European Exploration: Motives, Navigation & Claims · Grade 7 Social Studies

Part 1 · Why go at all

The short answer is pepper, and cloves, and nutmeg. Spices preserved food and disguised the taste of meat kept too long, and they came overland from south and southeast Asia through a chain of middlemen, each taking a cut. When Constantinople fell to the Ottomans in 1453 the chain became costlier and less reliable for western European buyers, and a sea route began to look worth the risk.

Portugal went first and went south. Under royal backing associated with Prince Henry, Portuguese captains worked down the African coast for decades; Bartolomeu Dias rounded the southern tip in 1488, and Vasco da Gama reached India in 1498. That is the sober answer to Columbus's proposal: Portugal already had a route that worked, which is partly why the Portuguese crown turned him down.

Spain's position was different again, and worse. Castile and Aragon had spent the fifteenth century at war on their own peninsula and had no foothold on the African route. For a crown shut out of the south, a western passage was not a wild idea but the only idea, which is why a proposal its own experts rejected on the geography could still get a hearing at court.

Behind the spices sat gold, and behind both sat a religious argument. The same monarchs who funded Columbus completed the conquest of Granada in 1492 and expelled Spain's Jews the same year. Expansion was understood by its backers as commerce and crusade at once, and the documents of the period say so openly rather than hiding it.

Part 2 · What made the voyages survivable

Ocean sailing needed ships that could work against the wind. The caravel was small, shallow and rigged with triangular lateen sails borrowed from Arab and Mediterranean practice, which let it sail much closer to the wind than a square rig and so beat its way home against the prevailing westerlies. A ship that can only run downwind is a one-way ship.

Finding your position was the other half. The magnetic compass, which reached Europe from China by way of the Islamic world, gave direction out of sight of land. The astrolabe and later the quadrant gave latitude by measuring the angle of the sun or the pole star. Longitude could not be measured reliably at sea for another two and a half centuries, so captains sailed to the right latitude and then ran east or west along it.

Ships also had to be provisioned for the unknown. Salt beef, hard biscuit and water in casks set a hard limit on how long a crew could stay at sea, and scurvy — which nobody yet understood — began to appear after roughly six to eight weeks without fresh food. That limit is why the distance argument in this unit's task was a matter of life and death rather than academic pedantry.

None of this was European invention from nothing. The compass is Chinese, the lateen sail Arab, the astrolabe Greek by way of the Islamic world, and the mathematics behind the tables likewise. The voyages were made possible by a long exchange of technique across Eurasia, which is a useful thing to notice before reading what the voyagers said about the people they met.

Part 3 · A claim, and who was bound by it

When a European captain went ashore, read a declaration and set up a cross or a pillar, he was performing a legal act — but only among Europeans. The ceremony told other Christian monarchs that this coast was spoken for. It had no standing with the people already living there, who were not party to it and in most cases were not present.

The framework came from Rome. Papal declarations in 1493 assigned newly encountered lands to Spain, and the Treaty of Tordesillas in 1494 redrew the line by agreement between Spain and Portugal, dividing the globe along a meridian in the Atlantic. Two European courts partitioned continents whose inhabitants they had not met. This bundle of ideas, later called the doctrine of discovery, was still being cited by United States courts in the nineteenth century.

The practical effect in this region came later. Giovanni da Verrazzano entered New York harbour for France in 1524; Henry Hudson, an Englishman sailing for a Dutch company, came up the river that now carries his name in 1609. Hudson's voyage is why the Dutch claimed this valley and why the next unit is about New Netherland.

Part 4 · Reading what the explorers wrote

The accounts these men sent home are our main source for first contact, and they were written to be read by investors and monarchs. A captain reporting on a coast he hoped to be sent back to had reasons to describe it as rich, its people as friendly or as easily overcome, and his own conduct as careful. That does not make the accounts worthless, but it does tell you what to weigh.

Verrazzano's 1524 letter to the French king describes the people of the harbour, their clothing and their boats in detail, and is the earliest European description of the area. It is also a sales document addressed to the man paying for the next voyage. Both things are true at once, and the four questions from the first unit apply exactly.

Hudson's case shows how tangled the motives were. He was English, sailing in 1609 for the Dutch East India Company, under orders to find a northeast passage over Russia; he ignored them, turned west, and explored the river instead. The Dutch claim to this valley rests on an Englishman disobeying a Dutch instruction, which is a useful corrective to any neat story of national destiny.

Notice too what the sources cannot contain. No Lenape or Munsee account of watching those ships arrive survives in writing. What we have is one side's description of a two-sided meeting, which is the same problem you met with the Manhattan purchase and will meet again in every treaty in this course.