Age of Exploration Essay ⋆ Environment Essay Examples ⋆ EssayEmpire

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Exploration entailed discovery of unknown lands by a certain culture and recognition of environments favorable for settlement or valuable resources for trade and, ultimately, a market for elaborated products of the metropolis. It normally implied contact with distinct and distant cultures and sometimes with organized political structures so that, depending on the attitude of both parts, the contact could derive into conflict, cooperation, or assimilation. Exploration also meant confronting harsh environments, storms, famine, thirst, diseases and scurvy in the seas, cold and dry regions, and tropical forests.

Exploration has been a key component in the configuration of empires and states, preceding or accompanying political expansion. The motivations were a combination of commercial, political, religious, and scientific interests. Discovery and exploration commonly brought parallel progress in the fields of the natural sciences-biology, geology, geography, and anthropology, and determinately influenced innovation and improvement of transportation and navigation systems. Newly collected information on the territories helped to improve geographical representation on maps and portolans, which in turn favored initiating new explorations and territory reclamation. Portolans were specially decisive for safe navigation; they represented directions, marine routes, principal physical ocean features, and ports. Exploration meant great expenditures, which required private and state investments for supporting presumably long and uncertain journeys, to remunerate manpower and disburse for transportation and navigation resources.

The age of exploration designates a phase in the process of European territorial expansion from the 15th to 18th centuries. During this time, Europe had a leading role in geographical exploration, which determinately contributed to connect almost the whole world and shape the geography of lands and seas.

The seven expeditions of Cheng Ho, from 1405 to 1433, supported by the expansionist strategy of the Chinese emperor Cheng-tsu, represented an isolated initiative but with a patent exploration mission. Within a tradition of contact and exchange with the Indian Ocean, Cheng Ho led a venture noted for its magnitude as for the lack of continuity.

Portugal and Spain took initiative within Europe. First, both became interested in the surrounding seas and discovered the nearer Atlantic islands of the Macaronesia (Madeira, Canaries and Azores) by mid-14th century. This area, the Atlantic Mediterranean, eventually became the base for future explorations in Africa and America.

The Portuguese developed a planned program-conceived by Prince Henry of Portugal (1398- 1460)-which included a school of navigators and cartographers in Sagres, the manufacturing of navigation instruments, a ship-building industry in Faro, and adopted the caravel as a ship for oceanic sailing. They pretended to gain access to the sources of gold and slaves in the western coast of Africa and to the Indian species through an eastern route. Bartolomeu Dias rounded the Cape of Good Hope in 1497-98 benefited by the subequatorial Atlantic wind system. It was Vasco da Gama, in an expedition in 1498-99, who reached India and established an alternative route to that ruled by Arabs through the Red Sea and gave the Portuguese an advantage over the Spaniards. The early diffusion of Islam contributed to the commercial integration of the western Indian Ocean up to Indonesia by the 13th century. When the Portuguese navigator Francisco Serrao reached the Moluccas by 1512, a Portuguese monopoly on spices started and changed the situation. Despite this progress, the interior of Africa remained rather unknown to the rest of the world until the 18th century.

Christopher Columbus

The most striking discovery in this age was the Spanish expedition of Christopher Columbus in 1492followed by other three voyages in 13 years-searching for an alternative western route to the Indies. The encounter with America started the colonization of a whole continent by Europeans. Columbus was supported by Isabel, the Queen of Castile, and he used the Canary Islands as a platform to ride on the northeast trades to cross west and the westerlies to return. Columbus was followed by a rapid process of exploration, colonization, and settlement. Hernan Cortes conquered the Aztec empire and explored the New Spain (Mexico) from 1518 to 1536, and established the base of the Spanish Empire in America. South America was explored through the Pacific and Atlantic Oceans. By mid-16th century most of the subcontinent was roughly explored. Francisco Pizarro (1524-33) occupied the Northern Andes; the Southern Andes were explored by Pedro de Valdivia, who reached Chile in 1541; and Diego de Rojas went through the Chaco and Tucuman in 1543. The search for El Dorado, an imaginary land of fabulous wealth, stimulated the exploration of the inland South America. Francisco de Orellana explored the Amazon between 1541-46. From the Atlantic, Pedro Alvares Cabral initiated in 1500 the Portuguese exploration and colonization of Brazil.

The rivalry between Spain and Portugal led to periodical sovereignty conflicts in Brazil and the Moluccan Islands. The Treaty of Tordesillas (1494) was an attempt gained by the Pope Alexander VI to resolve the territorial disputes between Portugal and Spain, a world repartition, which divided the Earth into two hemispheres-western for Spain and Eastern for Portugal. The different interpretation by the two parties led to the continuation of the conflict until the Treaty of Zaragoza (1529).

A southerly Atlantic passage securing Spanish access to the Pacific Ocean in the continuous search for an alternative route to the Spice Islands was found by Fernao de Magalhaes (Ferdinand Magellan) in 1520. The expedition traveled through the Pacific Ocean with a northwest direction until getting to the Philipines. Magalhaes was killed in 1521, and his pilot Juan de Elcano continued west to reach Spain through the Indian Ocean and the Cape of Good Hope, completing the first circumnavigation of the earth.

The exploration of northern America was initiated by the Norse in the 10th and 11th centuries discovering Greenland, Labrador, and Newfoundland. European exploration from the north was pursued by Giovanni Cabotto (John Cabot) in 1497-98, with the backing of the port of Bristol, and although he did not succeed to settle he placed England in a position of interest in the Northwest passage to trade with Asia, a route to the Pacific. Until 1819-20 the passage through this labyrintic frozen area was not completed by Robert McClure from the west in 1850 and William Parry from the East. The exploration of the southern part of North America was carried out by Alvar Nunez Cabeza de Vaca between 1528-36, starting from Florida, through Texas and northern Mexico. The exploration of the interior of North America was accomplished by British and French explorers, these particularly along the Mississippi River and Labrador. After 1776, the United States began its own exploration. The Lewis and Clark expedition (1804-05) was the first U.S. overland expedition to the Pacific coast to gain knowledge of the American west.

The exploration of the Pacific Ocean started with Magalhaes finding the southern passage and continued with more Spanish expeditions, but none were able to return back through the Pacific Ocean until Andres de Urdaneta was able to navigate sufficiently north to find the North Pacific Current in 1565, which took him back to New Spain. Other European countries, namely England and France, became soon interested in the area, and completed the gaps in the discoveries made by the Spaniards. Sir Francis Drake was commissioned by the Queen of England to circumnavigate the earth, which he did between 1577-80, and Louis Antoine de Bougainville completed the first French circumnavigation from 1766-69. Exploration of the north Pacific mainly took place in the last half of the 18th century, based on a dispute for the control of the fur trade between Spanish, Russians and British. Two main geographical questions were resolved, the confirmation of the peninsula character of California and the Bering Strait. The identification of a separation by sea between America and Asia by Vitus Jonassen Bering (1728) and Aleksei Chirikov (1741) made the world aware of a lack of a passage in temperate latitudes.

Terra Australis Incognita was an obscure land for a long time, and drove many expeditions. Luis de Torres crossed in 1606 the strait that separates Australia from New Guinea; but still the question of the insularity remained until Abel Tasman revealed its nature in 1642-44, particularly the southern separation, preceded by the surveys of the Dutch East India Company. James Cook, with his three voyages from 1768 until his death in 1779, completed the whole picture of the Pacific Ocean, discovered the Hawaiian Islands, reached the Antarctica and mapped New Zealand, and epitomized the end of an era where the main discoveries where completed.

Bibliography:

Carlo Cipolla, Guns, Sails and Empires: Technological Innovation and European Expansion, 1400-1700 (New York, 1965);
Alfred W. Crosby, Ecological Imperialism: The Biological Expansion of Europe, 900-1900 (Cambridge University Press, 1986);
Felipe Fernandez-Armesto, The Times Atlas of World Exploration: 3,000 Years of Exploring, Explorers, and Mapmaking (Harper Collins, 1991);
Oxford Atlas of Exploration (Oxford University, 1997);
John H. Parry, The Age of Reconnaissance: Discovery, Exploration, and Settlement, 1450-1650 (University of California Press, 1982);
John H. Parry, The Spanish Seaborne Empire (University of California Press, 1990).