Europeans Cross the Atlantic

The first Europeans to discover lands in the western Atlantic were Norsemen. In the early ninth century, Scandinavians colonized Ireland, and in the 870s they settled Iceland. A little more than a century later, seafarers led by Erik the Red reached Greenland. Sailing still farther west, Erik’s son Leif led a party that discovered an area that they called Vinland, near the Gulf of St. Lawrence. The Norse established a small settlement there around 1000 C.E., and people from Greenland continued to visit Vinland for centuries. By 1450, however, the Greenland settlements had disappeared.

Nearly a half century after Norse settlers abandoned Greenland, a Genoese navigator named Christopher Columbus visited the Spanish court of Ferdinand and Isabella and proposed an Enterprise of the Indies. He planned to sail west across the Atlantic to Cipangu (Japan) and Cathay (China). Because Italian city-states controlled the Mediterranean and Portugal dominated the routes around Africa, Spain sought a third path to the rich Eastern trade. Columbus claimed he could find it.

Columbus’s 1492 proposal was timely. Having just expelled the last Muslims from Granada and imposed Christian orthodoxy on a now-unified nation, the Spanish monarchs sought to expand their empire. Queen Isabella, ignoring the advice of two royal committees that had rejected Columbus’s plan, decided to fund his initial venture. With her support, the Genoese captain headed off in three small ships with ninety men. They stopped briefly at the Canary Islands and then headed due west on September 6, 1492.

Columbus had calculated the distance to Cipangu based on Ptolemy’s division of the world into 360 degrees of north-south lines of longitude. But in making his calculations, Columbus made a number of errors that led him to believe that it was possible to sail from Spain to Asia in about a month. The miscalculations nearly led to mutiny when Columbus’s crew had not sighted land after more than four weeks at sea. Disaster was averted, however, when on October 12 a lookout spotted a small island. Columbus named the island San Salvador and made contact with local residents, whom he named Indians in the belief that he had found the East Indies. These “Indians” offered the newcomers food, drinks, and gifts. Columbus was impressed with their warm welcome and viewed their gold jewelry as a sign of greater riches in the region.

Although the native inhabitants and Columbus’s men did not speak a common language, they communicated sufficiently to explore San Salvador as well as a larger island nearby, present-day Cuba. The crew then sailed on to an island they named Hispaniola. Nothing they saw resembled contemporary descriptions of China or the East Indies, but Columbus was convinced he had reached his destination. Leaving a small number of men behind, he sailed for Spain with samples of gold jewelry and tales of more wonders to come.

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Read part of Columbus’s account of his first encounter with native people in Hispaniola in Document 1.2.

Columbus and his crew were welcomed as heroes when they returned to Spain in March 1493. Their discovery of islands seemingly unclaimed by any known power led the pope to confer Spanish sovereignty over all lands already claimed or to be claimed 100 leagues west of the Cape Verde Islands. A protest by Portugal soon led to a treaty that moved the line 270 leagues farther west, resulting ultimately in Portugal’s control of Brazil and Spain’s control of the rest of what would become known as South America.