The Age of Discovery
During the Age of Discovery (a.k.a. the Age of Exploration, the Age of Reconnaissance, or the Age of Contact), between the 15th and 18th centuries, seafarers from European countries explored, colonised, and conquered the rest of the globe.
Although the Scandinavian Vikings had explored the North Atlantic, reaching Iceland, Greenland and North America centuries earlier, in the standard narrative, European exploration outside the Mediterranean started when the Portuguese began systematically exploring West Africa's Atlantic under the sponsorship of Infante Dom Henrique (a.k.a. Henry the Navigator) after 1418. After maritime expeditions to the Canary Islands discovered Madeira and the Azores and tracked down Africa's west coast, Bartolomeu Dias reached the Indian Ocean in 1488.
Vasco da Gama's voyage opened the sea route to India ten years later. Portuguese India Armadas extended his oceanic route in his wake, touching South America, exploring islands in the South Atlantic and Southern Indian Oceans and extending European knowledge eastward to the Spice Islands, China and Japan.
In 1492, Spain's King Ferdinand and Queen Isabella funded the Genoese mariner Christopher Columbus's attempt to reach the Indies by crossing the Atlantic. After Columbus encountered unanticipated coastlines to the south of areas Norsemen had temporarily colonised five hundred years earlier, Portuguese claims to the new territory under the terms of the Treaty of Alcáçovas resulted in four papal bulls dividing the unexplored world into Spanish and Portuguese hemispheres eventually defined by the Treaty of Tordesillas.
Spanish and Portuguese colonisation of the Americas followed Christopher Columbus' transatlantic voyages between 1492 and 1504. The Spanish Magellan expedition completed the first circumnavigation of the globe (1519-1522). It led to naval and overland expeditions investigating the Americas, Asia, Africa, and Australia in a process that continued into the late 19th century. Exploration of the polar regions had to wait until the mid-19th and early 20th centuries.
In the process, French, English and Dutch expeditions set about undermining the Iberian monopoly on maritime trade by investigating America's Pacific coast and following the Portuguese around Africa into the Indian Ocean, discovering Australia(1606), New Zealand (1642), and Hawaii (1778). Meanwhile, Russian overland expeditions explored and conquered Siberia from the 1580s to the 1640s and reached Alaska in the 1730s.
European overseas exploration led to the rise of international trade. At the same time, the Columbian exchange was a vast transfer of plants, animals, food, populations, infectious diseases, and culture. The Age of Discovery and later European exploration resulted in a new worldview as distant civilisations came into contact, new diseases decimated populations and exploration of previously unknown regions expanded geographical knowledge and science as Europeans integrated new material into their worldview.
Missing links:
Scandinavian Vikings
North Atlantic
Iceland
Greenland
North America
Canary Islands
Madeira
Africa's west coast
Columbian exchange
Ferdinand and Isabella
