109 Fun Facts About Age of Discovery

Which queen agreed in 1492 to back Columbus's first voyage across the Atlantic?

Isabella of Castile. Columbus was already riding away from her court when he was called back: a royal treasurer, Luis de Santángel, had talked her round.

Which great city fell to the Ottomans in 1453, a blow to Christian Europe?

Constantinople. Its ancient walls gave way after a siege of nearly two months, battered by a bombardment that included a giant cannon cast by a foreign gunfounder named Urban.

On the three-masted full-rigged ships of the era, the rear mast carried which triangular sail?

Lateen. Combining it with square sails on the other two masts produced the full-rigged ship, the ocean-going design that carried Europe's explorers around the world.

Which Ming admiral led seven treasure-fleet expeditions across the Indian Ocean between 1405 and 1433?

Zheng He. He began as a prisoner: captured as a boy when Ming armies took Yunnan, he was castrated and put into army service, then rose at court to command the fleets.

In 1414, which African animal was presented to China's Ming emperor as a mythical qilin?

Giraffe. The match outlived the Ming court: kirin, the Japanese form of qilin, is still the everyday Japanese word for a giraffe.

Which Italian city-state held a near-monopoly on Europe's spice trade with the Middle East in the 15th century?

Venice. Its merchants made huge profits reselling spices to the rest of Europe, and breaking that hold was a prime reason explorers went looking for new sea routes.

Which North African city did Portugal capture in 1415, the first step in its overseas expansion?

Ceuta. Portugal took it in a surprise attack in which the young Prince Henry won his spurs, yet the city later passed to Spain and is still a Spanish enclave in Africa.

Prince Henry hoped to find allies in the legendary Christian kingdom of which figure?

Prester John. The legend first placed his realm in Asia, where travellers such as Marco Polo reported it; only later did the search turn to Africa.

Which Atlantic archipelago did Prince Henry's captains claim for Portugal around 1420 and turn into a thriving colony?

Madeira. It was the most successful colony planted by Prince Henry, whose nickname 'the Navigator' is a foreign invention: he never sailed on a voyage of exploration himself.

Which feared African headland did Gil Eanes finally pass in 1434, dispelling myths of the world's edge?

Bojador. A dozen years of attempts had failed, and Eanes himself turned back in 1433; sent out again by Prince Henry, he rounded the cape the following year.

Which light Iberian ship type became the workhorse of 15th-century Portuguese voyages down the African coast?

The caravel. Its edge was speed and an unusual ability to sail to windward, and two of the three ships Columbus took across the Atlantic in 1492 were caravels.

Abraham Zacuto's astronomical tables, printed in 1496, let Portuguese pilots calculate what at sea?

Latitude. Vasco da Gama's ships carried Zacuto's tables and his new astrolabe to India, but working out longitude stayed beyond sailors for centuries more.

A 1455 papal bull backed Portugal's policy of 'mare clausum' in the Atlantic, a Latin phrase meaning what?

Closed sea. Rivals were to keep out of Portugal's waters, a claim the Dutch jurist Hugo Grotius attacked in 1609 in Mare Liberum, his famous case for the freedom of the seas.

The Portuguese trading fort of Elmina, in a region rich in alluvial gold, is in which modern country?

Ghana. The fort went up in 1482 to guard Portugal's gold trade, but it later became one of the main hubs of the Atlantic slave trade.

João de Barros wrote that Dias first named the Cape of Good Hope the Cape of what?

Storms. In Barros's telling it was the king who renamed it Good Hope, for the promise it held of a sea route to India.

The Portuguese spy Pero da Covilhã, sent overland in 1487, spent the rest of his life in which African kingdom?

Ethiopia. The emperor treated him well but would not let him leave, and when a Portuguese embassy finally arrived decades later he was still there to act as its interpreter.

Columbus set sail on 3 August 1492 from which Spanish port?

Palos de la Frontera. It was the home port of the Pinzón brothers, shipowners who found the crews and captained two of the three ships themselves.

Columbus first took his westward plan to which king, who turned it down years before he sailed in 1492?

John II of Portugal. On the way home in 1493 a storm drove Columbus into Lisbon, so he had to report his success in person to the king who had turned him down.

Columbus's first New World settlement, La Navidad, was built with timbers from which ship, wrecked on Christmas Day 1492?

Santa María. Columbus left 39 men in the fort and sailed home; when he came back the following year it had been burned down and every one of them was dead.

Which 1494 treaty drew a line 370 leagues west of Cape Verde to divide all newly found lands between two crowns?

Tordesillas. The pope's first line ran only 100 leagues out; Portugal bargained it further west, far enough that the coast of Brazil, found six years later, fell on its side.

Which Spanish-born pope drew a pole-to-pole line through the Atlantic in 1493, granting Spain the lands to its west?

Alexander VI. Born Rodrigo Borgia in Spain, he gave his homeland so much that Portugal's king refused the ruling and bargained with the Spanish crown directly.

Which Italian navigator, sailing from Bristol for Henry VII in 1497, reached North America?

John Cabot. He believed he had found the coast of Asia; he sailed again in 1498 with five ships, and what became of him and most of that fleet is still unknown.

Which region of Canada is said to be named after João Fernandes, an Azorean explorer of the North Atlantic around 1500?

Labrador. Fernandes was a lavrador, a landholder, in the Azores, and early maps wrote that title across Greenland before the name drifted west to the Canadian coast.

Vasco da Gama reached which Indian port on 20 May 1498?

Calicut. Da Gama's cheap trade goods, fine for West Africa, failed to impress its ruler, and he sailed home without the trade treaty he had come for.

Da Gama's voyage is romanticised in Os Lusíadas, an epic poem by which writer?

Luís de Camões. He knew those seas at first hand: he served for years in Portugal's eastern outposts and, tradition says, saved the manuscript from a shipwreck off the Mekong.

Which Portuguese commander, sailing for India in 1500, landed in Brazil and claimed it?

Pedro Álvares Cabral. Taking the coast for an island, he claimed it, sent one ship home with the news and after only ten days sailed on for India.

Brazil takes its name from brazilwood, a tree that Portuguese traders shipped to Europe to make what?

Red dye. The explorers christened the land for the Holy Cross, but within a decade maps were calling it the land of brazilwood, and the trade name won.

Which mapmaker's 1507 world map was the first to print the name 'America', in honour of Amerigo Vespucci?

Martin Waldseemüller. He printed 1,000 copies of the huge woodcut map, yet only one is known to survive, now kept in the Library of Congress.

Afonso de Albuquerque captured which rich trading port for Portugal in 1511, the gateway to the Spice Islands?

Malacca. Albuquerque wasted no time: he garrisoned the port and at once sent ships on to find where the spices grew, along with envoys to Siam.

The tiny Banda Islands, reached by the Portuguese in 1512, were then the world's only source of which spice?

Nutmeg. The same tree gives mace as well, and a monopoly that valuable drew the Dutch and then the English into a long fight for the islands.

In 1557 China allowed the Portuguese to occupy which trading enclave?

Macau. What began as a rented trading post stayed in Portuguese hands for more than four centuries: Portugal handed it back to China only in December 1999.

Who became the first European to see the Pacific from the New World, crossing Panama in 1513?

Vasco Núñez de Balboa. The discovery won him back the king's favour, but not for long: a little over five years later a suspicious governor had him tried for treason and beheaded.

Which of Magellan's five ships was the only one to sail around the world?

Victoria. The flagship Trinidad was captured after trying to recross the Pacific, so the Victoria limped home alone, leaking but loaded with spices.

Before Magellan renamed it the Pacific for its calm waters, Spaniards in Panama knew the ocean by what name?

South Sea. The first European to reach it from Panama waded into the surf and claimed the sea, and every shore it touched, for the Spanish crown.

How did Ferdinand Magellan meet his death in April 1521, with his voyage around the world only half done?

In battle with islanders. Magellan led a small landing party onto Mactan to force its chief, Lapulapu, to submit, and was killed on the beach, overwhelmed by far larger numbers.

After Magellan's death, which Basque navigator brought the last ship home in 1522?

Elcano. Juan Sebastián Elcano reached Spain with just 18 Europeans left alive on board, only to die at sea four years later on a second expedition to the Spice Islands.

Which Italian scholar kept the detailed journal that is the key source on Magellan's voyage?

Antonio Pigafetta. He sailed as a supernumerary with no command at all, yet he was among the handful who survived, and his journal became the main record of the voyage.

Which archipelago did Spain begin to colonise in 1565, founding its first lasting settlement there on the island of Cebu?

The Philippines. Spain wanted the islands, named for its king, as a stepping-stone to the Spice Islands, and held on to them long after that prize had gone to its rivals.

Cortés was welcomed into Tenochtitlan on 8 November 1519 by which Aztec emperor?

Moctezuma II. The welcome soon soured: Cortés made his host a prisoner in his own capital, and he died the next year, stoned by his own people in the Spanish account, murdered by the Spaniards in the Aztec one.

By tradition, Pizarro drew a line in the sand and dared his stranded men to follow him to which land?

Peru. Thirteen men stepped across on the Isla de Gallo and defied the governor's order to sail home; they waited for months on another island before a ship came to carry them south.

Which city did Pizarro found in 1535 as his new capital, naming it the City of the Kings?

Lima. Pizarro ruled from the city for only six years: in 1541 supporters of his executed rival Almagro stormed his palace there and killed him.

Urdaneta's 1565 discovery of a return route across the Pacific let Spanish treasure galleons shuttle between Asia and which Mexican port?

Acapulco. Urdaneta, a friar who had spent eight years in the Spice Islands as a young man, found the way home by sailing far to the north, and the galleons kept to his track for generations.

Giovanni da Verrazzano explored the North American coast in 1524 for which monarch?

Francis I of France. On that voyage Verrazzano became the first European to sail into New York Harbor, which is why the bridge across its entrance carries his name.

Henry Hudson explored the river that bears his name in 1609 while sailing for whom?

The Dutch East India Co. It had hired the English captain to look for a north-east passage around Russia; when head winds and ice blocked him he ignored his contract and crossed the Atlantic instead.

Which Dutch navigator's crew survived the Arctic winter of 1596-97 on Novaya Zemlya in a hut built from their ship's timbers?

Willem Barentsz. His men called the hut the Saved House and most of them lived to escape in open boats the next June, but Barentsz himself died a week into the voyage home.

Which navigator was the first European to reach Van Diemen's Land and New Zealand, in 1642?

Abel Tasman. He named Van Diemen's Land for the governor-general who sent him; New Zealand gave him a rougher welcome, a clash with Māori canoes at a place he named Murderers' Bay.

Which Stroganov-hired Cossack defeated Khan Kuchum and opened Siberia to Russia in 1582?

Yermak. He did not enjoy his conquest for long: surprised by Kuchum's warriors a few years later, he drowned in the Irtysh, apparently dragged under by his own chain mail.

The transfer of crops, animals and diseases between the Old and New Worlds is known as what?

The Columbian exchange. The name comes from a 1972 book by the historian Alfred Crosby; the swap is why potatoes, tomatoes and maize, all American crops, now feed the Old World.

Potosí's mines in the Andes helped make Spain's American empire the world's chief source of which metal?

Silver. Potosí's 'Rich Mountain', some 4,000 metres up, drew a boomtown of more than 150,000 people within decades of the 1545 strike.

The Portuguese arrival in Japan in 1543 began which trade period, named for the 'southern barbarians'?

Nanban. Along with their trade goods the newcomers brought matchlock guns, which Japanese smiths were soon turning out in large numbers, and Christian missionaries.

The long inflation in 16th-century Spain and Europe, often linked to treasure from the New World, is called what?

The price revolution. Wages lagged behind the rising price of food, so wage-earners could buy less and less; American treasure is only one of several causes historians put forward.

Aboard which galleon did Francis Drake receive his knighthood from Elizabeth I in 1581?

Golden Hind. The ship began the voyage as the Pelican and was renamed at sea; it came home so richly laden that Drake's fortune was made.

Which French explorer is credited with naming Canada, from an Iroquoian word for 'village' he heard in the 1530s?

Jacques Cartier. He used the word only for the country around what is now Quebec City; it was later mapmakers and governments who stretched it across half a continent.

Which conquistador, founder of the first European settlement on Puerto Rico, led the first known European expedition to Florida in 1513?

Juan Ponce de León. He is said to have named the land for Pascua Florida, the Easter season in which he sighted it, and for its greenery; when he came back in 1521 to settle it he was fatally wounded by an arrow.

Which Spanish explorer is the first European documented to have crossed the Mississippi River?

Hernando de Soto. He died of fever beside the river a year later, and his men sank his body in it, anxious to hide the death of a leader who had passed himself off as immortal.

In 1606 the crew of the Dutch ship Duyfken made the first known European landing on which land?

Australia. Captain Willem Janszoon charted part of Cape York believing it was more of New Guinea, and sailed away without knowing he had found a new continent.

Which Russian explorer sailed through the Bering Strait in 1648, 80 years before Vitus Bering?

Semyon Dezhnev. His report lay buried in a Siberian archive until 1736, so the strait he had sailed through was named for the man who came after him.

In 1482 the Portuguese captain Diogo Cão set up a stone pillar at the mouth of which great African river?

The Congo. The pillar claimed the river mouth for Portugal, and on his return the king ennobled Cão and let him add two stone pillars to his coat of arms.

The VOC, a spice-trading company founded in 1602, let ordinary citizens buy its shares, traded on which city's exchange?

Amsterdam. The company's charter gave it powers no ordinary business has: it could make treaties, build forts and keep its own armed forces, so its traders ended up ruling territory.

Columbus named his first landfall of 1492 San Salvador, an island most scholars place in which present-day country?

The Bahamas is home to the likeliest candidate, an island its own people called Guanahani. Columbus sailed on from it convinced he had reached the Indies, which is why the Caribbean islands are still called the West Indies.

Vasco da Gama lost well over half his crew on the first sea voyage to India, mainly to which disease?

Scurvy struck on any long crossing without fresh food, and it is thought to have killed at least two million sailors between 1500 and 1800.

A Muisca ruler said to coat himself in gold dust inspired which legend that lured Spaniards deep into South America?

El Dorado first meant the man himself, 'the Golden One'; only over time did the name pass to a lost city of immense wealth that no expedition ever found.

Which flightless bird, first recorded by Dutch sailors on Mauritius in 1598, had vanished for good within a century?

The dodo was last reliably seen in 1662, and its loss was the first to make people grasp that humans could wipe out an entire species.

Which Brazilian city owes its name to Portuguese explorers who reached Guanabara Bay on New Year's Day 1502?

Rio de Janeiro means 'January River', after the month the explorers sailed into the bay; the city itself was not founded until 1565.

Which English settlement of 1587 was found deserted in 1590, the single word 'CROATOAN' carved into its palisade?

Roanoke became the Lost Colony: its governor John White, kept away for three years by war with Spain, came back to find his granddaughter Virginia Dare and every other settler gone.

Which drink of the Aztec elite, met by Spanish conquistadors in 1519, was made from beans that also served as money?

Chocolate came from cacao beans that really were cash: Spaniards noted in 1545 that thirty of them bought a small rabbit and a hundred a turkey hen.

Columbus owned and heavily annotated a copy of which medieval traveller's account of the riches of Asia?

Marco Polo did not write it himself: by tradition he dictated the book to Rustichello da Pisa, a writer of romances, while the two were imprisoned together.

Francisco de Orellana, who reported fighting women warriors on the way, made the first European descent of which river?

The Amazon is said to owe its name to that fight: women led the attackers, reminding Orellana of the female warriors of Greek myth.

Which animal, extinct in the Americas for millennia, came back in 1493 aboard the ships of Columbus's second voyage?

The horse evolved in North America but died out there some 10,000 years ago, so the conquistadors rode an animal that no living American had ever seen.

Christopher Columbus, who made all four of his voyages for Spain, was born in which Italian maritime republic?

Genoa was where his father Domenico worked as a wool weaver and kept a cheese stand, at which the young Columbus helped out.

Spain's Catholic Monarchs agreed to back Columbus only after the 1492 surrender of which last Moorish emirate in Iberia?

Granada was handed over, Alhambra palace and all, by its last emir Boabdil on 2 January 1492, ending a ten-year war fought as a string of seasonal campaigns.

Columbus's fleet took on its final provisions in September 1492 at La Gomera, part of which Spanish-held archipelago?

The Canaries lay in the path of the northeast trade wind, which Columbus planned to ride west. The Pinta's broken rudder was replaced there too, on Gran Canaria.

Santo Domingo, the oldest continuously inhabited European settlement in the Americas, stands on which Caribbean island?

Hispaniola was where Bartholomew Columbus, the explorer's brother, founded the town in 1496; it is now the capital of the Dominican Republic.

Which Caribbean people, the first to meet Columbus, gave English the words hammock, canoe, hurricane and barbecue?

The Taíno built dugout canoes big enough to carry 150 people. Columbus never recorded their own name for themselves and simply called them Indians.

L'Anse aux Meadows in Newfoundland proves which seafarers settled in North America roughly 500 years before Columbus?

The Norse left eight sod-and-timber buildings and hundreds of objects there, and tree-ring dating pins their activity to the year 1021.

Which Flemish mapmaker's 1569 world map drew compass courses as straight lines, the projection still used on sea charts?

Mercator designed it for sailors, but it was ahead of its time: only in the 18th century did it become the standard projection for navigation.

Which nautical unit comes from the log-line that sailors of the Age of Discovery timed as it ran out astern?

The knot was literal: the line was tied at regular intervals, and the number of ties slipping through a sailor's hands in a set time gave the ship's speed.

Which Old World disease killed much of the Aztec leadership while Cortés was fighting for Tenochtitlan?

Smallpox barely touched the Spaniards, who had grown up with it, but it left the Aztecs too weak to bring in their crops, so famine followed the epidemic.

Which Inca emperor did Pizarro seize in an ambush at Cajamarca in 1532, then execute despite a vast ransom?

Atahualpa had only just won a civil war against his half-brother for the throne, so the Spaniards walked into an empire already split in two.

Which Spanish colonial system rewarded conquistadors with the labour of the peoples they had conquered?

Encomienda means 'entrusting', and holders owed their labourers protection in theory; in practice it came close to slavery, and a 1542 ban on inheriting the grants was revoked within three years.

Which natural wonder did Spanish soldiers under García López de Cárdenas become the first Europeans to see in 1540?

The Grand Canyon was a by-product of Coronado's hunt for fabled cities of gold: Hopi guides led a small scouting party to its South Rim.

Which Nahua woman, given to the Spaniards as a slave in 1519, became Cortés's interpreter and adviser in Mexico?

La Malinche spoke both Nahuatl and Maya, and she later bore Cortés a son, Martín, one of the first people of mixed European and Indigenous ancestry in New Spain.

Which Virginia settlement of 1607, England's first lasting American colony, lost most of its people in one winter?

Jamestown had only about 60 settlers left alive after the winter of 1609–10, a season remembered as the Starving Time.

Which cash crop did John Rolfe plant in Virginia from a sweeter Trinidad strain, rescuing the English colony's finances?

Tobacco had been a near-monopoly of Spain's colonies, and Rolfe saw the chance to undercut them; his crop became the foundation of Virginia's economy.

Which Florida city, founded for Spain in 1565, is the oldest European settlement still lived in on the US mainland?

St. Augustine got its name because the founding fleet first sighted Florida on 28 August, the saint's feast day; its founder, Pedro Menéndez de Avilés, became Florida's first governor.

Peter Minuit is credited with buying which island from the Lenape in 1626 for goods worth 60 guilders?

Manhattan's famous $24 price tag is a historian's conversion made in 1844; the payment itself was in trade goods, not coin.

Which animal's pelt, prized by European hat makers for the felt it gave, drove the French fur trade in North America?

The beaver trade began as a sideline: fishermen drying their catch ashore swapped metal goods for native-made robes, which hat makers then found gave superb felt.

Martin Frobisher made three Arctic voyages from 1576 in search of which sea route, not sailed through until 1906?

The Northwest Passage defeated every expedition for more than three centuries, until Roald Amundsen got through in a small sloop, the Gjøa.

Which fish drew French, Spanish and Portuguese fleets to the Grand Banks off Newfoundland throughout the 16th century?

Cod swam off Newfoundland in shoals so dense that English captains around 1600 said they could hardly row a boat through them.

Vasco da Gama's four ships set sail for India on 8 July 1497 from which Iberian port city?

Lisbon later raised the Jerónimos Monastery near the spot where the fleet set out, paying for it with a tax on the profits of the yearly India fleets.

The Casa de Contratación ran Spain's trade with the Americas from 1503, sitting for two centuries in which city?

Seville's merchants' guild handled the Indies trade alongside the royal agency, and the city's importance faded only when the Casa was moved to Cádiz in 1717.

Afonso de Albuquerque seized which city from the Sultanate of Bijapur in 1510, making it capital of Portuguese India?

Goa was not even among the places the king had ordered Albuquerque to capture, yet it stayed Portuguese for 451 years, until 1961.

Which island kingdom did Portugal take in 1515, giving it control of shipping through the Persian Gulf for a century?

Hormuz was one of the chokepoints King Manuel wanted in order to command the trade of the Indian Ocean; a first attempt on it in 1507 had failed.

Until the colonial era, which spice grew only on a few islands of the Moluccas, among them Ternate and Tidore?

Cloves are the aromatic flower buds of a tree; the VOC later concentrated their growing on Ambon and a few nearby islands to enforce its monopoly.

Batavia, founded in 1619 as the hub of the VOC's Asian trade, is known today as which capital city?

Jakarta echoes the older town of Jayakarta, which the governor Jan Pieterszoon Coen razed in 1619 so that he could build his new headquarters on the ruins.

Jan van Riebeeck landed in 1652 to set up a VOC supply station that grew into which African city?

Cape Town began as a halfway house for ships bound for Asia, though more than a thousand vessels had already called there in the half-century before.

Dejima, the artificial island where the Dutch were Japan's only Western traders for two centuries, lay off which city?

Nagasaki had grown as a port for Portuguese trade, and the shogun first had the island built in 1634 to pen those traders in and stop them spreading their religion.

Which young king of Spain, soon to be Holy Roman Emperor, put up most of the money for Magellan's voyage?

Charles V wanted a western route to the Spice Islands that kept clear of Portugal's eastern one; Magellan, a Portuguese subject, had left his own king's service to offer it.

Which archipelago is cut off from mainland South America by the strait Magellan sailed through in 1520?

Tierra del Fuego means 'Land of Fire': its people kept fires going along the coast, and possibly even in their canoes, for warmth and signalling.

Which headland did Willem Schouten and Jacob Le Maire become the first to round in 1616, naming it after a Dutch city?

Cape Horn is really Kaap Hoorn, after Schouten's home city, which had also given its name to the expedition's second ship, lost to an accidental fire weeks earlier.

Which Pacific archipelago, reached by Álvaro de Mendaña in 1568, got its name from hopes that it was the biblical Ophir?

The Solomon Islands were named by those who mapped his reports and linked them to the wealthy King Solomon; the expedition itself had found only a few traces of gold.

The Order of Christ, whose cross flew on Portuguese sails, was founded in 1318 from the remains of which banned order?

The Knights Templar had been abolished by the pope in 1312, but King Denis revived the Portuguese branch under a new name, and Prince Henry later served as its governor.

At which East African port did Vasco da Gama hire the Gujarati pilot who guided his fleet across to India in 1498?

Malindi was friendly because its rulers were at odds with nearby Mombasa; the pilot's knowledge of the monsoon winds took the fleet across the Indian Ocean in just 23 days.

Henry the Navigator died in 1460 at which place in the Algarve, the legendary home of his school of navigation?

Sagres probably owes the legend to the mapmakers Henry employed; his expeditions were actually run from Lagos, further east along the same coast.

Which 1529 treaty settled the Spice Islands dispute, with Portugal paying Spain 350,000 gold ducats for its claim?

The Treaty of Zaragoza followed the arrival of Magellan's surviving ships from the east in 1521, after which both crowns insisted the islands lay in their own half of the world.

Which 2nd-century geographer's atlas and treatise on mapmaking was first translated into Latin in Florence around 1406?

Ptolemy's Greek text had reached Italy only around 1400, and Columbus later reworked its figures to place Asia far closer to Europe than it really is.

Which medieval sea charts on vellum are recognised by their webs of straight lines radiating in 32 compass directions?

Portolans take their name from an Italian word meaning 'related to ports', and even the oldest known examples drew the Mediterranean coastline with startling realism.

Which name is given to the crossing that carried enslaved Africans to the Americas as part of the triangular trade?

The Middle Passage was the second of the trade's three legs, and an estimated two million captives, about one in seven, died during it.

Which French explorer founded Quebec in 1608 and earned the title 'Father of New France'?

Champlain crossed the Atlantic more than twenty times and drew the first accurate maps of the Great Lakes region, yet as a commoner he never held the formal title of governor.