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From the early 15th century to the early 17th century the Age of Discovery had, through Portuguese seafarers, and later, Spanish, Dutch, French and English, opened up southern Africa, the Americas (New World), Asia and Oceania to European eyes: Bartholomew Dias had sailed around the Cape of southern Africa in search of a trade route to India; Christopher Columbus, on four journeys across the ...
In 1683 Kino led the first European overland crossing of Baja California. European exploration of western Canada was largely motivated by the fur trade and the search for the elusive Northwest Passage. Hudson's Bay Company explorer Henry Kelsey has the distinction of being the first European to see the northern Great Plains in 1690.
Despite several significant transoceanic and transcontinental explorations by European civilizations in the preceding centuries, the precise geography of the Earth outside of Europe was largely unknown to Europeans before the 15th century, when technological advances (especially in sea travel) as well as the rise of colonialism, mercantilism ...
European exploration initiated the Columbian exchange between the Old World (Europe, Asia, and Africa) and the New World (the Americas and Australia). This exchange involved the transfer of plants, animals, human populations (including slaves), communicable diseases, and culture across the Eastern and Western Hemispheres.
Norse Viking explorers were the first known Europeans to set foot in North America. Norse journeys to Greenland and Canada are supported by historical and archaeological evidence. [ 11 ] The Norsemen established a colony in Greenland in the late tenth century, which lasted until the mid 15th-century, with court and parliament assemblies ( þing ...
North of Mexico the only settlements were Saint Augustine and the isolated outpost in northern New Mexico. Exploration of the interior was largely abandoned after the 1540s. Around Newfoundland 500 or more boats annually were fishing for cod and some fishermen were trading for furs, especially at Tadoussac on the Saint Lawrence.
Important explorations during this period went to a number of continents and regions around the globe. In Africa, important explorers of this period include Diogo Cão (1452–1486), who discovered and ascended the Congo River and reached the coasts of present-day Angola and Namibia ; and Bartolomeu Dias (1450–1500), the first European to ...
The Portuguese were to receive everything outside of Europe east of a line that ran 270 leagues west of the Cape Verde Islands. [77] The Spanish received everything west of this line, territory that was still almost completely unknown, and proved to be primarily the vast majority of the continents of the Americas and the Islands of the Pacific ...