Chapter 2.2 Crossing the Atlantic
Learning Objectives
By the end of this section, you will be able to:
- Explain how technological innovations in the fifteenth century made transatlantic journeys possible
- Discuss the motives for Spanish and Portuguese exploration in the Americas
- Analyze the impact of the Treaty of Tordesillas on the Atlantic World
- Describe the physical and cultural ramifications of the Columbian Exchange
During the European Middle Ages, the Middle East and North Africa entered a golden age of learning. As Europeans increasingly made connections with peoples across the Mediterranean and in Central and East Asia, ideas from this golden age trickled back to them that influenced sailors, explorers, and shipbuilders. Then, in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, innovators in navigation and exploration pushed Europeans to expand their trade networks across the globe and connect with new places and peoples. The most notable voyages of this period, known as the Age of Exploration, were the transatlantic voyages of Genoese explorer Christopher Columbus in the 1490s, underwritten by King Ferdinand and Queen Isabella of Spain.
The Rise of Maritime Nations
Christopher Columbus’s 1492 voyage did not represent the first contact between European explorers and Indigenous peoples on the North American continent. Through archaeological and historical research, historians can now date that contact to nearly five hundred years before Columbus reached his first stop in the Caribbean.
In the early 1000s, Leif Erikson, a Viking explorer living in Greenland, heard from fellow explorer Bjarni Herjólfsson that another land lay only a few hundred miles to the west. In a journey during which he was blown off course, Erikson found a land to the west that he called Vinland, for the grapes that grew near its shores. He stayed there only through the winter, never making direct contact with the Indigenous peoples and returning to Greenland in the spring. His brother Thorvald was the first to make contact, which ended in violent conflict and the deaths of several Native Americans and Thorvald himself. In a third exploration, men and women of Erikson’s family encountered the Indigenous people of Vinland again but maintained peace, creating a small but steady relationship with them based on trade (Figure 2.6).
The Viking explorers referred to these Indigenous peoples as Skraelings. Scholars are not sure which Indigenous group they belonged to, but twentieth-century archaeological digs in Nova Scotia have verified much of the information found in the Icelandic sagas of Vinland. In the 1960s, explorers Helge and Anne Ingstad discovered in Newfoundland, Canada, the buried ruins of a Viking camp from around the time of Erikson’s explorations, in a place called L’Anse aux Meadows. This find definitively proved at last that the Norse had traveled to the Americas before Columbus. Over the years, it has been suggested that other people besides the Vikings also dis