M01 GOLD0585 06 SE CH01 - Pearsoncatalogue.pearsoned.ca/assets/hip/us/hip_us_pearsonhighered/samp… · M01_GOLD0585_06_SE_CH01.QXD 8/17/10 9:14 AM Page 5. 6 Chapter 1 Worlds Apart

Chapter Outline

Native American Societies before 1492

Hunters, Harvesters, and Traders

The Development of Agriculture

Nonfarming Societies

Mesoamerican Civilizations

North America’s Diverse Cultures

The Caribbean Islanders

West African Societies

Geographical and Political Differences

Family Structure and Religion

European Merchants in West Africa andthe Slave Trade

Western Europe on the Eve of Exploration

The Consolidation of Political andMilitary Authority

Religious Conflict and the ProtestantReformation

Contact

The Lure of Discovery

Christopher Columbus and the WestwardRoute to Asia

The Spanish Conquest and Colonization

The Columbian Exchange

Cultural Perceptions and Misperceptions

Competition for a Continent

Early French Efforts in North America

English Attempts in the New World

Conclusion

After a difficult journey of over two hundred miles, theexhausted man arrived at the royal palace in the grand cityof Tenochtitlán. He had hurried all the way from the GulfCoast with important news for the Aztec leader,Moctezuma.

Our lord and king, forgive my boldness. I am from Mictlancuauhtla.

When I went to the shores of the great sea, there was a mountain range or

small mountain floating in the midst of the water, and moving here and there

without touching the shore. My lord, we have never seen the like of this,

although we guard the coast and are always on watch.

[When Moctezuma sent some officials to check on the messenger’s story, theyconfirmed his report.]

Our lord and king, it is true that strange people have come to the shores

of the great sea. They were fishing from a small boat, some with rods and

others with a net. They fished until late and then they went back to their two

great towers and climbed up into them. . . . They have very light skin, much

lighter than ours. They all have long beards, and their hair comes only to

their ears.

Miguel Leon–Portilla, The Broken Spears: The Aztec Account of the Conquest of Mexico (Boston, 1962).

Personal Journeys Online

■ Christopher Columbus, Journal of the First Voyage, October 12, 1492.Account of his first meeting with Caribbean islanders.

■ Martin Frobisher, Account of First Voyage to the New World, 1576.Description of his arrival in Canada and his encounter with native people.

Worlds Apart

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M01_GOLD0585_06_SE_CH01.QXD 8/17/10 9:13 AM Page 2

Mexico: Hernán Cortés is greeted by Montezuma’s messenger in 1519: Mexican Indian painting,16th century.


4 Chapter 1 Worlds Apart

Moctezuma was filled with foreboding when hereceived the messenger’s initial report. Aztec religion placedgreat emphasis on omens and prophecies, which werethought to foreshadow coming events. Several unusualomens had recently occurred—blazing lights in the sky, onetemple struck by lightning, and another that spontaneouslyburst into flames. Now light-skinned strangers appearedoffshore. Aztec spiritual leaders regarded these signs asunfavorable and warned that trouble lay ahead.

The messenger’s journey to Tenochtitlán occurred in1519. The “mountains” he saw were in fact the sails ofEuropean ships, and the strange men were Spanish soldiersunder the command of Hernán Cortés. Like Columbus’svoyage to the Caribbean in 1492, Cortés’s arrival in Mexico isconsidered a key episode in the European discovery of the“New World.” But we might just as accurately view the mes-senger’s entry into the Aztec capital as announcing the nativeMexicans’ discovery of a New World to the east, from whichthe strangers must have come. Neither the Aztecs nor theSpaniards could have foreseen the far-reaching consequencesof these twin discoveries. Before long, a variety of peoples—Native Americans, Africans, and Europeans—who hadpreviously lived worlds apart would come together to createa world that was new to all of them.

This new world reflected the diverse experiences of themany peoples who built it. Improving economic conditionsin the fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries propelledEuropeans overseas to seek new opportunities for tradeand settlement. Spain, Portugal, France, and England com-peted for political, economic, and religious dominationwithin Europe, and their conflict carried over into theAmericas. Native Americans drew upon their familiaritywith the land and its resources, patterns of political and re-ligious authority, and systems of trade and warfare to dealwith the European newcomers. Africans did not come vol-untarily to the Americas but were brought by the Euro-peans to work as slaves. They too would draw on theircultural heritage to cope with a new land and a new, harshcondition of life.

Native American SocietiesBefore 1492In 1492, the year Columbus landed on a tiny Caribbeanisland, perhaps 70 million people—nearly equal to the pop-ulation of Europe at that time—lived on the continents ofNorth and South America, most of them south of the pres-ent border between the United States and Mexico. They

belonged to hundreds of groups, each with its own languageor dialect, history, and way of life. In their own languages,many native groups called themselves “the original people”or “the true men.” Europeans called them “Indians,” follow-ing Columbus’s mistaken first impression that he hadarrived in the East Indies when his ships reached an islandin the Bahamas.

From the start, the original inhabitants of the Americaswere peoples in motion. The first migrants may have arrivedover 40,000 years ago, traveling from central Siberia andslowly making their way to south-ern South America. These people,and subsequent migrants fromEurasia, probably traveled acrossa land bridge that emerged acrosswhat is now the Bering Strait. During the last Ice Age, muchof the earth’s water was frozen in huge glaciers. This processlowered ocean levels, exposing a 600-mile-wide land bridgebetween Asia and America. Recent research examininggenetic and linguistic similarities between Asian and Na-tive American populations suggests that there may alsohave been later migrations. Asian seafarers may havecrossed the Pacific to settle portions of western North andSouth America, while as recently as 8,000 years ago, a finalmigration may have brought Siberians to what is nowAlaska and northern Canada.

Hunters, Harvesters, and TradersThe earliest Americans adapted to an amazing range ofenvironmental conditions, from the frozen Arctic to south-western deserts to dense eastern woodlands. At first, theymainly subsisted by hunting the mammoths, bison, andother large game that roamed throughout North America.Archaeologists working near present-day Clovis, NewMexico, have found carefully crafted spear points—some ofwhich may be over 13,000 years old. Such efficient toolspossibly contributed to overhunting, which, along withclimate change, led to the extinction of many large gamespecies. By about 9000 B.C.E., the world’s climate began togrow warmer, turning grasslands into deserts and reducingthe animals’ food supply. Humans too had to find other foodsources.

Between roughly 8000 B.C.E. and 1500 B.C.E., NativeAmerican societies changed in important ways. Native pop-ulations steadily increased, and men and women assumedmore specialized roles in their villages. Men did most of thehunting and fishing, activities that required travel. Womenremained closer to home, harvesting and preparing wildplant foods and caring for children.

Across the continent, native communities also devel-oped complex networks of trade. They not only exchangedmaterial goods, but also marriage partners, laborers, ideas,and religious practices. Trade networks sometimes ex-tended over great distances. Valuable goods, such as copperfrom the Great Lakes area and shells from the Gulf of

Read the Documentat www.myhistorylab.comPima Creation Story


Worlds Apart Chapter 1 5

Mexico, have been discovered at archaeological sites farfrom their places of origin. Ideas about death and the after-life also passed between groups. So too did certain burialpractices, such as the placing of valued possessions in thegrave along with the deceased person’s body. In some areas,the increasing complexity of exchange networks, as well ascompetition for resources, encouraged concentrations ofpolitical power. Chiefs might manage trade relations andconduct diplomacy for groups of villages rather than for asingle community.

The Development of AgricultureNo Native American adaptation was more momentous thanthe domestication of certain plants and the development offarming. Scientists working in northern Peru have discov-ered seeds from domesticated squash that are almost10,000 years old. Inhabitants of central Mexico begangrowing squash and corn between 9,000 and 10,000 yearsago. Agriculture in the Americas may thus have developedas early as it did in the Middle East, Southeast Asia, China,and India. Native Americans may have turned to farmingwhen population growth threatened to outrun the wildfood supply. Women, with their knowledge of wild plants,probably discovered how to save seeds and cultivate them,becoming the world’s first farmers.

Farming in the Americas initially supplemented a dietstill largely dependent on hunting and gathering, butgradually assumed a greater role. In addition to maize, themain crop in both South and North America, farmers inMexico, Central America, and the Peruvian Andes culti-vated peppers, beans, pumpkins, squash, avocados, sweetand white potatoes (native to the Peruvian highlands), andtomatoes. Mexican farmers also grew cotton. Maize and

◆ How did geography shape the develop-ment of regional cultures in NorthAmerica prior to 1492?

◆ What were the key characteristics ofWest African society?

◆ How did events in Europe both shapeand inspire exploration of the Americas?

◆ What were the biological consequencesof contact between Europeans andNative Americans?

◆ Why did early French and Englishefforts at colonization falter?

KE

Y T

OP

ICS

C H R O N O L O G Y

c. 40,000–8000 B.C.E.

Ancestors of Native Americans cross fromAsia to the Americas.

c. 9000 B.C.E. Extinction of large land mammals in North America.

c. 8000 B.C.E. Beginnings of agriculture in the PeruvianAndes and Mesoamerica.

c. 1500 B.C.E. Earliest mound-building culture begins.c. 500 B.C.E.–400 C.E.

Adena-Hopewell mound-building culture.

c. 700–1600C.E.

Rise of West African empires.

c. 900 First mounds built at Cahokia.Ancestral Puebloan expansion.

c. 1000 Spread of Islam in West Africa.c. 1000–1015 First Viking voyages to North America.c. 1000–1500 Last mound-building culture, the

Mississippian.c. 1290s Ancestral Puebloan dispersal into smaller

villages.1400–1600 Renaissance in Europe.1430s Beginnings of Portuguese slave trade in

West Africa.1492 End of reconquista in Spain.

Columbus’s first voyage.1494 Treaty of Tordesillas.1497 John Cabot visits Nova Scotia and

Newfoundland.1497–1499 Vasco da Gama sails around Africa to

reach India.1517 Protestant Reformation begins in

Germany.1519–1521 Hernán Cortés conquers the Aztec

empire.1532–1533 Francisco Pizarro conquers the Inca

empire.1534–1542 Jacques Cartier explores eastern Canada

for France.1540–1542 Coronado explores southwestern North

America.1542–1543 Roberval’s failed colony in Canada.1558 Elizabeth I becomes queen of England.1565 Spanish establish outpost at St. Augustine

in Florida.1560s–1580s English renew attempts to conquer

Ireland.1587 Founding of “Lost Colony” of Roanoke.1598 Spanish found colony at New Mexico.



bean cultivation spread from Mexico in a wide arc to thenorth and east. Peoples in what is now the southwesternUnited States began farming between 1500 and 500 B.C.E.,and by 200 C.E., farmers were tilling the soil in present-dayGeorgia and Florida.

Wherever agriculture took hold, important socialchanges followed. Populations grew, because farming pro-duced a more secure food supply than did hunting and gath-ering. Permanent villages appeared as farmers settled neartheir fields. In central Mexico, agriculture eventually sus-tained the populations of large cities. Trade in agriculturalsurpluses flowed through networks of exchange. In manyIndian societies, women’s status improved because of theirrole as the principal farmers. Even religious beliefs adaptedto the increasing importance of farming. In describing theorigins of their people, Pueblo Indians of the Southwestcompared their emergence from the underworld to a maizeplant sprouting from the earth.

The adoption of agriculture further enhanced the diver-sity of Native American societies that developed over cen-turies within broad regions, or culture areas (see Map 1–1).Within each area, inhabitants shared basic patterns ofsubsistence and social organization, largely reflecting thenatural environment to which they had adapted. Most, butnot all, of them eventually relied upon farming.

Nonfarming SocietiesAgriculture was impossible in the challenging environmentof the Arctic and subarctic. There, nomadic bands of Inuitsand Aleuts moved seasonally to fish or hunt whales, seals,and other sea animals and, in the brief summers, gather

wild berries. Farther inland, the Crees andother peoples followed migrating herds ofcaribou and moose.

Along the Northwest Coast and theColumbia River Plateau, one of the mostdensely populated areas of North America,abundant natural resources permitted na-tive peoples to prosper without farming.Local rivers teemed with salmon and otherfish, while the forests abounded in gameand edible plants. Among such groups asthe Kwakiutls and Chinooks, extendedfamilies lived in large communal houses lo-cated in villages of up to several hundredresidents. Rulers displayed their promi-nence most conspicuously during pot-latches, or ceremonies in which wealth wasdistributed among guests in order to cele-brate the power of the hosts.

Farther south, in present-day California,hunter-gatherers once lived in smaller vil-lages, which usually adjoined oak groveswhere Indians gathered acorns as animportant food source. Nomadic hunting

bands in the Great Basin, where the climate was warm and dry,learned to survive on the region’s limited resources. In what isnow Utah and western Colorado, the Utes and other groupsfished; hunted large game such as elk, bison, and mountainsheep; and gathered pinyon nuts, seeds, and wild berries.

Mesoamerican CivilizationsMesoamerica, the birthplace of agriculture in North America,extends from central Mexico into Central America. A seriesof complex, literate, urban cultures emerged in this regionbeginning around 1200 B.C.E. The Olmecs, who flourishedon Mexico’s Gulf Coast from about 1200 to 400 B.C.E., andtheir successors in the region, built cities featuring largepyramids, developed religious practices that includedhuman sacrifice, and devised calendars and writing systems.Two of the most prominent Mesoamerican civilizationsthat followed the Olmecs were the Mayans in the Yucatánand Guatemala and the Aztecs of Teotihuacán in centralMexico.

The Mayans. Mayan civilization reached its greatestglory between about 150 and 900 C.E. in the southern Yu-catán, creating Mesoamerica’s most advanced writing andcalendrical systems and developing a sophisticated mathe-matics that included the concept of zero. The Mayans of thesouthern Yucatán suffered a decline after 900, but therewere still many thriving Mayan centers in the northern Yu-catán when Europeans arrived in the Americas. The greatcity of Teotihuacán dominated central Mexico from thefirst century to the eighth century C.E., and influencedmuch of Mesoamerica through trade and conquest.

Women were the principal farmers in most Native American societies, growing corn, beans,and other crops in fields cleared by Indian men. Many of these New World foods would betransported across the Atlantic to become important to Old World diets.


0

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Arctic

Subarctic

Northwest Coast

Plateau

Great Basin

California

Southwest

Plains

Eastern Woodlands (Northeast)

Eastern Woodlands (Southeast)

Mesoamerica

Circum-Caribbean

MONTAGNAIS-NASKAPIS

ESKIMOS

CREES

BEOTHUKS

MICMACS

ABENAKIS

MASSACHUSETTSWAMPANOAGSNARRAGANSETTSPEQUOTS

SUSQUEHANNOCKS

IROQUOIS

DELAWARES

POWHATANS

TUSCARORAS

CATAWBAS

CREEKS

APALACHEES

TIMUCUAS

CALUSAS

AZTECS

CIBONEYS

GUANAHATABEYS CIBONEYS

TAINOS

COAHUILTECS

TARASCOS

HUASTECS

OTOMÍS

TOTONACSNAHUATLS

MIXTECS

ZAPOTECS

LENCASPAYAS

MISKITOS

NICARAOS

CHOCTAWS

CHICKASAWS

CADDOS

OSAGESKIOWAS

UTESPAIUTES

WASHOS

YUROKSMODOCS

POMOS

YOKUTS

CHUMASHES

LUISEÑOS

KAROKS

CHINOOKS

NOOTKASSALISHES

SHUSWAPSTHOMPSONS

SANPOILS

KWAKIUTLS

HAIDAS CARRIERS

BEAVERS

SLAVEYS

HARES

DOGRIBSESKIMOS

ESKIMOS

KUTCHINS

HANS

TANANAS

INGALIKS

KASKAS

TUTCHONES

CHIPEWYANS

ZUNISPAPAGOSMOHAVES

WALAPAIS

PUEBLOS

APACHES

HOPIS NAVAJOS

ARAPAHOS

PAWNEES

CHEYENNES

ARIKARAS

MANDANSCROWS

NEZPERCÉS

FLATHEADS

YAKIMAS

BLACKFEET

ASSINIBOINSGROS

VENTRES

SAUKS

SIOUX

ILLINOISMIAMIS

ERIESFOXES

POTAWATOMIS

SHAWNEES

COMANCHES

CHEROKEES

NATCHEZ

HURONS

SARCEES

SHOSHONES

TSIM

SHIANS

TAR

AH

UM

ARAS

TEPEHU

ANS

PIMAS

CO

CH

IMIS

HUIC

HOLS

M

AY

AN

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I S L A N D A R A W A K S C A R

IB

S

CO

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C A R I B B E A N S E A

Lak

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Mic

higa

n

Rio Grande

GUAYMIS

CUNAS

CH

OC

OS

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AJI

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Mississippi

Bering Strait

GULFOF

MEXICO

P A C I F I C

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O C E A N

Columbia River

YUCATÁNLake Texcoco

River

Ohio River

SIE

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A N

EV

AD

A MTS.

MAP 1–1 North American Culture Areas, c. 1500Over the course of centuries, Indian peoples in North America developed distinctive cultures suited to the environments in which theylived. Inhabitants of each culture area shared basic patterns of subsistence, craft work, and social organization. Most, but not all, Indianpeoples combined farming with hunting and gathering.

7



Acoma Pueblo has perched atop this 300-foot-tall mesa since the twelfth century. Now used mainly for ceremonial purposes, Acoma was once athriving Ancestral Puebloan village.

The Aztecs. Some 200 years after the fall of Teotihuacán,the Toltecs, a warrior people, rose to prominence, dominat-ing central Mexico from about 900 to 1100. In the wake ofthe Toltec collapse, the Aztecs migrated from the northinto the Valley of Mexico and built a great empire that sooncontrolled much of Mesoamerica. The magnificent Azteccapital, Tenochtitlán, was a city of great plazas, magnificenttemples and palaces, and busy marketplaces. Built on is-lands in the middle of Lake Texcoco, it was connected to themainland by four causeways. In 1492, Tenochtitlán washome to some 200,000 people, making it one of the largestcities in the world at the time.

The great pyramid in Tenochtitlán’s principal templecomplex was the center of Aztec religious life. Here Aztecpriests sacrificed human victims—by cutting open their chestsand removing their still-beating hearts—to offer to the gods.Human sacrifice had been part of Mesoamerican religion sincethe time of the Olmecs. People believed that such ceremoniespleased the gods and prevented them from destroying theearth. The Aztecs, however, practiced sacrifice on a muchlarger scale than ever before. Hundreds, even thousands, ofvictims died in ceremonies that sometimes lasted for days.

The Aztec empire expanded through military conquest,driven by a quest for sacrificial victims and tribute paymentsof gold, food, and handcrafted goods from hundreds of sub-ject communities. But as the empire grew, it became increas-ingly vulnerable to internal division. Neighboring peoplessubmitted to the Aztecs out of fear rather than loyalty.

North America’s Diverse CulturesNorth of Mexico, the development of a drought-resistanttype of maize around 400 B.C.E. enabled a series of culturessharing certain characteristics with Mesoamerica to

emerge. Beginning about 300 B.C.E., the Hohokams settledin southern Arizona and devised elaborate irrigation sys-tems that allowed them to harvest two crops of corn, beans,and squash each year. Artisans wove cotton cloth and madegoods reflecting Mesoamerican artistic styles out of shell,turquoise, and clay. Trade networks linked the Hohokams topeople living as far away as California and Mexico. Theirculture endured for over a thousand years but mysteriouslydisappeared by 1450.

Ancestral Puebloans. Early in the first century C.E.,Ancestral Puebloan peoples (sometimes called Anasazis)began to settle in farming communities where the bordersof present-day Colorado, Utah, Arizona, and New Mexicomeet. Scarce rainfall, routed through dams and hillside ter-races, watered the crops. Ancestral Puebloans originallylived in villages, or pueblos (pueblo is the Spanish word for“village”) built on mesas and canyon floors. In NewMexico’s Chaco Canyon, perhaps as many as 15,000 peopledwelled in a dozen large towns and hundreds of outlyingvillages. The largest town, Pueblo Bonito, covered threeacres and contained about 1,200 inhabitants. Its mainstructure, a four-story-tall complex of over 800 rooms andnumerous kivas, or ceremonial chambers, served as one ofseveral centers of production and exchange throughoutthe area. But after about 1200, villagers began carvingmultistoried stone houses into canyon walls, dwellingsthat could only be reached by difficult climbs up steepcliffs and along narrow ledges. Warfare and climate changemay have worked together to force the Puebloans intothese precarious homes.

Around 1200, the climate of the Southwest grew colder,making it more difficult to grow enough to feed the large



population. Food scarcity may have set village againstvillage and encouraged attacks by outsiders. Villagersprobably resorted to cliff dwellings for protection as

violence spread in the region. By1300, survivors abandoned thecliff dwellings and dispersed intosmaller villages along the RioGrande. Their descendants in-

clude the Hopis and Zunis, as well as other Puebloan peo-ples in the desert Southwest. In many of these villages, menfarmed—in contrast to the predominant pattern of womenfarmers elsewhere in Native America—raising corn, beans,squash, and sunflowers. They established new trade linkswith nomadic hunting peoples, including the Apaches andNavajos, who exchanged buffalo meat and hides for Pueblocorn, cotton blankets, pottery, and other goods.

Plains Indians. The Great Plains of the continent’s inte-rior were much less densely settled than the desert South-west. Mandans, Pawnees, and other groups settled alongriver valleys, where women farmed and men hunted bison.Plains Indians moved frequently, seeking more fertile landor better hunting. Wherever they went, they traded skins,food, and obsidian (a volcanic glass used for tools andweapons) with other native peoples.

Mound-building cultures. As agriculture spread to theEastern Woodlands, a vast territory extending from theMississippi Valley to the Atlantic seaboard, several “mound-building” societies—named for the large earthworks theirmembers constructed—developed in the Ohio and Missis-sippi Valleys. The oldest flourished in Louisiana between1500 and 700 B.C.E. The members of theAdena-Hopewell culture, which appearedin the Ohio Valley between 500 B.C.E. and400 C.E., built hundreds of mounds, oftenin the shapes of humans, birds, and ser-pents. Most were grave sites, where peoplewere buried with valuable goods, includingobjects made from materials obtainedthrough long-distance trade.

The last mound-building culture, theMississippian, emerged between 1000 and1500 in the Mississippi Valley. Mississip-pian farmers raised enough food to supportsizable populations and major urban cen-ters. The largest city by far was Cahokia,located near present-day St. Louis in a fer-tile floodplain with access to the majorriver systems of the continent’s interior.By 1250, Cahokia had perhaps 20,000residents, making it nearly as large as me-dieval London and the largest Americancity north of Mexico. Its political leaderscollected tribute, redistributed goods,

coordinated trade and diplomacy, and mobilized laborers tobuild large structures and earthworks. Cahokia dominatedthe Mississippi Valley, linked by trade to dozens of villagesin the midwestern region.

Mississippian culture began to decline in the thirteenthcentury, perhaps due to an ecological crisis. Cahokia’s pop-ulation may have outstripped its food supply, and a series ofhot, dry summers created further hardship. By 1400, mostof Cahokia’s residents had dispersed into scattered farmingvillages.

What followed in the Eastern Woodlands region was acentury or more of warfare and political instability. In thevacuum left by Cahokia’s decline, other groups sought to ex-ert more power. In the Northeast, the Iroquois and Huronsmoved from dispersed settlements into fortified villages.Both the Hurons and the Iroquois formed confederaciesthat were intended to diminish internal conflicts andincrease their collective spiritual strength. Among theIroquois, five separate nations—the Mohawks, Oneidas,Onondagas, Cayugas, and Senecas—joined to create theGreat League of Peace and Power around the year 1450.Similar developments occurred in the Southeast, wherechronic instability led to regional alliances and shifting cen-ters of trade and political power. One such center atEtowah, in northwestern Georgia, prospered until about1400, at which point it gave way to a new chiefdom at Coosa.

Eastern Woodlands peoples were the first to encounterEnglish explorers, and later, English settlers, at the start ofthe seventeenth century. By that point these native peoplesrelied on a mixture of agriculture and hunting, fishing, andgathering for their subsistence. They lived in villages with afew hundred residents, with greater densities of settlement

at www.myhistorylab.comIndians of the Rio Grande(1528–1536)

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This artist’s rendering, based on archaeological evidence, suggests the size and magnificence ofthe Mississippian city of Cahokia. By the thirteenth century, it was as populous as medievalLondon and served as a center of trade for the vast interior of North America.



in the south (where a warmer climate and longer growingseason prevailed) than in the north.Although early colonistssometimes described these Indian groups as nomadic, theyin fact inhabited semipermanent villages and moved onlywhen declining soil fertility or, in some instances, warfarecompelled them to shift location. For the most part, theirprincipal villages were near the coast or along rivers, wherethe greatest diversity of natural resources could be found.

The Caribbean IslandersThe Caribbean islands were peopled by mainland dwellerswho began moving to the islands around 5000 B.C.E. Ances-tors of the Tainos probably came from what is nowVenezuela. The Guanahatabeys of western Cuba originatedin Florida, and the Caribs of the easternmost islands movedfrom Brazil’s Orinoco Valley. Surviving at first by huntingand gathering, island peoples began farming perhaps in thefirst century C.E. They raised manioc, sweet potatoes,maize, squash, beans, peppers, peanuts, and pineapple onclearings made in the tropical forests. Canoes carried tradegoods throughout the Caribbean, as well as to Mesoamericaand coastal South America.

By 1492, as many as 4 million people may have inhabitedthe Caribbean islands. Powerful chiefs ruled over villages,conducted war and diplomacy, and controlled the distribu-tion of food and other goods obtained as tribute from vil-lagers. Elite islanders were easily recognized by their fineclothing, bright feather headdresses, and golden ear andnose ornaments—items that eventually attracted the atten-tion of European visitors.

Long before Europeans reached North America, thecontinent’s inhabitants had witnessed centuries of dynamicchange. Empires rose and fell, and new ones took theirplace. Large cities flourished and disappeared. Periods ofwarfare occasionally disrupted the lives of thousands of in-dividuals. The Europeans’ arrival, at the end of the fifteenthcentury, coincided with a period of particular instability, asvarious Native American groups competed for dominancein the wake of the collapse of the centralized societies atCahokia and Chaco Canyon. Yet at the same time, NativeAmerican societies experienced important continuities.These included an ability to adapt to widely varying envi-ronmental conditions, the preservation of religious and cer-emonial traditions, and an eagerness to forge relationshipsof exchange with neighboring peoples. Both continuitieswith past experience and more recent circumstances ofpolitical change would shape the ways native peoplesresponded to the European newcomers.

West African SocietiesIn the three centuries after 1492, six out of seven peoplewho crossed the Atlantic to the Americas were not Europeansbut Africans. They came from the world’s second-largest

continent and the one with the longest record of humanhabitation, where the ancestors of modern humans (Homosapiens) appeared 130,000 or more years ago. Like the Amer-icas, Africa had witnessed the rise of many ancient and di-verse cultures (see Map 1–2). They ranged from thesophisticated Egyptian civilization that developed in theNile Valley over 5,000 years ago to the powerful twelfth-century chiefdoms of Zimbabwe to the West African em-pires that flourished in the time of Columbus and Cortés.The vast majority of Africans who came to the Americasafter 1492 arrived as slaves, transported by Europeans eagerto exploit their labor. Although they were involuntary im-migrants, Africans could draw upon their ancient culturalheritages to help shape the New World in which they foundthemselves.

Geographical and Political DifferencesMost African immigrants to the Americas came from thecontinent’s western regions. Extending from the southernedge of the Sahara Desert towardthe equator and inland for nearly1,000 miles, West Africa was anarea of contrasts. On the whole asparsely settled region, WestAfrica nevertheless contained numerous densely inhabitedcommunities. Many of these settlements clung to thecoast, but several important cities lay well inland. Perhapsthe greatest of these metropolises was Timbuktu, whichhad as many as 70,000 residents in the fifteenth century.At that time, Timbuktu served as the seat of the powerfulSonghai empire and was an important center of trade andgovernment.

The Songhai empire was only the latest in a series ofpowerful West African states. One of the earliest, Ghana,rose to prominence in the eighth century and dominated thearea for nearly 300 years. Its successor, Mali, emerged around1200 and lasted another three cen-turies until a power struggleamong its rulers led to its decline.Songhai, larger and wealthier thanits predecessors, flourished fromaround 1450 until it fell to a Moroccan invasion in 1591.Equivalently large empires did not appear in coastal WestAfrica, although the Asante, Dahomey, Oyo, and Bini king-doms there grew to be quite powerful.And farther south, be-low the Equator, the powerful Kingdom of Kongo expandedthrough the fifteenth century to dominate a large area.

Geographical as well as political differences marked theinland and coastal regions. In the vast grasslands of the in-terior, people raised livestock and cultivated millet andsorghum. Rice also served as an important food crop. In the1500s, Europeans brought an Asian variety to add to indige-nous African rice strains. On the coast—where rain fallsnearly every day—people grew yams, bananas, and various

at www.myhistorylab.comAfrica Climate Regions andEarly Sites

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at www.myhistorylab.comGhana and Its People in theMid-Eleventh Century

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0

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250 500 750 1,000 Miles

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S P A I NPORTUGAL

GERMAN STATES

H O L YR O M A NE M P I R E

DENMARK

SWITZ.

NETHERLANDS

ARAGON

CASTILE

PRUSSIA

R U S S I A

P O L A N D

O T T O M A N E M P I R E

Fez

Ceuta

Wargla

Paris

Geneva

London

AmsterdamDublin

Granada

Rome

Genoa

Palos

Venice

Constantinople

Ghadames

Katsina

Suakin

Agades

Sijilmassa

Tamanrasset

Terhazza

Arguin

Timbuktu

Gao

Djenné

Tuat

Ghat

Murzuk

Bilma

Cairo

Alexandria

Kano

Sennar

Elmina

Benin

São Tomé

Cape VerdeIslands

CanaryIslands

Madeira

Azores

Windw

ard Coast

Ibos

YorubasMendes

WolofsTEKRUR

SEGU

ASANTE

AKAN

DAHOMEYOYO

NUPE

BORNUWADAI

LakeChad

DARFURFUNJHAUSA

STATES

BENIN

MOSSISTATES

MO

R O C C O

MALISENEGAMBIA

E G Y P T

A L G I E R S

GHANA W E S T E R N S U D A N

C E N T R A L S U D A N

NIL

OT IC

SUDAN

S A H A R A

Niger R

iver

G

rain Coast

Ivory Coast Gold Coast Slave Coast

G U I N E A C O A S T

A T L A N T I C

O C E A N

NORTHSEA

B A L T I C

SE

A

M E D I T E R RA N

E A N S E A

Nile R

iver

BLACK SEA

To India

AF

RI

CA

N O R T H

Tribes

Kingdoms

Sahel

Trans-Saharan trade routes

Venice-India trade route

Ibos

Boundaries of theHoly Roman Empire

S

O

NG

H A I

MAP 1–2 West Africa and Europe in 1492Before Columbus’s voyage, Europeans knew little about the world beyond the Mediterranean basin and the coast of West Africa.Muslim merchants from North Africa largely controlled European traders’ access to African gold and other materials.

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kinds of beans and peas in forest clearings. They also keptsheep, goats, and poultry.

Artisans and merchants. West Africans excelled asskilled artisans and metalworkers. Smiths in Benin pro-duced intricate bronze sculptures, and Asante craftsmendesigned distinctive miniature gold weights. West Africansmiths also used their skills to forge weapons, attesting tothe frequent warfare between West African states.

Trade networks linked inland and coastal states, andlong-distance commercial connections tied West Africa tosouthern Europe and the Middle East. West African mer-chants exchanged locally mined gold with traders fromNorth Africa for salt, a commodity so rare in West Africathat it was sometimes literally worth its weight in gold.North African merchants also bought West African pepper,leather, and ivory. The wealth generated by this trans-Saharan trade contributed to the rise of the Songhai andearlier empires.

Farming and gender roles. Most West Africans werefarmers, whose lives were defined by a daily round of work,family duties, and worship. West African men and womenshared agricultural tasks. Men prepared fields for planting,while women cultivated and harvested the crops. Men alsohunted and, in the grassland regions, herded cattle. Womenin the coastal areas owned and cared for other livestock, in-cluding goats and sheep. West African women regularlytraded goods, including the crops they grew, in local marketsand were thus essential to the vitality of local economies.

Family Structure and ReligionFamily connections were exceedingly important to WestAfricans, helping to define each person’s place in society. Chil-dren were especially cherished; one Yoruba proverb statedthat “Without children you are naked.” High rates of infantand child mortality—attributable in large part to a harsh dis-ease environment—made offspring all the more precious, forparents depended on their children for labor and for supportin old age. In some regions, men who could afford to do so hadmore than one wife, thus increasing their chances of havingsurviving offspring. While ties between parents and childrenwere of central importance, West Africans also emphasizedtheir links with aunts, uncles, cousins, and grandparents.Groups of families formed clans that further extended an in-dividual’s kin ties within the village.

Religious beliefs magnified the powerful influence offamily on African life. Ideas and practices focused onthemes of fertility, prosperity, health, and social harmony.Because many West Africans believed that their ancestorsacted as mediators between the worlds of the living and thedead, they held elaborate funerals for deceased membersand performed public rituals at their grave sites. Such ritu-als helped keep the memory of ancestors alive for youngergenerations.

West Africans believed that spiritual forces suffusedthe natural world, and they performed ceremonies to ensurethe spirits’ goodwill. Medicine men and women used ritualsto protect people from evil spirits and sorcerers. Religiousceremonies were held in sacred places—often near water—but not in buildings that Europeans recognized as churches.West Africans preserved their faith through oral traditions,not written texts.

Islam began to take root in West Africa as early asthe tenth century, introduced by Muslim traders andsoldiers from North Africa. By the fifteenth century,the cities of Timbuktu and Djenné had become cen-ters of Islamic learning, at-tracting students from as faraway as southern Europe. Urbandwellers, especially merchants,

at www.myhistorylab.comMuslim Reform in Songhai(1500)

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Craftsmen from the West African kingdom of Benin wererenowned for their remarkable bronze sculptures. This intricatebronze plaque depicts four African warriors in full military dress.The two tiny figures in the background may be Portuguese soldiers,who first arrived in Benin in the late fifteenth century.

Benin bronze plaque. National Museum of African Art,Smithsonian Institution, Washington, DC, U.S.A. AldoTutino/Art Resource, NY.



were more likely to convert to the new religion, as weresome rulers. Farmers, however, accustomed to religiousrituals that focused on agricultural fertility, tended to resistIslamic influence more strongly or adopt religious practicesthat mingled Islamic and traditional beliefs.

European Merchants in West Africa and the Slave TradeBefore the fifteenth century, Europeans knew little aboutAfrica beyond its Mediterranean coast. Spain, parts ofwhich had been under Islamic rule since the eighth century,had stronger ties to North Africa than did most of Europe.But Christian merchants from other European lands hadtraded for centuries with Muslims in the North Africanports. When stories of West African gold reached Europeantraders, they tried to move deeper into the continent. Butthey encountered powerful Muslim merchants intent onmonopolizing the gold trade.

The kingdom of Portugal sought to circumvent thisMuslim monopoly. Portuguese forces conquered Ceuta inMorocco and gained a foothold on the continent in 1415. Be-cause this outpost did not provide direct access to thesources of gold, Portuguese mariners began exploring theWest African coast. They established trading posts alongthe way, where they exchanged horses, clothing, wine, lead,iron, and steel for African gold, grain, animal skins, cotton,pepper, and camels.

By the 1430s, the Portuguese had discovered perhaps thegreatest source of wealth they could extract from Africa—slaves. A vigorous market in African slaves had existed in

southern Europe since the middle of the fourteenth century,and within West Africa itself for centuries. Chronic under-population in many parts of West Africa had led to the devel-opment of slavery as a way to maintain control over scarceand valuable laborers. African law recognized slaves, ratherthan land, as the main form of private property. Most slaveswithin Africa lost their freedom because they were capturedin war, but others had been kidnapped or were enslaved aspunishment for a crime. First the Portuguese, and later otherEuropeans, exploited rivalries among various West Africanstates to encourage them to take war captives who could besold into an expanding transatlantic slave trade. Virtually allof the African slaves who ended up in the New World hadfirst been enslaved by fellow Africans.

European visitors who observed African slaves in theirhomeland often described them as “slaves in name only” be-cause they were subject to so little coercion.African slaves atwork in the fields appeared little different from other farm-ers. Slaves were also employed as soldiers and administra-tors, fulfilling important duties and enjoying considerablefreedom in their daily routines. Slavery in Africa was notnecessarily a permanent status and did not automatically ap-ply to the slaves’ children.African merchants who sold slavesto European purchasers had no reason to suspect that thoseslaves would be treated any differently by their new owners.

Africans caught in the web of the transatlantic slavetrade, however, entered a much harsher world. Separatedfrom the kinfolk who meant so much to them, isolated froma familiar landscape, and hard-pressed to sustain spiritualand cultural traditions in a new environment, Africans faced

daunting challenges as they journeyedacross the ocean and entered into the his-tory of the New World.

Western Europe on the Eve of ExplorationWhen Columbus sailed from Spain in1492, he left a continent that was recover-ing from the devastating warfare and dis-ease of the fourteenth century and wasabout to embark on the devastating reli-gious conflicts of the sixteenth. Between1337 and 1453, England and France had ex-hausted each other in a series of conflictsknown as the Hundred Years’ War. And be-tween 1347 and 1351, an epidemic known asthe Black Death (bubonic plague, and per-haps in some areas a pneumonic form ofthe disease as well) wreaked havoc on aEuropean population already sufferingfrom persistent malnutrition. Perhaps athird of all Europeans died, with resultsthat were felt for more than a century.

Elmina Castle, located on the coast of what is now Ghana, was founded by the Portuguese in1482 as a trading post. In 1637, the Dutch West India Company seized the castle and convertedfor use in the slave trade.



The plague left Europe with far fewer workers, a resultthat contributed to southern Europeans’ interest in theAfrican slave trade. To help the economy recover, the sur-vivors learned to be more efficient and rely on technologicalimprovements. Farmers tilled their most fertile land, and arti-sans adopted labor-saving techniques to increase productivity.Metalworkers built larger furnaces with bellows driven bywater power. Shipbuilders redesigned vessels with steeringmechanisms that could be managed by smaller crews. Innova-tions in banking, accounting, and insurance also fostered eco-nomic recovery. Although prosperity was distributedunevenly among social classes, on the whole, Europe had astronger, more productive economy in 1500 than ever before.

In much of Western Europe, economic improvementencouraged an extraordinary cultural movement known asthe Renaissance, a “rebirth” of interest in the classical civi-lizations of ancient Greece and Rome. The Renaissanceoriginated in the city-states of Italy, where a prosperous andeducated urban class promoted learning and artistic expres-sion. Wealthy townspeople joined princes in becoming pa-trons of the arts, offering financial support to painters,sculptors, architects, writers, and musicians.

The daily lives of most Europeans, however, remaineduntouched by intellectual and artistic developments. MostEuropeans resided in agricultural communities that oftendiffered in important ways from Native American and WestAfrican societies. In European societies, men performedmost of the heavy work of farming, while women focusedon household production of such goods as butter, cheese,and cloth, as well as on caring for the family. Europeanslived in states organized into more rigid hierarchies thancould be found in most parts of North America or WestAfrica, with the population divided into distinct classes. Atthe top were the monarchs who, along with the next rank ofaristocrats, dominated government and owned most of theland, receiving rents and labor services from farmers andrural artisans. Next, in descending order, came prosperousgentry families, independent landowners, and, at the bot-tom, landless peasants and laborers.

European society was also patriarchal, with men domi-nating political and economic life. Europe’s rulers were,with few exceptions, men, and men controlled the CatholicChurch. Only men (or, in rare instances, widows) couldown property. According to an ideal not always upheld,Europeans thought that every man should be “as a king inhis own house,” ruling over his wife, children, and servants.

The Consolidation of Political and Military AuthorityBy the end of the fifteenth century, a measure of stability re-turned to the countries about to embark on overseas ex-pansion. The monarchs of Spain, France, and Englandsuccessfully asserted royal authority over their previouslyfragmented realms, creating strong state bureaucracies to

control political rivals. They gave special trading privilegesto merchants to gain their support, creating links thatwould later prove important in financing overseas expedi-tions. Spain and Portugal negotiated an end to a long-running dispute about the succession to the throne ofCastile, one of Spain’s largest kingdoms.

The consolidation of military power went hand in handwith the strengthening of political authority. Portugal de-veloped a strong navy to defend its seaborne merchants.Louis XI of France commanded a standing army, and Ferdi-nand of Spain created a palace guard to use against potentialopponents. Before overseas expansion began, Europeanmonarchs exerted military force to extend their authoritycloser to home. Louis XI and his successors used warfareand intermarriage with the ruling families of nearbyprovinces to extend French influence. In the early sixteenthcentury, England’s Henry VIII sent soldiers to conquerIreland. And the Spain of 1492 was forged from the successfulconclusion of the reconquista (“reconquest”) of territoryfrom Muslim control.

Muslim invaders from North Africa first entered Spainin 711 and their descendants ruled much of the IberianPeninsula (which includes Spain and Portugal) for centuries.Beginning in the mid-eleventh century, Christian armiesembarked on a long effort to reclaim the region. By 1450,only the southern tip of Spain remained under Muslim con-trol. After the marriage of Ferdinand of Aragon and Isabellaof Castile in 1469 united Spain’s two principal kingdoms,their combined forces completed the reconquista. Granada,the last Muslim stronghold, fell in 1492, shortly beforeColumbus set out on his first voyage.

Religious Conflict and the Protestant ReformationEven as these rulers sought to unify their realms, religiousconflicts began to tear Europe apart. For more than1,000 years, Catholic Christianity had united WesternEuropeans in one faith. By the sixteenth century, theCatholic Church had accumulated enormous wealth andpower. The pope wielded influence not only as the church’sspiritual leader but also as the political ruler of parts of Italy.The church owned considerable property throughoutEurope. In reaction to this growing influence, many Chris-tians, especially in northern Europe, began to criticize thepopes and the church itself for worldliness and abuse of power.

In 1517, a German monk, Martin Luther, invited opendebate on a set of propositions critical of church practicesand doctrines. Luther believed that the church had becometoo insistent on the performance of good works, such ascharitable donations or other actions intended to pleaseGod. He called for a return to what he understood to be thepurer beliefs of the early church, emphasizing that salvationcame not by good deeds but only by faith in God. With thehelp of the newly invented printing press, his ideas spread



widely, inspiring a challenge to the Catholic Church thatcame to be known as the Reformation.

When the Catholic Church refused to compromise,Luther and other critics withdrew to form their own reli-gious organizations. Luther urged people to take responsi-bility for their own spiritual growth by reading the Bible,which he translated for the first time into German. Whatstarted as a religious movement, however, quickly acquiredan important political dimension.

Sixteenth-century Germany was a fragmented regionof small kingdoms and principalities. They were officiallypart of a larger Catholic political entity known as the HolyRoman Empire, but many German princes were discon-tented with imperial authority. Many of these princes alsosupported Luther. When the Holy Roman Empire underCharles V (who was also king of Spain) tried to silence them,the reformist princes protested. From that point on, theseprinces—and all Europeans who supported religiousreform—became known as Protestants.

The Protestant movement took a more radical turn un-der the influence of the French reformer John Calvin, whoemphasized the doctrine of predestination. Calvin main-tained that an all-powerful and all-knowing God chose atthe moment of creation which humans would be saved andwhich would be damned. Nothing a person could do wouldalter that spiritual destiny. Once the ideas of Luther andCalvin began to spread in Europe, no one could contain thepowerful Protestant impulse. In succeeding years, othergroups formed, split, and split again, increasing Europe’s re-ligious fragmentation.

The Reformation fractured the religiousunity of Western Europe and spawned acentury of warfare unprecedented in itsbloody destructiveness. Protestants foughtCatholics in France and the German states.Popes initiated a “Counter-Reformation” tostrengthen the Catholic Church—in part byinternal reform and in part by persecutingits opponents and reimposing religious con-formity. Europe thus fragmented into war-ring camps just at the moment whenEuropeans were coming to terms with theirdiscovery of America. Some of the key par-ticipants in exploration, such as Spain andPortugal, rejected Protestantism, while oth-ers, including England and the Netherlands,embraced religious reform.

ContactReligious fervor, political ambition, andthe desire for wealth propelled Europeannations into overseas expansion as well as

conflict at home. Portugal, Spain, France, and England com-peted to establish footholds on other continents in an in-tense scramble for riches and dominance. The success ofthese endeavors reflected Europe’s prosperity and a seriesof technological breakthroughs that enabled its mariners tonavigate beyond familiar waters.

By 1600, Spain had emerged as the apparent winneramong the European competitors for New World domi-nance. Its astonishingly wealthy empire included vast territo-ries in Central and South America. The conquerors of thisempire attributed their success to their military superiorityand God’s approval of their imperial ambitions. In reality, itwas the result of a complex set of interactions with nativepeoples as well as an unanticipated demographic catastrophe.

The Lure of DiscoveryThe potential rewards of overseas exploration captured theimaginations of a small but powerful segment of Europeansociety. Most people, busy making a living, cared little aboutdistant lands. But certain princes and merchants anticipatedspiritual and material benefits from voyages of discovery.The spiritual advantages included making new Christianconverts and blocking Islam’s expansion—a Christian goalthat dated back to the eleventh-century Crusades againstthe Muslims in the Middle East and continued with thereconquista. On the material side, the voyages would con-tribute to Europe’s prosperity by increasing trade.

Merchants especially sought access to Asian spices likepepper, cinnamon, ginger, and nutmeg that added interest toan otherwise monotonous diet and helped preserve foods.Wealthy Europeans paid handsomely for small quantitiesof spices, making it worthwhile to transport them great

This illustration shows Martin Luther and his Protestant supporters burning the papal decreethat announced Luther’s excommunication from the Catholic Church.



distances. But the overland spice trade—and the trade inother luxury goods such as silk and furs—spanned thousandsof miles, involved many middlemen, and was controlled atkey points by Muslim merchants. One critical center wasConstantinople, the bastion of Christianity in the easternMediterranean. When that city fell to the Ottomans—Muslim rulers of Turkey—in 1453, Europeans feared thatcaravan routes to Asia would be disrupted. This encouragedmerchants to turn westward and seek alternative routes.

The reorientation of European trade benefited westernItalian cities such as Genoa as well as Portugal and Spain,whose ports gave access to the Mediterranean and theAtlantic Ocean. Mariners ventured farther into oceanwaters, seeking direct access to the African gold trade and,eventually, a sea route around Africa to Asia. Had it not beenfor a set of technological developments that reduced therisks of ocean sailing, such lengthy voyages into unexploredareas would have been impossible.

Advances in navigation and shipbuilding. Ocean voy-ages required sturdier ships than those that plied theMediterranean. Because oceangoing mariners traveled be-yond sight of coastal features, they also needed reliable nav-igational tools. In the early fifteenth century, Prince Henryof Portugal sponsored the efforts of shipbuilders, mapmak-ers, and other workers to solve these practical problems. By1500, enterprising artisans had made several important ad-vances. Iberian shipbuilders perfected the caravel, a shipwhose narrow shape and steering rudder suited it for oceantravel. Ship designers combined square sails (good forspeed) with triangular lateen sails, which increased maneu-verability. European mariners adopted two important navi-gational devices—the magnetic compass (first developed inChina) and the astrolabe (introduced to Europe by Muslimsfrom Spain)—that allowed mariners to determine their po-sition in relation to a star’s known location in the sky. Assailors acquired practical experience on the high seas, map-makers recorded their observations of landfalls, wind pat-terns, and ocean currents. Long-distance voyages remainedrisky, however, in part because mariners had no accurateway to measure longitude until the eighteenth century.

Portuguese mariners slowly worked their way alongAfrica’s western coast, establishing trading posts wherethey exchanged European goods for gold, ivory, and slaves(see Map 1–3). Bartolomeu Días reached the southern tip ofAfrica in 1488. Eleven years later, Vasco da Gama brought aPortuguese fleet around Africa to India, opening a sea routeto Asia. These initiatives gave Portugal a virtual monopolyon Far Eastern trade for some time.

The Atlantic islands and the slave trade. The new At-lantic trade routes gave strategic importance to the islandsthat lie off the west coast of Africa and Europe. Spain andPortugal vied for control of the Canary Islands, located800 miles southwest of the Iberian Peninsula, with the

Spanish eventually prevailing. Portugal acquired Madeiraand the Cape Verde Islands, along with a group of tinyislands off Africa’s Guinea Coast.

Sugar, like Asian spices, commanded high prices inEurope, so the conquerors of the Atlantic islands began tocultivate sugar cane on them, on large plantations workedby slave labor. In the Canaries, the Spanish first enslaved thenative inhabitants. When disease and exhaustion reducedtheir numbers, the Spanish brought in African slaves, oftenpurchased from Portuguese traders. Elsewhere Europeansimported African slaves from the start. São Tomé and theother small islands off the Guinea Coast eventually becameimportant waystations in the transatlantic slave trade.

Christopher Columbus and the Westward Route to AsiaChristopher Columbus was but one of many Europeanmariners excited by the prospect of tapping into thewealth of Asia. Born in Genoa in1451, he later lived in Portugaland Spain, where he read widelyin geographical treatises and lis-tened closely to the stories andrumors that circulated among mariners. As a young man,Columbus gained considerable experience with oceantravel, visiting Africa’s Guinea Coast and Madeira, andperhaps even voyaging to Iceland.

Columbus was not the first European to reach the NewWorld. Several centuries earlier, Norse explorers from Scan-dinavia sailed and raided around the North Atlantic. TheseVikings, as they were known, occupied Iceland by the lateninth century C.E. and later moved on to Greenland. Be-tween 1001 and 1014, Leif Erikson made several voyages tothe northern coast of Newfoundland, where he helped toestablish a short-lived Viking colony at Vinland and becameone of the first Europeans to encounter Native Americans.After the Viking colony disappeared, European fishermencontinued to make seasonal voyages to the area, but itwould be several centuries before Columbus initiated an-other attempt at settlement.

Neither was Columbus the first European to believethat he could reach Asia by sailing westward. The idea de-veloped logically during the fifteenth century as marinersgained knowledge and experience from their exploits in theAtlantic and around Africa. Most Europeans knew that theworld was round, but scoffed at the idea of a westwardvoyage to Asia in the belief that no ship could carry enoughprovisions for such a long trip. Columbus’s confidence thathe could succeed grew from a mathematical error. Hemistakenly calculated the earth’s circumference as 18,000(rather than 24,000) miles and so concluded that Asia layjust 3,500 miles west of the Canary Islands. Columbus firstsought financial support for a westward voyage from the

at www.myhistorylab.comFrom The Journal of ChristopherColumbus (1492)

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0

0 500 1,000 1,500 2,000 Kilometers

500 1,000 1,500 2,000 Miles

CanaryIslands

Madeira

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Bahamas

NEWFOUNDLAND

Cuba

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A M E R I C A

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H u d s o nB a y

St. LawrenceRiver

Cape ofGood Hope

FRANCE

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GREENLAND

PORTUGAL

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Frobisher 1576–1578

Cabot 1497

Verrazano 1524

Cartier 1534

Columbus 1492

Columbus 1493

Columbus 1502

Columbus 1498

Días 1488

da Gama 1497–1

499

English voyages

French voyages

Portuguese voyages

Spanish voyages

Cartier 1535, 1541

1534

MAP 1–3 European Voyages of Discovery in the Atlantic in the Fifteenth and Sixteenth CenturiesDuring the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, Europeans embarked on voyages of discovery that carried them to both Asia and the Americas.Portugal dominated the ocean trade with Asia for most of this period. In the New World, reports of Spain’s acquisition of vast wealth soonled France and England to attempt to establish their own territorial claims.

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A decidedly European view of Columbus’s landing appears in thislate sixteenth-century print. Columbus and his men, armed withguns and swords, are resplendent in European attire, while nearlynaked Indians offer them gifts. To the left, Spaniards erect a cross toclaim the land for Christianity. In the upper right, frightened nativesflee into the woods.

king of Portugal, whose advisers disputed his calculationsand warned him that he would starve at sea before reachingAsia. Undaunted, he turned to Portugal’s rival, Spain.

Columbus tried to convince Ferdinand and Isabella thathis plan suited Spain’s national goals. If he succeeded, Spaincould grow rich from Asian trade, send Christian missionar-ies to Asia (a goal in keeping with the religious ideals of thereconquista), and perhaps enlist the Great Khan of China as anally in the long struggle with Islam. If he failed, the “enter-prise of the Indies” would cost little. The Spanish monarchsnonetheless kept Columbus waiting nearly seven years—until 1492, when the last Muslim stronghold at Granada fellto Spanish forces—before they gave him their support.

After 33 days at sea, Columbus and his men were carriedby prevailing ocean currents to the Bahamas, probablylanding on what is now called Watling Island. They spentfour months exploring the Caribbean and visiting severalislands, including Hispaniola (now the site of Haiti and theDominican Republic) and Cuba. Although puzzled byhis failure to find the fabled cities of China and Japan,Columbus believed that he had reached Asia. Three morevoyages between 1493 and 1504, however, failed to yield clearevidence of an Asian landfall or Asian riches. Columbus re-ported that the islands he encountered contained “greatmines of gold and other metals” and spices in abundance,yet all he brought back to Isabella and Ferdinand werestrange plants and animals, some gold ornaments, andseveral kidnapped Taino Indians.

Frustrated in their search for wealth, Columbus and hismen turned violent, sacking native villages and demandingtribute in gold. They forced gangs of Indians to pan rivers

for the precious nuggets. But Caribbean gold reserves,found mainly on Hispaniola, Puerto Rico, and Cuba, werenot extensive. Dissatisfied with the meager results,Columbus sought to transform the Indians themselves intoa source of wealth.

In 1494, Columbus suggested to the Spanish monarchsthat the Indies could yield a profit if islanders were sold asslaves. His plan earned him a sharp rebuke from QueenIsabella, who opposed enslaving people she considered tobe new Spanish subjects. This royal fastidiousness wasshort-lived, however. Within a year, the queen agreed thatnative war captives could be enslaved. In succeedingdecades, the Spanish government periodically called for fairtreatment of Indians and prohibited their enslavement, butsuch measures were ignored by colonists on the other sideof the Atlantic.

Columbus died in Spain in1506, still convinced he had foundAsia. What he had done was to setin motion a process that wouldtransform both sides of the Atlantic. It would eventuallybring wealth to many Europeans and immense suffering toNative Americans and Africans.

The Spanish Conquest and ColonizationOf all European nations, Spain was best suited to take ad-vantage of Columbus’s discovery. Its experience with thereconquista gave it a religious justification for conquest(bringing Christianity to nonbelievers) and an army of sea-soned soldiers—conquistadores—eager to seek their fortunesin America now that the last Muslims had been expelledfrom Spain. In addition, during the reconquista and the con-quest of the Canary Islands, Spain’s rulers developed effi-cient techniques for controlling newly conquered lands thatcould be applied to New World colonies.

The Spanish first consolidated their control of theCaribbean, establishing outposts on Cuba, Puerto Rico,and Jamaica (see Map 1–4). The conquistadores were moreinterested in finding gold and slaves than in creatingpermanent settlements. Leaving a trail of destruction, theyattacked native villages and killed or captured the inhabi-tants. By 1524, the Tainos had all but died out; the Caribssurvived on more isolated islands until the eighteenthcentury. Spanish soldiers then ventured to the mainland. In1513, Juan Ponce de León led an expedition to Florida look-ing for the legendary fountain of youth. In that same year,Vasco Núñez de Balboa arrived in Central America, cross-ing the isthmus of Panama to the Pacific Ocean.

The end of the Aztec Empire. In 1519, Hernán Cortésand 600 soldiers—the light-skinned strangers who inspiredthe Indian messenger to rush to Moctezuma—landed onthe coast of Mexico. Their subsequent actions more thanfulfilled the Aztec king’s belief that the Spaniards’ arrivalwas an evil omen. “I and my companions,” Cortés

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announced, “suffer from a disease of the heart which can becured only with gold.” By 1521, Cortés and his men hadconquered the powerful Aztec empire, discovering richesbeyond their wildest dreams. They “picked up the gold andfingered it like monkeys,” reported one Aztec witness.

The swift, decisive Spanish victory depended on severalfactors. In part, the Spanish enjoyed certain technologicaladvantages. Their guns and horses often enabled them tooverwhelm larger groups of Aztec foot soldiers armed withspears and wooden swords edged with obsidian. But tech-nology alone cannot account for the conquest of a vastly

more numerous enemy, capable of absorbing far higherlosses in combat.

Cortés benefited from two other factors. First, heexploited divisions within the Aztec empire. The Spanishacquired indispensable allies among subject Indians whoresented Aztec domination, tribute demands, and seizure ofcaptives for religious sacrifice. Cortés received invaluablehelp in communicating with these peoples from Malinche,a captive native woman who served as a translator (and whoalso bore him a son). He eventually gained 200,000 Indianallies eager to throw off Aztec rule.

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WatlingIsland

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s 1519

Cartier1535,1541

de Soto1539

Coronado1540–1542

Coronado1540–1542

Cabeza de Vaca1528–1536

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Isthmus of Panama

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1528–1536

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MAP 1–4 Spanish, English, and French Settlements in North America in the Sixteenth CenturyBy the end of the sixteenth century, only Spain had established permanent settlements in North America. French outposts in Canada and at Fort Caroline, as well as the English settlement at Roanoke, failed to thrive. European rivalries for North America, however, wouldintensify after 1600.



To conquer Tenochtitlán, Spanish soldiers had to gain control of the narrow causeways that led to the center of this distinctively designed city.

A second and more important factor was disease. Oneof Cortés’s men was infected with smallpox, which soondevastated the native population. European diseases hadbeen unknown in the Americas before 1492, and Indianslacked resistance to them. Historians estimate that nearly40 percent of the inhabitants of central Mexico died ofsmallpox within a year. Other diseases followed, includingtyphus, measles, and influenza. By 1600, the population ofMexico may have declined from over 15 million to less thana million people.

Aztec society and culture collapsed in the face of ap-palling mortality. “The illness was so dreadful,” one survivorrecalled, “that no one could walk or move. The sick were soutterly helpless that they could only lie on their beds likecorpses, unable to move their limbs or even their heads. . . .If they did move their bodies, they screamed with pain.”The epidemic ravaged families, wiped out villages, and de-stroyed traditional political authority. Early in their bid togain control of the Aztec empire, the Spanish seizedMoctezuma, and eventually put him to death. They did nothave to kill his successor, however, for he died of disease notlong after gaining the throne.

The fall of the Inca Empire. In 1532, Francisco Pizarroand 180 men, following rumors of even greater riches thanthose of Mexico, discovered the Inca empire high in thePeruvian Andes. It was the largest empire in the Americas,stretching more than 2,000 miles from what is now Ecuadorto Chile. An excellent network of roads and bridges linkedthis extensive territory to the imperial capital of Cuzco.Economically prosperous from trade and agriculture basedon complex irrigation systems, the empire was also prone topolitical division. The Spaniards arrived at a moment ofweakness for the empire. A few years before, the Inca rulerhad died, probably from smallpox, and civil war had brokenout between two of his sons. The victor, Atahualpa, was onhis way from the empire’s northern provinces to claim histhrone in Cuzco when Pizarro intercepted him. Pizarro tookAtahualpa hostage and despite receiving a colossal ransom—a roomful of gold and silver—had him killed. The Spaniardsthen captured Cuzco, eventually extended control over thewhole empire, and established a new capital at Lima.

By 1550, Spain’s New World empire stretched from theCaribbean through Mexico to Peru. It was administeredfrom Spain by the Council of the Indies, which enacted laws


for the empire and supervised an elaborate bureaucracycharged with their enforcement. The council aimed toproject royal authority into every village in New Spain inorder to maintain political control and extract as muchwealth as possible from the land and its people.

For more than a century, Spanish ships crossed theAtlantic carrying seemingly limitless amounts of treasurefrom the colonies. To extract this wealth, the colonialrulers subjected the native inhabitants of New Spainto compulsory tribute payments and forced labor. Tensof thousands of Indians toiled in silver mines in Peruand Bolivia and on sugar plantations in the Caribbean.When necessary, Spaniards imported African slaves tosupplement a native labor force ravaged by disease andexhaustion.

Spanish incursions to the north. The desire for goldeventually lured Spaniards farther into North America. In1528, an expedition to Florida ended in disaster when theSpanish intruders provoked an attack by Apalachee Indi-ans. Most of the Spanish survivors eventually perished, butÁlvar Núñez Cabeza de Vaca and three other men (includ-ing an African slave) escaped from their captors and man-aged to reach Mexico after a grueling eight-year journey. Ina published account of his ordeal, Cabeza de Vaca insisted

that the interior of North America contained a fabulouslywealthy empire (see “American Views: Cabeza de VacaAmong the Indians”).

This report inspired other Spaniards to seek suchtreasures. In 1539, Hernán de Soto—who tried unsuccess-fully to get Cabeza de Vaca to serve as a guide—led anexpedition from Florida to the Mississippi River. Alongthe way, the Spaniards harassed the native peoples,demanding provisions, burning villages, and capturingwomen to be servants and concubines. De Soto, whoreportedly enjoyed “the sport of hunting Indians onhorseback,” ordered natives who resisted him to be muti-lated, thrown to dogs, or burned alive. He and his menalso exposed the Indians to deadly European diseases.Although weakened by native resistance, the expeditionkept up its rampage for three years, turning towardMexico only after de Soto died in 1542. In these sameyears, Francisco Vásquez de Coronado led 300 troops onan equally destructive expedition through present-dayArizona, New Mexico, and Colorado on a futile search forthe mythical Seven Cities of Cíbola, rumored to containhoards of gold and precious stones.

The failure to find gold and silver halted Spain’sattempt to extend its empire to the north. By the end ofthe sixteenth century, the Spanish maintained just two

Learning about ChocolateLong before Europeans arrived inMesoamerica, native peoples throughoutthe region—especially elite inhabitants—enjoyed beverages made with cacao.Thosewho prepared the drinks removed thenibs, or “beans,” from cacao fruit, dried andtoasted them, then ground them to makechocolate paste. They blended the pastewith water, flavored the mixture with chilipeppers or dried flowers, and sometimessweetened it with honey.The aromatic liq-uid would then be poured at a height fromone container to another to produce afoamy, often somewhat bitter, drink. Suffi-ciently valuable to circulate as currencythroughout the region,cacao beans formedan important part of the tribute that sub-ject peoples owed to their Aztec overlords.

After the conquest of Mexico, theSpanish likewise received cacao as trib-ute. They also developed a taste forchocolate when the Indian women whomthey employed as cooks served it to them.To learn how cacao was processed,Spaniards visited Indian villages andmarkets to watch chocolate being made.By the early seventeenth century, colonialmerchants and clergy who returned toSpain introduced their countrymen towhat had become a favorite drink.

Spaniards who had learned to drinkchocolate in the New World did theirbest to replicate the familiar taste andappearance of the beverage in their OldWorld kitchens. But they found itdifficult to do so, as the native flowers,

peppers, and spices used in Mesoamericawere unavailable in Spain. So theyimprovised by using products obtainedfrom Asia, such as cinnamon, cloves, andblack pepper, to approximate the flavorsof New World ingredients. Thus thechocolate consumed in wealthy homesacross Spain was a truly global beverage.A mixture of products obtained from allover the world, it testified to the vast ex-pansion of trade networks and served asan important example of the transfer ofknowledge and skills from Native Amer-icans to European colonists.

■ How did the Indians’ knowledgeof chocolate affect their relationswith the Spanish?

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precarious footholds north of Mexico. One was at St. Au-gustine, on Florida’s Atlantic coast. Founded in 1565, thisfortified outpost served as a naval base to defend Spanishtreasure fleets from raids by English and French privateers.The other settlement was located far to the west in what isnow New Mexico. Juan de Oñate, on a futile search for sil-ver mines, claimed the region for Spain in 1598. He and hismen proceeded to antagonize the area’s inhabitants. In onesurprise attack, the Spaniards destroyed the ancient townof Acoma, killing or enslaving most of the residents. Havingearned the enmity of the Pueblo people—astonishing evenhis own superiors with his brutality—Oñate barely man-aged to keep his tiny colony together.

Almost from the start of the conquest, the bloody tac-tics of men such as Oñate aroused protest back in Spain.The Indians’ most eloquent advocate was Bartolomé de LasCasas, a Dominican priest shamed by his own role (as a lay-man) in the conquest of Hispaniola. In 1516, the Spanish

king appointed him to the newlycreated office of Protector of theIndians, but his efforts had littleeffect. To publicize the horrors hesaw, Las Casas wrote In Defense of

the Indians, including graphic descriptions of native suffer-ings. Instead of eliciting Spanish reforms,however, his work inspired ProtestantEuropeans to create the “Black Legend,”an exaggerated story according to which afanatical Catholic Spain sought to spreadits control at any cost.

The seeds of economic decline. Mean-while, the vast riches of Central and SouthAmerica glutted Spain’s treasury. Between1500 and 1650, an estimated 181 tons ofgold and 16,000 tons of silver were shippedfrom the New World to Spain, making itthe richest and most powerful state inEurope (see Figure 1–1). But this influx ofAmerican treasure had unforeseen conse-quences that would soon undermine Span-ish predominance.

In 1492, the Spanish crown, deter-mined to impose religious conformity afterthe reconquista, expelled from Spain all Jewswho refused to become Christians. Therefugees included many leading merchantswho had contributed significantly toSpain’s economy. The remaining Christianmerchants, now awash in American riches,saw little reason to invest in new trade orproductive enterprises that might havesustained the economy once the flow ofNew World treasure diminished. As a re-sult, Spain’s economy eventually stagnated.

Compounding the problem, the flood of Americangold and silver contributed to what historians have calleda “price revolution” in Europe. Beginning in the latefifteenth century, as Europe’s population recovered fromthe Black Death, demographic and economic factors ledto a rise in prices. This inflationary cycle was made worseby the influx of New World gold and silver. Workers,whose wages failed to rise as fast as prices, suffered, as didsome aristocrats dependent on fixed rents from theirestates. At the same time, Spain’s monarchs wastedtheir American wealth fighting expensive wars againsttheir European enemies that ultimately weakened thenation. By 1600, some disillusioned Spaniards were argu-ing that the conquest had brought more problems thanbenefits to their country.

The Columbian ExchangeSpain’s long-term economic decline was just one of manyconsequences of the conquest of the New World. In thelong run, the biological consequences of contact—what onehistorian has called the Columbian exchange—proved tobe the most momentous (see the Overview table, TheColumbian Exchange).

FIGURE 1–1 Value of New World Treasure Imported into Spain, 1506–1655During the sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries, Spain was the only European power toreap great wealth from North America. The influx of New World treasure, however, slowedthe development of Spain’s economy in the long run. [Note: A ducat was a gold coin.]

Data Source: J. H. Elliott, Imperial Spain, 1469–1716 (1964), p. 175.

Tre

asu

re (

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ion

s o

f d

uca

ts)

0

80

100

120

180

60

40

20

140

160

1506–1530 1531–1555 1556–1580 1581–1605 1606–1630 1631–1655

Period

at www.myhistorylab.comOf the Island of Hispaniola(1542)

Read the Document



The most catastrophic result of the exchange was theexposure of Native Americans to Old World diseases.Europeans and Africans, long exposed to these diseases, haddeveloped some immunity to them. Native Americans,lacking such contact, had not. The Black Death of 1347–1351,Europe’s worst epidemic, killed perhaps a third of itspopulation. Epidemics of smallpox, measles, typhus, andinfluenza struck Native Americans with far greater force,killing half, and sometimes as many as 90 percent, ofthe people in communities exposed to them. The onlyAmerican disease that may have infected Old Worldpopulations was a sexually transmitted form of syphilis,which appeared in Spain just after Columbus returnedfrom his first voyage.

Another important aspect of the Columbian exchangewas the introduction of Old World livestock to the NewWorld, which began when Columbus brought horses, sheep,cattle, pigs, and goats with him on his second voyage in 1493.Native Americans had few domesticated animals of theirown (mainly dogs, and, in the Peruvian Andes, llamas and al-pacas). The large European beasts created problems as wellas opportunities for native peoples. With few natural pred-ators to limit their numbers, livestock populations boomedin the New World, competing with native mammals forgrazing. At least at first, the Indians’ unfamiliarity with theuse of horses in warfare often gave mounted European sol-diers a decisive military advantage. But some native groupsadopted these animals for their own purposes. Yaquis,Pueblos, and other peoples in the Southwest began to raisecattle and sheep. By the eighteenth century, Plains Indianshad reoriented their culture around the use of horses, whichhad become essential for travel and hunting buffalo. Horsesalso became a primary object for trading and raiding amongPlains peoples.

European ships carried unintentional passengers too.The black rat, a carrier of disease, arrived on the firstvoyages. So did insects, including honeybees, previouslyunknown in the New World. Ships also brought weeds suchas thistles and dandelions, whose seeds were often embed-ded in hay for animal fodder.

Columbus introduced such European crops as wheat,chickpeas, melons, onions, and fruit trees to the Caribbean.Native Americans, in turn, introduced Europeans to corn,tomatoes, squash, beans, cacao, peppers, and potatoes, aswell as nonfood plants such as tobacco and cotton. NewWorld food crops were transported back to Europe, wherethey enriched Old World diets and, due to their nutritionalbenefits, eventually contributed to a sharp rise in Europe’spopulation. Over time, many of these more numerousEuropeans chose to leave their overcrowded communitiesfor the New World.

The Columbian Exchange

From Old World to New World From New World to Old World

DISEASES Smallpox, measles, plague, typhus, influenza, yellowfever, diphtheria, scarlet fever, whooping cough

Sexually transmitted strain of syphilis

ANIMALS Horses, cattle, pigs, sheep, goats, donkeys, mules,black rats, honeybees, cockroaches

Turkeys

PLANTS Wheat, sugar, barley, apples, pears, peaches, plums,cherries, coffee, rice, dandelions, and other weeds

Maize, beans, peanuts, potatoes, sweet potatoes, manioc, squash,papayas, guavas, tomatoes, avocadoes, pineapple, chili pepper, cacao

2323

Cacao, from which chocolate is made, was one of manyNew World foods that entered Old World diets as part of the Columbian exchange. This sixteenth-centuryillustration shows a native Mexican woman pouringchocolate from a great height to produce a frothy drink.

O V E R V I E WO V E R V I E W



Cultural Perceptions and MisperceptionsCuriosity and confusion often marked early encounters be-tween Europeans and Native Americans. Even simple trans-actions produced unexpected results. When Columbusshowed swords to Caribbean islanders, for example, “theytook them by the edge and through ignorance cut them-selves” because they had never touched metal weapons. Thefirst Indians whom Cortés allowed aboard a Spanish shipfainted at the sound of a large cannon being fired. Frenchexplorers were similarly taken by surprise when theychoked while smoking Iroquois tobacco, which theythought tasted like “powdered pepper.” These relatively mi-nor mishaps were soon overshadowed by more substantialinteractions that highlighted cultural differences betweenIndians and Europeans.

Most Indians believed that the universe containedfriendly and hostile spiritual forces in human and other-than-human forms (such as plants, animals, and stars). Peo-ple interacted with the spirit world through ceremoniesthat often involved exchanging gifts. North of Mexico, In-dians (like West Africans) passed on religious beliefsthrough oral traditions, not in writing. To Europeans accus-tomed to worshiping one God in an organized church andpreserving their beliefs in a written Bible, Indian spiritualtraditions were incomprehensible. Columbus noted thatthe Tainos had no churches and erroneously concluded thatthey had no religion. Many Europeans went further, assum-ing that Indians worshiped the Devil. Indians, in turn, oftenfound Christianity confusing and at first rejected Europeanpressure to convert. As some Iroquois explained tocolonists, “We do not know that God, we have never seenhim, we know not who he is.”

Different understandings of gender roles provided an-other source of confusion. Europeans regarded men as su-perior to women and thus the natural rulers of society. Theydisapproved of the less restrictive gender divisions amongNative Americans. Wampanoags and Powhatans sometimesaccepted female leaders, for instance, and Huron womenhelped to select male chiefs. Many Indian societies werematrilineal, tracing descent through the mother’s family in-stead of the father’s, as Europeans did. In matrilineal soci-eties, married couples lived with the wife’s family, childreninherited property from their mother’s brother, and rulerssucceeded to their positions through their mother’s familyline. Europeans, accustomed to societies in which men didmost agricultural work, objected to Indian women’s domi-nant role in farming and assumed that men’s hunting wasmore for recreation than subsistence. They concluded thatIndian women lived “a most slavish life.” Indians, in turn,thought that European men failed to make good use of theirwives. In Massachusetts, native men ridiculed colonists “forspoiling good working creatures” by not making theirwomen work in the fields.

In order for Indians and Europeans to get along peace-ably, each side would have to look past these and othercultural differences and adapt to the new circumstances un-der which both groups now lived. At first, such harmonyseemed possible. But it soon became clear that Europeansintended to dominate the lands they discovered. Only threedays after he arrived in America, Columbus announced hisintention “not to pass by any island of which I did not takepossession.” Such claims to dominance sparked vigorous re-sistance from native peoples everywhere who strove tomaintain their autonomy in a changed world.

Competition for a ContinentSpain’s New World bonanza attracted the attention of otherEuropean states eager to share in the wealth. Portugalsoon acquired its own profitable piece of South America. In1494, the conflicting claims of Portugal and Spain wereresolved by the Treaty of Tordesillas. The treaty drew anorth–south line approximately 1,100 miles west of theCape Verde Islands. Spain received all lands west of the line,while Portugal held sway to the east. This limited Portugal’sNew World empire to Brazil, where settlers establishedsugar plantations worked by slave labor. But the treaty alsoprotected Portugal’s claims in Africa and Asia, which layeast of the line.

France and England, of course, rejected this division ofthe Western Hemisphere between Spain and Portugal.Their initial challenges to Spanish dominance in the NewWorld, however, proved quite feeble. Domestic troubles—largely sparked by the Protestant Reformation—distractedthe two countries from the pursuit of empire. By the closeof the sixteenth century, both France and England insistedon their rights to New World lands, but neither had createda permanent settlement to support its claim.

Early French Efforts in North AmericaFrance was a relative latecomer to New World explo-ration. In 1494, French troops invaded Italy, beginning along and ultimately unsuccessful war with the Holy Ro-man Empire. Preoccupied with European affairs, France’srulers paid little attention to America. But when news ofCortés’s exploits in Mexico arrived in the 1520s, KingFrancis I wanted his own New World empire to enrichFrance and block further Spanish expansion. In 1524,Francis sponsored a voyage by Giovanni da Verrazano, anItalian navigator, who mapped the North American coastfrom present-day South Carolina to Maine. During the1530s and 1540s, the French mariner Jacques Cartier madethree voyages in search of rich mines to rival those ofMexico and Peru. He explored the St. Lawrence River upto what is now Montreal, hoping to discover a water routethrough the continent to Asia (the so-called NorthwestPassage).


On his third voyage, in 1541, Cartier was to serve un-der the command of a nobleman, Jean-François de laRocque, Sieur de Roberval, who was commissioned bythe king to establish a permanent settlement in Canada.Troubles in recruiting colonists delayed Roberval, who—when he finally set sail in 1542—ended up taking convictsas his settlers. Cartier sailed ahead, gathered samples of

what he thought were gold and diamonds, and returnedto France.

This first attempt to found a permanent French colonyfailed miserably. Roberval’s expedition was poorly organized,and his cruel treatment of the convicts provoked several up-risings. The Iroquois, suspicious of repeated French intru-sions on their lands, saw no reason to help them. A year after


Cabeza de Vaca among the Indians (1530)Álvar Núñez Cabeza de Vaca came to theNew World in 1527 in search of riches,not suffering. But the Spanish expeditionof which he was a member met disastershortly after it arrived in Florida on a mis-sion to conquer the region north of theGulf of Mexico. Of an original group of300 soldiers, only Cabeza de Vaca andthree other men (including one Africanslave) survived. They did so by walkingthousands of miles overland from theGulf Coast to northern Mexico, an eight-year-long ordeal that tested the men’s wits

and physical endurance. Instead of enter-ing Indian villages as proud conquista-dors, Cabeza de Vaca and his companionsencountered native peoples from a posi-tion of weakness. In order to survive, theyhad to adapt to the ways of the peoplesacross whose land they passed. AfterCabeza de Vaca made it back to MexicoCity, he described his experiences in anofficial report to the king of Spain. Thisremarkable document offers vivid de-scriptions of the territory extending fromnorthern Florida to northern Mexico and

the many peoples who inhabited it. It isequally interesting, as this extract sug-gests, for what it reveals about Cabeza deVaca himself and the changes he made inthe interest of survival.

■ While living among the Capoques,what sort of work did Cabeza deVaca have to do, and why?

■ Why did Cabeza de Vaca decide tobecome a merchant? What advan-tages did this way of life offer him?

■ Why did the Indians welcomeCabeza de Vaca into their commu-nities even though he was a stranger?

[I remained with the Capoques] for more than a year, and

because of the great labors they forced me to perform and the

bad treatment they gave me, I resolved to flee from them and go

to those who live in the forests and on the mainland, who are

called those of Charruco, because I was unable to endure the

life that I had with these others; because among many other

tasks, I had to dig the roots to eat out from under the water and

among the rushes where they grew in the ground. And because

of this, my fingers were so worn that when a reed touched them

it caused them to bleed, and the reeds cut me in many places. . . .

And because of this, I set to the task of going over to the

others, and with them things were somewhat better for me.

And because I became a merchant, I tried to exercise the

vocation as best I knew how. And because of this they gave me

food to eat and treated me well, and they importuned me to go

from one place to another to obtain the things they needed,

because on account of the continual warfare in the land, there is

little traffic or communication among them. And with my

dealings and wares I entered inland as far as I desired, and I

went along the coast for forty or fifty leagues. The mainstay of

my trade was pieces of snail shell and the hearts of them; and

conch shells with which they cut a fruit that is like frijoles

[beans], with which they perform cures and do their dances

and make celebrations. . . . And in exchange and as barter for

it, I brought forth hides and red ocher with which they smear

themselves and dye their faces and hair, flints to make the

points of arrows, paste, and stiff canes to make them, and some

tassels made from deer hair which they dye red. And this

occupation served me well, because practicing it, I had the

freedom to go wherever I wanted, and I was not constrained in

any way nor enslaved, and wherever I went they treated me well

and gave me food out of want for my wares, and most

importantly because doing that, I was able to seek out the way

by which I would go forward. And among them I was very well

known; when they saw me and I brought them the things they

needed, they were greatly pleased.

Source: Rolena Adorno and Patrick Charles Pautz, eds., The Narrative of Cabeza de Vaca(Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2003), pp. 96–97.

25


they arrived in Canada, Roberval and the surviving colonistswere back in France. Their return coincided with news thatthe gold brought back by Cartier was iron pyrite (“fool’sgold”), and the diamonds were worthless quartz crystals.

Disappointed with their Canadian expeditions, theFrench made a few forays to the south, establishing out-posts in what is now South Carolina in 1562, and Florida in1564. They soon abandoned the Carolina colony, and Span-ish forces captured the Florida fort. Then, back in France, aprolonged civil war broke out between Catholics andProtestants. Renewed interest in colonization would haveto await the return of peace at home.

English Attempts in the New WorldThe English were quicker than the French to stake a claimto the New World but no more successful at colonization.In 1497, King Henry VII sent John Cabot, an Italianmariner, to explore eastern Canada on England’s behalf. Butneither Henry nor any of his wealthy subjects would investthe funds necessary to follow up on Cabot’s discoveries. Fornearly half a century, English contact with America waslimited to the seasonal voyages of fishermen who lived eachsummer in Newfoundland, fished for cod offshore, andreturned to England in autumn.

The lapse in English activity in the New Worldstemmed from religious troubles at home. Between 1534and 1558, England changed its official religion several times.King Henry VIII, who had once defended the CatholicChurch against its critics, took up the Protestant causewhen the pope refused to annul his marriage to Catherineof Aragon. In 1534, Henry declared himself the head of aseparate Church of England and seized the CatholicChurch’s English property. Because many English peoplesympathized with the Protestant cause, there was relativelylittle opposition to Henry’s actions. But in 1553, Mary—daughter of the spurned Catherine of Aragon—becamequeen and tried to bring England back to Catholicism. Shehad nearly 300 Protestants burned at the stake for theirbeliefs (earning her the nickname “Bloody Mary”), andmany others went into exile in Europe.

Mary’s brief but destructive reign ended in 1558, and herhalf-sister Elizabeth, a committed Protestant, becamequeen. Elizabeth ruled for 45 years (1558–1603), restoringProtestantism as the state religion, bringing stability to thenation, and renewing England’s interest in the New World.She and her subjects saw colonization not only as a way togain wealth and political advantage but also as a Protestantcrusade against Catholic domination.

The colonization of Ireland. England’s first target forcolonization, however, was not America but Ireland.Located less than 60 miles west of England and populatedby Catholics, Ireland threatened to become a base fromwhich Spain or another Catholic power might invadeEngland. Henry VIII had tried, with limited success, to

bring the island under English control in the 1530s and1540s. Elizabeth renewed the attempt in the 1560s with aseries of brutal expeditions that destroyed Irish villages andslaughtered the inhabitants. Several veterans of thesecampaigns later took part in New World colonization anddrew on their Irish experience for guidance.

Two aspects of that experience were particularly impor-tant. First, the English transferred their assumptions aboutIrish “savages” to Native Americans. Englishmen in Americafrequently observed similarities between Indians and theIrish. “When they [the Indians] have their apparel on theylook like Irish,” noted one Englishman. “The natives of NewEngland,” he added, “are accustomed to build their housesmuch like the wild Irish.” Because the English held the “wildIrish” in contempt, these observations encouraged them toscorn the Indians. When Indians resisted their attempts atconquest, the English recalled the Irish example, claimingthat native “savagery” required brutal suppression.

Second, the Irish experience influenced English ideasabout colonial settlement. English conquerors set up “plan-tations” surrounded by palisades on seized Irish lands. Theseplantations were meant to be civilized outposts in a savageland. Their aristocratic owners imported Protestant tenantsfrom England and Scotland to farm the land. Native Irishpeople, considered too wild to join proper Christian com-munities, were excluded. English colonists in America fol-lowed this precedent when they established plantations thatseparated English and native peoples.

Expeditions to the New World. Sir Humphrey Gilbert,a notoriously cruel veteran of the Irish campaigns, becamefascinated with the idea of New World colonization. Hecomposed a treatise to persuade Queen Elizabeth to sup-port such an endeavor. The queen, who counted Gilbertamong her favorite courtiers, authorized several ex-ploratory voyages, including Martin Frobisher’s three tripsin 1576–1578 in search of the Northwest Passage to Asia.Frobisher failed to find the elusive passage and sent backshiploads of glittering ore that proved to be fool’s gold.Elizabeth had better luck in allowing privateers, such asJohn Hawkins and Francis Drake, to raid Spanish ships andNew World ports for gold and silver. The plunder takenduring these raids enriched both the sailors and theirinvestors—one of whom was the queen herself.

Meanwhile, Gilbert continued to promote New Worldsettlement, arguing that it would increase England’s tradeand provide a place to send unemployed Englishmen. Likemany of his contemporaries, Gilbert believed thatEngland’s “surplus” population threatened social order. Thepopulation was indeed growing, and economic changesoften made it difficult for people to support themselves. Manylandlords had been converting farmland into sheep pasturesin order to profit from the wool trade, but in doing so threwtenant families off the land. Gilbert suggested offering freeland in America to English families willing to emigrate.




In 1578, Gilbert received permission to set up a colonyalong the North American coast. It took him five years toorganize an expedition to Newfoundland, which he claimedfor England. After sailing southward seeking a more favor-able site for a colony, Gilbert headed home, only to be lostat sea during an Atlantic storm. The impetus for Englishcolonization did not die with him, however, for his half-brother, Sir Walter Raleigh (another veteran of the Irishwars), took up the cause.

The Roanoke Colony. In 1584, Raleigh sent an expedi-tion to find a suitable location for a colony. The Carolinacoast seemed promising, so Raleigh sent men in 1585 tobuild a settlement on Roanoke Island. Most of the colonistswere soldiers fresh from Ireland who refused to grow theirown food, insisting that the Roanoke Indians should feedthem. When the local chief, Wingina, organized native re-sistance, they killed him. Eventually, the colonists, disap-pointed not to have found any treasure and exhausted by aharsh winter, returned to England in 1586.

Two members of these early expeditions, however, lefta more positive legacy. Thomas Hariot studied the Roanokeand Croatoan Indians and identified plants and animals in

the area, hoping that some might prove to be profitablecommodities. John White drew maps and painted a series ofwatercolors depicting the natives and the coastal landscape.When Raleigh tried once more, in 1587, to found a colony, hechose White to be its leader. This attempt also failed. Theship captain dumped the settlers—who, for the first time,included women and children—on Roanoke Island so thathe could pursue Spanish treasure ships. White waited untilhis granddaughter, Virginia Dare (the first English childborn in America), was born and then sailed to England forsupplies. But the outbreak of war with Spain delayed hisreturn for three years. Spain had gathered an immense fleetto invade England, and all English ships were needed fordefense. Although England defeated the Armada in 1588,White could not obtain a relief ship for Roanoke until 1590.

White found the colony deserted. Digging through theruins of the village, he found “my books torn from thecovers, the frames of some of my pictures and Maps rottenand spoiled with rain.” He also saw the word CROATOANcarved on a post and assumed that the colonists had movedto nearby Croatoan Island. But bad weather prevented himfrom searching there. For years,English and Spanish marinersreported seeing white peoplealong the coast of Chesapeake Bay.But no Roanoke colonists wereever found. They may have movedto the mainland and intermarried with local Indians. One his-torian has speculated that they survived until 1607 whenPowhatan Indians, angered by the appearance of moreEnglish settlers, killed them. The actual fate of the “LostColony” at Roanoke will probably never be known.

At this point, Raleigh gave up on North America andturned his attention to his Irish plantations. But England’sinterest in colonization did not wane. In 1584, Richard Hak-luyt had aroused enthusiasm for America by writing theDiscourse on the Western Planting for the queen and her advis-ers. He argued that England would prosper from trade andthe sale of New World commodities. Once the Indians werecivilized, Hakluyt added, they would eagerly purchase En-glish goods. Equally important, England could plant “sin-cere religion” (that is, Protestant Christianity) in the NewWorld and block Spanish expansion. Hakluyt’s argumentsfired the imaginations of many people, and the defeat of theSpanish Armada emboldened England to challenge Spain’sNew World dominance. The experience of Roanoke shouldhave tempered that enthusiasm, illustrating the difficulty ofestablishing colonies. Roanoke’s fate underscored the needfor adequate funding, the unsuitability of soldiers ascolonists, and the need to maintain good relations with theIndians. But the English were slow to learn these lessons;when they resumed colonization efforts in 1607, they re-peated Roanoke’s mistakes, with disastrous results for thepeople involved. As it was, the sixteenth century ended withno permanent English settlement in the New World.

John White’s picture of the village of Pomeiooc offers a rare glimpse of asixteenth-century Eastern Woodlands Indian community. The village issurrounded by a palisade with two entrances; evidence suggests thatWhite exaggerated the spacing of the poles in order to depict the housesinside. Eighteen dwellings constructed of poles and mats are clusteredaround the village circumference; inside some of them raised sleepingplatforms can be seen. Many of the villagers are clustered around a cen-tral fire, while others are working or conversing.

Algonquian Indian village of Pomeiooc, North Carolina: Watercolor,c. 1585 by John White.

Read the Document

at www.myhistorylab.comA Brief and True Report of theNew Found Land of Virginia(1588)


Hand-lining for cod, the fishing method depicted inthis eighteenth-century engraving, produced amplecatches but did not reduce cod populations todangerously low levels.

The Disappearance of Cod off the Grand BanksNot long after John Cabot returned from his voyage to America in 1497,rumors circulated that he had found astonishingly rich fishing grounds off thecoast of Newfoundland. As it happened, Basque fishermen sailing from portsin northern Spain and southwestern France already knew about this bonanza.But Cabot’s discovery spread the news, and by the 1550s, over a hundred shipsa year traveled from Europe to fish in the waters of the Grand Banks in thenorthern Atlantic. By the early sixteenth century, 60 percent of the fish eatenin Europe was cod, and most of it came from the Grand Banks. But now,500 years later, cod stocks are at an all-time low due in part to ocean warmingbut also because of overfishing. Up until the early nineteenth century, mostfishermen used handlines—single baited hooks fastened to a weight—dropped in the water from sailing vessels. Now commercial fishermen useenormous nets, harvesting their catch from motorized vessels. Experts differon whether cod populations can recover. Canadian officials have established amoratorium on fishing in the area in order to see if recovery is possible. Thelong-term legacy of John Cabot’s voyage may well be the disappearance of theresource that drew him and many other European adventurers to NorthAmerica in the first place.

■ What does the story of the Grand Banks tell us about the long-runenvironmental consequences of Europeans’ contact with the New World?

at www.myhistorylab.comRead the Document

From Then to Now Online1-1 Raimondo di Soncino to the duke of

Milan, December 18, 1497. Letter fromMilan’s ambassador in London describingJohn Cabot’s discovery of Grand Banks.

1-2 Nicolas Denys, The Description andNatural History of the Coasts of NorthAmerica (Acadia). Description of GrandBanks fishery and fishing techniques.

1-3 John Smith, A Description of NewEngland, 1672. Description of fishinggrounds off Cape Cod.

1-4 Map of Newfoundland and Grand Banks,1977. Shows the 200-mile limit withinwhich foreign boats could not fish.

By the twentieth century, commercial fishermen using enormous nets andmotorized boats helped to shrink cod stocks to an all-time low.



ConclusionDramatic changes occurred in North America during the cen-tury after the Aztec messenger spotted Spanish ships off theMexican coast and made his journey to tell Moctezuma abouthis discovery. The conquistadores were only the first trickle inwhat became a flood of Old World immigrants. Europeans, ea-ger for wealth and power, set out to claim a continent that just100 years earlier they had not dreamed existed. African slaveswere brought to the Caribbean, Mexico, and Brazil, andforced to labor under extremely harsh conditions for whitemasters. The Aztec and Incan empires collapsed in the wakeof the Spanish conquest. In the Caribbean and parts of Mex-ico and Peru, untold numbers of native peoples succumbed toEuropean diseases they had never before encountered.

And yet, conditions in 1600 bore clearer witness to thepast than to the future. Despite all that had happened,North America was still Indian country. Only Spain had es-tablished North American colonies, and even its soldiersstruggled to expand north of Mexico. Spain’s outposts inFlorida and New Mexico staked claims to territory that itdid not really control. Except in Mexico and the Caribbean,Europeans had merely touched the continent’s shores. In1600, despite the virulent epidemics, native peoples (evenin Mexico) still greatly outnumbered European and Africanimmigrants. The next century, however, brought many pow-erful challenges both to native control and to the Spanishmonopoly of settlement.

Review Questions1. How did the Aztecs who first glimpsed Spanish ships off

the coast of Mexico describe to Moctezuma what theyhad seen? What details most captured their attention?

2. Compare men’s and women’s roles in Native American,West African, and European societies. What were thesimilarities and differences? How did differences be-tween European and Native American gender roles leadto misunderstandings?

3. Many of the first European colonizers in North Americawere military veterans. What impact did this have ontheir relations with Indian peoples?

4. Why did Spain so quickly become the dominant colonialpower in North America? What advantages did it enjoyover France and England?

5. What role did religion play in early European efforts atoverseas colonization? Did religious factors always en-courage colonization, or did they occasionally interferewith European expansion?

6. In what ways were trade networks important in linkingdifferent groups of people in the Old and New Worlds?

Key TermsAztecs (p. 4)Cahokia (p. 9)Columbian Exchange (p. 22)Culture areas (p. 6)

Great League of Peace and Power (p. 9)Predestination (p. 15)Protestants (p. 15)Reconquista (p. 14)

Reformation (p. 15)Songhai Empire (p. 10)Tordesillas, Treaty of (p. 24)

Recommended ReadingLeon-Portillo, Miguel. The Broken Spears: The Aztec Account of

the Conquest of Mexico (1962; new edition, 1992). Reprintsof translated Indian chronicles, providing a moving ac-count of the Aztec experience of the Spanish conquest.

Mann, Charles. 1491: New Revelations of the Americas BeforeColumbus (2006). Based on recent archaeological andecological research, this study argues that pre-contact

Native American societies had larger populations andmore sophisticated cultures than previously assumed.

Norton, Marcy. Sacred Gifts, Profane Pleasures: A History ofTobacco and Chocolate in the Atlantic World (2008). Anintriguing account of European colonists’ introductionto two New World products and their adoption byconsumers in Europe.



Phillips, William D., Jr., and Carla Rahn Phillips. The Worldsof Christopher Columbus (1992). A judicious biography ofColumbus that places him firmly in the context offifteenth-century European culture.

Thornton, John. Africa and Africans in the Making of theAtlantic World, 1400–1680, 2nd ed. (1998). A thoroughexamination of the causes and consequences of the

movement of Africans throughout the Atlantic worldand the rise of the slave trade.

Townsend, Camilla. Malintzin’s Choices: An Indian Woman inthe Conquest of Mexico (2006). A fascinating account ofthe native woman whose translating skills helpedCortés in the conquest of the Aztec empire.

Where to Learn More■ Cahokia Mounds State Historic Site, Collinsville,

Illinois. This site, occupied from A.D. 600 to 1500, wasthe largest Mississippian community in eastern NorthAmerica. It now includes numerous exhibits, and archae-ological excavations continue in the vicinity. The web-site, http://cahokiamounds.org/, contains a wealth ofinformation and an interactive map.

■ Mashantucket Pequot Museum, Mashantucket, Con-necticut. This tribally owned and operated complexoffers a view of Eastern Woodlands Indian life, focusing on the Pequots of eastern Connecticut. Exhibits includedioramas, films, interactive programs, and a reconstructedsixteenth-century Pequot village. The homepage for theMashantucket Pequot Museum and Research Center ishttp://www.pequotmuseum.org/.

■ Mesa Verde National Park, Colorado. Occupied byAncestral Puebloan peoples as early as A.D. 550, the areacontains a variety of sites, from early pithouses tospectacular cliff dwellings. The official National Parkwebpage for Mesa Verde is http://www.nps.gov/meve/index.htm.

■ St. Augustine, Florida. Founded in 1565, St. Augustineis the site of the first permanent Spanish settlement inNorth America. Today the restored community resem-bles a Spanish colonial town, with narrow, windingstreets and seventeenth- and eighteenth-century build-ings. The site also contains the restored Castillo de SanMarcos, now a national park. There is an informationalwebsite at http://www.augustine.com/history/.



Reinforce what you learned in this chapter by studying the many documents, im-ages, maps, review tools, and videos available at www.myhistorylab.com.

Read and ReviewStudy Plan, Chapter 1

Alvar Núñez Cabeza de Vaca, Indians of the Rio Grande(1528–1536)

Bartolomè de Las Casas, Of the Island of Hispaniola(1542)

From The Journal of Christopher Columbus (1492)

Ghana and Its People in the Mid-Eleventh Century

Muslim Reform in Songhai (1500)

Pima Creation Story

Thomas Hariot, A Brief and True Report of the NewFound Land of Virginia (1588)

Pre-Columbian Societies of the Americas

Africa Climate Regions and Early Sites

See the Map

Read the Document

Study and Review

Research and Explore

Personal Journeys Online

From Then to Now Online:The Disappearance of Cod Off The Grand Banks

Exploring America: America and the Horse

Cultures Meet: Europeans View the New World

Read the Document

Hear the audio files for Chapter 1 atwww.myhistorylab.com

Hear the Audio

Ghana: Ewe-Atsiagbekor

How should we think of Columbus?

What is Columbus’s Legacy?

Watch the Video

Hear the Audio

Connections


Documents

M01 GOLD0585 06 SE CH01 - Pearsoncatalogue.pearsoned.ca/assets/hip/us/hip_us_pearsonhighered/samp… · M01_GOLD0585_06_SE_CH01.QXD 8/17/10 9:14 AM Page 5. 6 Chapter 1 Worlds Apart