Age Of Exploration

The Age of Exploration, also known as the Age of Discovery, took place between the fifteenth and seventeenth centuries when Europeans fanned out across the world to massively expand global knowledge of the geography of the earth. Where in 1400 it is likely that no person had sailed around the continent of Africa from Europe to Asia, the Portuguese had succeeded in doing it by the end of the fifteenth century. Around this time, Christopher Columbus made his transatlantic voyages on behalf of Spain in 1492, 1493, 1498 and 1502, while John Cabot, an Italian explorer in English employ, arrived to the mainland of North America for the first time in 1497. By the 1530s Spanish, French, Portuguese, and English explorers had charted a wide array of other regions in Canada, Central America, South America and passed through to the Pacific Ocean. Finally, in Asia, the Portuguese, followed by the Dutch, English, and Spanish, made great discoveries across Southeast Asia and the Far East during this period. For instance, while the discovery of Australia is usually attributed to James Cook in the eighteenth century, Abel Tasman (after whom Tasmania is named today) and other Dutch explorers had actually charted some of the region as early as the mid-seventeenth century. In tandem with these explorations came the establishment of colonies and great demographic change.

Chronology of events

The route of the first voyage of Christopher Columbus.

For centuries, Europeans had been trading with Asia, but this commerce had been undertaken through the Middle East and Central Asia to India and the lands beyond along the Silk Road, which was often reliant on Muslim middlemen who brought valuable commodities like spices, dyes and silk from India and other regions to Egypt and the Levant and then sold them to European merchants from Venice and other cities. These commodities were enormously valuable owing to the circuitous nature of these trade routes and as European navigational methods improved during the late medieval period, navigators from Portugal, Castile, Aragon, England other regions began trying to find new route-ways to Asia. It was this which drove the age of exploration and led the Portuguese to voyage incrementally down the coast of western Africa in the fifteenth century and then around the Cape of Good Hope, reaching India by the end of the 1490s. The Spanish were seeking an alternative route by sailing westwards over the Atlantic Ocean when Christopher Columbus set out in 1492, but he found a vast new continent in his way. Thus began the Age of Explorations.

Matters accelerated from the 1490s onwards. By the 1500s and 1510s the Spanish and Portuguese were sending out expeditions every year, while soon the French and English became more involved too. The first circumnavigation of the globe was achieved by the Magellan-Elcano Expedition between 1519 and 1522. By the late sixteenth century, the Dutch and others had joined the drive towards overseas exploration. These would soon become some of the major players involved, with the English and Dutch becoming the greatest explorers and cartographers of the seventeenth century, discovering new lands like Tasmania and extensive parts of the coastal regions of North America and South Africa.

However, these new discoveries could only be successfully exploited if there were people sent out from the home countries in Europe to begin conquering them and exploiting their resources. In the case of Portugal, this was limited to small trading stations in Asia, but eventually, they would colonize Brazil extensively. The English and French became involved in North America, as did the Dutch briefly, while lesser-known colonial powers such as the Danish and Swedes became involved in the colonization of small Caribbean islands where sugar plantations could yield enormous profits. But the colonial power par excellence in the early centuries was unquestionably Spain, which extensively colonized vast territories from the New Mexico Desert south to the River Plate in Argentina. All of this would profoundly transform the demographic landscape of much of the world.

Extent of migration

The extent of this migration differed from place to place. For instance, the Portuguese and the Dutch, who were the main protagonists when it came to controlling Southeast Asia and the Spice Islands, never engaged much in what is called ‘settler colonialism’, whereby large colonies of settlers were established. Instead, they sent out small numbers of soldiers and administrators to run trading stations and forts in key cities like Malacca near what is now Singapore. In this way, they used their superior technology to dominate the locals and yield as much profit as possible.

But things were different elsewhere. It is estimated that a quarter of a million Spaniards left Spain in the sixteenth century and headed to the Americas; there, they would have an enormous impact on the demography of the Western Hemisphere over the space of five centuries. In many cases, this settlement was necessary, as the arrival of the Europeans from the 1490s onwards had devastated the native population through the introduction of European diseases such as smallpox and measles. As this occurred, more settlers from Europe were needed, but the Europeans also began increasingly bringing slaves from Africa to work on their sugar, cotton, and tobacco plantations in the Americas.

Painting of the arrival of the first Dutch settlers to the Cape Colony.

Beyond the Spanish, the main centers of European settler colonialism overseas during the Age of Exploration lay further to the north along the eastern seaboard of North America, where the British and French began settling colonies at places like Jamestown in Virginia and Québec along the Saint Lawrence River in the first years of the seventeenth century. These were soon joined by the Dutch in New Holland in what is now New York. Others settled colonies in the Caribbean, but easily the most successful by 1700 were the British, who had settled tens of thousands along a string of colonies equating to the East Coast of the United States today. Finally, the Dutch had begun establishing a significant colony at the southern cape of the African continent in the 1650s; the Cape Colony, which became a haven for German and French Protestants fleeing religious persecution at home in the 1680s and 1690s, would form the basis for the modern state of South Africa.

Demographic impact

It is hard to overstate the importance of these developments in shaping the demographic landscape of much of the world. For instance, on countries like Argentina, Peru, Mexico or Cuba Spanish is the language being spoken and many of the people are either of Spanish descent or mestizo, meaning they are of ‘mixed’ Spanish and Native American ancestry. Equally, people all across the United States have some degree of Anglo-Norman ancestry, while the people of Brazil today are often descended from Portuguese settlers of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Though the historical reasons for it are bleaker, the population of many Caribbean countries is overwhelmingly made up of people of black, African extraction whose descendants were forcibly brought to the Americas as slaves owing to these events in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.

Outside of the Americas, the impact has been less substantial, but still important. For instance, in South Africa today many people speak Afrikaans, a language that evolved from Dutch and which developed with the influence of the languages spoken by the Dutch, French Huguenot and German Protestant settlers at the Cape Colony from the 1650s onwards but acquired a significant amount of Khoisan, Malay and Bantu vocabulary. Equally, the first European settlers in countries like India and Indonesia began arriving during the Age of Explorations, but it is really in the Americas where the demography was completely altered owing to what happened between 1492 and 1700.

See also

• Investing in America's British Colonies
• English Colonization of North America
• Spanish Empire

Explore more on Age of Exploration

• Passenger and Immigration Lists, 1500-1900 record collection on MyHeritage
• South Africa, Dutch Reformed Church Registers, 1660-1970 record collection on MyHeritage
• United States records from the colonial period on MyHeritage
• Latin American records from the colonial period on MyHeritage
• Immigration & travel records on MyHeritage
• Colonial Immigrants: Who They Were and Where They Came From, webinar by Mary Hill, AG on Legacy Family Tree Webinars
• Migration Trails Across America, webinar by Peggy Clemens Laurizen, AG on Legacy Family Tree Webinars

References

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