Exploring New Worlds. Merchants from Portugal, France, and Spain would travel by sea to get to the...
-
Upload
jewel-russell -
Category
Documents
-
view
213 -
download
0
Transcript of Exploring New Worlds. Merchants from Portugal, France, and Spain would travel by sea to get to the...
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.
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!
Unfortunately, he didn’t have enough money to test this theory.
Dang, I need money to buy ships.
And sailors.
And food.
And water.
Columbus went to the kings of France and England, and they wouldn’t help him either.
King Charles VIII of France King 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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