Age of Discovery: Columbus, Da Gama, Magellan

Tools for the open sea

A small ship with three-cornered sails rocks on the waves, and a needle swings to the north. The caravel, developed by Portuguese sailors in the 1400s, was light, fast and able to sail close to the wind. The magnetic compass, which reached Europe from China probably by way of Muslim sailors, showed direction. The astrolabe and the quadrant measured the height of the Sun or the Pole Star, which gives latitude. Pilots also learned from Arab, Indian and African seafarers, whose knowledge of winds and coasts was vital. We know these tools from surviving instruments, logbooks and maps.

Landfall

A flag is planted on a white beach, and people watch from the trees. On 12 October 1492 Christopher Columbus, sailing for Spain with three ships, the Santa Maria, the Pinta and the Nina, reached an island in the Bahamas that its Lucayan people called Guanahani. He believed he had reached the edge of Asia, which is why Europeans called the islands the Indies. Norse sailors had reached North America about 500 years earlier, as the archaeology at L’Anse aux Meadows shows. For the peoples of the Americas, who had lived there for many thousands of years, 1492 was not a discovery but the start of a violent invasion.

Round Africa to India

A line is drawn down the African coast, around its tip and up to a port in India. In July 1497 Vasco da Gama left Lisbon with four ships, rounded the Cape of Good Hope and, helped by a pilot hired in East Africa, crossed the Indian Ocean. He anchored at Calicut in May 1498. Portugal now had a sea route to the spice markets that avoided the overland middlemen. But the Indian Ocean was no empty sea. It had busy ports and trading peoples, and the Portuguese often used force to take control of the trade. The voyage is known from sailors’ accounts and Portuguese archives.

The first circle

On a turning globe a thin line creeps west, then south, then across a vast ocean. In 1519 Ferdinand Magellan left Spain with five ships and about 270 men, hoping to reach the Spice Islands by sailing west. They found the strait at the tip of South America that now carries his name, then crossed the Pacific, which took months and cost many lives to hunger and illness. Magellan was killed in the Philippines in April 1521. Juan Sebastian Elcano brought the one remaining ship, the Victoria, home in September 1522 with 18 men. The Italian Antonio Pigafetta, a survivor, wrote the best account.

The Columbian exchange

Arrows now cross the Atlantic in both directions, loaded with plants and animals. Historians call this the Columbian exchange. From the Americas came potatoes, maize, tomatoes and cocoa, which changed farming and cooking in Europe, Africa and Asia. From the Old World came horses, cattle, wheat and sugar cane. Potatoes helped feed growing populations in Europe, and the horse changed life for many peoples of the Plains. But it was also an exchange of illnesses, and it was not fair. People in the Americas had never met smallpox or measles, and these diseases, together with war, forced labour and enslavement, killed a very large share of the Indigenous population.

Counting the cost

The map darkens where villages stand empty. Estimates of how many Indigenous people died vary widely, and scholars still argue about the numbers, but in many regions most people died within a century. We learn this from Spanish tax records, church registers, the archaeology of abandoned towns and even ice cores, where some researchers think they see farmland returning to forest. The same colonisation brought the Atlantic slave trade, which forced millions of Africans across the ocean. To study the age of exploration is to keep two stories in view: remarkable seamanship and great suffering.

The Age of Discovery