The story of European exploration and discovery in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries starts with the international fishing community at Newfoundland, a group of fisherfolk mariners and merchants who swarmed to fish the waters off the Grand Banks and to swap supplies and gossip at St. John's. The tales traded by these ordinary seamen and traders featured the exploits of "great men"--the Portuguese explorers of the coast of Africa and their charting of a new route to Asia; John Cabot and his effort to find a northwest passage to the Orient; and, of course, Christopher Columbus and his discovery of America.

The Meeting of Europe, Africa and America
The European conquest of the high seas began with the successful voyages of the Portuguese into the Atlantic in the late 1300s, when they colonized the Canary Islands and, a few decades later, Madeira and the Azores. By the early 1400s, the Portuguese had established sugar plantations on the Atlantic islands worked by enslaved Africans. The Portuguese also initiated a trade with West Africa, where their white skins and technological achievements astonished sub-Saharan inhabitants who had never before encountered Europeans. Slaves became one of the most profitable commodities taken from these markets, although the trade remained small in scale compared to what was to come. By the end of the century, Portuguese explorers had rounded the tip of that continent and opened a direct commerce with India.

While the Portuguese dominated the trade routes to Africa and Asia, the Spanish laid claim to the Americas, led by the discovery of an Italian mariner, Christopher Columbus.

The European Background of American Colonization
To understand why western European expansion extended overseas requires a closer investigation of advances in maritime technology and the economic and political evolution of early modern Europe. That evolution included the concentration of investment capital in the hands of merchants, financiers, and landlords, the population pressure exacerbated by a limited supply of land; and the centralization of political authority in nation states. All of these factors combined to make transatlantic expansionism both possible and desirable, a situation that impelled Europeans to cross the ocean frontier and support overseas settlement.

Spain's Empire in the New World
Spain took the lead in exploring and colonizing the Americas. Under Spain, conquistadors like Hernando Cortez and the Pizarro brothers supplanted the Aztecs and the Incas as the new overlords of the most densely populated regions of Central and South America. Divisions within Indian empires and the devastation of native populations by European diseases made these Spanish conquests easier.

Spanish monarchs soon replaced the conquistadors with an elaborate civil and ecclesiastical bureaucracy that asserted royal control over Spanish America. The empire that developed during the sixteenth century proved enormously profitable, especially after the discovery of silver. That wealth, in turn, pushed Europe more rapidly down a path it had already begun to follow toward more capitalistic forms of economic organization and more centralized structures of political authority.

The Reformation in Europe
During the period that Spain developed its American empire, the Protestant Reformation transformed Western Europe. Inspired by the teachings of Martin Luther and John Calvin, Protestant reformers criticized the worldliness and corruption of the Roman Catholic church, as well as its failure to respond to the spiritual needs of ordinary Christians. Protestant teachings addressed popular needs for religious reassurance by stressing that men and women were saved not by good works but through divine grace alone. Protestants also stressed the ability of each individual to read and understand the will of God as revealed in the bible.

England's Entry into the New World
Protestant attacks on Roman Catholicism won both zealous followers and determined opponents, triggering a series of bloody religious wars. The energies of young English men, barred by royal policy from poaching on Spain's preserve in the Americas, found an outlet in these religious conflicts, as well as in England's effort to conquer and colonize Ireland.

Many veterans of the Irish campaigns subsequently turned their attention to North America in the 1570s and 1580s. At that time, the threat Spain posed to English economic and military security encouraged Elizabeth I to challenge Spain more aggressively, both within Europe and across the Atlantic. English merchants and gentlemen, in search of new markets and new land, lent increasing support to colonization schemes as well. Martin Frobisher, Humphrey Gilbert, and Walter Raleigh all tried and failed to plant colonies in America. But their efforts, as well as the younger Richard Hakluyt's energetic promotion of English colonization, paved the way for renewed English expansionism in the seventeenth century.