For two centuries Europe's ships went looking for a way around the world, and found people who had been living at the other end of it all along. These stories follow the instruments, the ships and the crews: a friar who found the way home across the Pacific, a prince who never sailed, and a cure for scurvy that was offered once and then lost.
Every tile in a Age of Exploration game carries one of these. Open one to read it now, or leave them for the board to hand you.
Explorers
nine stories
1The Navigator who never sailed an ocean voyage
On the tile: Prince Henry1394-1460Myth busted
Portugal's Prince Henry has been called the Navigator for so long that the name sounds like a job description. It is not. He spent very little time on the water and none at all on an ocean-going voyage, and the nickname was fastened on him long after his death. What he did was pay for it. He gathered experts in cartography, navigation, astronomy and ship design at Sagres, where, contrary to legend, there was no navigation school, and he funded many of the early expeditions that went south without him.
Decades before Portuguese caravels worked their way down the African coast, the Ming admiral Zheng He was crossing the Indian Ocean with fleets of hundreds of ships. Accounts of his first voyage, in 1405, put the fleet at anywhere from about 200 to 317 vessels, with sixty-two treasure ships among them. Across seven voyages between 1405 and 1433 he reached the Somali coast and Kenya. Then the court lost interest. A new emperor suspended the expeditions after the sixth, the seventh did not sail until 1431, and the voyages ended in 1433.
John Cabot sailed from Bristol in May 1497 in a small ship called the Matthew, with a company of about twenty, and raised land after thirty-five days. He came home reporting the country of the Grand Khan, a place of brazilwood and silk where the sea swarmed with codfish. Henry VII paid him ten pounds, and later granted a pension of twenty pounds a year drawn on the Bristol customs. Cabot sailed again in 1498. After that voyage he was never seen again anywhere.
Estevanico was a native of Azamor on the Atlantic coast of Morocco, baptized in Spain, and the property of Andres Dorantes de Carranza when the Narvaez expedition put roughly three hundred men ashore near present-day Tampa Bay in 1528. Almost none of them lived. He was one of four survivors who spent years among the peoples of the Gulf coast, gaining a reputation as healers, before walking across northwest Mexico to the Pacific coast and on to Mexico City. In 1539 he was sent ahead as a scout and was killed at the Zuni pueblo of Hawikuh in western New Mexico.
5The friar who found the way home across the Pacific
On the tile: Urdaneta1565
Getting to Asia across the Pacific was the easy half. Coming back defeated crew after crew, because the prevailing winds blow the wrong way. Andres de Urdaneta, an Augustinian friar who had been a seaman first, left Cebu on June 1, 1565, in the galleon San Pedro and steered north instead of east, riding the Kuroshio current before turning for America. He reached Acapulco on October 8. Another ship of the same fleet, under Alonso de Arellano, had slipped back in August, but it was Urdaneta's route that the Manila galleons followed for more than two hundred years.
On his third search for a northeast passage, Willem Barentsz rounded the north point of Novaya Zemlya in 1596, and there the pack ice trapped his ship and broke it apart. Seventeen men built a house out of driftwood and ship's timbers and wintered in it, the first Europeans to winter so far north. In June 1597 they started for the mainland in two open boats. Barentsz died on the way, and twelve men survived. The wintering place became known as the Barents House, and it stood undisturbed for nearly three hundred years.
In July 1608 Samuel de Champlain raised a fortified settlement on the St. Lawrence at Quebec, a name said to come from a Montagnais word for the place where the river narrows. It became the first permanent French settlement in America. Twenty-eight people wintered there. When fresh supplies arrived at the end of May 1609, eight of them were left. Champlain kept coming back anyway, crossing the Atlantic again and again for some thirty years and mapping as he went, from the Atlantic coast of Canada up the St. Lawrence and into the Great Lakes.
Christopher Newport lost his right arm in 1590 off the northwestern coast of Cuba, trying to capture two Spanish treasure ships. It did not end his career at sea. Sixteen years later, on December 20, 1606, he took the flagship Susan Constant down the Thames, carrying the settlers who founded Jamestown, and he made his last voyage to Virginia in 1611. In 1612 he took up the Royal Navy post of principal master, to which he had been named back in 1606, and entered the service of the East India Company.
9He named the island for his boss; it was renamed for him
On the tile: Abel Tasman1642-1643
Abel Tasman left Batavia on August 14, 1642, with two ships, the Heemskerck and the Zeehaen. The land he found in the far south he named Antony Van Diemen's Land, after the governor-general of the Dutch East India Company who had sent him out. Farther east, on December 13, he reached another coast and called that one Staten Landt. The second is New Zealand. The first is Tasmania: in 1856, to shake off its name's convict associations, it took the name of the captain rather than the official he was flattering.
The caravel was not big. The early ones weighed no more than eighty tons, and John Cabot's Matthew, a small three-masted ship much like a caravel, was rated at fifty. What mattered was the rig and the draft. Triangular lateen sails let a caravel sail within five points of the wind and even tack against a headwind, and a low draft let it work coastal shallows where a larger ship would have stranded. Two of Columbus's three ships, the Nina and the Pinta, were caravels.
If the caravel was the scout, the carrack was the freight. It usually carried three masts with a mix of square and lateen sails, and a wide deep hull with room for cargo, provisions and a large crew. Columbus's flagship Santa Maria was one, around sixty-two feet long and about 108 tons. So was Magellan's Victoria, the one ship of his five that sailed all the way around the world. Some of the most famous ships of the age were the slow, roomy ones.
The junk carried an idea that ships still use. It is known as the first ship to steer with a rudder mounted on its stern, and the oldest known depiction of one is on a pottery model of a junk from the Han dynasty, about two thousand years old. The sails were the other departure: not square but elliptical and curved, reinforced with inner bars of bamboo. A 1597 adventure tale made the biggest junks 460 feet long. Finds suggest ships of the 1400s were usually no longer than 100 feet, though one huge excavated rudder hints some were larger.
A mariner's astrolabe measures the angle between a star and the horizon, which is how a navigator finds latitude. Europeans adapted it from the land instrument when they began making ocean voyages, casting it in brass or iron so it would be heavy and sturdy, the better for use on a moving vessel. It still was not reliable. Keeping it steady on a rolling ship in high winds was the whole difficulty, and navigators lived with the error until the end of the seventeenth century.
To use a cross-staff you set one end against your cheek just below the eye and slid the crosspiece until its top touched the sun and its bottom edge touched the horizon, then read the altitude off the staff. The geometry is sound. The trouble was aiming at the sun. A small shield that blocked all but the sun's upper edge, or a piece of smoked glass, spared the navigator painful damage to his eyes, and he still had to hold the staff steady on a pitching deck. By 1750 the octant had taken its place.
The English navigator John Davis described a better way in 1594: measure the sun without looking at it. With his backstaff, the navigator stood with his back to the sun, watched the horizon through a slit in the horizon vane, and adjusted the instrument until a shadow cast by the sun lined up with that slit. The reading gave the sun's height, the figure he needed to work out latitude. By the mid-1600s it had grown into the two-arc Davis quadrant, used resting on the shoulder, and still nobody had to stare into the sun.
The kamal is about as plain as an instrument gets: a flat piece of wood with a string attached to the middle. The navigator tied a knot in the cord, held that knot between his teeth, and raised the card until the North Star sat along its top edge and the horizon along the bottom. Because the height of Polaris depends on where you are, holding that same frame night after night held the ship on its latitude across the Indian Ocean.
A traverse board is a slab of wood full of holes, and it is how a ship remembered where it had just been. The top carried a compass rose of thirty-two points, and every half hour the direction being sailed was measured and recorded by putting a small wooden peg in the matching hole. Rows at the bottom took the speed in knots the same way. At the end of a four-hour watch the pattern of pegs was the record, and the navigator worked from it.
The unit is a literal knot. Sailors in the seventeenth century used a device called the common log: a rope with knots at regular intervals, attached to a piece of wood shaped like a slice of pie. They dropped the wood over the stern and let it float free for a set time, often measured with an hourglass. Then they counted the knots that had run out between the ship and the wood. That number was the speed, and the name stayed.
1He named it the Cape of Storms, and it kept its word
On the tile: Cape of Storms1487-1488
Bartolomeu Dias sailed from Lisbon in August 1487 with three ships, and in 1488 fierce storms drove his fleet so far south that he lost sight of land entirely. Turning north again, he found he had gone around the bottom of Africa. He named the place the Cape of Storms. King John II renamed it the Cape of Good Hope, which was better for trade. Dias got no farther, because his crew refused. In May 1500 he was caught in a storm off that same cape and his ship went down.
2Two years to India and back, a third of the crew home
On the tile: Vasco da Gama1497-1499
Vasco da Gama left Lisbon in July 1497 with four vessels and a hand-picked crew of no more than 170, rounded Africa, and took on a pilot at Malindi who knew the crossing. It has long been claimed that this pilot was the famous navigator Ahmad ibn Majid, but scholars now reject the idea. They raised the Malabar coast near Calicut in May 1498. The way home was worse. Scurvy struck again on the long recrossing of the Indian Ocean, and of the 170 who sailed, only around 55 made it home, 732 days after leaving.
Pedro Alvares Cabral sailed in 1500 with a fleet of thirteen vessels and well over a thousand men, bound for India, with Bartolomeu Dias among his captains. Sailing far to the southwest into the Atlantic, he came up against the coast of South America. The crew went ashore, raised a large wooden cross and claimed the land for Portugal. Portugal's claim to Brazil rested on that landing and on the Treaty of Tordesillas, signed six years before.
Martin Frobisher went looking for a northwest passage in 1576 and came back with a piece of black rock. An assayer reported gold in it. That was enough. In 1577 he returned with three ships and loaded about 200 tons of ore. In 1578 he sailed from Harwich with a fleet of fifteen vessels, planning on 2,000 tons. English refiners kept working at the stuff until at least 1583, when both the refiners and the investors finally admitted failure.
5Set adrift in a small boat, and no one was convicted
On the tile: The Mutiny1611
Henry Hudson spent the winter of 1610 and 1611 frozen in at the bottom of James Bay, and by June the crew had had enough. At daybreak one morning in late June 1611, Hudson, his son John, Thomas Wydowse and five others were seized and pushed into the ship's shallop. The carpenter, Philip Staffe, refused to save himself and climbed in after his captain. Nothing is known of what became of them. Four of the men who sailed home were tried in 1618 for murder, and all four were acquitted.
6The Pelican sailed out and the Golden Hind came home
On the tile: Golden Hind1577-1580
Francis Drake left England in 1577 with five ships. He commanded the Pelican, and somewhere along the way he renamed her the Golden Hind. Four of the five never finished. He captured and destroyed Spanish vessels and took their riches as he went, and came back in 1580 with a great deal of treasure and one ship. Elizabeth I knighted him the next year. The ship that completed the first English voyage around the world was the same one that had set out, wearing a new name.
In September 1513 Vasco Nunez de Balboa set out across the Isthmus of Panama with a party of Spaniards, one of them Francisco Pizarro, and around a thousand local people who did the hard work of getting them through. Twenty-four days and about forty-five miles later he looked down from a peak on open water and named it the South Sea. Today it is called the Pacific Ocean. Sources differ on whether that day was September 25 or 27, and on whether he had one hundred Spaniards or two hundred, which is a fair summary of the record.
In late 1605 a small ship called the Duyfken sailed from a port in what is now Indonesia under Willem Janszoon. In early 1606 she reached the north of Australia and charted about 190 miles of the west coast of Cape York. The crew were unaware they were the first Europeans to visit the continent. The voyage was also the first recorded meeting on Australian soil between the Indigenous people of Australia and Europeans, and it came 164 years before Cook.
9A pewter dish nailed to a post in Western Australia
On the tile: Hartog's Plate1616
In 1616 the Dutch skipper Dirk Hartog, sailing the Eendracht with the upper-merchant Gillis Miebais, accidentally discovered the west coast of Australia. The crew landed and explored for about two days, then left an engraved pewter dish behind to mark the visit and proclaim it to whoever came next, fixed to a wooden post. That dish and that post are the earliest confirmed archaeological evidence of a European presence in Australia. The dish is now in the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam.
In 1507 the German mapmaker Martin Waldseemuller published a world map that put a name on the new lands. He called them America, in recognition of Amerigo Vespucci's understanding that a new continent had been uncovered, and lettered the name across the southern landmass. Vespucci had sailed that coast and called it a new world. The name is the feminine form of his own, because continents take feminine names. About a thousand copies are believed to have been printed. One is known to survive, and the Library of Congress holds it.
On June 7, 1494, Spain and Portugal signed a treaty at Tordesillas dividing the unexplored world between them along a line 370 leagues west of Cape Verde, roughly 46 degrees 30 minutes west. There was a practical problem. It was an approximate and entirely imaginary line, because cartographers at the time had no means of measuring longitude. It mattered anyway. Brazil juts out far enough east to cross that line, and Portugal colonized it on the strength of the treaty.
By 1492 people had lived in the Western Hemisphere for tens of thousands of years, across an area five times the size of Europe, speaking hundreds of languages. The largest group living in the islands of the Caribbean were the Tainos. Their villages had chieftains called caciques whose authority was limited. They were known for fine wood carving and for hammocks woven from cotton, and they were not a particularly warlike people. Ceremonial ball games gave neighboring communities a way to compete.
In 1535 Jacques Cartier sailed up the St. Lawrence River, and he carried a word home. Two Indigenous youths told him about the route to kanata, a Huron-Iroquois word meaning village or settlement. They meant Stadacona, the village where Quebec City stands today. Cartier used the name Canada for Stadacona and for all the land its chief, Donnacona, controlled, and by 1547 maps labeled everything north of the river Canada. One town on one riverbank is the likeliest source of the name of a country that now runs from the Atlantic to the Pacific.
In the winter of 1535 and 1536 Cartier's men were dying at their camp on the St. Lawrence. By mid-February not more than ten of his 110 men were still well and eight were dead; twenty-five died in all. By carefully questioning Domagaya, an Iroquoian man who had had scurvy and recovered, Cartier learned the secret of the remedy: an infusion made from annedda, probably the white cedar. The crew was quickly cured. On his third voyage, in 1541 and 1542, there seems to have been some scurvy again, and the same infusion readily overcame it.
The English who came ashore at Cape Cod in 1620 did not arrive in an empty country. In the 1600s the Wampanoag Nation, whose name means People of the First Light, had as many as 40,000 people in 67 villages. But from 1616 to 1619 an epidemic swept the coast from Maine to Narragansett Bay, and the Wampanoag lost at least three quarters of their people. Patuxet, a village of about 2,000, lost nearly everyone. Its site, later known as Plymouth, is where the newcomers settled.
The Plymouth colonists could not feed themselves from ground they did not understand, and the man who taught them already spoke their language. Tisquantum, also called Squanto, was from Patuxet, the very place they had settled. In 1614 an English captain, Thomas Hunt, carried him off to be enslaved in Spain. He escaped to England, lived in London with a merchant, and came home five years later to find his village deserted. He showed the colonists how to set and tend corn. The only reason he could speak to them at all was that he had been kidnapped.
Maize, potatoes, beans, tomatoes, peanuts, tobacco and cacao were among the plants that went east across the Atlantic. The potato had the greatest impact on Europe, affecting both diet and lifespan. Going the other way came the major domesticated animals of the Old World: cattle, horses, sheep, goats and pigs. The traffic was not equal. Old World diseases reached people who had never met them, and by 1650 an estimated ninety percent of the native populations had died.
In early April 1513 Juan Ponce de Leon came ashore on the Atlantic coast of a land he named La Florida, the flowered one, for its lush growth and because it was the Easter season. Exactly where he landed is still argued: long placed at St. Augustine, perhaps as far south as Melbourne Beach. The part everyone remembers, that he was hunting a fountain that gave back youth, has no evidence behind it. The chronicler Gonzalo Fernandez de Oviedo tied the fountain to his name fourteen years after his death, and it has proved impossible to detach.