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The Golden Age of Exploration

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Drake's Golden Hinde docked in London

All Around the World with the Most Travelled Indian

By Nitin Gairola

Globalization was brought about when the ‘Old World’ of Europe’ stumbled into the ‘New World’ of the Americas as their ships were en route to trade with Asia, but via the west and not the east. Let me explain this in a bit….

During the years from mid-1400 to mid-1700 AD, we had the most extraordinary explorers who virtually discovered and mapped the entire world. This feat of finding America or Australia was almost as impossible at that time as landing a man on the Moon was in the 20th century, and yet it happened. These 300 odd years, according to many, were the golden age of exploration. It was the time of charting new lands and seas and of geographic discovery. In comparison today we are in the era of scientific discovery & conservation as far as Earth goes since the basic geographic world has already been explored. The actual physical or geographic exploration today has moved to space above and the sea below.

It is also true however that during these voyages of discovery, besides exploration we also had exploitation at a never seen before scale. The native populations of both North and South America (the most famous of them being the Mayans, Aztecs and the Incans) were enslaved and ravaged. It is said that European diseases such as small pox and measles and even the common cold (to which the natives had no immunity), destroyed as much as 90% of some communities. These great civilizations were also stripped off their riches virtually overnight, their kings and emperors overthrown and the populations either enslaved or culled. Yes, our history is very dark so never wish you were born at an earlier time. This is the best time to be alive in all of human history.

On the positive side (we have to find one), this is the era that all continents finally got connected and while it has been a brutal road to a certain level of empathy between fellow humans, we are now closer than ever before, even if it’s 5 centuries later.  Before these discoveries, the known world only extended to three continents i.e. Europe, Asia and Africa, with Africa’s interiors hardly been set foot on by Europeans or Asians. This implies that for 10,000 odd years since the end of the last Ice Age and start of agrarian societies, our worldly understanding was limited to less than half the continents that were actually there on the planet. Post this era, North and South America and then Australia got added to the known world and we even had a very strong hunch that there was a great cold continent at the southern end of the world. The continent would be called Antarctica (i.e. the ‘polar’ opposite of the Arctic) and it would complete the 7 on Earth.

Posing like a sailor from the age of discovery

So during these 300 years, all of mankind was re-discovered after it had separated post the last Ice Age. You see after the Ice Age the global water levels rose due to the Earth warming and as the ice melted, the narrow land passage between Eastern Russia and Alaska (Bering Strait) got submerged under the sea. Hence the early people who had walked from Russia into Alaska in the north (around 15,000-20,000 years ago) and from there further south into the rest of America, were to be ‘forever’ cut off from rest of mankind, until this time. The facial similarities between Mongolians of Central Asia and the Red Indians of America, is no coincidence. Besides the Bering Strait, the other significant intercontinental passage that was lost was from the Malay Peninsula to the Indonesian Islands all the way to the pointy North-Eastern tip of Australia. Again you will see facial similarities between the Polynesians and the natives of Australia (Aborigines) and New Zealand (such as the Maori).

 The Portuguese Sailors

The era started when the Portuguese were searching for a sea route to India and South East Asia (East Indies) in order to find an alternate way to trade with the east in mostly spices and silk. This is since the land based Silk Route was being blocked by Ottoman Turks who had taken over Constantinople in 1453 (and had renamed it Istanbul). The Ottoman Turks were fiercely ruled by their sultan, Suleiman the Magnificent. This land route faced further hurdles because of the new Persians kingdom (famous for the reign of King Abbas I in present day Iran) which lay to the east of the Turkish strongholds. The Turks and the Persians would fight each other for the next two centuries and all this was adding to the trade disruption for Europe. This new found sea route east to Asia (around the west coast of Africa) was opened by pioneers and traders and later followed by missionaries and adventurers.  Some of them are the greatest of all explorers in human history. Soon enough we would also have the Spanish and the Portuguese looking west to reach Asia by sea (thinking it would be shorter than going east from around Africa). But those taking the western route would stumble into America.

The great voyages of discovery were given the initial spark by Prince Henry of Portugal, whose father had seized a city in Morocco. The stay in Morocco inspired the prince to learn more about Africa and foreign shores. With the backing of his father, he set up a school of navigation in Sagres, Portugal. By this time the Portuguese had developed a new type of ship called the Caravel. It was narrower that the earlier ones and hence the captains were able to maneuver it more easily and it could weather sea storms better. It is from Sagres that many such caravels went to chart the West African coastline. The prince sponsored quite a few voyages and it is said that he did more for the exploration of the seas than anyone else in history. By the mid-1,400s the Portuguese had reach down to Senegal and Ghana in West Africa and in 1472 Lopo Goncalves was the first recorded European to cross over the equator to the Southern Hemisphere of Earth. Imagine how much was still left to be explored by man just 500 years earlier.

Ships that sailed the seven seas

By 1487, the Portuguese had sailed the West African coastline and mapped it, but could not find a route round the continent to the East Indies. Then came Bartolomeu Dias who sailed down the entire African coastline.  His caravel got caught in a heavy sea storm near today’s Namibia on the south-western side of the African continent. This forced him to move further south for the next two weeks and when the tempest had subsided, he turned the ship east, back towards the African coastline. However instead of finding the African terra firma, what he got was more water. He sighted land only at the southern tip of Africa and thus became the first European to see the Cape of Good Hope. This is the place where the Atlantic meets the Indian Ocean and many of us witness that when we visit Cape Town in South Africa.

A decade later, Bartolomeu Dias would join Vasco da Gama on the first part of his sea journey to India via the Cape of Good Hope. A fun fact detour is that Dias was also the commander aboard Pedro Cabral’s ship that discovered Brazil and the two Americas in 1500. So if he had made it out of Cape of Good Hope and reached India (i.e. Asia) then he would have been the first man to visit the 5 known continents of that time – Europe, Africa, Asia, North and South America.

In 1497, Vasco da Gama had left Lisbon, and sailed down south along the African coast before turning his ship north on the other side of the Cape and sailing up the east coast of Africa to Mombasa, Kenya. From there, his compass turned east and he finally reached Calicut in Southern India in 1498. The spice route had been put on the map. Later this would lead to the establishment of Portuguese colonies in India which remained in their hands up until 1961. Vasco da Gama was followed by many traders and also many Christian missionaries into Asia, all keen to convert the locals. The most famous of these was Saint Francis Xavier who spent many years in India and Sri Lanka. His mortal remains are on display to this day in the Church of Bom Jesus in the Indian coastal state of Goa.

 The Discovery of Discoveries

With the Portuguese wanting to build their trade supremacy over the seas, one Italian sailor named Christopher Columbus had gone to the Portuguese royalty in 1490 to suggest that Asia could be reached from the west as well, if the world were actually round. This was 8 years before the eastern route to India was found by Vasco da Gama in 1498. While Columbus’s proposal for funding was met with a cold shoulder in Portugal, it was King Ferdinand and Queen Isabella of Spain who agreed to back his expedition. Christopher Columbus, was about to be immortalized and become a household name for all of mankind for centuries to come and especially a hero for Spain since this is the moment that Portugal was to ‘miss out’ on the Americas (barring Brazil). And ironically Columbus never got to know about his immortality since mortality came to him before fame.

On the 3rd of August 1492, Columbus had left the Spanish shores with three ships, Santa Maria, Nina and Pinta. Santa Maria was the cargo ship while the other two were caravels. It was finally on 12th October of 1492, those on Pinta saw land. They planted their foot on terra firma and called the place San Salvador and the Spanish claim was laid. No one to this day knows the exact location of San Salvador in the West Indies (probably in present day Bahamas), but Columbus had discovered a new continent, even though he only reached an island and not mainland America. He thought he had arrived on the west coast of India and hence the name ‘West Indies’ came about. In his travels, Columbus came back thrice to the West Indies and even scraped around mainland Mexico in Central America and the uppermost tip of South America but died not knowing that he had found a new continent.

However this event literally opened the flood gates into America. A tsunami was coming in from the Atlantic and the American natives were sadly unaware of it and unprepared for it. Post Columbus returning to Europe in 1493 and with word of the discovery of the westerly route to Asia, other navigators were quick to follow.

One such was Italian John Cabot, who reached either Newfoundland or Nova Scotia in 1497, aboard his boat, the Matthew. There were also many back home in Europe who didn’t believe that Columbus had reached Asia as the land was too near Europe for it to be Asia. In order to prove or disprove, four Europeans sailed west to the Americas a year before the world welcomed 1500.  While history books are not clear as to who reached first, it is believed that Pedro Cabral first sighted Brazil in South America in April 1500 whereas Vicente Pinzon reached the country’s north east. It is also the end point of the Amazon River at it drains into the Atlantic. The third person was Alonso de Ojeda who mapped out the Caribbean coast but the name of the two American continents came from the name of the Italian explorer, Amerigo Vespucci. He sailed along the Caribbean coast in North America and then went to Brazil in South America and so Vespucci saw both the continents. In fact in his second voyage, Vespucci reached as far south as Patagonia in present day Argentina. The account of his travels became a hit in Europe wherein he referred to the continent as the ‘Land of Amerigo’ or later America. So that’s history for you – Viking Leif Erickson was the first European to reach North America way back in 1000 AD, but the credit goes to Columbus 500 years later and on top of it the names of the two continents are linked to the man who reached a decade after Columbus (just because he wrote a popular book on it).

It is at this point in history that the treaty of Tordesillas was signed between the governments of Spain and Portugal, drawing a north to south vertical line on the world map. It divided the world between the Spanish and the Portuguese and that is why Brazil (east of the line) speaks Portuguese today whereas the majority of the American continent from Mexico to Chile (west of the line) speaks Spanish. The game of dominance at the global stage and the age of geopolitics had begun. The brave explorers were caught not just in the midst of sea storms but in the midst of this geopolitics as well.

Columbus had died in 1506, but what he had done now could not be halted. A flood of merchants, pirates and conquistadors (Spanish adventurers) would come in waves, all ‘dying’ to get their share of the ‘American pie’. From their settlements in the West Indies, the Spanish set out to chart North and Central American mainland. Some of the notable explorers who did this were Vasco Nunez de Balboa (first European to see the Pacific Ocean), Juan Ponce de Leon (‘discovered’ Florida) and Caneza De Vaca (got shipwrecked on the Texan coast and published a popular account of his adventures). And then there was the capricious Hernan Cortes who, by order to the Spanish governor of Cuba, set out to explore and exploit the coast of the Yucatan peninsula in the south of Mexico. He learnt about the great Aztec empire in Central Mexico, and along with the help of local rebels and tribes, went out for a confrontation in the capital, Tenochtitlan, one of the greatest cities of its era. Cortez sacked the capital, taking control over the entire Aztec empire and called it ‘New Spain’. That ‘new’ was to be applied to a lot of places (why do you think you have the ‘New’ in ‘York’) and it is this ‘new’ that symbolized what the European invaders thought of all the natives and their lands. They wanted a ‘white wash’ and a white wash it was.

Circumnavigation of the World

 After the discovery of America and in the new knowledge that the world was indeed round, there was an era of seafarers who wanted to circumnavigate the entire planet– for either gold or for glory. Some were pirates, some were profiteers and some were just seeking immortality and to be the first to circumnavigate. Strangely, not one but three people became the first captains to circumnavigate the world but more on that in a bit.

In 1519, Ferdinand Magellan left Spain with 5 ships in search of the Spice Islands in Indonesia that Spain could trade with. In order to cross America, instead of going north, he went south and sailed from Cape Horn at the ‘Strait of Magellan’ (the southernmost tip of South America) and through this very stormy part of the world called ‘Drake’s Passage’. Last year the ship that I was in also faced a storm at this passage. After crossing it, Magellan was in the Pacific Ocean and later reached the island of Guam and the Philippines post that. However it’s here he met with his end as in 1521 Magellan was killed by the army of the local chiefs who had refused to convert to Christianity. But Magellan had found a way to Asia from the west and through the newly found Americas. After his death, the voyage was completed by Juan Sabastian Delcano, who became the leader of the fleet for the journey back. Delcano found the Spice Islands in Indonesia and in 1922 finally returned to Spain, successfully completing the first circumnavigation of the world that Magellan had started. But no single captain so far had actually done the first circumnavigation, rather the crew had (which included Delcano).

For a very different reason, we had the other circumnavigation of the world by Sir Francis Drake of England from December 1577 to September 1580 sponsored by Queen Elizabeth I (the infamous sea passage got his name). The relations between England and Spain had grown sour, and Drake was commissioned by the queen to attack and plunder the Spanish treasure ships sailing the Pacific, so that the gold and riches looted by them could come to the British Empire. Loot and plunder is what Drake did and then he stored the stolen gold inside his trusted vessel, the Golden Hinde. In his voyage, which started from Plymouth in England, he had sailed past Brazil, Argentina and crossed into the Pacific via Cape Horn and then went towards present day Indonesia. Finally on the way back the ship was navigated to Africa’s Cape of Good Hope after which it headed north along the African west coast and finally reached home in Plymouth. Thereby he became the first single captain to complete the circumnavigation of the globe and earned a knighthood from the queen aboard his ship. The replica of the ship, Golden Hinde, is proudly displayed on the Thames waterfront in London near the Tower Bridge and it’s a must see.

Few other great explorers did the circumnavigations of the globe after this such as Thomas Cavendish, William Dampier (three times), George Anson and James Cook and all became heroes back then as they are now as well. There was one who decided that since he came too late to the circumnavigation party, he would set a different record – he would go around the world in record time. And so John Byron completed his circumnavigation in less than 2 years. This truly was the golden age of exploration, even if the gold was at times tainted by blood.

Nitin Gairola is from Dehradun and has travelled the natural world more than almost any Indian ever. He has set world travel records certified by India Book of Records, has written for Lonely Planet, and holds National Geographic conservation certifications. He is also a senior corporate executive in an MNC and in his early days, used to be a published poet as well. More than anything else, he loves his Himalayan home. Reach him at: www.facebook.com/MostTravelledIndian/ ; www.instagram.com/MostTravelled_Indian/