Nation of Nations Concise 2/e Davidson, Gienapp, Heyrman, Lytle, & Stoff
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The story of European exploration and discovery in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries starts with the international fishing community off Newfoundland-a group of fisherfolk, mariners, and merchants who swarmed to fish the waters and to swap supplies and gossip at St. John's. The tales traded by these ordinary seamen and traders featured the exploits of "great men"-the Portuguese explorations of the coast of Africa and their charting of a new route to Asia; the efforts of John Cabot to find a northwest passage to the Orient; and, of course, Columbus's discovery of America.

The Meeting of Europe and America

Their encounter with the Americas occurred because of Europeans' conquest of the high seas, which in turn was part of a larger technological, economic, demographic and cultural transformation. The outward reach began with the successful voyages of the Portuguese into the Atlantic in the late 1300s, when they colonized the Canary Islands and, a few decades later, Madeira and the Azores. By the early 1400s the Portuguese had established sugar plantations on the Atlantic islands worked by enslaved Africans. The Portuguese also initiated a trade with West Africa, and by the end of the century their explorers had rounded the tip of that continent and opened a direct commerce with India.

While the Portuguese dominated the trade routes to Africa and Asia, the Spanish laid claim to the Americas, led by the discovery of an Italian mariner, Christopher Columbus.

Early North American Cultures

The people who first settled the Americas were descendants of Asian migrants who crossed the Bering Strait to Alaska many millennia before 1492. When Europeans first arrived in the Americas, these Indian cultures were numerous and diverse, ranging from the hunting and gathering societies of the Great Plains to the sophisticated civilization of the Aztecs in Mesoamerica.

Indeed, the Aztec economy and society encountered by Spanish explorers was similar in some respects to that of sixteenth-century Europe. One crucial difference, however, was that Aztec expansionism did not take the form of exploration and colonization across the seas.

The European Background of American Colonization

To understand why western European expansion extended overseas requires an understanding of conditions in late medieval Europe, which bred a sense of crisis mixed with a sense of possibility. Life was uncertain and often violent. The economic and political evolution concentrated investment capital in the hands of merchants, financiers, and landlords. Population growth put pressure on a limited supply of land. Political authority became concentrated in nation-states. All these changes, coupled with advances in maritime technology, allowed Europeans to push back the ocean frontier and to support overseas settlement. Transatlantic expansionism became not only possible but desirable.

Spain's Empire in the New World

Spain took the lead in exploring and colonizing the Americas. Under Spain, conquistadors like Hernando Cortes supplanted native societies like the Aztecs as the new overlords of Central and South America. Technological superiority, divisions within Indian empires, and the devastation of native populations by European diseases made the Spanish conquest easier.

But Spanish monarchs soon replaced the conquistadors with their own rule over Spanish America, through an elaborate civil and ecclesiastical bureaucracy. The empire that developed during the sixteenth century rested largely on the coerced labor of natives and imported Africans. It proved enormously profitable, especially after the discovery of silver. That wealth, in turn, made Spain the dominant power in Europe.

The Reformation in Europe

But even while Catholic Spain developed its American empire, the Protestant Reformation transformed western Europe, and added a new dimension to the ensuing competition for empire. Inspired by the teachings of Martin Luther and John Calvin, Protestant reformers criticized not only the worldliness and corruption of the Roman Catholic church, but also what they saw as error in its teachings. They addressed popular needs for religious reassurance by stressing that men and women were saved not by good works but through divine grace alone. Protestants also stressed the ability of each individual to read and understand the will of God as revealed in the Bible. Protestantism took root slowly in England, even after King Henry VIII broke with the Roman Pope. By the reign of Elizabeth, Protestantism was established, although an impatient minority wanted to "purify" it further.

England's Entry into the New World

Protestant attacks on Roman Catholicism won both zealous followers and determined opponents, triggering a series of bloody religious wars. Young Englishmen found adventure in these religious conflicts, as well as in England's effort to conquer and colonize Ireland.

Many veterans of the Irish campaigns turned their attention to North America in the 1570s and 1580s. At that time, the threat Spain posed to English economic and military security encouraged Elizabeth I to challenge Spain more aggressively, both within Europe and across the Atlantic. English merchants and gentlemen, in search of new markets and new land, lent increasing support to colonization schemes as well. Martin Frobisher, Humphrey Gilbert, and Walter Raleigh all tried and failed at planting colonies in America. But their efforts, as well as the younger Richard Hakluyt's energetic promotion of English colonization, paved the way for renewed English expansionism in the seventeenth century.

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