The Age of Discovery

In 1402 the Norman lord Jean de Béthencourt and Gadifer de La Salle sailed from La Rochelle and landed on Lanzarote, beginning the European conquest of the Canary Islands. Holding the islands as a vassal of the King of Castile, Béthencourt subdued Lanzarote, Fuerteventura and El Hierro by the end of 1405 — the first step towards Castile's empire in the Atlantic.

Between 1405 and 1433 the eunuch admiral Zheng He led seven voyages of a great Ming fleet from Nanjing through Southeast Asia to India, the Persian Gulf, Arabia and East Africa. Carrying envoys, gifts and troops, the expeditions drew many states of the Indian Ocean into the Ming tributary order and made China the leading naval power of the early 15th century; after 1433 the court abandoned them, and China turned away from long-distance seafaring.

In 1415 envoys of Malindi, a Swahili port on the coast of present-day Kenya, brought a giraffe to the Yongle Emperor, and the court hailed it as a qilin, the auspicious beast of Chinese lore. The fifth voyage of the Ming treasure fleet (1417–1419), sent to take the envoys of eighteen countries home, brought Chinese ships to the east coast of Africa for the first time, probably as far south as Malindi.

A Portuguese fleet led by King John I captured Ceuta, a Marinid port on the African shore of the Strait of Gibraltar — Portugal’s first overseas conquest and the beginning of the Portuguese empire.

Captains of Henry the Navigator reached the uninhabited islands of Porto Santo and Madeira and began to settle them — the first Portuguese colony in the Atlantic, where a plantation economy based on sugar and slave labour was first tried out.

In November 1419 a large embassy left Herat for the court of the Yongle Emperor, with envoys of Shah Rukh and of his son Baysunghur. It reached Beijing in December 1420, just after the city had been declared the Ming capital, spent five months at court and returned in August 1422; the diary of Ghiyath al-Din Naqqash is one of the most important Muslim accounts of early Ming China.

Navigators in Portuguese service found the uninhabited islands of the Azores, about 1,400 km west of Portugal, and from about 1439 Portugal began to settle them, first Santa Maria and São Miguel. The dates are uncertain: a chart of 1439 records a discovery probably in 1427, while later tradition credits Gonçalo Velho Cabral and the years 1431–1432.

Sent by Prince Henry the Navigator, his squire Gil Eanes sailed past Cape Bojador on the coast of the Western Sahara, beyond which no European ship was known to have gone and returned. The passing of the feared cape opened the African coast to the Portuguese voyages that within little more than half a century reached the Gulf of Guinea and the Cape of Good Hope.

On voyages to the Guinea coast, navigators in Portuguese service found the uninhabited Cape Verde Islands off the westernmost point of Africa: the Genoese António de Noli the eastern islands by 1460, Diogo Afonso the western ones by 1462. In 1462 the settlement of Santiago began at Ribeira Grande, which soon became a base of the Atlantic slave trade.

The Tver merchant Afanasy Nikitin traveled through the Volga region, the Caucasus and Persia to India and lived for several years in the Bahmani Sultanate; his travel notes are the first Russian description of India.

On the Gold Coast of West Africa the Portuguese built the fortress of São Jorge da Mina to guard the royal monopoly of the gold trade; today the oldest surviving European building in sub-Saharan Africa, it later became a hub of the Atlantic slave trade.

On two voyages for King John II, Diogo Cão sailed far south of the equator, discovered the mouth of the Congo, made contact with the Kingdom of Kongo and followed the coasts of Angola and Namibia to Cape Cross, almost 22° south. At his landfalls he set up stone pillars, padrões, bearing the arms of Portugal — the first of the markers that staked out the way round Africa.

In May 1487 King John II sent Pêro da Covilhã, a squire who spoke Arabic, and Afonso de Paiva overland to the East to find out where the spices came from and to seek Prester John. Disguised as merchants, they reached Aden; Covilhã went on to the Malabar coast of India and to Sofala in East Africa, gathering first-hand knowledge of the Indian Ocean trade, and ended his journey at the court of the Ethiopian emperor, who never let him go.

The expedition of Bartolomeu Dias was the first European voyage to round the southern tip of Africa and enter the Indian Ocean, proving that India could be reached by sea.

Columbus’s three ships, fitted out by the Crown of Castile to find a western route to Asia, crossed the Atlantic and reached the Bahamas, Cuba and Hispaniola.

Columbus’s sailors sighted the island of Guanahani in the Bahamas; Columbus went ashore, named it San Salvador and claimed it for the Catholic Monarchs. This day is regarded as the date of the European discovery of America.

Columbus returned to the Caribbean with 17 ships and well over a thousand settlers, discovered the Lesser Antilles, Puerto Rico and Jamaica, and founded La Isabela on Hispaniola, the first Spanish town in the Americas.

Castile and Portugal divided the world outside Europe along a meridian 370 leagues west of the Cape Verde Islands: lands to the west went to Castile, those to the east to Portugal.

John Cabot, an Italian navigator in English service, crossed the North Atlantic in the small ship Matthew and reached Newfoundland or nearby Cape Breton Island — the first European to do so since the Norse, who had sailed to Vinland in the 11th century.

Vasco da Gama’s fleet rounded Africa and became the first to sail from Europe to India, opening a direct route for the Portuguese to the spice markets.

Vasco da Gama’s ships anchored off Calicut on the Malabar Coast: for the first time Europeans had reached India by sea around Africa.

On his third voyage Columbus sailed farther south, discovered Trinidad and in August 1498 sent his men ashore on the Paria Peninsula — the first recorded landing of Europeans on the mainland of South America. The voyage ended with his arrest on Hispaniola: Columbus was sent back to Spain in chains.

Four Castilian caravels under Vicente Yáñez Pinzón, who had commanded the Niña on Columbus’s first voyage, reached the coast of Brazil in January 1500, three months before Cabral, and found the mouth of the Amazon — the first European voyage to do so.

Bound for India, the fleet of Pedro Álvares Cabral swung far to the west and sighted the coast of South America; the new land was claimed for Portugal.

Sailing west for King Manuel I in search of a northern route to Asia, Gaspar Corte-Real reached Greenland and then Newfoundland or Labrador; he and his brother Miguel, who went to look for him, were lost at sea.

A Portuguese expedition with Amerigo Vespucci on board explored the coast of Brazil from about 5° to 25° south, naming Rio de Janeiro on the way. In his letter Mundus Novus Vespucci declared these lands a “new world” unknown to the ancients, and in 1507 the new continent was named America after him.

On his last voyage Columbus searched for a passage to Asia along the coast of Central America from Honduras to Panama; his worm-eaten ships had to be beached on Jamaica, where he and his men were marooned for a year.

At Saint-Dié the cartographer Martin Waldseemüller published a wall map of the world on which the New World was called “America” for the first time, in honor of the navigator Amerigo Vespucci.

Afonso de Albuquerque, governor of Portuguese India, finally wrested the city of Goa from the Bijapur Sultanate; it went on to become the centre of Portugal’s possessions in Asia.

Afonso de Albuquerque’s fleet captured Malacca, the main hub of the Asian spice trade and capital of the sultanate that controlled the strait between the Indian Ocean and the South China Sea.

Soon after taking Malacca, Afonso de Albuquerque sent António de Abreu and Francisco Serrão with Malay pilots to the Spice Islands. In 1512 they loaded nutmeg, mace and cloves in the Banda Islands, and Serrão, shipwrecked, was brought to Ternate in the northern Moluccas, one of the few islands where cloves grew, and stayed there as the sultan's adviser — the beginning of a Portuguese presence in the Moluccas that lasted most of the century.

Juan Ponce de León, the conqueror of Puerto Rico, sailed north-west through the Bahamas and on 2 April 1513 sighted a coast he took for an island; he named it La Florida, after the Easter season. On the same voyage the Spaniards became the first Europeans known to encounter the Gulf Stream.

At the naval base of Gallipoli the Ottoman sea captain Piri Reis completed a world map on gazelle-skin parchment, combining Ptolemaic, Arab and Portuguese charts with a now-lost map by Christopher Columbus. Its surviving western third, with the Atlantic coasts of Europe, Africa and South America, is one of the earliest maps of the New World.

In 1513 the Portuguese merchant Jorge Álvares sailed from Malacca in a trading junk to the estuary of the Pearl River below Canton and set up a stone pillar with the arms of Portugal on an island the Portuguese called Tamão — the first recorded Portuguese voyage to China, two years after the capture of Malacca.

Vasco Núñez de Balboa’s party crossed the Isthmus of Panama, and Europeans saw the Pacific Ocean for the first time; Balboa named it the South Sea.

About a hundred Spaniards from Cuba, piloted by Antón de Alaminos, reached the Yucatán Peninsula. The voyage is usually regarded as the discovery of Yucatán: the first Spanish expedition to explore and describe its coast and the stone towns of the Maya. At Champotón the Maya routed them, and their mortally wounded leader died soon after returning to Cuba.

King Manuel I's first embassy to China, headed by the apothecary Tomé Pires, came to Canton with the fleet of Fernão Pires de Andrade in 1517 and after long delays travelled to Nanjing and Beijing. The violence of Portuguese captains on the coast, the complaints of the deposed Sultan of Malacca and the death of the Zhengde Emperor in 1521 doomed the mission: the envoys were sent back to Canton and imprisoned, and the Portuguese were driven from the China coast.

Juan de Grijalva led four ships and about 240 men along the coasts of Yucatán and the Gulf of Mexico from Cozumel to the Pánuco River. The Spaniards were the first to meet envoys of Moctezuma II and brought back news of a rich empire inland, which led directly to the expedition of Hernán Cortés.

Hernán Cortés’s expedition, together with numerous Indigenous allies, destroyed the Aztec Empire within two and a half years.

The Spanish expedition of Ferdinand Magellan, completed by Juan Sebastián Elcano, found a strait from the Atlantic into the Pacific and was the first to sail around the globe.

Warriors led by the chieftain Lapulapu defeated a Spanish force on the island of Mactan; Ferdinand Magellan was killed in the battle.

After a siege of almost three months, Cortés’s Spaniards and their Indigenous allies took Tenochtitlan and captured Cuauhtémoc, the last tlatoani; the Aztec Empire fell.

Sailing for Francis I of France in search of a passage to Asia, the Florentine Giovanni da Verrazzano explored the Atlantic coast of North America from the Carolinas to Newfoundland. He was the first European known to enter New York Bay and Narragansett Bay.

Pánfilo de Narváez’s attempt to conquer Florida ended in disaster: of the 300 men who marched inland only four survived — Álvar Núñez Cabeza de Vaca, Andrés Dorantes, Alonso del Castillo Maldonado and the enslaved Moroccan Estevanico. After years among the peoples of the Texas coast, they walked across the south of North America and in 1536 reached Mexico City.

Francisco Pizarro’s small force — 180 men at the outset — landed on the coast of the Inca Empire, weakened by civil war and epidemics, captured the Sapa Inca Atahualpa at Cajamarca and a year later took the capital, Cusco. The fall of Tawantinsuyu opened the Andes and their silver to Spain.

Francisco Pizarro’s small force made a surprise attack on the retinue of the Inca ruler Atahualpa in the square of Cajamarca, killed thousands of unarmed people and took Atahualpa prisoner.

The Breton navigator Jacques Cartier became the first European to sail up the Saint Lawrence River, reaching the Iroquoian villages of Stadacona and Hochelaga, the future Quebec City and Montreal.

Diego de Almagro, Pizarro’s partner, led the first Spanish expedition into Chile, crossing the high Andes from what is now north-western Argentina. Finding no gold, he returned across the Atacama Desert, seized Cusco and started a civil war among the conquerors of Peru.

The force of the conquistador Hernando de Soto spent four years searching for gold in what is now the southeastern United States and was the first European party to cross the Mississippi; de Soto died on the march, and the survivors made their way to Mexico.

Francisco Vázquez de Coronado led about 400 Europeans, most of them Spaniards, and 1,300 to 2,000 Indian allies from New Spain in search of the fabled Seven Cities of Cíbola. In two years they crossed what is now Arizona, New Mexico, Texas, Oklahoma and Kansas, saw the Grand Canyon and the bison herds of the Great Plains, and found no gold.

Sent downstream to find food for Gonzalo Pizarro’s starving expedition, Francisco de Orellana and about fifty men could not return against the current and sailed on down the whole length of the Amazon to the Atlantic — the first Europeans known to do so.

Juan Rodríguez Cabrillo led three ships from New Spain up the Pacific coast in search of a route to China and was the first European to explore the coast of present-day California, from San Diego Bay to the Monterey area. He died during the voyage, and his pilot Bartolomé Ferrer took the ships farther north.

A Chinese junk carrying Portuguese traders, driven off course by a storm, put in at the island of Tanegashima: the Japanese met Europeans for the first time and were introduced to European firearms.

In May 1553 three English ships under Sir Hugh Willoughby left London to seek a north-east passage to China. The crews of Willoughby’s two ships perished while wintering on the Kola coast, but Richard Chancellor reached the mouth of the Northern Dvina, travelled to Moscow and was received by Ivan IV. His voyage opened the White Sea route by which England traded with Russia through the Muscovy Company.

On 1 June 1565 the San Pedro left Cebu with the Augustinian friar and veteran navigator Andrés de Urdaneta as chief adviser, sailed north-east to about the 38th parallel, caught the westerlies and on 8 October reached Acapulco. Urdaneta's carefully recorded route back across the Pacific — the tornaviaje — solved the problem that had defeated Spanish ships since Magellan and made the Manila galleon trade possible.

Sent from Peru by his uncle, Governor Lope García de Castro, the 25-year-old Álvaro de Mendaña sailed from Callao with two ships and about 150 men in search of lands believed to lie in the western ocean. On 7 February 1568 they sighted Santa Isabel — the first Europeans known to reach the Solomon Islands — and spent six months exploring the archipelago before returning by the northern route across the Pacific, without the gold they had hoped for.

In August 1569 Gerardus Mercator published at Duisburg a great world map in eighteen sheets, "adapted for the use of navigators", on a new projection in which the spacing of the parallels grows towards the poles so that a course of constant compass bearing appears as a straight line. The Mercator projection became the standard for sea charts and is still used for nautical charts today.

Seeking a north-west passage to Cathay, Martin Frobisher reached the south-east coast of Baffin Island in 1576 and sailed into the bay that now bears his name, which he took for a strait leading to Asia. A black stone he brought home was declared to contain gold, and two larger expeditions in 1577 and 1578 — the second of fifteen ships — mined well over a thousand tons of ore there that proved worthless.

Francis Drake sailed from Plymouth with five ships, passed the Strait of Magellan, plundered Spanish ports and treasure ships along the Pacific coast of South America, claimed "New Albion" in California for Queen Elizabeth and returned across the Pacific and Indian Oceans in the Golden Hind on 26 September 1580. It was the second circumnavigation completed in a single expedition and the first by an English crew, and its plunder made Drake rich and famous.

A band of Cossacks under the ataman Yermak, supplied by the Stroganov merchants, crossed the Urals by rivers and portages, defeated Khan Kuchum and on 26 October 1582 (Old Style) occupied his capital, Isker (Qashliq). Yermak was killed in 1585, but his campaign broke the Khanate of Sibir and began the Russian conquest of Siberia.

In three voyages from Dartmouth, backed by the London merchant William Sanderson, Sir Francis Walsingham and other investors, John Davis searched for a north-west passage, met the Inuit of Greenland, explored the coast of Baffin Island and in 1587 sailed up the west coast of Greenland to 72° 12′ N. He charted the strait between Greenland and America that now bears his name and reported open water to the north.

Four ships fitted out by Amsterdam merchants sailed round the Cape of Good Hope under Cornelis de Houtman and in June 1596 reached Banten, the great pepper port of western Java. The voyage was costly in lives and marred by quarrels, but it showed that Dutch ships could reach the spice markets without going through Lisbon or past Portuguese Malacca, and it opened the way for the Dutch East India Company.

Mendaña's second expedition — four ships with some 378 settlers, among them his wife Isabel Barreto, and Pedro Fernandes de Queirós as chief pilot — set out from Peru to colonise the Solomon Islands. It discovered the Marquesas, where the Spaniards killed about 200 islanders, and founded a short-lived colony on Nendö in the Santa Cruz Islands, where Mendaña died of fever; Queirós brought the last ship to Manila.

The third Dutch attempt to find a north-east passage to China. In June 1596 the expedition discovered Bear Island and Spitsbergen; Willem Barentsz’s ship then rounded the northern tip of Novaya Zemlya and was trapped by ice at Ice Haven, where the crew wintered in a hut built of driftwood. In June 1597 the survivors set out in two open boats; Barentsz died on the way, and twelve men reached Kola and returned to Amsterdam on 1 November 1597.

The Jesuit lay brother Bento de Góis, disguised as an Armenian merchant, travelled with caravans from Mughal India across the Hindu Kush and the Pamirs to Yarkand and on to the Great Wall, proving that Marco Polo’s Cathay was China; he died at the Chinese frontier town of Suzhou.

Sent by the Dutch East India Company to explore New Guinea, the small ship Duyfken under Willem Janszoon sailed from Banten, crossed the Arafura Sea and in late February 1606 landed on the west coast of Cape York Peninsula — the first recorded European landfall in Australia. Janszoon took the coast for part of New Guinea and turned back, short of provisions and after deadly clashes with the inhabitants.

Searching for the great southern continent, Pedro Fernandes de Queirós sailed from Callao with three ships and in May 1606 reached Espiritu Santo in present-day Vanuatu, which he named La Austrialia del Espíritu Santo and where he planned a city, New Jerusalem. When his own ship turned back to Mexico, his second-in-command Luís Vaz de Torres sailed west along the south coast of New Guinea and through the strait that now bears his name, reaching Manila in May 1607.

On 3 July 1608 Samuel de Champlain, sent by the fur-trade monopolist Pierre Dugua de Mons, landed at the point where the St. Lawrence narrows — Kébec in the Algonquian language — and built a fortified trading post, the Habitation. Only eight of its 28 men survived the first winter, but Quebec became the first lasting French settlement on the St. Lawrence and the heart of New France.

Hired by the Dutch East India Company to find a north-east passage to Asia, the English navigator Henry Hudson turned back from the ice and a restive crew beyond the North Cape and crossed instead to North America in the Halve Maen. In September 1609 he entered New York Bay and sailed up the river now named after him to near present-day Albany, opening the way for Dutch fur traders and the colony of New Netherland.

On his last voyage, financed by English investors, Henry Hudson took the Discovery through Hudson Strait and on 2 August 1610 entered the vast inland sea now called Hudson Bay, hoping it would lead to Asia. After a hard winter in James Bay the crew mutinied in June 1611 and set Hudson, his son and seven others adrift in an open boat; they were never seen again, and Robert Bylot brought the Discovery home with eight survivors.

On 28 October 1613 the galleon San Juan Bautista, built in the domain of Date Masamune, sailed from Tsukinoura with an embassy led by the samurai Hasekura Tsunenaga and the Franciscan Luis Sotelo. Crossing the Pacific to Acapulco and New Spain and then the Atlantic, Hasekura was received by Philip III of Spain and, in November 1615, by Pope Paul V, but the trade with New Spain that Masamune sought was refused, and when he returned in 1620 Christianity was banned in Japan.

Financed by Isaac Le Maire's Australian Company, which sought a way to the Indies outside the Dutch East India Company's monopoly, the Eendracht under the skipper Willem Schouten, with Jacob Le Maire in command of the expedition, found a new strait east of Tierra del Fuego and on 29 January 1616 rounded the southernmost cape of America, naming it Kaap Hoorn after the town of Hoorn. The voyage showed that Tierra del Fuego was not part of a southern continent and opened a new route into the Pacific; in Java, however, the Company confiscated the ship.

In the small Discovery, with Robert Bylot as master and William Baffin as pilot, an English expedition sailed up Davis Strait past John Davis's farthest north and round the great bay beyond, reaching about 77° 45′ N — a record in those waters for 236 years. Baffin charted its coasts and the entrances of Smith, Jones and Lancaster Sounds, but finding them blocked by ice, he reported that there was no hope of a passage that way.

Sailing from the Cape of Good Hope to the Indies by the new route across the southern Indian Ocean, the Dutch East India Company's ship Eendracht under Dirk Hartog unexpectedly came upon the coast of Western Australia at Shark Bay on 25 October 1616. Before leaving on 27 October Hartog nailed an inscribed pewter plate to a post on the island now named after him — the oldest surviving artefact of European exploration in Australia — and then charted the coast northward.

On 25 September 1632 (Old Style) some thirty Cossacks from Yeniseysk under the sotnik Pyotr Beketov built the Lena ostrog on the middle Lena. As Yakutsk, from 1638 the seat of a voivodeship, it became the base from which Russian explorers set out for the Sea of Okhotsk, the Amur, the Kolyma, Chukotka and Kamchatka.

In 1639 a party of some thirty Cossacks from Tomsk and Krasnoyarsk under Ivan Moskvitin crossed from the Aldan basin over the Dzhugdzhur range and in August came down the Ulya to the Sea of Okhotsk — the first Russians to reach the Pacific. They wintered at the mouth of the Ulya, explored the coast from the Okhota to the Amur estuary, heard of the Amur and returned to Yakutsk in July 1641.

Two small ships of the Dutch East India Company under Abel Tasman sailed from Batavia by way of Mauritius far into the southern Indian Ocean and became the first Europeans known to reach Tasmania, on 24 November 1642, and New Zealand, on 13 December, returning by Tonga and Fiji. By sailing round Australia at a distance, the voyage showed that it was not joined to any greater southern continent.

In the summer of 1643 the Yakutsk official Vassili Poyarkov set out with 133 men for the Zeya and the Shilka, lands said to be rich in grain and silver ore. After a winter of famine on the Zeya, his men sailed down the Zeya and the Amur to its mouth in 1644, wintered among the Nivkhs and in June 1646 returned to Yakutsk by the Sea of Okhotsk and Moskvitin’s route — the first Russian expedition down the Amur.

On 20 June 1648 (Old Style) the Cossack Semyon Dezhnev and the trader Fedot Popov sailed from the Kolyma with seven koches. In September they rounded the ‘Great Stony Nose’ — today Cape Dezhnev — and, by the usual reading of Dezhnev’s reports, passed from the Arctic into the Pacific through the strait between Asia and America eighty years before Vitus Bering; the voyage remained almost unknown until G. F. Müller found the reports in Yakutsk in 1736.

The trader Yerofey Khabarov led bands of volunteers and Cossacks from Yakutsk to the Amur in 1649–1650 and again in 1650–1653, seized the Daur town of Albazin and sailed far down the river, forcing tribute from the Daurs and Duchers. On 24 March 1652 (Old Style) his men beat off an attack by a Qing force at Achansk — the start of the Russo-Qing struggle for the Amur that ended with the Treaty of Nerchinsk.

Sent by the authorities of New France to find where the great western river flowed, the fur trader Louis Jolliet and the Jesuit Jacques Marquette, with five companions in two canoes, crossed from Green Bay by the Fox and Wisconsin rivers to the Mississippi and paddled down it to the villages of the Quapaw near the mouth of the Arkansas. Convinced that the river emptied into the Gulf of Mexico, not the Pacific, they turned back on 17 July 1673 and returned by the Illinois River and Lake Michigan.

In February 1682 René-Robert Cavelier de La Salle, with 23 Frenchmen and 18 Native companions, entered the Mississippi from the Illinois River and canoed down it past the towns of the Arkansas and the Taensa to the Gulf of Mexico. On 9 April 1682, near the mouth, he raised a cross and a column with the royal arms and claimed the whole Mississippi basin for France, naming it Louisiana in honour of Louis XIV.

Vladimir Atlasov, the prikazchik of Anadyrsk, led some 120 Cossacks and Yukaghirs on reindeer into Kamchatka, crossed to the Kamchatka River, where an ostrog was built, and went south almost to the tip of the peninsula, within sight of the Kuril Islands. His reports in Yakutsk and Moscow gave the first description of Kamchatka, which his campaign opened to Russian rule.