# Age of Exploration — Caravels and Conquest 1400–1600 Canonical URL: https://shipslides.com/d/catalog-history-age-of-exploration Raw viewer URL: https://content.shipslides.com/d/catalog-history-age-of-exploration/raw Category: History Slides: 13 Updated: 2026-05-17T20:55:55.310Z Tags: catalog, history, age, exploration ## Summary N S W E Anno Domini MCDXCII · A Cartographer's Account AGE OF EXPLORATION Caravels & Conquest · 1400 — 1600 Drawn upon parchment · with rhumb & rose Key sections include: AGE OF EXPLORATION Caravels & Conquest · 1400 — 1600; Why now? The Push to the Open Sea; Henry the Navigator — Patron of the Atlantic; Bartolomeu Dias — Rounding the Cape; Cristóbal Colón — A Westward Wager; Vasco da Gama — The Sea Road to India; Treaty of Tordesillas — A Line on the World; Magellan & Elcano — Around the World; Cortés & Pizarro — Conquest and Collapse; The Columbian Exchange. ## Slide Outline 1. AGE OF EXPLORATION Caravels & Conquest · 1400 — 1600 2. Why now? The Push to the Open Sea 3. Henry the Navigator — Patron of the Atlantic 4. Bartolomeu Dias — Rounding the Cape 5. Cristóbal Colón — A Westward Wager 6. Vasco da Gama — The Sea Road to India 7. Treaty of Tordesillas — A Line on the World 8. Magellan & Elcano — Around the World 9. Cortés & Pizarro — Conquest and Collapse 10. The Columbian Exchange 11. Dutch & English Ascendancy 12. The Dark Side of the Age 13. Further Reading & Listening ## Slide Transcript ### Slide 1: AGE OF EXPLORATION Caravels & Conquest · 1400 — 1600 - Anno Domini MCDXCII · A Cartographer's Account - Drawn upon parchment · with rhumb & rose ### Slide 2: Why now? The Push to the Open Sea - Slide II · Conditions - The Ottoman blockade. After Constantinople fell in 1453, overland Silk Road routes grew costly and politically fraught. Europe needed another way East. - The caravel. A small Portuguese vessel with lateen and square sails — nimble against the wind, capable of long Atlantic voyages. - The magnetic compass & the astrolabe — sailors could now hold a heading and fix latitude far from any coast. - Better cartography. Portolan charts, Ptolemy rediscovered, and the slow rise of mathematical mapmaking. - A Mariner's Toolkit - Caravel - Compass - Astrolabe - Portolan chart - Lateen sail - "Spices are gold lighter than gold." — a Lisbon merchant, c. 1500 ### Slide 3: Henry the Navigator — Patron of the Atlantic - Slide III · 1394 – 1460 - The Portuguese prince Infante Dom Henrique never sailed far himself. He did something arguably more consequential — he institutionalised exploration. - Established a base at Sagres in the Algarve, gathering chartmakers, astronomers, shipwrights and pilots. - Sponsored decade after decade of voyages down the West African coast — past Cape Bojador (1434), once thought impassable. - Funded the first Portuguese caravels — vessels designed for the unknown. - His patronage shifted exploration from a merchant gamble to state policy. ### Slide 4: Bartolomeu Dias — Rounding the Cape - Slide IV · 1488 - In 1487 Dias departed Lisbon with two caravels and a supply ship. A storm drove him beyond sight of the African coast — and when the seas calmed, the coastline lay to the north. - He had, without seeing it, rounded the southern tip of Africa. - King João II christened it Cabo da Boa Esperança — Cape of Good Hope — for the path it opened to India. - Dias's crew, exhausted, refused to push further. He turned home. - His charts and reports made Vasco da Gama's voyage possible a decade later. ### Slide 5: Cristóbal Colón — A Westward Wager - Slide V · 1492 – 1504 - Columbus had a wrong number — he badly underestimated the size of the Earth. By his reckoning, Asia lay only a few weeks' sail west of the Canaries. - First voyage · 1492 - Three ships — Santa María, Pinta, Niña — make landfall in the Bahamas (San Salvador). He believes he has reached the Indies. - Three more voyages · 1493 – 1504 - Hispaniola, Cuba, the South American mainland. To his death, Columbus insists he has found Asia. He has not. - A geographic error of cosmic proportion — and a collision of two worlds that had stood apart for ten thousand years. ### Slide 6: Vasco da Gama — The Sea Road to India - Slide VI · 1497 – 1499 - Where Columbus stumbled upon a continent, Vasco da Gama did precisely what was planned: he sailed from Lisbon to Calicut, India, and back. - Departed July 1497 with four ships and ~170 men. - Rounded the Cape, fought a hostile reception in East Africa, and crossed the Indian Ocean with a Gujarati pilot. - Reached Calicut, May 1498 — the first European seaborne arrival in India. - He returned with a cargo of pepper and cinnamon worth sixty times the cost of the expedition. - The Mediterranean spice monopoly of Venice and the Ottomans was finished within a generation. - Pepper - Cinnamon - Cloves - Nutmeg - Mace - Cargoes that paid for empires. ### Slide 7: Treaty of Tordesillas — A Line on the World - Slide VII · 1493 – 1494 - With Columbus's report fresh, Pope Alexander VI drew a meridian through the Atlantic. The Iberian crowns then negotiated it westward, fixing it 370 leagues west of the Cape Verde Islands. - Spain claims everything west of the line — most of the Americas. - Portugal takes everything east — Africa, the Indian Ocean, and (by accident of geography) Brazil. - The treaty assumed a flat planisphere; it ignored the planet's other half. - It also ignored every other people on Earth — including the inhabitants of the lands being divided. ### Slide 8: Magellan & Elcano — Around the World - Slide VIII · 1519 – 1522 - Ferdinand Magellan, a Portuguese captain in Spanish service, set out west to reach the Spice Islands by going around the New World. - The voyage out - Five ships and 270 men sail from Sanlúcar in 1519. They winter on Patagonian ice, mutiny, and finally find a strait at the continent's tip — now Magellan's Strait. - The Pacific crossing - Thirteen weeks without fresh food. Scurvy, starvation, leather chewed for sustenance. They name the calm new ocean Mar Pacifico. - Magellan's death · 1521 - Killed in the Battle of Mactan in the Philippines. He never completes his own voyage. - Elcano returns · 1522 - Juan Sebastián Elcano brings the Victoria home — one ship, eighteen men, the first humans to circle the Earth. ### Slide 9: Cortés & Pizarro — Conquest and Collapse - Slide IX · 1519 – 1572 - Hernán Cortés landed at Veracruz in 1519 with ~600 men. Within two years the Aztec capital of Tenochtitlán had fallen. - Francisco Pizarro followed the same pattern in 1532: 168 men, the capture of the Sapa Inca Atahualpa at Cajamarca, and the Inca empire's collapse. - How did so few overthrow so many? - Steel, horses, gunpowder. A tactical edge in open battle. - Indigenous allies. Tlaxcalans, rivals of the Aztecs, did much of the fighting. - Disease. Smallpox arrived before the Spanish in many places. Indigenous populations of the Americas may have fallen by 75 – 90% over the next century. - Political fortune. The Inca were in the middle of a civil war when Pizarro arrived. ### Slide 10: The Columbian Exchange - Slide X · The Great Mixing - Two ecosystems that had been separate for ten thousand years suddenly began trading species — plants, animals, microbes, ideas, peoples. The world's diet, demography, and disease landscape were all rewritten. - From the Americas → - Maize - Potato - Tomato - Cassava - Cacao - Tobacco - Chili pepper - Potato & maize alone may have driven a doubling of populations across Eurasia and Africa over the next three centuries. - → To the Americas - Wheat - Sugar - Coffee - Cattle & horses - Smallpox - Measles - Influenza - The diseases were the deadliest cargo of the age — and they crossed first. ### Slide 11: Dutch & English Ascendancy - Slide XI · The 17th Century turn - By 1600 the Iberian advantage was fading. Two new powers built a new tool that would outlast the age of sail itself: the joint-stock company. - VOC — Dutch East India Company (1602). The first publicly-traded company. Could wage war, mint coin, sign treaties. - EIC — English East India Company (1600). Slowly became sovereign over much of South Asia. - Hudson's Bay Company (1670). Trapped a continent for furs. - Capital was pooled across thousands of investors — risk distributed, voyages made repeatable. - The corporation, in its modern form, was born of long voyages. ### Slide 12: The Dark Side of the Age - Slide XII · The Account Unbalanced - Every triumphal map of this period is also a map of suffering. Honesty about the age requires holding both at once. - The transatlantic slave trade. Roughly 12.5 million Africans were forcibly transported to the Americas between 1500 and 1866. Around 2 million died on the voyage itself. - Indigenous catastrophe. Disease, war, forced labour (the encomienda), and displacement combined to kill the great majority of the pre-contact populations of the Americas. - The encomienda & the mita. Systems of coerced indigenous labour, especially in the silver mines of Potosí — which alone may have consumed more lives than any battlefield of the era. - The seeds of empire. The legal, financial and racial frameworks invented in this century would shape colonialism for the next four hundred years. - The age that opened the world also began the modern history of unfreedom. ### Slide 13: Further Reading & Listening - Slide XIII · Hic Liber Finis - Books - 1493 — Charles C. Mann (the Columbian Exchange in granular detail) - The Conquest of New Spain — Bernal Díaz del Castillo (firsthand) - Conquerors — Roger Crowley (on Portuguese India) - The Earth Is Weeping — Peter Cozzens (on indigenous histories) - Watch - YouTube → Age of Exploration - YouTube → Columbian Exchange - "The discovery of America, and that of a passage to the East Indies by the Cape of Good Hope, are the two greatest and most important events recorded in the history of mankind." — Adam Smith - Finis — fair winds, & following seas. ## Related Decks - [The Age of Exploration](https://shipslides.com/d/history-age-of-exploration) - [The Viking Age — Voyagers, Raiders, and Settlers](https://shipslides.com/d/history-viking-age) - [REVOLUTIONS // The 20th Century](https://shipslides.com/d/catalog-history-20th-century-revolutions) - [Aegyptus — Three Thousand Years on the Nile](https://shipslides.com/d/catalog-history-ancient-egypt)