The Age of Exploration

Why did Europeans set out to sea?

In the 1400s, people in Europe wanted goods from Asia, such as pepper, cinnamon, silk and porcelain. These goods traveled long distances over land and sea, passing through many traders, so they were very expensive by the time they reached Europe. European rulers and merchants hoped that if their ships could sail directly to Asia, they could get those goods more cheaply and grow rich.

Explorers had other reasons too. Some wanted gold and land. Some wanted to spread Christianity. Many wanted fame. Kingdoms such as Portugal, Spain, France, England and the Netherlands competed to claim new lands and trade routes before their rivals.

New tools for long voyages

Sailing far from land was dangerous. New ship designs, like the Portuguese caravel, could sail well against the wind. Sailors used the compass, which came to Europe from China, to tell direction. They used the astrolabe and quadrant to measure the height of the sun or North Star, which helped them estimate how far north or south they were. Better maps, often built on knowledge shared by Arab, Jewish and other mapmakers, helped too.

Portugal led early voyages down the coast of Africa. Bartolomeu Dias sailed around the southern tip of Africa in 1488, and Vasco da Gama reached India in 1498.

People were already here

When you read about explorers, remember one important fact: the Americas were not empty. Millions of Indigenous people lived across North and South America in hundreds of nations, with farms, cities, trade routes and governments.

Europeans were not even the first to cross the Atlantic. Around the year 1000, Norse sailors from Greenland, including Leif Erikson, reached North America. Archaeologists have found the remains of their buildings at L’Anse aux Meadows in Newfoundland, Canada. The Norse did not stay long.

Columbus and the Taíno

Christopher Columbus was an Italian sailor who believed he could reach Asia by sailing west. Spain’s rulers, Queen Isabella and King Ferdinand, paid for his voyage. In October 1492, his three ships reached an island in the Bahamas. The people who lived there were Lucayan Taíno. Columbus thought he had reached the “Indies” near Asia, which is why Europeans began calling Indigenous people “Indians.”

Columbus made four voyages. He and the Spanish colonists who followed forced the Taíno to search for gold and to work for them, punished those who resisted, and took people as captives. Disease, violence and forced labor caused the Taíno population of the Caribbean to fall dramatically within a few decades. Taíno descendants and Taíno culture survive today, especially in Puerto Rico, Cuba and the Dominican Republic.

Columbus’s voyages mattered because they began lasting contact between the hemispheres. That contact changed the world, but it was a disaster for many Indigenous peoples.

Other explorers in North America

Explorer	Sailed for	What happened
John Cabot	England	Reached the coast of North America in 1497, probably Newfoundland. England later used his voyage to claim land.
Juan Ponce de León	Spain	Led an expedition to Florida in 1513. Calusa and other nations resisted Spanish settlement.
Jacques Cartier	France	Sailed up the St. Lawrence River in the 1530s. He met the St. Lawrence Iroquoians, an Iroquoian-speaking people, and took people back to France, including the sons of the leader Donnacona.
Hernando de Soto	Spain	Led a large, violent expedition through the Southeast from 1539 to 1543, searching for gold and spreading disease.
Francisco Vázquez de Coronado	Spain	Traveled through the Southwest and onto the Plains from 1540 to 1542, searching for cities of gold. He attacked Zuni and other Pueblo communities and found no gold.
Samuel de Champlain	France	Mapped much of the Northeast and founded Quebec in 1608. He formed alliances with the Wendat (Huron) and Algonquin nations.
Henry Hudson	Netherlands and England	Explored the Hudson River in 1609, where the Lenape and Mohican lived, and later Hudson Bay.

Indigenous guides, navigators and traders

Explorers rarely found their way alone. Indigenous people guided expeditions, drew maps, shared knowledge of rivers and trails, translated and traded food and furs. Some did this willingly to build alliances or gain trade goods. Others were forced or kidnapped. Indigenous nations also made their own choices about explorers: they welcomed some, traded carefully with others, and drove some away. Indigenous people’s knowledge was often the reason an expedition survived.

The Columbian Exchange

After 1492, plants, animals, people and germs began crossing the Atlantic in both directions. Historians call this the Columbian Exchange.

• From the Americas to the rest of the world: corn, potatoes, tomatoes, peppers, beans, squash, peanuts, cacao (chocolate), vanilla and turkeys.
• From Europe, Africa and Asia to the Americas: horses, cattle, pigs, sheep, wheat, rice, sugarcane, coffee, bananas and honeybees.
• Diseases: smallpox, measles and influenza spread to the Americas and killed huge numbers of Indigenous people.
• People: European colonists arrived, and millions of Africans were later brought to the Americas by force and enslaved.

Today, foods like Italian tomato sauce or Irish potatoes exist because of this exchange.

Thinking about the word “discovery”

Many older books say explorers “discovered” places. But you cannot discover a place where people already live. A more accurate way to describe these voyages is to say that explorers reached, arrived in, mapped or claimed places that were new to Europeans.

When you read about an explorer, ask:

• Who already lived in this place?
• Whose point of view is this book or website telling?
• What happened to the people who lived there after the explorer arrived?

Asking these questions does not mean explorers’ voyages were unimportant. It means you are telling the full story.

How to use this page for homework

• For an explorer report, use the table as a starting point, then add the Indigenous nations the expedition met and what happened to them.
• Use the Columbian Exchange list to make a chart or poster.
• Replace “discovered” with a more accurate verb in your writing and explain why.
• Check dates against one of the sources below, since some voyage dates are given differently in different books.