 Hi, I'm Dr. Gene Preuss. In this lecture, we're going to look at a very age old question. Sea travel in the 1400s was dangerous. It was very hazardous. It was frightening, and a lot of people didn't survive. So the question we're going to address in this lecture is why did Europeans take to the seas in the 1400s? What we're going to look at in this lecture is why they sailed across the Atlantic, understand a concept known as the Columbian Exchange, and to recognize the significance of Columbus's voyages. Now, the Atlantic Ocean, as I said earlier, was a frightening, dangerous place, but we know that about the year 1000, the Vikings had traveled along the North Pole and the Arctic Circle around to Newfoundland in what's today Canada and had established a colony there where they were doing fishing. This was Leif Eric's son, the son of Eric the Red, and this had largely been a myth, but archaeologists had discovered remnants of a Viking village in Canada. So we know that the story was true that Vikings really did come as far as Canada. There were other European myths, though. The across the Atlantic was a land of youth, or an island of seven cities. You have to remember that Muslim invaders had conquered the Iberian Peninsula, what's today Spain and Portugal, around the year 740. And the legend had it that when the Muslims invaded, Catholic bishops took the riches from their treasuries and sailed across the Atlantic and established these seven cities of gold. Now, it was largely a legend. However, when sailors coming out of Spain and Portugal and the Mediterranean sailed out on North Africa and discovered the Azor islands in about the 1420s, maybe some of these legends, they thought, were true. They didn't know islands were out there, and with the discovery of these islands, it fed these myths. Also, there is a legend that we believe, and are often repeating, that people believe the world was flat. That really wasn't true. Most people understood the world was round, and they had since the time of the Greeks. So the idea that the world was flat, of course, you always have people who believe that, even today. Most people believed the world was round. They just didn't know how big the world was. They wanted to continue trade with Asia, especially the silk roads and the spices, but changes in the political atmosphere and rulers and leaders in the areas in between caused trade to dwindle. And so what they were looking for, what Europeans were looking for, were ways to continue the trade with Asia. They were also very interested in land acquisition. Land was the principal source of wealth in Europe at the time. Now, in the early 1400s, the Iberians, what we would today call the Portuguese, had developed colleges or universities, as they called them, which were workshops where they brought together the best minds of the Christian nations and the Muslim nations to discover ways of working out technological change. One of these was the Portuguese prince Henry, so-called a navigator, who brought in sailing experts to look at new ways of designing ships and sails. Another motivating factor was religious zeal. Since the 1100s, the Europeans had been interested in Crusades and in exporting their religion and Christianizing other nations. And then of course, as I mentioned earlier, with the expansion of the Ottoman Empire into Iberia and Peninsula in Spain and what's today Portugal and the takeover of the Muslims, there had been a chance that the Spanish people would someday reconquer the reconquista, as it was called, reconquer their territory from the Muslim Ottomans. And so this had long been a dream, and this finally occurred in the late 1470s and 1492, as a matter of fact. And there had been some trade success across in the Atlantic Ocean, not across it, but in the Atlantic Ocean. Explorers like Bartolba Ideas and Vasco de Gama had begun sailing around the coast of Africa and on into India. So there had been use of the technology developed by the Muslim and Christian mathematicians and navigators and shipbuilders that had made deep sea travel possible. Now we talk about Christopher Columbus. Now Columbus in 1492 left in August. He didn't sight land for another couple of months until October. And when he sighted land, nobody really knows where he landed. But because of this exploration and because of Portuguese sailors also sailing out, the Pope issued in 1494 the Treaty of Tordesillas, which was an agreement between Spain and Portugal to divide the world that the Portuguese would have the right to settle in the east, the Spanish would have the right to settle in the west. And so this is why Brazil is Portuguese territory because it fell on that side of the line. Now another question is why isn't this Columbia? In fact, a map maker on one of the voyages of Columbus named America Vespucci drew the maps of the New World and the world was named after him, America. Now why wasn't it Columbus? Well, Columbus had always held that he didn't really find any place new. He always said he found India, a new route to India, although nobody else believed him. It was pretty certain that Columbus had found another world, another land, but because he never accepted that for himself, he always maintained he had really found India, other people knew better the land was named after America. Columbus had kind of fallen out of disfavor. Now why was Columbus significant? Well, because his trip using the technology that had been developed allowed other Europeans to make trips repeatedly from the old world to the new. Now the other thing that they found were different people, different birds, different animals, different foods, and this exchange. Some people said that maybe this was a new creation. And here you have a quote from Joseph de Akama in 1570 that maybe God had made a new creation of beasts. And there was some doubt as to whether Native Americans were really human beings at all or whether they were some sort of savages or maybe even some sort of animal. The other significance of Columbus in his voyage is what we call the Columbian Exchange. Alfred Crosby, a historian in the 1970s, coined this term and this was the exchange of animals, food, and diseases. And one historian has called this the greatest biological revolution in the Americas since the time people appeared in the new world. It was this exchange between the old world and the new world of animals, food, and diseases. And it had significant repercussions in the world on both sides of the Atlantic Ocean. So in this lecture, although it was very brief, we looked at three things. One, why did Europeans sail? Well, they wanted to continue trade with Asia and they were trying to use the new technology, shipbuilding, and sailing that they had developed. The Columbian Exchange was this biological exchange of life, food, animals, people, and disease between the old world and the new. And what was the importance of Columbus's voyages? That Europeans were able now to repeat trips to the new world. They had come before but they were never able to repeat it. But with the new technological advances that Europeans had in the 1470s and the 1480s and the 1490s, the trips were reproducible. So I hope that answers some of the questions we have about Columbus and why he's important without romanticizing what he did. Thank you very much.