Age of Discovery - Overview

Overview

The Portuguese began systematically exploring the Atlantic coast of Africa from 1418, under the sponsorship of Prince Henry. In 1488 Bartolomeu Dias reached the Indian Ocean by this route. In 1492 the Spanish monarchs funded Christopher Columbus’s plan to sail west to reach the Indies by crossing the Atlantic. He landed on an uncharted continent, then seen by Europeans as a new world, America. To prevent conflict between Portugal and Spain, the Treaty of Tordesillas was signed dividing the world into two regions of exploration, where each had exclusive rights to claim newly discovered lands.

In 1498, a Portuguese expedition commanded by Vasco da Gama reached India by sailing around Africa, opening up direct trade with Asia. Soon, the Portuguese sailed further eastward, to the valuable spice islands in 1512, landing in China one year later. Thus, Europe first received news of eastern and western Pacific within a one year span around 1512. East and west exploration overlapped in 1522, when Portuguese navigator Ferdinand Magellan led a Spanish expedition West, achieving the first circumnavigation of the world, while Spanish conquistadors explored inland the Americas, and later, some of the South Pacific islands.

Since 1495, the French and English and, much later, the Dutch entered the race of exploration after learning of these exploits, defying the Iberian monopoly on maritime trade by searching for new routes, first to the north, and into the Pacific Ocean around South America, but eventually by following the Portuguese around Africa into the Indian Ocean; discovering Australia in 1606, New Zealand in 1642, and Hawaii in 1778. Meanwhile, from the 1580s to the 1640s Russians explored and conquered almost the whole of Siberia.