Topic 4.2 Exploration: Causes and Events from 1450 to 1750

Unaffected by the ravages of Europe's 100 Years War and Spain's civil strife, Portugal became the first European nation to embark on a program of exploration. King John's son, Prince Henry, was motivated by a crusading zeal to convert heathens to Christianity and an economic zeal to gain access to west Africa's legendary sources of gold. Henry's capture of the Muslim city of Ceuta in 1415 opened the western coast of Africa to Portuguese exploration, and by the year of Henry's death in 1460 his country had arrived in

The location of Ceuta. Its fall to Prince Henry encouraged the Portuguese exploration of Africa's west coast.

Guinea on Africa's western coast. Soon African gold was flowing by sea from west Africa directly to Iberia rather than across the trans-Saharan caravan routes. Algiers and Tunis in north Africa were economically devastated by this rerouting of trade. Portugal got rich. As contacts with west African societies continued the Portuguese began trading in ivory and slaves as well.

After a dispute with his father, Prince Henry returned home to Portugal but avoided the capital of Lisbon where he could have easily gained a comfortable royal job. Instead, he settled in the remove coastal town of Sagres which he turned into a center of navigational studies and cartography. Now called Prince Henry the Navigator, he collected fresh information from newly arrived sailors to produce the most current maps possible. The compass, thought by many Europeans to be driven my occult powers, was disenchanted of superstition and its use expanded and refined. Since initial Portuguese voyages traveled north and south exploring Africa, more precise means of measuring latitude were researched. Borrowing elements of Arabic shipbuilding, Prince Henry and his engineers designed the famous caravel, mentioned above. All the elements needed for global exploration were brought together by Prince Henry at Sagres. Portugal was poised to take the lead, albeit brief, in the exploration and exploitation of the globe.

Equipped with new maritime instruments and knowledge, the Portuguese accomplished many "firsts" in global exploration. In 1487 Bartholomew Diaz sailed his caravel around the southern tip of Africa, the first European to do so (his crew refused to press on to India). Then Vasco da Gama became the first to sail all the way to India in 1498. When he turned to Portugal the following year, the spice cargo in his ship was worth 60 times the cost of his voyage. Europeans had found the illusive water route to the lucrative Indian Ocean trade network. The Portuguese strategy in the Indian Ocean was to dominate trade through the use of firepower, intimidation, and brutality. In the long run they were never able to completely monopolize this network but did succeed in building a trading-post empire which gave them a significant share of the spice and slave trade. With over 50 trading posts from southeast Asia to Africa's west coast, they attempted to force merchants to call at these ports and pay duties. They also required merchants to purchase passports from them; sailors caught at sea without one were mutilated and had their cargo confiscated. Despite these grand plans, the Portuguese had neither the manpower nor the fleet to carry out their demands. Many Indian Ocean merchants took their chances and sailed without passports or paying dues at Portuguese trading-posts. And the Spanish, English and Dutch sailors hired by the Portuguese to work their fleet took the knowledge of the seas back to their respective countries who were organizing their own expeditions to Asia. The Portuguese began the explorations but were soon to be strong-armed out of the way by their European neighbors.

The Portuguese Empire, including the New World (Brazil), West Africa (Angola), and the trading-posts of the Indian Ocean.

In 1476 a 25

Christopher Columbus

year old Christopher Columbus washed onto the Portuguese shore with a broken oar he had used as a float. The cargo ship he worked on had been sunk by a French fleet near Gibraltar. As fortune would have it, the place where he reached the shore was only a few miles from Sagres, the location of Prince Henry's research center of navigation and cartography. Having grown up in Genoa on the Italian coast, Columbus had long possessed a fascination with sailing. But his time in Portugal, particularly Lisbon, would prove to be the most formative for what he would unwittingly accomplish.

The

The routes of Columbus in the Caribbean.

idea that sailing west would lead one to Asia was not new. What was novel about Columbus was his conviction that the distance between Europe and Asia to the west was not significant. Basing his argument on Marco Polo's description of the distance across Eurasia and Ptolemy's longitudinal calculations, Columbus vastly underestimated the distance of a western route to Asia. Nevertheless, he set out enthusiastically to convince the monarchs of Europe he was right in order to obtain funding for his journey. After a series of rejections, Ferdinand and Isabella of newly united Spain decided to pay for Columbus' voyage. In October of 1492 he sighted land in what he believed to be Asia. Columbus would make four voyages across the Atlantic and seems to have died not knowing that he had failed.

Columbus did not actually discover anything, nor was he the first European to make this crossing. Nonetheless, his journey is very important historically because he initiated a world-transforming encounter between two hemispheres of this planet. There would be profound cultural, demographic, political and social consequences.

When it was realized that Columbus had not succeeded in finding a route to Asia, the quest did not end. North Atlantic crossings increased as European explorers sought to exploit the wealth of the New World and continue to find a way across it. The waters off the eastern coast of North America were teeming with fish and some men made fortunes shipping salt-cured cod to Europe and the Caribbean. Explorers such as Champlain from France earned huge profits by sending beaver pelts back to Europe. But like many others, Champlain's motivation was not merely conquest or profit for their own sake. The furs were used to fund his ongoing obsession--the discovery of a western route to China.

The new global circulation of goods was facilitated by royal chartered European monopoly companies that took silver from Spanish colonies in the Americas to purchase Asian goods for the Atlantic markets, but regional markets continued to flourish in Afro-Eurasia by using established commercial practices and new transoceanic shipping services developed by European merchants.

According

The Sultan of Kilwa on the Swahili coast of Africa was expelled by the Portuguese.

to the long standing conventions of Indian Ocean trade, no single power controlled the entire network and the seas were free and open to any merchant. The Europeans would attempt to change this. Beginning with the Portuguese, Europeans attempted to install a Mediterranean system of trade which used military might to divert trade through trading ports they controlled. There it could be taxed. They did not really bring any items of their own to trade, or add value to the sum of trade in this region. Instead, they attempted, in a parasitic way, to extract benefits from the host network into which they forced themselves.

From the start, superior firepower allowed them to accomplish much. The Portuguese stormed the Swahili city of Kilwa and threw out its Muslim leaders. Commander Alfonso Alboquerque seized Malacca in 1511 (the Dutch would take it from Portugal in 1641). The Portuguese attempted to close the Red Sea to trade to stop this "leak" of trade through their fingers into the Mediterranean via Egypt. Breaking traditional customs of tolerance, the King of Portugal asked the leader of Calicut to expel all Muslims from his kingdom. But Portugal's ambitions were grander than its ability to enforce its demands. Rather than an all-out conquest of the region, they established a trading-post empire (mentioned above) in order to profit from goods as they moved from one area to another. Indeed, by the end of the 1500s they had integrated with the normal political and economic climate of the region. Other European countries would implement the same strategy. The Dutch, for example, found that working within the existing system could produce for them the highest profits. They made a fortune charging fees to transport items from one Asian area to another. The European powers were never able to establish genuine and lasting monopolies in the Indian Ocean. This is in stark contrast with their experiences in the New World.

We

A peso de ocho, or piece of eight.

saw in the previous period (600-1450) that the creation of a common currency in China facilitated trade in that region. Widely accepted currencies speed up transactions and provide standardized way for merchants to measure the value of products. In this period the use of a common currency expanded from regional to global use. The Spanish peso de ocho, or "piece of eight," was the first currency in history to be used globally.

This currency was the product of Spain's mining of enormous amounts of silver in the New World. In present day Bolivia and Mexico, they discovered massive deposits of silver, including a mountain full of silver at Potosi. After the purest veins of silver were quickly strip-mined production slowed; then the

The Taj Mahal is a testimony to the wealth of silver.

Spanish introduced the amalgamation method of using mercury to extract silver from ore. Production soared. In two centuries the silver mines of the Spanish New World produced 40,000 tons of silver. The industrial centers that grew around these mines minted 2.5 million silver coins per year. The peso de ocho, worth about 80 US dollars today, gained acceptance around the world and lubricated global trade on an unprecedented level. Mughal India wanted Spanish silver for payment for its pepper sales, and this surge of silver funded Shah Jahan's construction of the Taj Mahal. Much of the Spanish silver ended up the hands of the Chinese, who had no desire for European products but readily accepted silver as payment for its coveted exports. The peso do ocho was even accepted currency in the United States until the Coinage Act of 1857.