Documents from Reading the American Past

Chapter 2

Introduction to the Documents

During the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, European explorers, traders, and soldiers repeatedly encountered non-Europeans, first in Africa and, beginning in 1492, in the New World. Portuguese mariners venturing down the west coast of Africa inaugurated a thriving trade in African goods, including, most fatefully, slaves. The arrival of Christopher Columbus in the Caribbean launched an unremitting series of encounters between Europeans and Native Americans in the Western Hemisphere. These early encounters around the rim of the Atlantic world informed each group about the other and established patterns of communication, miscommunication, and violence that lasted long into the future. The documents that follow illustrate the varied forms of these encounters between strangers and reveal their many-layered novelty and complexity.