Am Hist 2

Oceanic Travel and the Beginnings of Globalization

Most Native Americans and Europeans generally knew little of each other until the fifteenth century. What Europeans did know, vaguely, was the existence of the distant Chinese Empire. They called the realm Cathay, a term used by Italian merchant Marco Polo, who journeyed from Venice across Asia along the fabled Silk Road in the 1270s.

China and Africa

Some claim that the desire to obtain oriental spices at their source fueled European oceanic exploration, leading eventually to the transformation of the Americas, yet it was China, not Europe, that first mastered ocean sailing.

Others claim that Europe’s exploratory urge had two initial objectives: first, to circumvent overland Muslim traders by finding an eastward oceanic route to Asia; and second, to tap the African gold trade at its source. Since the tenth century, Muslim middlemen in North Africa had brought the precious metal to Europe from West Africa. Now the possibility arose of bypassing these non-Christian traffickers.

Looking for The Indies

During the 1480s, following a war with Spain, the Portuguese continued their African designs. In 1482 they erected a trading fort called Elmina Castle on the Gold Coast (modern Ghana) to guard against Spanish competition and to support exploration toward the east. But they soon encountered a new obstacle: Africa’s long coastline turned abruptly south and continued in that direction for a vast distance.

Meanwhile in Spain

Meanwhile, the rulers of rival Spain, who were reconquering their realm from Muslim control at great expense, gambled on finding a profitable westward route to the Indies. In 1492, King Ferdinand and Queen Isabella finally succeeded in driving Islam from their realm by military means. The monarchs imposed Christian orthodoxy and forced Jews into exile. That same year, they agreed to sponsor an Atlantic voyage by Christopher Columbus.

Columbus

Leaving Spain with 90 men aboard three small vessels, the Italian-born navigator headed for the Canary Islands, eluding Portuguese caravels sent to stop him. From the Canaries, he sailed due west on September . After a voyage of three or four weeks, he expected to encounter the island of Cipangu (Japan), which Marco Polo had mentioned, or to reach the coast of Asia.

Upon his return to Europe, Columbus told the Spanish court that he had reached the Indies off the Asian coast, and he displayed several natives he called “Indians” to prove it . . .

World Maps by Martellus and Waldseemüller

Mapping neatly expresses the Renaissance’s emphasis on the scientific and practical consequences of exploration. What knowledge could be more basic, more fundamental to the human prospect than tracing the physical extent and features of this world—its breadth, depth, oceans, shores, and mountains? These representations were essential to the act of exploring and navigating across a globe that they dimly understood.

World Maps by Martellus and Waldseemüller

This map, completed by German cartographer Martin Waldseemüller in 1507, reveals how profoundly Europe’s view of the world had changed just a quarter century later. The world’s five major continents are more defined— though Europeans’ knowledge remained distorted and incomplete.

QUICK CHAT!!

1. There are obvious differences between the two maps. What are the similarities?

2. Which parts of the maps are the least accurate or have the least amount of detail? Why?

The Great Dying

Spanish contacts with the natives of the Caribbean basin, central Mexico, and Peru in the early sixteenth century triggered a biological epidemic.

The results were catastrophic. In 1518, the smallpox virus erupted on Hispaniola. The Spanish priest Bartolomé de las Casas recorded that “of that immensity of people that was on this island and which we have seen with our own eyes” only about one thousand were spared among a population of between 1 and 3 million that had existed when Columbus arrived in 1493 . . .

Questions to Consider

1. Can you guess what illness each image represents?

2. What do these drawings convey that words could not?

Answers: (a) Measles, (b) Whooping Cough, (c) Small Pox, (d) Starvation, (e) Dropsy, (f) Cholera.

The arrival of Europeans and Africans in North America brought unprecedented dangers and opportunities for the continent’s indigenous peoples. All three groups had different interests, and the circumstances of their encounters varied dramatically. These encounters, furthermore, served to disperse exotic diseases and other organisms that spread in unexpected and powerful ways. Early encounters were full of chance.

CONVO!

1. How does the history of early encounters in North America fit with the history of the rest of the world in the 1400s and 1500s?

2. What were the unintended consequences of sustained contact between North America, Europe, and Africa? What unintended consequences did the movements between these continents of people, germs, plants, and animals have?

Spain’s Northern Frontier

Spanish explorers began charting the southeastern region of North America in the early sixteenth century, beginning with Juan Ponce de León’s expeditions to Florida in 1515 and 1521 and Lucas Vasquez d’Ayllón’s short-lived settlement at Winyah Bay in South Carolina in 1526. For the next half century, Spaniards planted small settlements along the coast as far north as Chesapeake Bay, where their temporary encampment included enslaved Africans. The Spanish traded some with the natives, but the North American coast, especially Florida, was chiefly important to the Franciscan friars, who attempted to gather the local tribes into mission villages and convert them to Catholicism.

The Southwest

The Southwest became a more important region of early Spanish activity in North America. Francisco Vásquez de Coronado explored the region from 1540 to 154 , leading an expedition of several hundred Spanish soldiers, a number of Africans, and a baggage train of some 1,300 friendly Indians, servants, and slaves. Coronado never found the Seven Cities of Cíbola, reported by earlier Spanish explorers to be fabulously decorated in turquoise and gold. But he opened much of Arizona, New Mexico, and Colorado to eventual Spanish control, happened upon the Grand Canyon, and probed as far north as the Great Plains. His interior explorations, together with the nearly simultaneous expedition of de Soto in the Southeast, established Spanish claims to the southern latitudes of North America and gave them contacts, often bloody, with the populous corn-growing Indian societies of the region.

How we followed the corn route

Creator: Álvar Núñez Cabeza de Vaca

Context: Cabeza De Vaca was one of a few survivors of an ambitious Spanish expedition to Florida in 15 8 and wandered thousands of miles over several years.

Audience: Spanish readers

Purpose: To win readers, fame, and sympathy

How we followed the corn route

We found that they were so well disposed for it that, if we could have communicated perfectly in a common language, we could have converted them all to Christianity. We tried to communicate these things to them the best we could. From then on at sunrise, with a great shout they would stretch their hands towards heaven and run them over their entire bodies. They did the same thing at sunset.

Throughout these lands those who were at war with one another made peace to come to greet us and give us all they owned. In this way we left the whole country in peace. We told them in sign language which they understood that in heaven there was a man whom we called God, who had created heaven and earth, and that we worshipped him and considered him our Lord and did everything that he commanded. We said that all good things came from his hand and that if they did the same, things would go very well for them.

We enjoyed a great deal of authority and dignity among them, and to maintain this we spoke very little to them. The black man always spoke to them, ascertaining which way to go and what villages we would find and all the other things we wanted to know. We encountered a great number and variety of languages; God Our Lord favored us in all these cases, because we were able to communicate always. We would ask in sign language and be answered the same way, as if we spoke their language and they spoke ours. We knew six languages, but they were not useful everywhere, since we found more than a thousand differences.

Álvar Núñez Cabeza de Vaca, La Relación, the narrative of Álvar Núñez Cabeza de Vaca (1555), Chapter 31. Courtesy of the Southwestern Writers Collection, Alkek Library, Texas State University-San Marcos.

Primary Sources

The Requerimiento

The Codex Kingsborough, also known as the Codex Tepetlaoztoc, 16th-century

Primary Sources

Bartolome De las Casas

"A boat could sail from the Bahamas to Haiti without a compass or chart, guiding itself solely by the Trail of the dead Indians who had been thrown from the ships."

Primary Sources

"I ordered that a Lombard and a musket be fired, and the King was spell bound when he saw the effect of their force and what they penetrated. When the people heard the shots, they fell to their knees. They brought me a large mask, which had large pieces of gold in the ears and eyes and in other places, which the king himself presented to me. He placed this, along with other jewels of gold, on my head and around my neck. The king was delighted to see me happy and he understood that I desired a great deal of gold."

Christopher Columbus.

Primary Sources

Christopher Columbus

The Indians are so naive and so free with their possessions that no one who has not witnessed them would believe it. When you ask for something they have, they never say, 'no, To the contrary, they offer to share with anyone.

They would make fine servants. With 50 men, we could subjugate them all and make them do whatever we want.

Primary Sources

Christopher Columbus

The cost of a woman is 100 Castellanos, the same as that of a farm. The trade is very common and there are now many merchants who go about looking for girls, some of ages nine or ten are now on demand, but whatever their age they command a good price.

Primary Sources

When the infantry squadrons of both armies had attacked the mass of Indians, and they had begun to break under the fire of muskets and crossbows, the cavalry and hunting dogs charged wildly upon them to prevent them re-forming. The Indians fled like cowards in all directions, and our men pursued them, killing so many.

Ferdinand Columbo

CONVO

Which of the sources is most striking?

On what things do all the sources agree, and on what things do they disagree?

What is the overall picture painted by the sources?

Whose voices comprise the source material? Whose voices are missing from the source material? Why is it like this?

What can perspective did Europeans bring to initial encounters? What perspective did Native Americans bring? Africans?

What sort of primary sources are most and least biased?

ISABELLA, Dominican Republic (1493)

A small town that Columbus ordered his men to build on the northeastern shore of Hispaniola (in present-day Dominican Republic) during his second voyage to the New World in 1493. Hunger and disease soon led to mutiny, punishment, disillusion, and more hunger and disease. Isabella barely survived until 1496 when Columbus ordered a new town built on the island as the Spanish capital (now Santo Domingo). Isabella was the "first of the Indies," declares Antonio de Herrera, the seventeenth-century historian who compiled this history of early New Spain from state archives.

[Antonio de Herrera y Tordesillas, Historia general de los hechos de los Castellanos en las islas y tierra firme del Mar Oceano (General History of the Deeds of the Castilians on the Islands and Mainland of the Ocean Sea), Madrid, 1601-1615]

ST. AUGUSTINE, Florida (1565)

St. Augustine was founded on Sept. 8, 1565, 11 days after the Spanish explorer Pedro Menéndez de Avilés came ashore on the feast day of St. Augustine. For more than 200 years, it was the capital of Spanish Florida. From 1763 to 1783, control of the region fell into British hands. During that period, St. Augustine was the capital of British East Florida. Control reverted to the Spanish in 1783 until 1822, when it was ceded by treaty to the United States.

St. Augustine remained the territorial capital until 1824 when it was moved to Tallahassee. In the 1880s, developer Henry Flagler began buying up local rail lines and building hotels, ushering in what would become Florida's winter tourist trade, still an important part of the city and state economy.

JAMESTOWN, Virginia (1607)

Justifiably called "the first permanent English settlement" in the New World—a hard-won designation. As historian Alan Taylor recounts, of the first 104 colonists who landed in April 1607, only thirty-eight survived the winter. Of the 10,000 who left England for Jamestown in its first fifteen years, only twenty percent were still alive, and still in Jamestown, in 1622. The first months of the colony were chronicled by John Smith, Edward Wingfield, and in this selection by George Percy, who twice served as the colony's governor. After writing several accounts to justify his actions as governor, Percy left Jamestown for good in 1612. (John Smith, who also felt compelled to defend his leadership, had left for good in 1609.)

[George Percy, Observations Gathered out of a Discourse of the Plantation of the Southern Colony in Virginia by the English, 1606, publ. 1608]

SANTA FE, New Mexico (1607)

Santa Fe holds the distinction of being the oldest state capital in the U.S. as well as New Mexico's oldest city. Long before Spanish colonists arrived in 1607, the area had been occupied by Native Americans. One Pueblo village, founded around 900 A.D., was located in what is today downtown Santa Fe. Native American tribes expelled the Spanish from the region from 1680 to 1692, but the rebellion was eventually put down.

Santa Fe remained in Spanish hands until Mexico declared its independence in 1810, and then became part of the Texas Republic when it pulled away from Mexico in 1836. Santa Fe (and present-day New Mexico) didn't become a part of the United States until 1848 after the Mexican-American War ended in Mexico's defeat. Today, Santa Fe is a thriving capital city known for its Spanish Territorial style of architecture.

HAMPTON, Virginia (1610)

Hampton, Va., began as Point Comfort, an English outpost established by the same people who founded nearby Jamestown. Located at the mouth of the James River and the entrance to the Chesapeake Bay, Hampton became major military outpost after American Independence. Although Virginia was the capital of the Confederacy during the Civil War, Fort Monroe in Hampton remained in Union hands throughout the conflict. Today, the city is the home of Joint Base Langley–Eustis and just across the river from the Norfolk Naval Station.

PLYMOUTH

To American schoolchildren of many generations, the term "colonist" spurs images of stalwart Pilgrims setting sail on the Mayflower to land at Plymouth Rock—an epic tale of adventure and determination. And it's true. Unlike the single men—the courtiers, soldiers, and adventurers—who built Isabella, Jamestown, and many other early European settlements, the Pilgrims were skilled, hardworking, and self-disciplined. In addition, they settled as families for the most part, unique in Atlantic coast settlement at this point. Here we read from the journal of the colony's longtime governor, William Bradford, of the colonists' hard first year after landing in November 1620 to the first harvest in autumn 1621.

[William Bradford, History of Plymouth Plantation, written between 1630 and 1647]

Let's backtrack. Remember the first class? Have your opinions changed at all?

1. Prior to European contact in North America, what was the continent like in terms of established societies, culture, and achievements?

2. When does American history begin?

Some Big Questions

How do different sources present the arrival of the explorers?

Is the world better off for having experienced the Columbian Exchange?

How did humans benefit from its existence?

How did they suffer from it?

How can a reader's perspective about an issue be changed by the sources an author chooses to include or leave out?

Why is there such a difference between what primary sources tell us about the exploration of the Americas and how this exploration is presented in modern culture?