly Italians. Italians could get to the Middle East easily. The Italian merchants, for awhile there, had virtually a monopoly on this "spice trade" as they called it then. You wanted spices and other goods, you bought them from Italians. Italian city-states grew fat and sassy on the spice trade. They were wealthy! in other words.

The other option was to travel to the Far East yourself. There were two ways to get there. You either took the Steppe Nomad Route or you took the Silk Road. Both were long and dangerous. The Steppe Nomad Route went through southern Russia, most of which at that time was unorganized. Outlaws and robbers infested the area. They were watching for caravans of merchants going out to the Far East, and they were especially watching on the way back! You stood a good chance of being robbed or killed. The Silk Road went through territory that was owned by the Turks and they were ready to kill anyone they suspected of being Christian. So, either route you took, your chances of coming back alive weren't real great. The trip, either way you went, took about 2 years for a round trip. If you arrived back alive, you were going to charge for your time and the risk and you made the prices of the goods astronomical. Again, people would pay the prices. The demand was that great that these merchants would get the outrageous prices they charged. Profits were such that one round trip, successfully completed, could make you a millionaire and set you up for life.

This was a great situation money-wise if you're the merchant but consumers (buyers) suffered. They had to pay way too much for all the goods from the Far East, Middle East and Africa that they wanted. Even for the merchant, the risk was too great for the situation to be acceptable. Then, something happened that made the situation much worse. The Turks took over the Middle East and Constantinople and closed the trade routes to Christians. Somehow new routes had to be found to the Far East, routes that would avoid Turks, Arabs, and Italians.

There weren't too many options. In those days, the Suez Canal was not there. That left Africa. The idea was to sail around the continent of Africa, across the Indian Ocean, and then go to China. At first, they didn’t even consider going across the Atlantic Ocean. There was only one problem! Europeans did not have the tools, ships or knowledge to even begin to explore this route.

Getting the tools and knowledge to do the job

Their abysmal ignorance

One obstacle in the way of their going on any trip to find a new route was their abysmal ignorance of the world. You know more at your age than they did as adults about the world they lived in. They were ignorant of four continents: North America, South America, Antarctica, Australia. They were ignorant of the Pacific Ocean. They were ignorant of the true size of Africa. Because they were ignorant of these other things, they could have no true idea of the size of the earth.

Another obstacle was that they were also ignorant of how to sail a ship out on a big ocean. How would you tell where you were with no landmarks? How would you know where you were going? They also had no idea how to build a ship that would withstand a big ocean and its currents and winds. They were ignorant of what the places they were going were really like.

Another obstacle was the misconceptions they had about the world. Most of these were based on observation. For example, the average person then thought the earth was flat. It looked flat. When you look out toward the horizon, it looks as though there's an edge out there. People assumed if you sailed too far, you might come to that edge and fall off. People assumed that since the weather got hotter as you go south, if you continued going south, sooner or later the sea water would boil! Again, they'd observed that the further south you went the hotter it got. The assumed it would keep on getting that way. They didn't know that on the other side of the equator, if you keep going south, it gets colder again. They thought there were giant whirlpools out at sea that would suck a ship down.

The consequences of such ignorance were first of all, they would make mistakes. The Portuguese, for example, thought that Africa was a lot smaller than it really is; that's why they thought the trip around Africa to India was practical and shorter than the old trade routes. Columbus thought the earth was a lot smaller than it really is; that's why he thought he could get to the Far East in less time than it took the Portuguese to get around Africa and back. Also, he mistakenly thought you could sail straight across the Atlantic and you'd get to China. The explorers would find places, and then they'd lose them again because they couldn't figure out how to get back there. Second, the ignorance made it hard for the explorers to find crews that would go along or stick with the trip once they were on it. The crew members were scared, either too scared to go at all or at the first sign of trouble, they wanted to go home. Many times the only way a crew could be found was to go to the local jail and offer the inmates freedom if they went on a trip of exploration and survived.

Prince Henry of Portugal took the lead in doing something about the ignorance and misconceptions. He also took the lead in getting the materials - mainly better ships, better instruments and better maps - people would need to go on a trip of exploration. He built a school for sailors on the southwest tip of Portugal near Cape St. Vincent. He went to live there himself, and he invited scholars who knew astronomy, mathematics and geography. He also invited experienced sailors, pilots, instrument makers and shipbuilders. The scholars would think of new ideas and the shipbuilders and sailors would try them out. Sailors told the scholars what worked and what didn't. Gradually a body of information was built up, and the ships, instruments and maps got better.

Better Ships

Europeans had never sailed a lot. Most of the sailing they'd done had been in the Mediterranean Sea, where the water was calm and they could always see the shore. The ships they used reflected that. The ships were made of wood. They had no distinguishable front and back end. They had one mast which carried a square sail. Such a ship only went anywhere when the wind blew, and it could not tack, or sail against the wind. The ship had no keel to make it sit steady in the water. This meant that if too hard a wind blew, the ship would turn over in the water. The ships also had no rudder, which meant they could not be steered. You simply could not take such a ship into the Atlantic Ocean. It wouldn't last.

The ships were improved. They were given a definite front and back end by making it narrower in the front and wider in the back. They gave the ship a keel and a rudder, so it would hold steady in the water and so it could be steered. They learned about the triangular sail on a movable mast from the Muslims and tried it out on their ships. They were pleased to learn that it made it possible for the ship to tack, and that it was easier to steer the ship using a movable mast. The ships were made heavier and larger, so that they could carry firearms (which would be a necessity when sailing to places they'd never been before). The ship they produced that they would use the most was called a caravel. It had both square and triangular sails, longer, lower lines, a keel, and a rudder. It was built of wood, but it was substantial and could sail the ocean.

Better Instruments

Now that they had ships which were capable of sailing on the ocean, they needed to tackle the next problem: how would they know where they were, out on a huge ocean with no landmarks anywhere around? They knew of the compass, but a compass will only tell you one thing: where magnetic north is. You would have to figure the other directions from that. If you were lost on the ocean and wanted someone to come help, a compass wouldn't do much good. You needed something that would mark your position more precisely than that. You needed to be able to tell a person your north-south position and your east-west position. The north-south position they will learn how to handle. The east-west position problem won't get solved right away. We will see what they did about that; it wasn't much but it was better than nothing. They solved the north-south position problem by the use of an instrument called an astrolabe. An astrolabe measures the angle between the horizon and a fixed heavenly object such as the North Star or the Sun. This angle's measurement gives you your degrees of latitude north or south of the equator. To say where they were east or west of where they had started their trip, they used something called dead reckoning. This is how it worked: First, you had to know the length of your ship, and you had to know what time you left home, so you knew how many hours you'd been at sea. You had to know, from your compass, whether you were going east or west. Then, you took one of the logs you had brought on board ship for this purpose, and you dropped the log off the front end of the ship. Then you timed how fast you sailed past the log. Say it took 15 minutes. If you knew your ship was 10 feet long, you could figure out mathematically that you were sailing forty feet an hour. If you've been gone eight hours, you've traveled 320 feet in whichever direction you were going. This was, of course, not very accurate, but it was the best they had. Errors of 500 miles or so were not at all uncommon, which explains why the sailors could find a place and then lose it again! With compass and astrolabe, and the use of dead reckoning, Europeans now had instruments they could use to sail the ocean.

Better maps

Once they had a way to tell their north-south position and their east-west position and worked out a route, they needed to be able to put that on a chart or map of some kind so that their work would be useful to others. The best maps were called portolan charts or portolans. As sailors began using astrolabes, they began marking latitude lines on the portolans. Each time a sailor made a trip of exploration, he made maps and charts of the places he'd been, and gradually a body of knowledge was built up.

Portugal explores the African route

With better ships, instruments and maps, the Portuguese were ready to begin exploring the African route. They did this a little bit at a time. The reasons the Portuguese did this instead of going the entire way the first time were that they did not know where they were going exactly; the crew members would get frightened and might mutiny on the captain; the ship wouldn't last that long; it would have to be repaired; and at first, they were afraid to stop in Africa to do this; and the ship could not carry enough provisions -food, for example - for longer than about three months. The Portuguese sent a captain and a crew out and the captain would sail as far as he dared, and then he'd go home. While at sea, he would keep a journal in which he wrote about what he saw; a logbook with mathematical calculations in it of where the ship had been; and he drew pictures and charts. When he got home, he handed all this to the next captain, who took what he'd been given and tried to go further. He also wrote in a journal, kept a logbook and drew maps and charts, went home, handed it to the next person and so on.

Little by little Prince Henry's ships crept down the coast of Africa. In 1415, the Canary Islands were discovered; in 1420, Madeira was colonized; in 1432 Cape Bojador (Cape Juby) was rounded; in 1448, Prince Henry had sent 50 caravels, and still no sign of a tip of Africa had been found; in 1460, Prince Henry died, and the trips continued; in 1475, Sierra Leone was found; in 1482, the mouth of the Congo River was found. In 1487, Bartholomew Diaz rounded the tip of Africa, the Cape of Good Hope. After 72 years of exploring, Portugal had gotten half way to the Far East. This was a little disappointing; obviously, this wasn't going to be a short route as they had hoped. However, they kept exploring, and finally in 1498, Vasco da Gama sailed all the way to India and back. It had taken him 21 months to complete the round trip.

Once it was proven that you could sail to the Indies and get back by going around Africa, the Portuguese began to use this route regularly. They established a colony on the Cape of Good Hope to use as a place for sailors to rest, eat well (they always got malnutrition on these early trips form lack of proper diet, especially fruits and vegetables), and to repair the ship. They proceeded to build the first sea-based empire in modern times. Portuguese merchants moved to the Far East and set up trading posts and eventually trading colonies. They tried, in the new places, to recreate the society they had at home, which was, of course, a feudal one, with one change: the merchant put himself in the place of the noble. Since, he, the merchant did not know a whole lot about the spice plants and so on that he was looking for, he soon enlisted the help of natives in finding what he needed. The native was not necessarily paid for doing this for the merchant, and as time went on, he became little better than a slave. The merchants got by with this because there was no one there from their own society to stop them. By doing this, these Portuguese merchants set the pattern for how Europeans would colonize the places they found and how they would use the natives of those places.

Portugal began to grow rich and wealthy, and the other nations grew jealous. Portugal tried to keep what she knew secret but that wasn't very successful. There was one thing about the Portuguese route that could be improved, however; that was its length. Anyone finding a shorter water route to the Far East would be front page news, and they'd get the trade and the money. So far, though, no one had come up with a way. In the next section, we will learn about someone who had a radical idea for his time that he thought would make the trip to the Far East shorter.

Columbus sails west to reach east

Christopher Columbus was born in Genoa, Italy. His father was a weaver, and he expected his son to follow his footsteps into weaving. Christopher had other ideas. He wanted to go to sea. He worked for awhile as a mapmaker and then hired himself out on merchant ships where he gained experience and the kind of knowledge that comes from experience. This experience led Columbus to think that the earth was a sphere; he often had seen ships coming up over the horizon; if the earth were flat, those ships would have fallen off somewhere, he thought to himself. Therefore, it had to be a sphere. If it was a sphere, then you ought to be able to start anywhere on it, sail around it, and come back to the same place. If that were so, then you could sail to India by going west instead of east (the direction you go to get to India if you're using the Africa route) and the route ought to be shorter since you weren't sailing around anything. He was dying to try out his new idea, but Columbus wasn't a rich man. If he was to go on such a trip, he'd need money, ships and a crew. The only way to get this, he thought, was to get some monarch to give it to him in return for that monarch's nation's being the first to find something it could claim.

Columbus went the rounds. The Italians said no; they weren't interested. They were making enough money with their own spice trade. The Portuguese experts agreed that the earth was a sphere but said that Columbus was wrong about the size of the earth. It was much bigger, they said, and it wouldn't be practical to sail west to reach east. It would cost too much. Therefore, the king of Portugal said no. Columbus must have been frustrated and discouraged by now, but he went to Spain. He described his idea to King Ferdinand and Queen Isabella. They were interested, but right then, they had a war on. They were fighting the Muslims that had taken over Spain so long ago. They wanted to finish the war first. They told him to come back when the war was over.

Columbus did not forget. When the war was over, in 1492, Columbus did go back. Columbus also alluded to the fact with Queen Isabella that he might find the lost Christians on Atlantis, a continent that was supposedly out there in the Atlantic somewhere. He did this because he knew her to be very religious. Isabella agreed to pay for the trip. If Columbus did find anything it would be good for Spain, and Spain was in a jubilant mood, having just finished throwing the Muslims out. She wanted to celebrate. What better way than announcing that she had found the shortest route to the Indies? Columbus got 3 small ships, and a crew, and a title, "Admiral of the Ocean Sea". He also got some goodies in the Far East if he found anything.

On August 2, 1492, Columbus and the crew left Palos, Spain. Before they left, a priest came and gave all of them the Last Rites of the church; they never expected to see any of them again. Columbus expected this voyage to be about 2500 miles, and he thought it would take about three months. For three months, the little ships and Columbus sailed through the Atlantic Ocean. The trip was not easy. At times the Atlantic can be quite a stormy ocean. At other times, when they were in what they called the 'horse latitudes', there would be no wind at all. The men would see 'mirages', created by the reflection of the sun on the ocean, that they thought were land. They were always disappointed. By the beginning of October, the crews of the three ships, who had come from the local jails (they were offered their freedom if they came home alive) were becoming ever more restless. They were scared now - scared that Columbus did not know what he was doing, and that they would never get home again. They threatened Columbus with mutiny. He made a deal with them - if they did not find land in three days, they'd turn back to Spain. Columbus was a lucky man, because in three days they did find land! All of the men got off the ship as fast as they could. Devout Catholics that they were, they first prayed, and then they gave the place a religious name - San Salvador, which means "Savior".

They then sailed around the area a little bit. They marveled at the new and strange things they saw. They captured some of the birds and took some of the plants; they even captured a few of the native inhabitants, whom they called 'Indians'. They also found a little gold. Columbus was sure he had reached India or something close to it. He had traveled approximately the right distance and the trip had taken the amount of time he thought that it should. The fact that they did not see the things they should have seen didn't bother him. Columbus didn't really know too much about the Far East, so he didn't know exactly what to look for. Maybe it was on another piece of land close by, anyway. Columbus and his men collected the things they were taking home and they went back to Spain. He stopped by the court and gave Queen Isabella the plants, birds, the little bit of gold and the 'Indians' he had brought with him. She was impressed for awhile but then she wanted to know where the other goodies were - the spices and jewels of the Orient, and he had to say he hadn't found them.

Columbus came to the 'Indies' three more times. He sailed all around the Caribbean area and as far north as around Florida, but he never found what he was looking for. There were never any spices, jewels and other riches to take to Isabella. She got tired of him and refused to send him any more times. He died in 1506 in poverty, a bitter man.

The Indies or something else?

Once it had been proven that you could sail across the ocean and get back to Europe without falling off the edge of the earth anywhere, many people went out, explored and looked for the Indies. Little by little, they began to think something was wrong. No one had as yet found the mainland. Where were all the riches if this was India? They should be seeing great and wealthy cities. They weren't. Maybe this wasn't the East after all.

In 1499, a banker turned geographer and sailor, Amerigo Vespucci, went on an exploring voyage. He kept a diary of his trip and when he went home he printed it. He did not think that what Columbus had found was India. The world was bigger than Columbus thought. This was something different. In his diary, he referred to the new land as 'the New World', which was a name that stuck and North and South America have been referred to as the New World ever since. Europe then became the 'Old World'! When the time came to name the new land, it was named after Amerigo Vespucci. This was because of his diary. People read it and mistakenly thought he had found this new land, so poor Columbus was cheated out of the honor that should have been his - to have the new land named for him.

Magellan sails around the world

Europeans still did not know whether you could, in fact, sail from Europe to the Far East across the Atlantic. They did not know if there was a way through the new continents.

Ferdinand Magellan, a Portuguese explorer, set out to find the answers to these questions. Spain paid for the trip, and Magellan set sail in September, 1519, with five very old ships and a crew. They sailed west across the ocean, came to South America, and turned south. They sailed down the coast of South America. After a year, they finally got to Cape Horn, the southern tip of South America. Magellan found the strait that still bears his name. The ships found it hard to navigate this strait because of weather conditions, but they finally got through. Then they saw something no European had seen before, the Pacific Ocean! Magellan and his men headed north, up the west coast of South America. For 98 days they sailed and their food ran out. They were reduced to eating rats and chewing on pieces of leather. Some of the sailors died of malnutrition. In 1521, they sighted land. They had come to the Philippine Islands. There Magellan was killed by the natives. His men went on without him. They eventually did, of course, reach the Indies and China. In 1522, they finally returned home.

What had Magellan's trip found out? First, the earth was definitely a sphere. They had sailed around it. Second, there was no easy way that they had found through the Americas. You had to go to Cape Horn, and that was way out of the way to going to India and China. Third, you would eventually get to the East, so, yes, you could sail west and get to the east. Fourth, he had found the great Pacific Ocean and had navigated it successfully. Fifth, the world was much, much bigger than they had thought.

The effect of the 'great discoveries'

The fifteenth century was an important one in Europe. At the beginning of it, the world for Europeans had been very small. There had been the Muslim lands to the east and south of them and the Atlantic to the north and west. They had been pretty much limited by those boundaries. When they went on the Crusades, they had begun to learn about a larger world. In the 1400's, they continued this and learned lots, lots more. Let's review what they have learned in this exciting 15th century. They had learned how to make ships, instruments, and maps worthy of a trip across a huge ocean. They have learned to use those instruments and maps. They had found two new continents and an ocean. They had learned for sure that the earth is a sphere and that you can navigate around it, even though the trip is very long. Now that they know all this, new routes for trade will be set up. New products and ideas will come into Europe. And, before long, Europeans will move to the new lands they have found and set up colonies. They will take their culture and attitudes with them, and that will change the history of especially the New World forever. Doing all these things successfully gave Europeans a tremendous feeling of confidence in themselves and their ability to solve their own problems. This is going to have great consequences for Europe.

CHAPTER QUESTIONS AND OUTLINE

The Great Discoveries (title of outline)

 

 

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