Before the 15th century, Venice, Genoa and the Ottoman Empire walled Western Europe off from the spice, silk and porcelain of Asia. Breaking out took new hardware. The magnetic compass came from Han China through Arab traders, and shipbuilders fused the Mediterranean’s flush carvel hulls and lateen sails with the northern square sail and a sternpost rudder hung on iron pintles and gudgeons, producing the caravel. Under Henry the Navigator, Portugal crept down the African coast until Bartolomeu Dias rounded the Cape in 1488 and Vasco da Gama reached India. Spain gambled on Columbus, and the 1494 Treaty of Tordesillas split the unmapped world along a papal line.
Navigation became atmospheric science through the volta do mar, sailing far off course to ride circular wind gyres home, which Andrés de Urdaneta later applied to the Pacific. Exploration gave way to conquest: Cortés toppled the Aztecs with tens of thousands of Indigenous allies and the interpreter La Malinche, and Pizarro captured Atahualpa at Cajamarca in 1532, took a room of gold and silver as ransom and executed him anyway. Locked out of the south, Francis Drake raided Spanish shipping and claimed New Albion, Henry Hudson was set adrift by mutineers in Hudson Bay, and the Cossack Yermak crossed the Urals for the Stroganovs. The Columbian Exchange followed, moving crops and animals and diseases that killed up to 90 percent of some Indigenous populations.
- Balboa sighted the Pacific from Panama in 1513, and Elcano completed Magellan’s circumnavigation by 1522.
- On Isla del Gallo, Pizarro drew a line in the sand and only 13 starving men crossed it to stay.
- Yermak drowned during a night attack while swimming a river in heavy chain mail given to him by the Tsar.
- Portuguese traders brought drought-resistant cassava from South America to Africa, supporting large population growth.
- Leif Erikson’s Newfoundland settlement came 500 years before Columbus but never grew into a lasting colony.
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