60 Fun Facts About Age of Discovery

The Age of Discovery is also commonly known by what other name?

It overlapped with the Age of Sail and ran from roughly the early 15th to the 17th century.

Which two countries led the first wave of overseas colonisation in the 15th and 16th centuries?

The English, French and Dutch joined later.

The magnetic compass used by European navigators was originally invented during which Chinese dynasty?

It was in use for navigation in China by the 11th century and reached Europe by the late 12th or early 13th century.

The full-rigged ship of the era combined a carvel hull with how many masts?

The fore and main masts set square sails while the mizzen carried a lateen sail.

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

His largest 'treasure ships' may have measured 121 metres, and the fleets brought back giraffes, zebras and ostriches.

What was the name of the Ming isolationist policy that ended China's long-distance voyages?

The Xuande Emperor even suppressed much of the information about the voyages.

Which Italian city-state near-monopolised European trade with the Middle East from the 8th to 15th century?

The spice trade made these Mediterranean republics phenomenally rich, which is what the Atlantic powers hoped to bypass.

Which North African city did Portugal conquer in 1415, often taken as the start of the era?

Young Prince Henry the Navigator became aware there of the profits of the trans-Saharan trade routes.

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

His other aims were to bypass Muslim-controlled routes and to probe whether the Indies could be reached by sea.

Which Atlantic archipelago did the Portuguese reach in 1419, before the Azores in 1427?

João Gonçalves Zarco led the expedition that established settlements there.

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

Sailing beyond it had begun systematically in 1421 under Henry's sponsorship.

From 1440, which shallow-draft Iberian ship type became the workhorse of voyages down the African coast?

Its lateen rig was poor downwind, which is why Columbus re-rigged the Niña with square sails.

Which Jewish astronomer's 1496 Almanac Perpetuum gave Portuguese navigators latitude tables?

Exact longitude, by contrast, remained beyond mariners for centuries.

Which 1455 papal bull granted the King of Portugal all lands discovered beyond Cape Bojador?

It initiated a 'mare clausum' policy declaring the Atlantic closed to other states.

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

The area came to be called the Gold Coast.

Bartolomeu Dias originally gave what name to the southern tip of Africa when he rounded it in 1488?

King John II renamed it the Cape of Good Hope in his optimism about a sea route to India.

Who was sent overland in secret to Ethiopia to gather intelligence on the Red Sea and East African coast?

His reports suggested a sea route to the Indies would soon be found.

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

Land was sighted on 12 October, an island he named San Salvador in what he took to be the East Indies.

Columbus first presented his westward project to which king, who rejected it in both 1485 and 1488?

The king's experts thought his 2,400-mile estimate for the distance to Asia was far too low.

How many men did Columbus leave behind at La Navidad, the settlement he founded in what is now Haiti?

He also kidnapped between 10 and 25 natives, of whom only seven or eight reached Spain alive.

The 1494 Treaty of Tordesillas drew its dividing line how many leagues west of the Cape Verde islands?

The pope's earlier line had been 100 leagues; John II negotiated it westward, which later gave Portugal a claim to Brazil.

Which pope issued the 1493 bull Inter caetera dividing new lands between Castile and Portugal?

He was Rodrigo Borgia, and the bull did not even mention Portugal.

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

He hoped a northerly crossing would make the route to the 'West Indies' shorter.

Labrador is named after which Portuguese explorer, who sighted it in 1499?

The Corte-Real brothers explored Greenland and Newfoundland between 1499 and 1502.

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

He returned to Portugal two years and two days after leaving with just 55 surviving men.

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

It is widely regarded as Portugal's greatest literary achievement.

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

He believed it was an island and named it Ilha de Vera Cruz.

Cabral is described as the first captain to touch how many continents?

His voyage connected Europe, Africa, the New World and Asia in a single expedition.

The Americas were named in 1507 by which cartographers, after Amerigo Vespucci?

Vespucci's published accounts had argued the new lands were a 'Mundus novus', not the Indies.

Afonso de Albuquerque conquered which city, then the centre of Asian trade, for Portugal in 1511?

From there he sent the first European envoy to Siam and an expedition to the Spice Islands.

The Banda Islands, reached by de Abreu in 1512, were then the sole source of which two spices?

Finding them was the main purpose of the Portuguese voyages in the Indian Ocean.

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

Hostilities had eased decades after Chinese victories at Tunmen and Xicaowan.

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

He named it the Mar del Sur, the South Sea; the Pearl Islands he named are still called that.

Magellan's fleet of five ships left Seville in 1519 with what flagship?

Only the Victoria completed the circumnavigation, returning on 6 September 1522.

Magellan named the Pacific 'Mar Pacífico' for what reason?

He entered it on 28 November 1520 after 373 miles of the strait that now bears his name.

Magellan was killed in 1521 in the Battle of Mactan, in which modern country?

Juan Sebastián Elcano then took command and completed the voyage.

How many of Magellan's original crew completed the circumnavigation aboard the Victoria in 1522?

Seventeen more returned later, including twelve who had been captured by the Portuguese.

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

He was one of the 18 who made it home.

The 1529 Treaty of Zaragoza gave the Moluccas to Portugal and which islands to Spain?

Experts at Badajoz-Elvas had failed to agree on the antimeridian because longitude could not yet be calculated accurately.

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

Cortés later took him hostage in his own palace; he was killed the following year, possibly stoned by his own people.

How many 'Famous Thirteen' stayed with Pizarro after his line in the sand at Isla de Gallo?

They waited seven months on Isla Gorgona for provisions before sailing on to Peru.

Pizarro founded which city on 18 January 1535, an act he considered among the most important of his life?

The first provisional capital, Jauja, had been judged too high in the mountains.

Which friar-navigator found the eastward Pacific return route in 1565, enabling the Manila galleons?

He sailed north to 38 degrees to catch the westerlies, reaching Acapulco after 130 days and 12,000 miles.

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

He was the first recorded European to visit the future Virginia Colony and United States coast.

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

He was looking for a western route to Asia and laid the foundation for Dutch colonisation of the region.

Barentsz's crew, trapped on Novaya Zemlya in 1596, wintered in a lodge built from their ship called what?

On his first voyage the crew had brought a polar bear aboard, which rampaged and had to be killed.

Abel Tasman's 1642-44 voyage first reached New Zealand and which island, then named Van Diemen's Land?

He also proved that Australia was not part of the mythical great southern continent.

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

The decisive fight was the three-day Battle of Chuvash Cape on the Irtysh River.

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

Europe sent cattle, horses and sheep west and received tobacco, potatoes, tomatoes and maize.

Between 1500 and 1800, Mexico and Peru produced roughly what share of the world's silver?

Much of it ended up in China, which received about 100 tons a year between 1600 and 1800.

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

The Japanese adopted the arquebus, European cuirasses and Christianity during it.

The inflation in 16th-century Spain and Europe caused by New World gold and silver is called what?

Spain held the equivalent of about US$1.5 trillion (in 1990 terms) from New Spain during the century.

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

Drake's 1577–80 voyage was only the second circumnavigation of the world in a single expedition and the first by the English.

Which French explorer named 'Canada' after Iroquoian words for the settlements at Stadacona and Hochelaga?

Cartier, from Saint-Malo, was the first European to describe and map the Gulf of Saint Lawrence and its river in the 1530s.

Which conquistador led the first European expedition to Florida in 1513 and served as Puerto Rico's first governor?

He first came to the Americas as a 'gentleman volunteer' on Columbus's second voyage in 1493.

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

He died on the river's banks in 1542 after a vast trek through the modern southeastern United States in search of gold.

The Dutch ship Duyfken, whose crew made the first known European landing on Australia in 1606, was captained by whom?

Duyfken means 'little dove'; it was in Torres Strait months before Luís Vaz de Torres sailed through it.

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

He sailed from the Kolyma River on the Arctic Ocean to the Anadyr on the Pacific, but the feat was forgotten for nearly a century.

Which Portuguese mariner reached the mouth of the Congo River in 1482 and marked it with a stone padrão?

His pillar on Shark Point stood until 1642, when the Dutch destroyed it during their occupation of the Congo.

In which year was the Dutch East India Company (VOC) established, with a 21-year monopoly on Asian trade?

Its shares traded openly in Amsterdam, and it could wage war, strike coins and found colonies, making it arguably the first multinational.