y2meta.com-Explorers in History - Exploring the Globe - Lesson Preview

This is Nicholas. The year is 1768 and Nicholas is sitting in an inn with his father in London. Nicholas is a young cabin boy and works as a servant on a ship. He dreams of travelling across the vast ocean to exotic, faraway lands. His father works on a ship too, as a sailor, and he is about to go on a long voyage to India. Nicholas listens closely as his father tells him about the exciting journey he's about to set out on. The sea route to India is very important for Britain, his father explains, because it allows us to trade products like wool for valuable Indian goods like tea, spices, indigo dye and silk. If the weather is fine and the journey smooth, we should reach the port of Bombay on the west coast of India in about six months. Six months is a very long time, Nicholas exclaims sadly. It's true it often takes a whole six months to travel to India by sea, but it's far quicker than it used to be. Before the 15th century, it was dangerous and time-consuming to travel from countries like England, France and Spain to Asia. Western Europe relied on merchants from other places like Italy who were aware of sea passages through the Mediterranean and North Africa to Asia. Otherwise, merchants had to make a dangerous journey over land across the Middle East to reach India and China. Many of these merchants used an ancient and famous network of trade routes called the Silk Road that linked the West with Asia. So who found the routes to travel there by ship? In the 15th and 16th centuries, many of the European powers like Spain and Portugal were sending ships out to explore new trade routes, hoping to find quicker ways to access areas like India and Southeast Asia. People were also hoping to find wealthy lands unknown to Europeans to trade with. On August 3rd, 1492, the Spanish King Ferdinand and his wife Isabella sent explorer Christopher Columbus with three ships to find the way to Asia. They wanted to convert people to Christianity and trade Spanish goods for spices to bring back to Europe, as Asian spices were very expensive and rare at this time. Columbus was sure that if he travelled west around the globe, he would end up in the Far East more quickly than if he travelled east past Africa and India. But instead, he came across a whole new continent. Nicholas's eyes widened as he realises, he must have landed in America instead. Exactly! Nicholas's dad nods proudly. Instead of finding the route to Asia, in October 1492, Columbus landed on one of the Bahamian islands in Central America. He also visited present-day Cuba and then Haiti, making maps of the lands he was encountering and looking for valuables to bring back to the Spanish King and Queen. When he returned to Spain with exotic Central American parrots and plants, gold and some Native Americans he had kidnapped, he was welcomed as a hero. So Columbus was the one who Nicholas's eyes sparkle with excitement. Well, there were already people living in America when Columbus came across it, so he wasn't the first to discover it at all. He wasn't even the first European to visit there. The Vikings had already travelled to North America back in the 11th century.