(p. 1 European Exploration) In October 1492, Columbus landed on the island of Hispaniola (present-day Haiti and Dominican Republic). Columbus believed that he was in the outer islands of the Far East, and he made three more voyages in search of a path to Asia. During the last three voyages, Columbus reached the major islands of the Caribbean, which he named the West Indies. It was not until 1507, a year after Columbus's death, that cartographer Amerigo Vespucci suggested that Columbus had landed on an entirely new land that was far from Asia. (p. 2 European Exploration) Although Spain's new claims created the Spanish Empire, the extent of its lands was still unknown.
Learning there was no gold Columbus went on a “slave raid7”. At this point of the expedition, turning the Arawak’s into slaves seemed to be the only mission going for Columbus. Zinn makes a slight point, Columbus tried to use religion to help justify his actions. Zinn quotes from Columbus’s journal “Let us in the name of the Holy Trinity go on sending all the slaves that can be sold.8" The Arawak’s numbers had rapidly decreased. By 1550 the Arawak’s numbers had gone from two hundred and fifty thousand to five hundred totals.
Tribes such as the Lencas, the Tecan Uman, and the Nicarao soon started taking over the overall dying city of Copan. In 1502 Columbus sailed past the Islas de la Bahía and shortly thereafter reached the mainland of Central America. Columbus marked his first direct contact while trading with the civilizations of Honduran and northern Central America. Little exploration took place for the next two decades. That was until Spanish navigators Juan Díaz de Solís and Vicente Yáñez Pinzón touched on part of the Honduran coast in 1508 and devoted most of their efforts to exploring the area.
On June 7, 1610 the colonists said goodbye to Virginia. They headed down the James River and on June 8th, they were met by a longboat. “The man piloting the longboat, Captain Edward Brewster, reached the Deliverance, he handed Gates a letter, which rerouted the governor’s course and that of American history.”1 Lord De La Warre had been dispatched from England to take over Jamestown after the charter and leaders of Jamestown were lost at sea. He brought three ships, carrying one-hundred fifty settlers and plenty of supplies to care for the colonists at Jamestown. The decision to return to the colony that they had just abandoned did not sit well with many of the starving colonists, but the arrival of supplies and new leadership was enough to convince Sir Thomas Gates that returning to Jamestown was the best
Ibn Battuta, however, was a little different from Marco Polo. Ibn Battuta was born a Muslim in Morocco in 1304. When he was twenty-one, he set out by himself on a journey of the entire Islamic World. [4]Although his travels eventually took him to China, he never traveled much in Europe. [5] In all, he traveled over 75,000 miles during his journey and reported meeting over 2,000 people including sixty rulers.
In Spain 1942, Christopher Columbus set out on a voyage to India, his hopes were to find a shorter route and to trade with the peoples there. Due to some mathematical and navigational errors he sailed west instead and landed in San Salvador 33 days later thinking it was the West Indies. Columbus was the first European to cross the Atlantic Ocean to the Americas hence opening the doorway to centuries of global exploration and colonization. A few years later in 1947 a Portuguese explorer Vasco da Gama set route to India. Da Gama sailed south of Portugal into the Atlantic around Africa and eventually reaching India thirty-seven hundred kilometers later.
For the following four days , the crew was left to fend for themselves in the water suffering from starvation, dehydration, body wounds, and possibly the worst of all, shark attacks. Finally, on the fourth day the crew was discovered accidentally by Lt. Wilbur Gwinn and rescued by the USS Cecil Doyle. Of the 900 original survivors, only 317 made it out of the water. Fifty five years later, on October 12, 2000, the USS Cole also suffered a fatal attack. While in port at Aden, Yemen, the Cole was refueling when a small craft operated by two al-Qaeda radicals approached its port side and detonated around 1000 pounds of explosives resulting in
Class (most), shared “Storage”, a large open space at the bottom of the ship. Before steamships, people took sailboats, with the trip lasting 1-6 months. The Immigration Commission - “Dillingham Commission,” 1907 policy was a 42 volume report, investigating issues. The Chinese Exclusion Act, May 6, 1882, required a special certificate to enter the U.S.; this was because racist believed they were inferior immigrants. The “Golden Door” closed tom immigration with a selective literacy test in 1917; quotas set off different ethnic groups ( The First Quota Act 1921).
Columbus underestimated the circumference of the earth by one-fourth and he believed him and his men could reach Japan by sailing 2,400 miles west from the Canary Islands. Until his death in 1506, he insisted that he had reached Asia. But he quickly recognized that the new lands could be a source of wealth from precious minerals and sugar cane. The 15th and 16th century voyages of discovery brought Europe, Africa, and the Americas into direct contact producing an exchange of foods, animals, and diseases that scholars call “The Columbian Exchange.”
The story of the 37 year old fisherman stuck at sea has striking similarities to the popular book and movie, The Life Of Pi. Alvarenga originally set off towards northern Mexico in December 2012 on what he expected to be a short shark fishing trip. When a part of his boat became altered and broken, he drifted until he reached a beach 13 months later. Similarly, in The Life Of Pi, Piscine Motor Patel was on a journey with his immediate family to Canda from India when the ship carrying them and their cargo (animals from the zoo they were selling) had a breach and started to sink. Pi was saved from the ship, but continued to drift further out into the ocean.