Italians continued to make important journeys in the East during the 15th century. Among them was Nicolo Conti, who passed through Persia, sailed along the coast of Malabar, visited Sumatra, Java and the south of China, returned by the Red sea, and got home to Venice in 1444 after an absence of twenty-five years. He related his adventures to Poggio Bracciolini, secretary to Pope Eugenius IV.; and the narrative contains much interesting information. One of the most remarkable of the Italian travellers was Ludovico di Varthema, who left his native land in 1502. He went to Egypt and Syria, and for the sake of visiting the holy cities became a Mahommedan. He was the first European who gave an account of the interior of Yemen. He afterwards visited and described many places in Persia, India and the Malay Archipelago, returning to Europe in a Portuguese ship after an absence of five years.
In the 15th century the time was approaching when the discovery of the Cape of Good Hope was to widen the scope of geographical enterprise. This great event was preceded by the general utilization in Europe of the polarity of the magnetic Portuguese exploration—Prince Henry the Navigator. needle in the construction of the mariner’s compass. Portugal took the lead along this new path, and foremost among her pioneers stands Prince Henry the Navigator (1394-1460), who was a patron both of exploration and of the study of geographical theory. The great westward projection of the coast of Africa, and the islands to the north-west of that continent, were the principal scene of the work of the mariners sent out at his expense; but his object was to push onward and reach India from the Atlantic. The progress of discovery received a check on his death, but only for a time. In 1462 Pedro de Cintra extended Portuguese exploration along the African coast and discovered Sierra Leone. Fernan Gomez followed in 1469, and opened trade with the Gold Coast; and in 1484 Diogo Cão discovered the mouth of the Congo. The king of Portugal next despatched Bartolomeu Diaz in 1486 to continue discoveries southwards; while, in the following year, he sent Pedro de Covilhão and Affonso de Payva to discover the country of Prester John. Diaz succeeded in rounding the southern point of Africa, which he named Cabo Tormentoso—the Cape of Storms—but King João II., foreseeing the realization of the long-sought passage to India, gave it the stimulating and enduring name of the Cape of Good Hope. Payva died at Cairo; but Covilhão, having heard that a Christian ruler reigned in the mountains of Ethiopia, penetrated into Abyssinia in 1490. He delivered the letter which João II. had addressed to Prester John to the Negus Alexander of Abyssinia, but he was detained by that prince and never allowed to leave the country.
The Portuguese, following the lead of Prince Henry, continued to look for the road to India by the Cape of Good Hope. The same end was sought by Christopher Columbus, following the suggestion of Toscanelli, and under-estimating the diameter Columbus. of the globe, by sailing due west. The voyages of Columbus (1492-1498) resulted in the discovery of the West Indies and North America which barred the way to the Far East. In 1493 the pope, Alexander VI., issued a bull instituting the famous “line of demarcation” running from N. to S. 100 leagues W. of the Azores, to the west of which the Spaniards were authorized to explore and to the east of which the Portuguese received the monopoly of discovery. The direct line of Portuguese exploration resulted in the discovery of the Cape route to India by Vasco da Gama (1498), and in 1500 to the independent discovery of South America by Pedro Alvarez Cabral. The voyages of Columbus and of Vasco da Gama were so important that it is unnecessary to detail their results in this place. See [Columbus, Christopher]; [Gama, Vasco da].
The three voyages of Vasco da Gama (who died on the scene of his labours, at Cochin, in 1524) revolutionized the commerce of the East. Until then the Venetians held the carrying trade Vasco da Gama. of India, which was brought by the Persian Gulf and Red sea into Syria and Egypt, the Venetians receiving the products of the East at Alexandria and Beirut and distributing them over Europe. This commerce was a great source of wealth to Venice; but after the discovery of the new passage round the Cape, and the conquests of the Portuguese, the trade of the East passed into other hands.
The discoveries of Columbus awakened a spirit of enterprise in Spain which continued in full force for a century; adventurers flocked eagerly across the Atlantic, and discovery followed discovery in rapid succession. Many of the companions Spaniards in America. of Columbus continued his work. Vicente Yañez Pinzon in 1500 reached the mouth of the Amazon. In the same year Alonso de Ojeda, accompanied by Juan de la Cosa, from whose maps we learn much of the discoveries of the 16th century navigators, and by a Florentine named Amerigo Vespucci, touched the coast of South America somewhere near Surinam, following the shore as far as the Gulf of Maracaibo. Vespucci afterwards made three voyages to the Brazilian coast; and in 1504 he wrote an account of his four voyages, which was widely circulated, and became the means of procuring for its author at the hands of the cartographer Waldseemüller in 1507 the disproportionate distinction of giving his name to the whole continent. In 1508 Alonso de Ojeda obtained the government of the coast of South America from Cabo de la Vela to the Gulf of Darien; Ojeda landed at Cartagena in 1510, and sustained a defeat from the natives, in which his lieutenant, Juan de la Cosa, was killed. After another reverse on the east side of the Gulf of Darien Ojeda returned to Hispaniola and died there. The Spaniards in the Gulf of Darien were left by Ojeda under the command of Francisco Pizarro, the future conqueror of Peru. After suffering much from famine and disease, Pizarro resolved to leave, and embarked the survivors in small vessels, but outside the harbour they met a ship which proved to be that of Martin Fernandez Enciso, Ojeda’s partner, coming with provisions and reinforcements. One of the crew of Enciso’s ship, Vasco Nuñez de Balboa, the future discoverer of the Pacific Ocean, induced his commander to form a settlement on the other side of the Gulf of Darien. The soldiers became discontented and deposed Enciso, who was a man of learning and an accomplished cosmographer. His work Suma de Geografia, which was printed in 1519, is the first Spanish book which gives an account of America. Vasco Nuñez, the new commander, entered upon a career of conquest in the neighbourhood of Darien, which ended in the discovery of the Pacific Ocean on the 25th of September 1513. Vasco Nuñez was beheaded in 1517 by Pedrarias de Avila, who was sent out to supersede him. This was one of the greatest calamities that could have happened to South America; for the discoverer of the South sea was on the point of sailing with a little fleet into his unknown ocean, and a humane and judicious man would probably have been the conqueror of Peru, instead of the cruel and ignorant Pizarro. In the year 1519 Panama was founded by Pedrarias; and the conquest of Peru by Pizarro followed a few years afterwards. Hernan Cortes overran and conquered Mexico from 1518 to 1521, and the discovery and conquest of Guatemala by Alvarado, the invasion of Florida by De Soto, and of Nueva Granada by Quesada, followed in rapid succession. The first detailed account of the west coast of South America was written by a keenly observant old soldier, Pedro de Cieza de Leon, who was travelling in South America from 1533 to 1550, and published his story at Seville in 1553.
The great desire of the Spanish government at that time was to find a westward route to the Moluccas. For this purpose Juan Diaz de Solis was despatched in October 1515, and in January 1516 he discovered the mouth of the Rio de la Pacific Ocean. Plata. He was, however, killed by the natives, and his ships returned. In the following year the Portuguese Ferdinando Magalhães, familiarly known as Magellan, laid before Charles V., at Valladolid, a scheme for reaching the Spice Islands by sailing westward. He started on the 21st of September 1519, entered the strait which now bears his name in October 1520, worked his way through between Patagonia and Tierra del Fuego, and entered on the vast Pacific which he crossed without sighting any of its innumerable island groups. This was unquestionably the greatest of the voyages which followed from the impulse of Prince Henry, and it was rendered possible only by the magnificent courage of the commander in spite of rebellion, mutiny and starvation. It was the 6th of March 1521 when he reached the Ladrone Islands. Thence Magellan proceeded to the Philippines, and there his career ended in an unimportant encounter with hostile natives. Eventually a Biscayan named Sebastian del Cano, sailing home by way of the Cape of Good Hope, reached San Lucar in command of the “Victoria” on the 6th of September 1522, with eighteen survivors; this one ship of the squadron which sailed on the quest succeeded in accomplishing the first circumnavigation of the globe. Del Cano was received with great distinction by the emperor, who granted him a globe for his crest, and the motto Primus circumdedisti me.
While the Spaniards were circumnavigating the world and completing their knowledge of the coasts of Central and South America, the Portuguese were actively Portuguese in Africa and the East. engaged on similar work as regards Africa and the East Indies.
With Abyssinia the mission of Covilhão led to further intercourse. In April 1520 Vasco da Gama, as viceroy of the Indies, took a fleet into the Red sea, and landed an embassy consisting of Dom Rodriguez de Lima and Father Francisco Alvarez, a priest whose detailed narrative is the earliest and not the least interesting account we possess of Abyssinia. It was not until 1526 that the embassy was dismissed; and not many years afterwards the negus entreated the help of the Portuguese against Mahommedan invaders, and the viceroy sent an expeditionary force, commanded by his brother Cristoforo da Gama, with 450 musketeers. Da Gama was taken prisoner and killed, but his followers enabled the Christians of Abyssinia to regain their power, and a Jesuit mission remained in the country. The Portuguese also established a close connexion with the kingdom of Congo on the west side of Africa, and obtained much information respecting the interior of the continent. Duarte Lopez, a Portuguese settled in the country, was sent on a mission to Rome by the king of Congo, and Pope Sixtus V. caused him to recount to his chamberlain, Felipe Pigafetta, all he had learned during the nine years he had been in Africa, from 1578 to 1587. This narrative, under the title of Description of the Kingdom of Congo, was published at Rome by Pigafetta in 1591. A map was attached on which several great equatorial lakes are shown, and the empire of Monomwezi or Unyamwezi is laid down. The most valuable work on Africa about this time is, however, that written by the Moor Leo Africanus in the early part of the 16th century. Leo travelled extensively in the north and west of Africa, and was eventually taken by pirates and sold to a master who presented him to Pope Leo X. At the pope’s desire he translated his work on Africa into Italian.
In Further India and the Malay Archipelago the Portuguese acquired predominating influence at sea, establishing factories on the Malabar coast, in the Persian Gulf, at Malacca, and in the Spice Islands, and extending their commercial enterprises from the Red sea to China. Their missionaries were received at the court of Akbar, and Benedict Goes, a native of the Azores, was despatched on a journey overland from Agra to China. He started in 1603, and, after traversing the least-known parts of Central Asia, he reached the confines of China. He appears to have ascended from Kabul to the plateau of the Pamir, and thence onwards by Yarkand, Khotan and Aksu. He died on the journey in March 1607; and thus, as one of the brethren pronounced his epitaph, “seeking Cathay he found heaven.”
The activity and love of adventure, which became a passion for two or three generations in Spain and Portugal, spread to other countries. It was the spirit of the age; and England, Holland and France were fired by it. English enterprise English, Dutch and French. was first aroused by John and Sebastian Cabot, father and son, who came from Venice and settled at Bristol in the time of Henry VII. The Cabots received a patent in 1496, empowering them to seek unknown lands; and John Cabot discovered Newfoundland and part of the coast of America. Sebastian afterwards made a voyage to Rio de la Plata in the service of Spain, but he returned to England in 1548 and received a pension from Edward VI. At his suggestion a voyage was undertaken for the discovery of a north-east passage to Cathay, with Sir Hugh Willoughby as captain-general of the fleet and Richard Chancellor as pilot-major. They sailed in May 1553, but Willoughby and all his crew perished on the Lapland coast. Chancellor, however, was more fortunate. He reached the White Sea, performed the journey overland to Moscow, where he was well received, and may be said to have been the founder of the trade between Russia and England. He returned to Archangel and brought his ship back in safety to England. On a second voyage, in 1556, Chancellor was drowned; and three subsequent voyages, led by Stephen Burrough, Arthur Pet and Charles Jackman, in small craft of 50 tons and under, carried on an examination of the straits which lead into the Kara sea.