Exploration

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EXPLORATION

EXPLORATION. The early modern period, in European usage, defined the centuries in which Europeans explored the rest of the world. The motivations of individual explorers and their sponsors varied, but taken collectively, their efforts greatly increased European knowledge about the world's lands and peoples and brought vast continents and their inhabitants into contact with Europe, for both good and ill.

RENAISSANCE BEGINNINGS OF EXPLORATION

The so-called Age of Discovery began in the late fifteenth century, but Europeans had been probing the known areas and boundaries of their world for several centuries before that, motivated by tales of fabulous riches in distant kingdoms in Africa and Asia. Christian missionaries and leaders of the Catholic Church in Rome had also sent emissaries into Asia in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, seeking to fulfill the biblical mandate to spread the message of Christianity. Later they sought allies against the growing power of Muslim rulers in the Middle East. Developments in the mid-fifteenth century added momentum to those efforts. Western Europe showed unmistakable signs of economic growth by 1450, as population and the economy recovered from the century of crisis that began in the early fourteenth century and was worsened by waves of epidemic disease from 1348 on. In 1453 the Ottoman Turks conquered Constantinople, the heir to ancient Rome and capital of Orthodox Christianity, and brought it within the Muslim world. At about the same time, the invention of movable type (associated with Johannes Gutenberg) made it possible to reproduce written materials more cheaply and quickly. Reports on great events such as the fall of Constantinople, plus ancient treatises about geography and real or fanciful books about travel, inspired many Europeans to seek new venues for trade, spread the message of Christianity, and search for allies against Ottoman expansion.

Potential explorers sought out investors among wealthy merchant communities, and asked for sponsorship from the various national monarchies emerging in the climate of economic recovery that marked the late fifteenth century. Portuguese explorers such as Gil Eanes, Nuno Tristão, and Alvise da Cada Mosto had explored down the western coast of Africa in the 1430s, 1440s, and 1450s, respectively. After 1479 and a treaty with Castile that gave them exclusive rights to African exploration, Portuguese expeditions continued their search for trade opportunities and a sea route to India. The voyages of Diogo Cão, Bartolomeu Dias, and Vasco da Gama (1498) established that route by 1500. Castilian expeditions after 1479 explored westward in search of fabled islands, conquering the Canary Islands in the process. Isabella of Castile and her husband Ferdinand of Aragón also sponsored the four voyages of Christopher Columbus between 1492 and 1504 to search westward for Asia, as well as sponsoring voyages by other explorers in the same period.

By the Treaty of Tordesillas in 1494, Portugal and Castile agreed upon spheres of influence in lands discovered across the Ocean Sea (the Atlantic Ocean). Probing the treaty's limits, the Portuguese brothers Gaspar and Miguel Corte-Real explored a northern route across the Atlantic, staking a claim to rich fishing grounds near Labrador; Pedro Álvares Cabral touched the northeast coast of Brazil in 1500 on the way to India. The Italian father and son John and Sebastian Cabot and their associates aimed above all to find a northwest passage to Asia—an aim that would continue to inspire explorers thereafter. Henry VII of England (ruled 1485–1509) sponsored expeditions by the Cabots in the 1490s to explore toward the northwest, following up on presumed voyages from Bristol in the 1480s that left little or no trace in the records.

THE SIXTEENTH CENTURY

In terms of sea and overland routes established and coastlines and hinterlands explored and mapped, Europeans probably accomplished more in the early sixteenth century than in any other half-century in history. In 1513 the Spaniard Vasco Núñez de Balboa crossed the Isthmus of Panama and saw the great western ocean that would be named the Pacific. That same year his compatriot Juan Ponce de León cruised around the southern tip of Florida. In 1519 the Portuguese Ferdinand Magellan, having quarreled with the king of Portugal, sailed under Spanish auspices to find a westward route to Asia that would challenge the south and eastward route pioneered by the Portuguese. Sailing south beyond the known coastlines of America, Magellan explored the treacherous strait that would bear his name and crossed the vast Pacific Ocean to the islands of East Asia, where the Portuguese were already established. Anxious to spread the Christian Gospel and support local allies, Magellan was killed in a skirmish in the islands later known as the Philippines. The remnant of his expedition finally made it back to Spain in 1522 under the leadership of Juan Sebastián de Elcano (del Cano), sailing ever westward around Africa and accomplishing the first voyage around the world.

From the 1520s through the 1540s, Spaniards, Portuguese, and a few Germans, Frenchmen, and others probed the interior of the Americas, from the Rocky Mountains and Great Plains of North America to the great river and mountain systems of South America, mapping lands of stunning natural beauty and awesome physical challenges. In the process, Hernán Cortés (1485–1547) conquered the Aztec empire, Francisco Pizarro (c. 1475–1541) conquered the Inca empire, and numerous other explorers, conquerors, clerics, and officials working for the crown established the administrative structure of a Spanish empire in the Americas.

Francis I of France, the great rival of Spanish King and Holy Roman Emperor Charles V, supported several expeditions to North America. Among others, he sponsored the Italian Giovanni da Verrazano's discovery (1524) of New York Bay and Jacques Cartier's exploration (1534–1541) of the Gulf and river of St. Lawrence. Wherever Europeans went, they inadvertently brought with them the whole array of diseases that Europeans, Africans, and Asians had long endured, but which the native populations of the Americas had never experienced. The result was a demographic catastrophe for native populations. Many scholars argue that syphilis was transferred from the Americas to the Old World, with serious but not devastating effect.

The Portuguese established a basic administrative structure in Brazil, but their overseas efforts focused largely on Asia in the sixteenth century. Portuguese mariners learned how to navigate the trade routes of the Red Sea, the Indian Ocean, and the South China Sea—routes that were well known to local peoples but were new to Europeans. A Dutch expedition would find its way to East Asia in 1595, challenging the Portuguese thereafter. Although several expeditions sailed westward to Asia from America in the decades after Magellan, Spaniards did not discover the eastward route back across the Pacific until the voyage of Andrés de Urdaneta in 1565. Thereafter, they established a trading base at Manila, with regular voyages between New Spain (Mexico) and the Philippines, and discovered various other island groups in the South Pacific.

At the same time, English expeditions under Hugh Willoughby and Richard Chancellor (1553), and Arthur Pet and Charles Jackman (1580), plus a Dutch expedition under Willem Barents (1594–1597), tried to find a viable northeast route through the Arctic Ocean to Asia in the late sixteenth century. Russian fur-trading expeditions probed the area as well; one of these expeditions, under the Cossack Ermak Timofeevich (1581–1582), began the exploration of Siberia. The continuing search for a northern passage to Asia inspired English efforts under Martin Frobisher (1576–1578) and John Davis (1585–1587), who sailed eastward, and Francis Drake (1577–1580), who sailed westward. By the late sixteenth century, some European mapmakers showed a clear understanding of the world's major coastlines and oceans, but others replicated antiquated or misleading information. Similarly, Europeans still knew little about the vast interior spaces of Africa, Asia, North America, and parts of South America.

THE SEVENTEENTH CENTURY

By the early seventeenth century, Europeans competed for trade and colonies in the areas already discovered and explored the boundaries of a known world that was already much larger than it had been at the start of the early modern period. The Portuguese António Fernandes (1613) and the Spanish Jesuit Pedro Paez (1618) explored the interior of East Africa, while Dutch expeditions under Willem Schouten and Isaac Le Maire (1615–1616) discovered Cape Horn, and Frederik de Houtman (1619) traced the western coast of Australia. Expeditions under Franz Thyssen (1627) and Abel Janszoon Tasman (1640s) explored and charted other parts of Australia, New Zealand, Tasmania, and nearby island groups, but never found the legendary great southern continent (Terra Australis) that had graced many early maps.

In North America, Henry Hudson (1610) discovered the bay later named for him, thinking it was the great western ocean at the end of the Northwest Passage. Other expeditions proved him wrong, but the search at least increased geographical knowledge. The vast lands south of Hudson's Bay and north of New Spain remained largely unknown to Europeans in the early seventeenth century, apart from a few Spanish settlements in the southeast and a few English and Dutch settlements in the northeast. During the century, France sponsored a series of expeditions that challenged the English presence in the north and sought a route through the continent. Samuel de Champlain (1603–1615) explored the St. Lawrence River and the Great Lakes. Jean Nicolet (1634) and Pierre Esprit Radisson and Médard Chomart, Sieur des Groseillers (1658–1659), continued French exploration of the Great Lakes region. In the last few decades of the century, King Louis XIV sponsored a series of expeditions that explored from the Great Lakes to the network of river systems in central North America, aiming to establish a French empire between the English in the north and the Spanish in the south. The most famous expeditions were led by Réné-Robert Cavelier, Sieur de La Salle (1673–1687), Jacques Marquette and Louis Joliet (1673), and Louis Hennepin (1679–1680). Approaching from the Gulf of Mexico, Pierre le Moyne d'Iberville (1699) discovered the mouth of the Mississippi River. By the time Louis XIV died in 1715, France had a chain of settlements from Quebec to the Gulf of Mexico, though they remained small and vulnerable to hostile local peoples and international rivals alike.

In South America, expeditions from the 1630s to the 1660s traced the awesome extent of the Orinoco and Amazon River systems, as Spain and Portugal struggled to grasp the true extent of their colonial dominions. The discovery in the 1690s of gold and gem deposits in Brazil gave added impetus to exploration of the interior, within the structure of settled colonial regimes run by Spain and Portugal. Nonetheless, huge areas would remain unknown to Europeans until well beyond the early modern period.

European exploration in the eighteenth century, as in earlier times, was motivated in large part by political rivalries as well as by enduring goals such as oceanic passages northwest and northeast from Europe to Asia and the search for the elusive great southern continent. Vitus Bering, a Dane in the service of Tsar Peter I ("the Great") of Russia, made two major voyages (1728 and 1733–1741) in search of a northeast passage, in the process mapping much of coastal Siberia and discovering the strait later named for him between Asia and Alaska. In the Americas, the French founded New Orleans in 1718 and sponsored expeditions in the 1720s and 1730s to continue exploration in the middle of North America, even as they faced increasing pressure from England in the northeast. In the Seven Years' War (1756–1763) they lost most of the territory they claimed in North America to England. Nonetheless, French exploration continued, driven by the increased interest in scientific endeavors that was part of the Enlightenment.

Scientific voyages of exploration are traditionally associated with the eighteenth century, although the scientific urge to discover, classify, and understand lands, peoples, animals, and plants characterized European exploration throughout the early modern period. Eighteenth-century voyages concentrated on the Pacific Ocean, one of the last great spaces on Earth that remained largely unexplored. The Dutch explorer Jacob Roggeveen (1722) is credited with discovering Easter Island and some of the Samoan islands in the South Pacific, though he claimed to have sighted the great southern continent as well. Pacific voyages in the last half of the century reflected the rivalry between England and France, while at the same time searching for that elusive continent and other new lands and observing various natural phenomena. Samuel Wallis of England, while circumnavigating the globe from 1766 to 1768, discovered the Society Islands (Tahiti), while Philip Carteret on another ship in the expedition sailed farther south looking for Terra Australis. A French expedition under Louis Antoine de Bougainville also reached Tahiti in 1768. The greatest of the eighteenth-century voyages were those of the Englishman James Cook. In three major expeditions (1768–1771, 1772–1775, and 1776–1779), Cook probed and tested most of the legends and lore about the vast Pacific Ocean. With superb mapmaking skills, and aided on the second and third voyages by the most accurate timepiece yet developed and other modern navigational aids, Cook was able to chart the Pacific and its islands with unprecedented accuracy. He confirmed the existence of and mapped numerous islands, explored the northwest coast of North America, and proved to all but the most diehard believers in Terra Australis that whatever land existed in the far south was not habitable. His reports and maps became best-sellers among the literate public in Enlightenment Europe. On his third voyage, Cook's expedition became the first documented European arrival at the Hawaiian Islands. Although some of the officers who accompanied him assumed that some Spanish voyage or other must have preceded them, Cook dismissed those assumptions. He died in a skirmish with local islanders in 1779, on a return visit to the islands. A French expedition under Jean-François de Galaup, Count of la Pérouse (1785–1788) and a Spanish expedition under the Italian Alessandro Malaspina (1789–1795) carried out their own extensive Pacific voyages. Their agendas reflected European political rivalries as well as a search for scientific knowledge.

In North America as well, exploration by Daniel Boone into Kentucky (1769–1775), Alexander Mackenzie across the Rocky Mountains to the Pacific (1789–1793), and George Vancouver along the northwest coast (1792–1794) established an English presence in an area long claimed by Spain but hardly settled or defended by her. Belatedly, Spain dispatched expeditions along the coast from Mexico that established a chain of presidios (garrisons) and missions along the length of California, exploring and mapping as they went. By land José Ortega discovered San Francisco Bay in 1769, and by sea Juan Pérez and Bruno Heceta discovered Nootka Sound (1774–1775). The far northwest corner of North America thus became a focus of rivalry for England, Russia, Spain, and—after 1783—the fledgling United States, which sponsored Robert Gray's expedition along the northwest coast (1787–1793).

At the very end of the early modern period, English expeditions into the African interior (Mungo Park to the Gambia and Niger Rivers in 1795–1805 and Sir John Barrow northward from the Cape of Good Hope in 1797–1798), foreshadowed a major focus for European exploration in the nineteenth century. During the early modern centuries, Europeans had explored and mapped much of the world, driven by a combination of motives that ranged from religious zeal and scientific curiosity to commercial and political rivalries and personal ambitions. In their travels, they had not only explored the world; they had changed it forever.

See also Africa ; Asia ; British Colonies ; Cartography and Geography ; Columbus, Christopher ; Cortés, Hernán ; Dutch Colonies ; Europe and the World ; French Colonies ; Gama, Vasco da ; Islands ; Magellan, Ferdinand ; Pizarro Brothers ; Portuguese Colonies ; Shipbuilding and Navigation ; Spanish Colonies .