The World of the Portuguese and Spanish Explorers

The Magellanic Diaries 9

The Magellanic Diaries 8, with free links to foundational posts offering full understanding of the series.

The Age of “Exploration,” also what is called the Age of “Discovery,” what served too as the start of an age of European imperialism and colonialism, contains within it, for roughly 150 years, an age of Portuguese and Spanish exploration that provided the engine and the knowledge for the whole greater enterprise to spread across the world and conquer much of it. Though there are millennia of earlier sea exploration and trade, and Northern European initiatives of colonial exploration that followed, it was this period of Portuguese and Spanish exploration that gunned the final expansion into the world we know today.

The northern seas have their own history, including across the Atlantic, while the Venetians had long dominated Mediterranean Sea routes – and trade with the eastern, Asiatic world via Arab and Muslim sea and land routes (the Silk Road). The Chinese, too, have a little-known history of sea exploration. But it was the Portuguese and Spanish determination to break the Venetian-Muslim domination of the spice trade and, as Christian nations, economically and spiritually to out compete the Muslim world that drove the exploration.

Historians wrangle professionally over “periodization” – the establishment, both for purposes of deeper understanding and convenience, distinct and named historical periods. Fortunately, for my creative purposes, I am not a professional historian. I have my own dramatic, narrative aims, and I choose 1415 and 1565 as my boundary setting years.

It is true that the Portuguese and Spanish were already disputing rights to the Canary Islands, off the northwestern coast of Africa, as early as the mid-14^th century. The Spanish prevailed, and their control over the Canaries played out a final fraught scene in the near limitless tale of misadventure that was the 3-year Magellan saga.

But it is an event of 1415 that kicks off a chain of activity that leads to 1565. On August 21, 1415, King John I of Portugal led 45.000 men on 200 ships across the Strait of Gibraltar to capture the North African city of Ceuta. Accompanying him were his three sons, including the youngest, who later became known as Henry the Navigator. As I wrote earlier in these diaries, it is Henry who dedicates himself over his career to leading a Portuguese national mission of sea faring and explorations.

This conquest served as only the beginning of decades-long Portuguese efforts to capitalize the resources of Africa – including people – and extend limited sea routes down the coast of Africa and beyond it to Asia and the East Indies, and then, after Columbus in 1492, west to the newly encountered lands of the New World.

Everyone knows of Columbus. Not everyone knows that he never landed on the mainland of North America. Rather, he encountered first the islands of the Caribbean, primarily Hispaniola. On later among his four voyages, he explored the northern coast of South America and the east coast of Central America. The question remains arguable among historians whether Columbus continued to believe until his death that he had landed upon the East Indies.

Columbus was Genoese, sailing for Spain under King Ferdinand and Queen Isabella. This mix of nationalities is central to the story of the exploration age, with captains and ordinary seamen both going to sea under the flags of other nations – like maritime seamen today – and this includes the always contentious crossover and mix of Portuguese and Spanish, often back and forth. This contention lies at the heart of the Magellan story, with the Portuguese Magellan sailing for Spain after decades of dedication to the Portuguese crown.

By the time of Columbus’s second voyage in 1493, Ferdinand and Isabella had begun to entrust governance of Spanish exploration and colonial administration to the young priest Juan Rodriguez de Fonseca. It is the older, Bishop Fonseca who remains powerful still, under the new King Charles 1 of Spain, when a once-again spurned Ferdinand Magellan turns from the Crown of Portugal to that of Spain 25 years later. He comes with a plan – to reach the Moluccas, the Spice Islands of the Indies, by sailing west rather than east, through an unknown route he claims to exist. This route, a strait through the New World continent to the newly sited Western Sea (which Magellan would later name the Pacific) will enable Spain to pursue its own route to the Spice Island riches, without having to contest with Portugal over an Eastern route around Africa and into the Indian Ocean the latter has come to dominate and claim.

Columbus. Magellan. The two most prominent names. The two most transformative events of the age. But there were other explorers – other names that will sound familiar but about which you can’t really recall anything specific. There are explorers you never heard of. But these names are those who led to Columbus, who connect him to Magellan, and who lead from Magellan to 1565 and Spain’s last great seafaring achievement of the age. They form the world of Portuguese and Spanish exploration within which the historic and disastrous first circumnavigation sailed.

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