Christopher Columbus was born in Genoa (JEN oh uh) ,Italy. He was the oldest of five children in his family. His father was a wool weaver. He helped his father with the weaving, but he always wanted to sail the seas.
He didn't get to go to school very much, but he learned to read and write Spanish during his travels. He also taught himself Latin because all the geography books were written in Latin.
Some people thought he was trying to prove the world was round, but this is not true. Most people already knew the earth was round. He wanted to find a short way to get to the Indies by ship.
He was a Christian and wanted to tell the story of Christ to the people he would find in the far-away lands. He also wanted wealth for himself and for Spain, and he wanted to be famous.
He tried for eight years to get King Ferdinand and Queen Isabella to supply him with ships and money. Finally they agreed, but he made more demands.
He wanted to be made a knight, admiral of the Ocean Sea. He wanted to be the viceroy and governor general of all lands he would discover. Also he wanted one-tenth of everything he found of value in the new lands.
He even boldly told them he wanted all of this in writing. This was rather brave of him because they could have had him killed because of his demands.
They finally agreed and he got three ships ready to sail;
the Santa Maria and two smaller ships, the Pinta and the Nina. He took enough food for a year. In four months he was ready to sail.
They left Spain on August 3, 1492. They made one stop, then sailed on toward the west. After many days, the sailors were ready to turn around and start back home.
"Just three more days," he said. "Then if we don't see land, we'll turn around and go back home."
Two days later they saw land; an island Columbus named San Salvador. He thought he had found the Indies and called the people he saw there "Indians".
When they got to Cuba, he thought he was in China. The world was a lot larger than he thought.
On Christmas Eve, the Santa Maria was wrecked near Haiti. Columbus built a fort and left 40 men to hunt for gold. Then he returned to Spain on the Nina. The Pinta also returned. The people of Spain welcomed him as a hero.
He made three more voyages across the ocean. His 13-year-old son, Ferdinand went with him on the fourth voyage.
Columbus did not become rich as he had hoped. At the end of his life he only had a pension the king and queen had given him because he was the first to reach the New World. He spent the last few months of his life in bed because of the pain of arthritis.
Columbus not only discovered a New World, but he led the way for other explorers.
Amerigo Vespucci will long be remembered as the man America was named after but who was this inconsequential explorer and how did he get his name on two continents?
Vespucci was born in 1454 to a prominent family in Florence, Italy. As a young man he read widely and collected books and maps. He began working for local bankers and was sent to Spain in 1492 to look after his employer's business interests.
While in Spain, Amerigo Vespucci began working on ships and ultimately went on his first expedition as a navigator in 1499. This expedition reached the mouth of the Amazon River and explored the coast of South America. Vespucci was able to calculate how far west he had traveled by observing the conjunction of Mars and the Moon.
On his second voyage in 1501, Amerigo Vespucci sailed under the Portuguese flag. After leaving Lisbon, it took Vespucci 64 days to cross the Atlantic Ocean due to light winds. His ships followed the South American coast to within 400 miles of the southern tip, Tierra del Fuego.
While on this voyage, Vespucci wrote two letters to a friend in Europe. He described his travels and was the first to identify the New World of North and South America as separate from Asia. (Until he died, Columbus thought he had reached Asia.)
Amerigo Vespucci also described the culture of the indigenous people, and focused on their diet, religion, and what made these letters very popular - their sexual, marriage, and childbirth practices. The letters were published in many languages and were distributed across Europe (they were a much better seller than Columbus' own diaries).
Amerigo Vespucci was named Pilot Major of Spain in 1508. Vespucci was proud of this accomplishments, "I was more skillful than all the shipmates of the whole world." Vespucci's third voyage to the New World was his last for he contracted malaria and died in Spain in 1512 at the age of 58.
The German clergyman-scholar Martin Waldseemuller liked to make up names. He even created his own last name by combining words for "wood," "lake," and "mill." Waldseemuller was working on a contemporary world map, based on the Greek geography of Ptolemy, and he had read of Vespucci's travels and knew that the New World was indeed two continents.
In honor of Vespucci's discovery of the new forth portion of the world, Waldseemuller printed a wood block map (called "Carta Mariana") with the name "America" spread across the southern continent of the New World. Waldseemuller printed and sold a thousand copies of the map across Europe. Within a few years, Waldseemuller changed his mind about the name for the New World but it was too late. The name America had stuck. The power of the printed word was too powerful to take back. Gerardus Mercator's world map of 1538 was the first to include North America and South America. Thus, continents named for a Italian navigator would live on forever.
The journey of Alvar Nuñez Cabeza de Vaca remains one of the most amazing feats of exploration in the Americas. Cabeza de Vaca was born into the Spanish nobility in 1490. Little of his early life is known, except that he made his career in the military. In early 1527 he left Spain as a part of a royal expedition intended to occupy the mainland of North America.
After their fleet was battered by a hurricane off the shore of Cuba, the expedition secured a new boat and departed for Florida. They landed in March 1528 near what is now Tampa Bay, which the expedition leader, Pánfilo de Narváez, claimed as the lawful possession of the Spanish empire. Despite this confident declaration, the expedition was on the verge of disaster. Narváez's decision to split his land and sea forces proved a grievous error, as the ships were never able to rendezvous with the land expedition. The party soon overstayed its welcome with the Apalachee Indians of northern Florida by taking their leader hostage. Expelled and pursued by the Indians, suffering from numerous diseases, the surviving members of the expedition were reduced to huddling in a coastal swamp and living off the flesh of their horses. In late 1528, they built several crude rafts from trees and horse hides and set sail, hoping to return to Cuba. Storms, thirst and starvation had reduced the expedition to about eighty survivors when a hurricane dumped Cabeza de Vaca and his companions on the Gulf Coast near what is now Galveston, Texas. They were initially welcomed, but, as Cabeza de Vaca was to remember, "half the natives died from a disease of the bowels and blamed us." For the next four years he and a steadily dwindling number of his comrades lived in the complex native world of what is now East Texas, a world in which Cabeza transformed himself from a conquistador into a trader and healer. By 1532, only three other members of the original expedition were still alive -- Alonso del Castillo Maldonando, Andrés Dorantes de Carranca, and Estevan, an African slave. Together with Cabeza de Vaca, they now headed west and south in hopes of reaching the Spanish Empire's outpost in Mexico, becoming the first men of the Old World to enter the American West. Their precise route is not clear, but they apparently traveled across present-day Texas, perhaps into New Mexico and Arizona and through Mexico's northern provinces. In July 1536, near Culiacán in present-day Sinaloa, they finally encountered a group of fellow Spaniards who were on a slave-taking expedition. As Cabeza de Vaca remembered, his countrymen were "dumbfounded at the sight of me, strangely dressed and in company with Indians. They just stood staring for a long time."
Appalled by the Spanish treatment of Indians, in 1537 Cabeza de Vaca returned to Spain to publish an account of his experiences and to urge a more generous policy upon the crown. He served as a Mexican territorial governor, but was soon accused of corruption, perhaps for his enlightened conduct toward Indians. He returned to Spain and was convicted; a 1552 pardon allowed him to become a judge in Seville, Spain, a position which he occupied until his death in 1556 or 1557.
Hernando de Soto (c.1496/1497[1]–May 21, 1542) was a Spanish explorer and conquistador who, while leading the first European expedition to the territory of the modern-day United States, was the first European to discover the Mississippi River.
A vast undertaking, De Soto's expedition ranged throughout the southeastern United States searching for gold and a passage to China. De Soto died in 1542 on the banks of the Mississippi River at present-day Lake Village, Arkansas. Hernando de Soto was born to parents who were hidalgos of modest means in Extremadura, a region of poverty and hardship from which many young people looked for ways to seek their fortune elsewhere. Two towns—Badajoz and Jerez de los Caballeros—claim to be his birthplace. All that is known with certainty is that he spent time as a child at both places and he stipulated in his will that his body be interred at Jerez de los Caballeros, where other members of his family were also interred.[2] The age of the Conquerors came on the heels of the Spanish reconquest of the Iberian peninsula from Islamic forces. Spain and Portugal were filled with young men begging for a chance to find military fame after the Moors were defeated. With discovery of new lands to the West (which seemed at the time to be far East Asia), the whispers of glory and wealth were too compelling for the poor.
De Soto sailed to the New World in 1514 with the first Governor of Panama, Pedrarias Dávila. Brave leadership, unwavering loyalty, and clever schemes for the extortion of native villages for their captured chiefs, became De Soto's hallmark during the Conquest of Central America. He gained fame as an excellent horseman, fighter, and tactician, but was notorious for the extreme brutality with which he wielded these gifts.
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