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A major maritime victory for Portugal, Dias’ breakthrough opened the door to increased trade with India and other Asian powers. It also prompted Genoan explorer Christopher Columbus (1451-1506), then living in Portugal, to seek a new royal patron for a mission to establish his own sea route to the Far East.
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Helped establish the first stable settlement on the South American continent at Darién, on the coast of the Isthmus of Panama. In 1513, while leading an expedition in search of gold, he sighted the Pacific Ocean.
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Francisco Pizarro was born circa 1476 in Trujillo, Spain. In 1513, he joined Vasco Núñez de Balboa in his march to the "South Sea," during which Balboa discovered the Pacific Ocean. In 1532, Pizarro and his brothers conquered Peru.
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The expedition sighted land, probably Watling Island in the Bahamas, and went ashore the same day, claiming it for Spain. Later that month, Columbus sighted Cuba, which he thought was mainland China, and in December the expedition landed on Hispaniola, which Columbus thought might be Japan. He established a small colony there with 39 of his men.
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Columbus set sail from Spain to find an all-water route to Asia. On October 12, more than two months later, Columbus landed on an island in the Bahamas that he called San Salvador; the natives called it Guanahani.
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Agreement between Spain and Portugal aimed at settling conflicts over lands newly discovered or explored by Christopher Columbus and other late 15th-century voyagers.
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The Portuguese nobleman Vasco da Gama (1460-1524) sailed from Lisbon in 1497 on a mission to reach India and open a sea route from Europe to the East. ... Two decades later, da Gama again returned to India, this time as Portuguese viceroy; he died there of an illness in late 1524.
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Columbus left the port of Sanlucar in southern Spain on May 30, 1498 with six ships, bound for the New World on his third voyage. After stopping at the islands of Porto Santo and Madeira, the fleet arrived at Gomera in the Canary Islands on June 19.
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He concluded that the land they had found had to be another continent – the “new world” that some Europeans thought might be there.
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On the 1499 voyage, Vespucci sailed to the northern part of South America and into the Amazon River. He gave places he saw names like the "Gulf of Ganges," thinking, as his explorer contemporaries did, that he was in Asia.
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On May 11, 1502, four old ships and 140 men under Columbus's command put to sea from the port of Cadiz. Among those accompanying him were his brother Bartholomew, and younger son Fernando, then thirteen years old. At age fifty-one, Columbus was sick, but felt he had one more voyage left in him.
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The first contact with Mexico occurred in 1517, when explorer Francisco Hernández de Córdoba landed on the Yucatan coast. A subsequent expedition by Juan de Grijalva confirmed a land dominated by a powerful people who were despised by those forced to pay tribute to them.
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Hernan Cortes, the conquistador captain, established a New World Empire with 600 men against a million Aztecs. His conquest in 1519 set in motion the destruction of one of the greatest ancient societies. The Aztecs were reported to be at the height of their civilization during the sixteenth century.
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Ferdinand Magellan Reaches the Pacific Ocean. On this day in 1520, famed Portuguese explorer Ferdinand Magellan entered "The Sea of the South" having sailed from the Atlantic Ocean through the passage that now bears his name, the Straits of Magellan.
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The Roanoke Island colony, the first English settlement in the New World, was founded by English explorer Sir Walter Raleigh in August 1585. The first Roanoke colonists did not fare well, suffering from dwindling food supplies and Indian attacks, and in 1586 they returned to England aboard a ship captained by Sir Francis Drake.
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A fleet of eight ships under Jacob van Neck was the first Dutch fleet to reach the 'Spice Islands' of Maluku, the source of pepper, cutting out the Javanese middlemen. The ships returned to Europe in 1599 and 1600 and the expedition made a 400 percent profit.
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The Virginia Company of England made a daring proposition: sail to the new, mysterious land, which they called Virginia in honor of Elizabeth I, the Virgin Queen, and begin a settlement. They established Jamestown, Virginia, on May 14, 1607, the first permanent British settlement in North America.
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The number of black slaves in America did not immediately expand after the Dutch brought the first boatload to Jamestown in 1619. Slavery as an institution was not formally recognized in Virginia until 1664. Opposition to the slave trade developed early, particularly among Quakers and Mennonites.
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Plymouth Colony. Plymouth Colony First colonial settlement in New England (founded 1620). The settlers were a group of about 100 Puritan Separatist Pilgrims, who sailed on the Mayflower and settled on what is now Cape Cod bay, Massachusetts.
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One of the original English settlements in present-day Massachusetts, settled in 1630 by a group of about 1,000 Puritan refugees from England under Gov. John Winthrop and Deputy Gov. Thomas Dudley. In 1629 the Massachusetts Bay Company had obtained from King Charles I a charter empowering the company to trade and colonize in New England between the Charles and Merrimack rivers.
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Tonti was to command the fort while La Salle traveled again to France for supplies. On July 24, 1684, La Salle sailed again from France and returned to America with a large expedition designed to establish a French colony on the Gulf of Mexico, at the mouth of the Mississippi River.
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The explorer Christopher Columbus made four trips across the Atlantic Ocean from Spain: in 1492, 1493, 1498 and 1502. He was determined to find a direct water route west from Europe to Asia, but he never did. Instead, he accidentally stumbled upon the Americas.
