It was not until the continent itself was explored that Spain found the wealth it had sought in the form of abundant gold. In the Americas the Spanish found a number of empires that were as large and populous as those in Europe. However, the Spanish conquistadors, with the aid of the pandemics of disease their arrival unleashed, managed to conquer them with only a handful of men.
Once Spanish suzereignancy was established the main focus became the extraction and export of gold and silver. The nations outside of Iberia refused to acknowledge the Treaty of Tordesillas.
France, the Netherlands, and Britain each had a long maritime tradition and, despite Iberian protections, the new technologies and maps soon made their way north. The first of these missions was that of the British funded John Cabot. It was the first of a series of French and British missions exploring North America.
Spain had largely ignored the northern part of the Americas as it had few people and far fewer riches than Central America. The expeditions of Cabot, Cartier and others were mainly hoping to find the Northwest passage and thus a link to the riches of Asia. This was never discovered but in their travels other possibilities were found and in the early seventeenth century colonist from a number of Northern European states began to settle on the east coast of North America.
It was the northerners who also became the great rivals to the Portuguese in Africa and around the Indian Ocean. Dutch, French, and British ships began to flaunt the Portuguese monopoly and found trading forts and colonies of their own. Gradually the Portuguese were forced out of many of their most valuable possessions. The northerners also took the lead in exploring the last unknown regions of the Pacific Ocean.
Dutch explorers such as Willem Jansz and Abel Tasman explored the coasts of Australia while in the eighteenth century it was British explorer James Cook that mapped much of Polynesia. The effect of the Age of Exploration was unprecedented. By the logic of the age, lands on the same latitude should have similar climates and produce similar natural resources. In what has come to be known as the Chicora Legend, this bit of deception found a home in De Orbe Novo.
Meanwhile, in Giovanni da Verrazzano, a Florentine working for France, sailed along the Atlantic coast but apparently did not notice the Chesapeake Bay. In the Outer Banks region of present-day North Carolina, however, he claimed to have seen the Pacific Ocean in the distance.
It began in unpromising fashion, however. From there he marched west instead of north, and by the spring of he had reached the Mississippi River. The colony failed before an attack could be made. But there were no major expeditions until, as it happens, the French spurred Philip II to action. Worried that his European rival planned to stake a claim in La Florida, he ordered that a settlement be established at the Point of Santa Elena, near present-day Parris Island, South Carolina.
In , the Spaniards introduced el Requerimiento , a document to be read to Indians in Spanish introducing them to church doctrine.
Indians were not compelled to convert, but if they did not, they were immediately subject to Spanish invasion. He then set his sights to the north. The Spanish had always been interested in finding the Northwest Passage for commercial reasons, but by this time, the Jesuits were interested in it, too.
They had largely written off La Florida as a place to evangelize and hoped that such a passage could quickly take their priests to the more promising land of China. After the Spanish presence in the Chesapeake Bay had been eliminated, the English moved in. They had been bit players in the New World up to that point, unsuccessfully attempting to save the French settlement at Charlesfort in and looting the Spanish galleons transporting gold and silver back to Spain.
In three voyages from to , Martin Frobisher explored the icy waters between Greenland and Canada, searching for that ever-elusive passage to China. Raleigh assembled an elite group of would-be colonizers. These included the brilliant mathematician Thomas Hariot , who instructed sailors on the art of open-sea navigation, and Richard Hakluyt the younger , an Anglican minister and enthusiastic geographer, who provided compelling arguments in favor of the English settlement of America.
In , Raleigh funded an English colony at Roanoke in the same Outer Banks region where the explorer Giovanni da Verrazzano had claimed to have seen the Pacific Ocean more than a half century earlier.
Although this and a subsequent colony both failed , the colonization attempts included a visit to the Chesapeake Bay during the winter of — There the Englishmen found the ports to be deeper and safer, and the Indians friendlier. Although the Spaniards had largely given up their attempts to settle in this area, they still resisted English incursions.
They quite reasonably feared that the English would use ports at Roanoke or in the Chesapeake as safe havens for pirates such as Sir Francis Drake and Christopher Newport. Their protection of this coastline, in other words, was a means of protecting Spanish shipping in the Caribbean.
Despite their efforts, though, they did not discover the location of the Roanoke colony in time to destroy it, and although they considered an attack against the Jamestown settlement, founded in , the king refused to give the order. So ended more than a century of feverish competition over control of the Atlantic coast and the area of present-day Virginia. Encyclopedia Virginia Grady Ave. Virginia Humanities acknowledges the Monacan Nation , the original people of the land and waters of our home in Charlottesville, Virginia.
We invite you to learn more about Indians in Virginia in our Encyclopedia Virginia. Skip to content. Contributor: Brendan Wolfe. Background Ebstorf Map. Anglorum in Virginiam aduentus The arrival of the Englishemen [sic] in Virginia.
May 4, Pope Alexander VI issues a bull, Inter caetera , that decrees that all newly discovered lands west of a line of longitude running through the eastern part of present-day Brazil belong to Spain, and everything east to Portugal. September 24, —November 7, Christopher Columbus completes three additional voyages to the New World. He is probably the first European to encounter the American mainland since the Vikings. In both he sails down the east coast of South America. April 22, Sailing far to the west in an attempt to pick up the best winds down the west coast of Africa, Pedro Alvares Cabral sights what is present-day Brazil in South America.
He claims it for Portugal. One known copy remains. The document is designed to be read in Spanish by Spanish explorers to American Indians, introducing them to Christian doctrine.
Magellan dies in the Philippines before the voyage is completed. Levenson, Jay A. Circa Art in the Age of Exploration. Exhibition catalogue. Washington, D. Vezzosi, Alessandro.
Leonardo da Vinci: The Mind of the Renaissance. New York: Abrams, Visiting The Met? Astronomical table clock. Astronomicum Caesareum Michael Ostendorfer.
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