The Age of Discovery
From Zheng He's fleets to Dezhnev's strait: how in two centuries sailors linked every continent, and what it meant for the Americas.
The globe flies from place to place and the timeline from year to year. Every step has its own link — handy for showing it in class.
Tour steps
-
1405–1433 Zheng He's fleets
Before any European, the Chinese admiral Zheng He leads fleets of hundreds of ships on seven voyages across the Indian Ocean, as far as Arabia and East Africa. After 1433 the Ming court ends the expeditions.
-
1415 Portugal looks to the sea
The Portuguese capture Ceuta on the African shore of the Strait of Gibraltar. Prince Henry, later called the Navigator, begins sending expeditions ever further south along Africa.
-
1488 Cape of Good Hope
Bartolomeu Dias becomes the first European to round the southern tip of Africa and enter the Indian Ocean. A sea route to India around Africa proves possible.
-
1492 Columbus
Christopher Columbus, sailing for Spain in search of a western route to Asia, lands in the Bahamas on 12 October 1492. Lasting contact between the Old World and the New begins.
-
1494 The world cut in two
The Treaty of Tordesillas divides lands yet to be discovered between Spain and Portugal along a meridian 370 leagues west of Cape Verde. That is why Brazil will later be Portuguese.
-
1498 Vasco da Gama in India
Vasco da Gama's fleet rounds Africa and reaches Calicut on the Malabar Coast. Europe now has a direct sea route to the spices of India.
-
1500 Brazil
Pedro Álvares Cabral's fleet, bound for India, swings far to the west and reaches the coast of Brazil. Cabral claims the land for Portugal.
-
1513 A new ocean
Vasco Núñez de Balboa crosses the Isthmus of Panama and becomes the first European to see the Pacific from the Americas. It becomes clear that America is not Asia.
-
1520 Around the world
Magellan's expedition passes the strait at the tip of South America and crosses the Pacific. Magellan dies in the Philippines, and in 1522 the Victoria under Elcano completes the first circumnavigation.
-
1521 The fall of Tenochtitlan
After a long siege, Hernán Cortés's Spaniards and their Tlaxcalan allies take the Aztec capital, already weakened by smallpox. Mexico City, the centre of New Spain, will rise on its ruins.
-
1532 Cajamarca
Francisco Pizarro's band of fewer than two hundred men captures the Inca ruler Atahualpa. The Inca Empire, already split by civil war, soon falls.
-
1582 Yermak and Siberia
While Europeans open the seas, Russia pushes east overland. Yermak's Cossacks defeat Khan Kuchum and take his capital, Isker; by 1639 Russians will reach the Pacific.
-
1642 Tasman
The Dutchman Abel Tasman becomes the first European to reach Tasmania and the west coast of New Zealand. The outlines of the southern lands appear on European maps for the first time.
-
1648 Dezhnev's strait
Semyon Dezhnev and Fedot Popov sail around the north-eastern tip of Asia and through the strait between Asia and America, 80 years before Vitus Bering.