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The discovery of the American continent
had nothing to do with intellectual curiosity or even
unfathomable human courage. It was almost entirely about one
and only one thing: money. And it was a mistake.
The Portuguese all throughout the sixteenth
century ruthlessly and aggressively built a monopoly in the
spice trade from the east by dominating the trade routes
around the continent of Africa. Spain, on the other hand,
began thinking of ways to get around this monopoly by
developing a western route to the eastern countries.
The problem was that this route was infinitely longer than
the trip around Africa and it lay across an ocean so vast
that it staggered the imagination and chilled the heart.
It was Christopher Columbus
(1451-1506), a Genoese navigator, who convinced the Spanish
to underwrite a western expedition to the eastern countries.
Contrary to what you might have heard, educated Europeans
knew that the world was round and had known this for
millenia. Then as now, people who thought the world was flat
were regarded as crackpots. Europeans also had a good idea
as to the circumference of the earth; this circumference, in
fact, had been accurately calculated in the second century
BC. The general view, then, was that a western voyage to
India would be a disaster, for the ship would have to travel
thousands of miles over open ocean. The ship's crew would
starve or die of dehydration long before the journey was
complete.
But Columbus believed that the world was
considerably smaller than was imagined in the general view
and he managed to convince Isabella, the Queen of Spain,
that a western expedition would be but a short trip. He was,
of course, completely mistaken and had not the Americas
gotten in his way, he and his men would have starved or died
of dehydration just as everyone knew they would. But
fortunately for Columbus, America did get in the way.
The Europeans immediately believed that a
new continent had been "discovered" and they called it the
"New World." As for Columbus, he never acknowledged or
believed that the Americas were anything other than
Asia&emdash;he was pretty much the only European who
subscribed to this view. He went to his grave absolutely
convinced of this idea, and sent several of his crew to
their grave for daring to suggest otherwise.
The "New World" is a problematic term for
many reasons. First, it was not a "New World," for the
inhabitants of America had known of its existence for at
least twenty thousand years. No European had "discovered"
America since Native Americans had, in essence, discovered
the continent some twenty millenia earlier. Second, the
Americas were not isolated continents, even from Europe.
Icelanders had landed on and settled along the coastline of
Canada in the thirteenth century, and accounts of this
settlement spread throughout Iceland and the Scandinavian
countries. However, even before the Norse settlements in
Canada, there seems to have been some kind of sporadic trade
with the Americas dating all the way back to ancient Egypt.
There is disputed physical evidence of American products in
the Mediterranean and Europe including the discovery of
nicotine in Egyptian mummies (nicotine only comes from
tobacco, which grows only in the Americas). The
circumstances and nature of this trade has been lost to us;
suffice it to say that if this trade occurred, it was
extremely rare, circuitous, and certainly not an ongoing
phenomenon.
A few Europeans, then, had a slight
knowledge of the Americas. Columbus's discovery, however,
catapulted these continents to the forefront of the European
imagination. Soon after Columbus's discovery, every country
in Europe jumped on the Americas bandwagon. Henry VII of
England sent John Cabot to explore the coast of New England.
In 1500, Pedro Cabral, a Portuguese captain, discovered South
America. Florence sent Amerigo Vespucci, who travelled
several times to the new continent in order to catalog the
geography; because of this, the continents would eventually
bear his name.
It was the Spanish, however, that
dominated the settlement and exploitation of the Americas.
In 1494, Spain signed a treaty with Portugal, the Treaty
of Tordesillas, that divided the entire world between
the two countries (imagine that). All the trade routes east
of the Cape of Good Hope belonged to Portugal while all the
routes west across the Atlantic belonged to Spain.
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