Explorers of the New World
For geography it was a time of adventure and excitement. Reports kept arriving from missionaries, Spanish conquerors, sailors and travelers from all corners of the world, and they widened Europeans' knowledge of the globe considerably. The Spaniards who in these years conquered Mexico, California, Central America and Peru were at first adventurers tired of monotony and poverty at home, ready to face the perils of distant, foreign lands. In the hardships of that venturesome life and in their bold deeds, they cast off the restraints and customs of the civilized world, made the rule of force and the gun their open practice, and under the pretext of spreading civilization stopped at no plunder, treachery or killing, although there is no doubt that the defeated were then more civilized than the conquerors. Consider the Maya civilization, found in Yucatan by Hernandez de Cordoba (1517); the Aztec empire, which in the time of Montezuma fell to Hernando Cortes (1521); and the advanced, socialist-style society of the Incas, destroyed in the conquest of Peru under Francisco Pizarro (1526-1532). We can no longer know in what higher form these peoples might have continued the development of their civilization had they possessed the arms to defend themselves.
Geographic discoveries went on expanding. Sebastian Cabot, under the Spanish flag, explored Argentina, Uruguay and Paraguay. De Soto crossed Florida and "the states adjoining the Gulf of Mexico" and entered Oklahoma. Pedro de Alvarado is credited by the source with discovering Texas (an attribution that looks garbled), and Francisco de Coronado crossed Arizona and Oklahoma and pressed on to Kansas. The mines of Potosi in Bolivia began to send their silver to Spain (1545). With every passing year the map of the New World was marked with gold, silver and blood. In this great invasion the English and French lagged behind, since the parts of North America left to them by the Spaniards and Portuguese were poor in metals and covered by dense forests without passage. John Rut sailed along the coast of Newfoundland and Maine. Giovanni da Verrazzano was sent to America by Francis I to seek a northwest passage to Asia; he landed in North Carolina, entered the harbor of New York (where a statue in Battery Park keeps his memory), rounded Cape Cod and went on to Maine. Jacques Cartier, under the French flag, sailed up the St. Lawrence as far as Montreal and made France's claim to Canada official.
Magellan's Voyage
The most effective event of this second generation of explorers beyond the oceans was the voyage around the earth. Ferdinand Magellan (Fernao de Magalhaes) was a Portuguese who had taken an active part in many Portuguese explorations and conquests; but when he fell out of favor with his government, he left his homeland and entered Spanish service. In 1518 he persuaded Charles I (the same as Charles V) to pay for an expedition to find a southwestern route to Asia. The young king had not yet gained any wealth, and the five ships assigned to the voyage were so worn and weathered that one captain called them "unfit for the sea." The largest carried 120 tons and the smallest 75. Experienced sailors would not sign on, and crews had to be made up from idlers of the waterfront.
On 20 September 1519 Magellan's fleet passed down the Guadalquivir from Sanlucar and entered the Atlantic. The expedition at least had the benefit of moving from the northern Atlantic summer into the southern one; but in March 1520 winter closed in on them, the ships anchored, and the crews had to remain five long, tiring months in Patagonia. The giant natives, who averaged about 1.9 meters in height, befriended the relatively short Spaniards; even so, hardships were so many that three of the five crews mutinied, and Magellan had to fight his own men to make them persevere. One ship fled the fray and returned to Spain; another struck a rock and was wrecked. In August 1520 the voyage resumed, with every bay and inlet anxiously examined lest the sea passage between the two continents be one of them and slip away. On 28 November of that year the search succeeded; the diminished fleet entered the strait now called by Magellan's name. The passage from sea to sea was 530 kilometers, covered in thirty-eight days and nights.
Then began the wearisome crossing of the Pacific, which seemed endless. In ninety-eight days only two small islands were seen. Provisions ran dangerously low and scurvy broke out among the sailors. On 6 March 1521 they reached Guam, but found the natives so hostile that they went on. On 6 April they were beside the Philippines, and the next day landed on the island of Cebu. There, to obtain enough provisions, Magellan promised to aid the local ruler in war against his neighbors. He joined the campaign against the island of Mactan and was killed in battle on 27 April 1521. Although Magellan did not complete the circuit of the earth, he was the first to fulfill Columbus's dream, opening a way to Asia by sailing directly westward.
The Return of the Victoria
Death had reduced the crews so far that the survivors could man only two ships. One turned back across the Pacific and probably headed for the American coast in search of gold. Only the Victoria remained. Juan Sebastian del Cano took command of that little ship of eighty-five tons, went on sailing past the Spice Islands and across the Indian Ocean, rounded the Cape of Good Hope and turned north along Africa's western coast. In search of provisions the crew anchored at one of the Cape Verde islands, but were attacked by the Portuguese and half of them captured. Twenty-two men escaped, and on 8 September 1522 the Victoria returned to Seville with only eighteen survivors (plus some Malay natives) of the two hundred eighty who had left Spain on that long voyage. The ship's log recorded the date as 7 September, but Cardinal Gasparo Contarini explained that the difference was the result of sailing around the earth westward. It was one of the boldest deeds in history and one of the most fruitful steps in the development of geography.
The Geographers' Harvest
Now it was time for geographers to complete their work. Giovanni Battista Ramusio, the great geographer and Hakluyt of Italy, eased the task for scholars by gathering all the reports of explorers and sailors over thirty years. He translated and prepared them for the press; they were published in three volumes thirteen years after his death (1550-1559; the dates do not agree with the thirteen-year figure). Compare a globe of 1520 (kept in the German National Museum at Nuremberg), which shows the West Indies but no trace of the American continent and, with a single leap across a narrow ocean, joins Asia, with three world maps by Diogo Ribeiro showing the coasts of Europe, Africa and southern Asia with full accuracy, and the eastern coast of America from Newfoundland to the Strait of Magellan and the western coast from Peru to Mexico correctly; one sees how remarkable the progress of geography was in ten years. The "Ramusio map" of America (Venice, 1534), a beautiful piece in the New York Public Library, was probably drawn from Ribeiro's. The same library holds a crude and mistaken map by Gerhard Mercator (1538) on which the two parts of America first bear the names North and South. Petrus Apianus (1524) advanced the science another step by reducing geographical distances to small, exact measurements.
Consequences of the Discoveries
The results of these discoveries were reflected in every phase of European life. The voyages made between 1420 and 1560 nearly quadrupled the surface of the known world. The vegetation of each region, with its jewels and minerals, foods and medicines, was discovered, and enriched botany, zoology, geology, pharmacopoeia and the daily menu. People began to wonder how pairs of every kind of animal on earth had fitted into Noah's ark. Literature changed in kind: chivalric tales gave way to stories of sea voyages and adventures in remote lands, and the quest for gold replaced the search for the Holy Grail. The greatest commercial change in history (before the airplane) opened the Atlantic and the world's other oceans to European trade; soon the Mediterranean became a commercial, and in time a cultural, backwater. In other words, the cradle of the Renaissance passed from Italy to the Atlantic coastal countries.
Europe, with better ships and cannon and more daring and greedier men, subdued or colonized the newly found lands one after another. Native peoples everywhere were set to hard and unceasing labor, against their nature, to produce more goods for Europe; organized slavery took root. The smallest continent became the richest of all, and the age of the Europeanization of the globe began, which in our own time has sharply reversed. The Western mind was stirred with great force by the distance, breadth and variety of the new lands. Part of Montaigne's skepticism was revived by the variety of opinions and customs among faraway peoples. Habits and morals took on a geographic relativity, uprooting settled sayings and fixed judgments. Christianity itself now had to be weighed in a new setting, as the religion of a small continent amid a world of rival faiths. As humanism had discovered the world before Christ, and as Copernicus had revealed the astronomical insignificance of the earth, so exploration and the trade that followed it opened vast lands that were beyond Christianity's reach and indifferent to it. The authority of Aristotle and other Greek thinkers wavered, for it turned out they had known only a small part of the earth's breadth. The Renaissance's passionate idolatry of ancient Greece cooled, and humanity, swollen with pride in its new discoveries, was ready to ignore its astronomical demotion against the widening of its knowledge and trade. Modern science and philosophy rose and took on the heavy historical task of "understanding the world anew."