What factors might have led these various nations to explore and colonize different areas of the New World?
EUROPEAN EXPLORATION AND CONQUEST, 1492–1583 This map shows the many voyages of exploration to and conquest of North America launched by Europeans in the late fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. Note how Columbus and the Spanish explorers who followed him tended to move quickly into the lands of Mexico, the Caribbean, and Central and South America, while the English and French explored the northern territories of North America. In all cases they encountered Indians, whose roots trace back centuries before the arrival of the Europeans. • What factors might have led these various nations to explore and colonize different areas of the New World?
that separated America from China. Seeking access to that ocean, Ferdinand Magellan, a Portuguese in Spanish employ, found the strait that now bears his name at the south- ern end of South America, struggled through the stormy narrows and into the ocean (so calm by contrast that he christened it the Pacific), and then proceeded to the Philippines.
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There Magellan died in a conflict with local Indians, but his expedition went on to complete the first known circumnavigation of the globe (1519–1522). By 1550, Spaniards had explored the coasts of North America as far north as Oregon in the west and Labrador in the east.
The Spanish Empire In time, Spanish explorers in the New World stopped thinking of America simply as an obstacle to their search for a route to Asia and began instead to consider it a possible source of wealth in itself. The Spanish claimed for themselves the whole of the New World, except for a large part of the east coast of South America (today’s Brazil) that was reserved by a papal decree for the Portuguese.
In 1518, Hernando Cortés, who had been an unsuccessful Spanish government official in Cuba for fourteen years, led a small military expedition of about 600 men against the Aztecs in Mexico and their powerful emperor, Montezuma, after hearing stories of their great treasures. Moving his warriors through Mexico, he befriended a native tribe that he labeled the Tlaxcalans, who were rivals of the Aztecs and would become crucial military allies. Approaching Tenochtitlán, Cortés benefited from perfect timing. His arrival seemed to fulfill a popular Aztec prophecy that claimed the god Quetsalcoatl was to return to Earth. The Aztecs mistook Cortés and his fighters—mysterious light skinned men—as divine company and greeted them as honored figures. Cortés, with the support of the Tlaxcalans, quickly took control of the city. Key to his success was the use of body armor that repelled or blunted arrows, steel swords, lances with iron or steel points, and a type of early musket called harquebus—all weapons unknown to the Aztecs. An Aztec counterrebellion, however, soon restored them to power. But not for long.
A smallpox epidemic, begun when a Spanish soldier died from the disease while in Tenochtitlán, spread among the Aztecs and gutted the population. When Cortés re-attacked, again with the backing of the Tlaxcalans, he now fought a depleted people. Even more significantly, he employed a series of new and aggressive military tactics—blocking delivery of food and water to the city, choking off canals, destroying aqueducts—that brought the city to its knees after 75 days. Cortés laid claim to Tenochtitlán, ruthlessly destroying temples and homes and establishing himself as one of the most brutal of the Spanish conquistadores (conquerors). Twenty years later, Francisco Pizarro overpowered the Incas in Peru and opened the way for other Spanish advances into South America.
The first Spanish settlers in America were interested largely in exploiting the American stores of gold and silver, and they were fabulously successful. For 300 years, beginning in the sixteenth century, the mines of Spanish America yielded more than ten times as much gold and silver as all the rest of the world’s mines combined. Before long, however, most Spanish settlers in America traveled to the New World for other reasons. Many went in hopes of profiting from agriculture. They helped establish elements of European civilization permanently in America. Other Spaniards—priests, friars, and missionaries—went to America to spread Catholicism; through their efforts, the influence of the Catholic Church ultimately extended throughout South and Central America and Mexico. They sometimes evangelized, however, with an iron fist, forcing whole families to forsake their sacred beliefs and practices, be baptized, and adopt the teachings of the Catholic Church or face physical punishment and even death. Yet one of the first friars to work in the colonies, Bartolomé de Las Casas, fought for the fair treatment of native peoples by the Spanish as part of his ministry. (See “Consider the Source: Bartolomé de Las Casas, ‘Of the Island of Hispaniola.’”)
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