Exploring New Worlds

Merchants from Portugal, France, and Spain would travel by sea to get to the West African ports, but they couldn’t seem to find an easy way to get to India.

On land, merchants had to fight off bandits, wandering war-bands, and face hostile Ottoman Turks, who guarded the roads to the east.

They tried to sail around Africa, but no one succeeded.

An Italian sailor named Christopher Columbus was determined to find a sea route to India, but his idea was to sail west. The earth is round!

He thought that by sailing west, he would bump into India’s eastern coast.

Unfortunately, he didn’t have enough money to test this theory. Dang, I need money to buy ships. And sailors. And food. And water.

He went to the king of Portugal, but the king’s scientists laughed at Columbus’s maps.

Columbus went to the kings of France and England, and they wouldn’t help him either. King Charles VIII of FranceKing Henry VII of England

Finally, Columbus went to Ferdinand and Isabella of Spain and told him about his plan. Ferdinand didn’t care, but Isabella was fascinated.

She wanted to help fund his expedition, but all her money was being used in the war to conquer Granada, so Columbus had to wait seven years.

Isabella provided him with three ships: the Niña, the Pinta, and the Santa Maria.

She also supplied Columbus with sailors, food, and water, as well as cloth, gold, and other goods he could use to trade for spices.

As Christopher Columbus left the Spanish port in 1492, he noticed other ships around him filled with weeping men, women, and children. They were the Jews driven out by Ferdinand and Isabella.

At first, the westward trip went well, but as the days passed by, the sailors began to mumble.

Sometimes the seaweed became so thick, the ships could only inch forward.

The sailors were getting sick with scurvy, which is a lack of vitamin C.

The sailors were afraid they would die before the voyage was completed. They were also afraid the world was flat, and they might fall off the edge, so they began to plot mutiny.

Columbus agreed to turn around and head back to Spain if they didn’t spot land in three days. Please, just three more days!

Finally on the second day, several islands were spotted. Columbus thought the islands were the ones off the coast of India.

When Columbus landed, he claimed the islands for the country of Spain.

He found people lived on the islands that were brown- skinned and had black hair, and he called these people Indians.

The language these people spoke sounded nothing like the Indian language, and they had no spices, gold, or riches. Instead, they had cotton thread, parrots, sweet potatoes, and green peppers.

It turns out that Columbus didn’t land in India. He landed in the islands off the coast of Florida.

After Columbus explored the islands, he went back to Spain to report his findings. He brought things from the islands, and he even brought some Indians with him.

Ferdinand and Isabella agreed to pay for several more voyages to this new land, so Columbus traveled back across the ocean to work on his map of discovery. He was still convinced that he found a new route to India.

Others began to realize that Columbus had found an entirely new continent.

Five years after Columbus landed in the Americas, a Portuguese explorer named Vasco da Gama managed to sail around Africa and reach India. It took him an entire year!

The first explorer to realize the shoreline of the Americas was a new land was an Italian merchant named Amerigo Vespucci. I’m pretty sure that’s a new land…

Vespucci loved the idea of exploring, and when Ferdinand and Isabella agreed to pay for more westward expeditions, he was anxious to apply!

Over the next ten years, Amerigo Vespucci made several journeys to the Americas. He sailed all the way down to the tip of South America, and up the coast of North America. The more he saw, the more he was sure Columbus was wrong.

Although Columbus discovered America, Amerigo Vespucci was the first to realize that he found a new continent, and when a famous geographer made the first maps of the new lands, he decided to name it “America,” after Amerigo Vespucci. No fair!! ‘merica.

Another Portuguese explorer, Ferdinand Magellan, was the first to actually try to carry out Columbus’s original plan: get to India by sailing west. I’m going to do it!

He thought it would be much quicker to sail west to the Americas, turn south and go down around South America. He was going to try and find a river that cut through to the other side.

At the lowest point of South America, he finally found an opening. It took more than a month, and rowboats had to pull the ship through the treacherous water, but they finally made it to the other side. It was so smooth and still, he named the ocean the Pacific, which means “calm.”

Magellan didn’t want to give up on the idea that India might be close by, but after three months in the Pacific, the sailors were starving and ate sawdust to survive. At last, they spotted land, but it turned out to be islands off the coast of China.

Magellan wasn’t daunted. He sailed on and found another group of islands, but these were the Philippines.

While he was gathering food and water for yet another try at India, Magellan agreed to help a local warrior chief fight a battle with another tribe. Magellan was killed in the battle. Magellan

Magellan’s lieutenant, Elcano, continued the voyage and went home. When they departed Portugal in 1519, they had five ships and 280 men. When they returned in 1522, they only had one ship left with thirty-five men.