Why Cross the Atlantic?

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The decision to cross the Atlantic was a logical expansion of Mediterranean, northern European, and Scandinavian trade routes pioneered by the seafaring nations of the Middle Ages. In the 15th century, the Iberian nations of Portugal and Spain began to explore seriously the role that the islands of the Eastern Atlantic might play in their dreams of empire. They looked westward to a chain of islands that seemed ripe for colonization to plant lucrative crops such as sugar, cotton, wheat, and grapes, as had been done on the islands of the Mediterranean for centuries.

The Spanish arrived in the Canaries by the mid-14th century and began the process of colonizing these islands in 1402. The Portuguese began to settle the Madeiras in 1420 and conquered the Azores in 1439, subsequently adding the Cape Verde islands to their Eastern Atlantic possessions that protected their growing presence in Africa.

The westward spread of sugar cultivation from Asia through Europe and onto the Americas.

The sugar plantations of the Madeira and Canary islands now competed with the long established ones on the eastern Mediterranean island of Cyprus developed by Islamic and Venetian merchants. Later generations would continue to move sugar production ever westward, to Jamaica, Haiti, Brazil, Mexico, and Hawaii. They laid waste to each region as they subjected its ecology, indigenous population, and poorest immigrants to this harsh and unyielding economy. This 15th-century experience of the Eastern Atlantic became a training ground for how the Iberian nations subsequently possessed land and people in the Americas.

Even as European seafaring nations looked westward, they dreamed of the East. The desire to establish new routes to Asia to gain access to the spice trade and other imported luxuries haunted the medieval imagination. The Venetian, Genoese, Pisan, Catalan, Islamic, and Jewish merchants who filled European markets with exotic goods prospered in the heyday of Mediterranean trade between the 11th and 14th centuries.

There were actually several Silk Roads, most of them by land, shown here in brown.
There was also a ship route shown here in blue.
Map of several Silk Roads, most of them by land, but there was also a ship route.

They designed shallow-hulled ships to cross these fairly calm and contained waters, connecting seaborne empires with overland trading routes of the kind followed by the Venetian Marco Polo in the late 13th century. Polo reached the court of the Great Khan and the fabled Spice Islands of the Indian Ocean where pepper, nutmeg, cinnamon, mace, Chinese silks, and Indian cotton could be bought cheap and sold at home for great profit. He traveled as far east as any European of his age had gone and lived to tell the tale.

The collective greed of medieval merchants fueled the ambition of Renaissance rulers, financiers, and explorers to find new routes to the East. Marco Polo's favorable description of "Cipangu" (Japan), which he never saw but heard about in China as the outermost limit of Asia, became a crucial point of reference for westward exploration that sought to reach this destination by other means.

The 13th-century journey of the Venetian merchant Marco Polo to Asia and back to Europe.

Polo informed European readers that there were at least 1378 islands off the coast of Asia. Thus, conquest of the Eastern Atlantic islands would be a first step in discovering numerous uncharted and unknown islands across the sea. These islands then might become a series of trading outposts forging new connections between Europe and Asia. This idea was well established long before Columbus set sail. He hoped to be the first to discover a new Atlantic island en route to the Mongol court. Ironically, the Mongol Empire had fallen in 1368, a few decades after Polo visited it. Nevertheless, the dream enjoyed a long afterlife on paper because of Polo's bestselling Travels.

Maps that charted the known and unknown world

The decision to explore the West African coast would have momentous implications for the societies of the Americas in the next four centuries. As the Portuguese began to sail in both directions, they designed a new kind of ship, the caravel, for these longer voyages. They began to make new maps to keep a record of everything they knew and discovered, treating these documents as important state secrets. The Renaissance of mapmaking helps us to see with great clarity how America emerged into view.

Accurate depiction on tiles of the lateen and square sails of a Portuguese caravel.
Image of tiles depicting lateen and square sails of a Portuguese caravel.

Portuguese exploration of the western coast of Africa began as early as 1420 under Prince Henry who would later be called "the Navigator." They found enough gold and slaves that by 1448 they established a trading outpost on the island of Arguim. Their exploration of the Guinea coast led to the establishment of a second fortified trading outpost at Elmina in 1482. The first West African slaves arrived in Hispaniola in 1518. While many other aspects of this nascent Atlantic economy were uncertain, slaves were consistently profitable.

16th century Portuguese map showing Elmina Castle (founded in 1482),
the first European slave center below the Sahara.
16th century Portuguese map showing Elmina Castle, founded in 1482, the first European slave center below the Sahara.

Traditions of African and Mediterranean slavery gave birth to the Atlantic slave trade. Columbus's business partner Gianotti Berardi had been involved in the Iberian slave trade before financing the Genoese navigator's second voyage. His associate Vespucci owned 5 slaves, including 2 from the Canaries and 2 from West Africa, clearly indicating the connections between the Atlantic and African ventures.

As the Portuguese established their presence on the West African coast, the Spanish observed them enviously, hoping to find a way to compete. In the short term, they contented themselves by securing their right to the Canaries, enslaving the inhabitants of the Great Canary Island in 1489. But they found little opportunity to compete with the Portuguese in Africa. It is little wonder that Columbus hoped to work for the Portuguese before approaching the Spanish with his proposal.

During this early era of Iberian expansion the cod-filled waters of the North Atlantic temporarily entered the doldrums. The Norse colony established in Newfoundland in the 11th century had all but disappeared. The end of one era of sailing, fishing, and colonizing the North Atlantic gave birth to another. In the 1480s there were rumors that Bristol fishermen had reached Newfoundland, perhaps even headed south, and that their Basque confrères and fellow fishermen, were also sailing farther west as they fished the North Atlantic.

Norse exploration in the 11th century and the Newfoundland fishing banks.
Map of a Norse exploration in the 11th century, from Iceland around Greenland to the Newfoundland fishing banks.

These anonymous and unheralded precursors to Columbus were not self-styled "discoverers" seeking the unknown with a ruler's support. They were practical, skilled men plying their trade at sea. The fishermen may have randomly touched the coastline of North America and been the first to have contact or trade with its indigenous peoples. There was indeed a nascent interest in northern routes which would eventually give birth to the age of English, French, and Dutch exploration.

Strategic locations, where the Atlantic is at its narrowest, offered numerous opportunities for unheralded crossings. Consider the experience of the Portuguese captain Gaspar Corte-Real who sailed from the Azores to the Maine coastline in 1501 where he captured approximately 50 Native men, women, and children. To his surprise, he discovered signs of a prior European presence: a broken sword and 2 rings, both evidently of Venetian manufacture.

Perhaps John Cabot, sailing for Henry VII of England in 1497, traveled this far south. The sword and rings may have been poignant talismans and remnants of his ill-fated second voyage the following year from which he did not return. Or just possibly it is a reminder of these earlier, undocumented encounters of fishermen that brought small quantities of European goods into the orbit of North America.

In the absence of any historical or archaeological record, we must consider such episodes a kind of historical rumor. And yet the desire to traverse the Atlantic was already there for the English and the French, though without the strong impetus that pushed the Portuguese, the Spanish, and the Italian pilots and traders who worked for them. All of these tentative, half-formed ventures established the necessary preconditions for the European discovery and conquest of the Americas that officially began in 1492.