Pinzon’s route led into the south Atlantic, to a point on the Brazilian coast where, had he chosen to turn south instead of north, the current would have led him to beyond the Tropic of Capricorn and into the zone of the roaring forties. Luis Velez de Mendoza, who followed hard on Pinzon’s heels, did turn south but without getting much further. It was left to Vespucci, sailing in Pinzon’s wake under Portuguese auspices in company with Gongalo Coelho, in 1501—2, to trace the extent of the coast along the path of the current. He got at least as far as Rio de Janeiro — reached on New Year’s Day, 1502 — and, by his own account, much further, though his reported southernmost reach of 50 degrees along the coast and 52 degrees after turning east into the open sea must be judged against the background both of his habit of exaggeration and of the poor record generally of navigators of the time in determining latitude. Vespucci was unstinting in self-praise and some of his other contemporaries were almost equally impressed with him. The rapid dissemination of an increasingly accurate picture of the Atlantic shore of south America in the early years of the sixteenth century probably owes much to his efforts and influence, and it was therefore not so great an error as is often suggested when the continent took its name from him.
Judged by its consequences, the exploration of the wind-system of the south Atlantic must be acknowledged to have been more important than the delineation of the ocean’s coasts. Yet the sources available at present permit only a patchy and unsatisfactory reconstruction of the events. Between the return of Bartolomeu Dias in 1488 and the departure of Vasco da Gama, bound for the Indian Ocean in 1497, no voyages of exploration in those waters are known; the presumption that some part of the record is missing arises from the contrast between the tentative procedures of Dias and the boldness of da Gama. The former, after long, slow headway against the Benguela current, waited until a late stage before turning his prow out into the ocean to find the westerlies that carried him round the Cape. Da Gama, however, sailed exclusively with square-rigged vessels, demonstrating his intention of using following winds all the way. After his initial course to the Cape Verde Islands, he stood out to sea at about the latitude of Sierra Leone and steered a long course to the south and west, across the belt of south-east trade winds, before turning with the first favourable wind, probably around 30 degrees S. Even this proved insufficiently bold, for he made a landfall near the mouth of the Orange river and had then to work his way coastwise around the southern tip of Africa. If, as seems likely, his plan was to round the Cape of Good Hope without making land, he should have risked following an even wider arc into the south Atlantic and turning east below 35 degrees S. This was the course adopted in 1500 by theexpedition of Pedro Alvares de Cabral, which, sent to follow up da Gama’s achievement, sailed so far west on the outward voyage that a landfall was made on the Brazilian coast at about 17 degrees S. Nevertheless, it seems remarkable that, without benefit of any reconnaissance more thorough than that of Dias, Vasco da Gama should have undertaken this enormous voyage — probably by far the longest ever made on the open sea from Europe — of ninety-three days out of sight of land.
It is not even certain that he knew that this dangerous and laborious voyage would end by giving him access to the Indian Ocean. Late fifteenth-century maps in the Ptolemaic tradition showed that sea to be landlocked and barred to an approach from the south. Investigation of this problem was one of the objectives confided in 1487 to Pedro de Covilha, whose mission to report on the spice routes of the Indian Ocean was financed by some of the same Florentine merchant houses that were investing in Portugal’s exploration of the Atlantic. The surviving account of his exploits contains romantic episodes but there is no reason to doubt the claim that he investigated the routes between southern India and east Africa as far south as Sofala. Hearing of the death of a colleague who had been sent as Portuguese ambassador to the Negus of Abyssinia, he then decided to take up that post himself; he was found still living at the Negus’s court by the next Portuguese embassy, which arrived in 1520. Meanwhile, however, he had despatched a report of his findings to Lisbon. While there is no evidence that it ever arrived, its existence raises the possibility that Vasco da Gama may have been guided by some such intelligence. Though he entered the Indian Ocean by a novel route, once he had reached Sofala, da Gama did not engage in exploration but — like the many European merchants who had preceded him there in native shipping — merely followed the existing trade routes with the help of local pilots and guides, most notably a Gujerati Muslim who showed him the way from Malindi to Calicut.
Exploration was a means whereby the civilisation of Latin Christendom established access to and, in the longer run, command of a disproportionate share of the resources of the world. Explorers made a major contribution to the reversal of fortunes on a global scale. In the course of it, other civilisations, which in some cases had seemed better endowed and better equipped, became bystanders and ultimately victims of ‘western’ hegemony. The conquest of the Atlantic in the fifteenth century seems, in retrospect, a decisive step because of the way Atlantic routes led to previously isolated and underexploited lands, and connected with other oceans. Yet this great leap forward for Latin Christendom followed a period of demographic decline and, on most fronts, of contracting frontiers.
It may have helped to come from behind: in richer societies, there was less incentive to look for new sources of wealth; larger civilisations, more autarkic and more secure, could afford contempt for the rest of the world. Considered from one perspective, the endeavours of European explorers in this period resemble the efforts of ‘developing’ economies today, desperately drilling for offshore resources. On the other hand, as we have seen, the western rim of Latin Christendom had important advantages as a base for world exploration: an Atlantic-side position and a ‘culture of explorers’, whose vocation enjoyed higher prestige than in some potentially rival civilisations, reflected in the inspiration of literary role-models. The distribution of the technical prerequisites of long-distance travel should not, perhaps, be stressed too much: the achievement of Columbus shows that rudimentary and antiquated technology was adequate for revolutionary tasks. As for the new technology needed for African and south Atlantic exploration, the rule seems to have been solvitur navigando.
Unsurprisingly, the communities which produced the explorers and contributed the means were located, for the most part, in the western Mediterranean and on the Atlantic rim, especially in Genoa, Majorca, the Atlantic shores of the Iberian peninsula and, to a lesser extent, parts of England, France, Flanders and perhaps Denmark. Very broadly, it is fair to say that there was an overall displacement of the initiative, over the period as a whole, from other centres to Portugal and lower Andalusia, which enjoyed privileged access to the relatively productive central Atlantic and south Atlantic routes.
The conspicuous achievements of the 1490s raise a particular problem of interpretation. In a period of a few years, what came to be seen as decisive breakthroughs were made into the New World and the Indian Ocean. The voyages of Columbus and Vasco da Gama have often been highlighted as elements of what Adam Smith, for example, called ‘the most important event in history’, which helped to transform a ‘medieval’ world into a ‘modern’ one. These terms are not very helpful, and the gradualist assumptions of recent historiography have happily compelled us to see events in the contexts of long, grinding processes of change. Nevertheless, the pace of processes varies and change sometimes occurs with bewildering rapidity. The story of European exploration is a long one, but the concentrated speed and power of the episodes of the fifteenth century, and of the 1490s in particular, still demand to be acknowledged.
As well as influencing what might be called the balance of world power, the explorers of this period had a major effect on the received picture of the world thanks to the increasing exchange of information between explorers and cartographers. An agreed world map is a common resource of mankind: ours has been pieced together slowly, over a long period, mainly in the last 500 years. Whereas previous civilisations derived their images of the world from dogmas of cosmology, from inductive reasoning, from revelation, from inherited tradition or from the elaboration of theory, we owe today’s largely to the practical contributions — often gathered at hazard in hostile environments and reported over vast distances — of the empirical observers whom we call explorers.