FREE THE SPICE ROUTE: A HISTORY PDF

John Keay | 308 pages | 25 Feb 2014 | University of California Press | 9780520254169 | English | Berkerley, United States The Spice Route: A History by John Keay

Goodreads helps you keep track of books you want to read. Want to Read saving…. Want to The Spice Route: A History Currently Reading Read. Other editions. Enlarge cover. Error rating book. Refresh and try again. Open Preview See a Problem? Details if other :. Thanks for telling us about the problem. Return to Book Page. Spices came from lands unseen, possibly uninhabitable, and almost by definition unattainable; that was what made them The Spice Route: A History desirable. Yet more livelihoods depended on this pungent traffic, more nations participated in it, more wars were fought for it, and more discoveries resulted from it than from any other global exchange. Epic in scope, marvelously detailed, laced with drama, The Spice Route spans three The Spice Route: A History and circles the world to chronicle the history of the spice trade. A veritable spice race evolved as The Spice Route: A History west vied for control of the spice-producing islands, stripping them of their innocence and the spice trade of its mystique. This enthralling saga, progressing from the voyages of the ancients to the blue-water trade that came to prevail by the seventeenth century, transports us from the dawn of history to the ends of the earth. Get A Copy. Hardcoverpages. Published July 15th by University of California Press first published More Details Original Title. California Studies in Food and Culture Other The Spice Route: A History 8. Friend Reviews. To see what your friends thought of this book, please sign up. To ask other readers questions about The Spice Routeplease sign up. Lists with This Book. Community Reviews. Showing Average rating 3. Rating details. More filters. Sort order. Did you know, for example, that mace and nutmeg come from the same plant? Or that salt which is The Spice Route: A History mineral is alone in adding intrinsic preservative value to food? I found this book provided a perfect blend of the exotic, the heroic and the mundane. The story of the journeys which resulted in the discovery of spices, the desire for the rare and the risks associated with transportation make for fascinating reading. Long before a formal stock market existed, futures were made and lost in this precious trade. The spice trade is a fascinating juxtaposition of an historical process spanning three millennia, a geographic progression that encircles the world and a trade in commodities that have little intrinsic value. So, if you have ever wondered The Spice Route: A History the stories behind those small packets or glass bottles containing those mysteriously named ingredients that so many of us use in our cooking, you may like to read this book. An excellent history of the lands that produced much of the wealth of Europe from the The Spice Route: A History of Exploration up to the Industrial Age -- but it begins long, long before that, with the Arab, Indian and Chinese traders whose ships first plied this route. Economics and conquest make this a deeply interesting story. Feb 09, Simon Wood rated it really liked it. Keay as always is irrerevent, his gentle and humourous mocking of the more fantastic elements of the accounts of for example Pliny, Herodotus, Marco Polo,etc are enlightening and amusing, always a pleasant combination. He charts the vagaries of the Spice Route, the changes to it over the centuries and the reasons for those changes succintly and with plenty of clarity. He is particularly effective in portraying the European incursion into the Indian Ocean and points further east from the late 15th Century and doesnt shirk from describing the more brutal and frankly monstrous aspects of this. Raiding rather than trading would be the more appropriate term for say the Portugese visits to the west coast of India, or the Dutch in Sumatra and the Spice Islands proper. There are also some beautiful colour plates of people and places related to the Spice Route and a number of maps from different periods in which the development of geographical knowledge is given eloquent expression. Thoroughly reccomended. Dec 15, Katherine rated it really liked it Recommends it for: Food history buffs. Recommended to Katherine by: Library of Congress subject headings. Shelves: historyfoodpurple-proseread-in This is a very good history of the spice trade despite the fact that the The Spice Route: A History is a bit confused and the prose can be purple and convoluted and he's obviously biased towards and against certain historical players causing him to gloss over the actions of some and hyper focus on those of others and the fact that there are one or two factual errors. But other than that this book was pretty okay. Took me forever to read though. A little disappointed because he starts off saying too many authors This is a very good history of the spice trade despite the fact that the narrative is a bit confused and the prose can be purple and convoluted and he's obviously biased towards and against certain historical players causing him to gloss over the actions of some and hyper focus on those of others and the fact that there are one or two factual errors. A little disappointed because he starts off saying too many authors focus exclusively on the European narrative of this subject and not enough on the Asian story and he would do differently and then he basically does the same thing as The Spice Route: A History else. Or maybe I just imagined he said that; I started this book an ice age ago so it's a little hard to remember. Still, if you're interested in the subject I suggest giving this a read. It's very thorough. Oct 06, Colin Williams rated it it was amazing. Keay's dense prose is something to write home about, and always rewarding. Bet you don't know where nutmeg comes from. Spices were always an alluring object for Europeans of every hue. They wanted to add punch to their meals The Spice Route: A History liberally sprinkling those exotica, used them as medicine and aphrodisiacs and also for worship of gods by smoking them as incense. Human history was shaped in no mean measure by the ups and downs in the quest for spices and to locate them in their native environment in the remotest islands of Indonesia. John Keay tells the long tale of the pursuit of spices spanning across three millenni Spices were always an alluring object for Europeans of every hue. John Keay tells the long tale of the pursuit of spices spanning across three millennia which moulded the world as it is today. The author is an English journalist and author specializing The Spice Route: A History popular histories of India and the Far East, often with particular focus on their colonization and exploration by Europeans. This book may also be read as a sequel to the book Spice — the History of a Temptation by Jack Turner, which was also reviewed earlier in my The Spice Route: A History. While Turner specializes on the spices as such, Keay is more concerned with the history surrounding their discovery and The Spice Route: A History diffusion. Even before written history came into vogue, spices arrived at the tables of the Egyptians and Greeks. They came in a series of hauls across the land and the sea. Nutmeg, mace and cloves grew only in the Moluccas island chain of Indonesia, but they trotted half of the globe before ending up in Europe. Several kingdoms presided over the spice routes. The decline in fortune of a dynasty affected the trade and conversely, hiccups in trade told heavily on the fortunes of ruling houses as well. The age old route for the spices from the remote Indonesian islands was to transport it first through sea on to Malacca. The produce changed The Spice Route: A History at this hub. It then sailed on the Bay of Bengal to reach Coromandel ports in India. An overland stretch now lay ahead. Ports on the Malabar Coast then took on the task of loading the transit spices on to Arabian vessels anchored in those ports. To the cargo is added pepper, which was a homegrown variety. Cinnamon from Sri Lanka was also sometimes added to the list. The former was then carried along the Red Sea, then by land through the Nile, reaching Alexandria. The latter moved overland through much of Syria and Turkey, ending up in Constantinople. European merchants then completed the last leg. Spices could then be loaded into the same ship that carried it all the way to its European markets. The book describes these routes in some detail and includes a good narrative on the journey periplus of the Erythrean Sea that first identified the monsoon winds The Spice Route: A History could be used as a trade wind from Arabia that The Spice Route: A History ships to sail right across the Arabian Sea to reach Malabar ports. We also read about an abortive naval conquest on more peaceful lines in the Indian Ocean by Chinese sailors. Admiral Cheng-ho made several voyages in the region and established contacts at Malaya, Malabar and the African coast. He came as the representative of the Celestial Empire and is thought to have created a maritime trading empire that encompassed the whole of South Asia. This was in the 14thth centuries. Had it flourished with a little more resolve from the Chinese side, the Portuguese would have nothing but their effort to show off for their perilous travel across half the planet. But surprisingly, after a few trips, the Chinese quit the game and The Spice Route: A History the field ripe and vacant for the Europeans to start a new leaf of conquest and colonization in world history. The age of exploration began in the Iberian Peninsula in lateth century. Their avarice was exceeded only by their unscrupulousness, since all they could find exportable from Africa were slaves! Columbus sought to reach the spice islands of Moluccas through a western route. This was rational, as nobody had any idea that a very large continent interposed between Europe and Asia on the western hemisphere. Columbus believed, or rather made himself believe that he had landed somewhere in Asia which is near to the source of spices. What are the Spice Routes? | Silk Roads Programme

Java is a rather small island compared to giants like New Guinea, Borneo or Sumatra. Yet it is called home by more than half of the Indonesian population : a staggering millions people by This is on Java that some of the most powerful kingdoms of the pre-colonial times flourished. And this is also Java that will become the core of the Dutch colonial empire. This article is the first of a series to introduce to you to the culture of the Javanese people, the main ethnic group of Java island. The second part deals with the religion The Spice Route: A History the Javanese. Java is not home only to the Javanese, even if they form the main ethnic group. The Sundanese, the Madurese or the Betawi are other close neighbours, that speak a different language as their mother tongue. Yet despite clear differences, it is also possible to observe similarities between neighbouring cultures : the traditional Sundanese and Javanese attires are quite close for instance. To make it simple, the Javanese are the ones that speak the Javanese language. Their homeland is the central and east regions of Java island. The Javanese recognize some regional particularities I have extracted the following description from a book written in the 80s : most remain true but deep Islamisation has occurred since 40 years and some comments about the religious norm or the culture might be out of date. For centuries, the history of Java is that of kingdoms that fight for the control of a larger territory. Both Buddhism under different forms and Hinduism from various traditions prevailed among the rulers that build temples. Chinese sources and very scarce stone inscription evokes an Hindu kingdom on the north coast of Java near modern Jepara around the 6 th or 7 th century. More solid evidence teach us that a Saivite king called Sanjaya established himself in the valley of the Merbabu and Merapi volcano north of modern Yogyakarta in the first half of the 8 th century. The remains of a temple complex on Dieng plateau are dated from this period. The center of power shifted several times through history back and forth from central to east Java : the old Mataram kingdom was most likely based north of Yogyakarta where the temples of Borobodur and Prambanan have been builtthen the power moved to Kediri and the valley of the Brantas river before settling again near the river delta probably near the modern town of Trowulan south of Surabaya. A Javanese civilization emerged and developed a sophisticated artistic, literary and religious culture. The apogee of this era is reached with the Majapahit kingdom 14th until early 16th century that came to dominate the central and eastern part of Java, Madura and Bali. Through expeditions, it also had a punitive influence over western Java, some parts of south Borneo, Sulawesi, Sumbawa The Spice Route: A History the Straits of Malaka interesting article if you want to go The Spice Route: A History. For instance, the keraton courts of Yogyakarta and Surakarta will be founded only in the 18th century even though they claim the heritage of the former court cultures. The history of the early days of Islam in Java is still not fully clear to this day. Unless new significant historical sources are discovered, it will probably remained so. By the 14 th century, Java was shared between interior kingdoms producing rice in fertile valley and port-town engaging in regional trade. We know than from the 7 th century, Muslim emissaries from Arabia began to arrive at the Chinese court. In the 9 th century, thousands of Muslim merchants could be found in Canton. Such contacts were possible through maritime transports and the sea routes pass through what are now Indonesian waters. So Java was probably exposed from an early period to Islam, most likely through merchants potentially from Arabia The Spice Route: A History also in large parts from South India or Persia. It would sounds logical to find the first trace of Islam on the coast but actually the first conclusive evidence of Islam among the Javanese are gravestones near Trowulan the supposed capital of Majapahit, so an interior kingdom dated from In the early 15th century, Chinese observer Ma Han did not describe Muslim presence on the north coast the pasisir. A century later, when the Portuguese Tome Pires visited the coast in the s, Islam has established. InIslamized kingdom of Demak attacked a highly declining Majapahit and destroyed it. The royalty and many members of its aristocracy were probably killed, while others fled to the still Hindu- Buddhist kingdoms of eastern Java and Bali where there were Javanese courts. Demak expanded to the east but was stopped by the Hindu state of Panarukan East Java. For the first time, The Spice Route: A History Islamic kingdom came to dominate, for a short time, Java. But quite shortly after second half of the 16th centurythe power shifted The Spice Route: A History again to the interior of Central Java, with the expansion of a former Demak vassal in Pajang near present day Surakartathat would be in turn taken over by a new kingdom of Mataram led by Senopati in He returned to the land of the ancient kingdom of Mataram that had built Borobodur years before! In the meantime, new actors established themselves in Java : the Europeans. Java is then the largest rice exporter of South-East Asia it will remain so until the 19th century and is located right in the middle of the spice route that is thriving. Sultan Agung that has attempted but failed to take over Batavia twice The Spice Route: A History and is largely regarded as the last great Javanese king. From his death inthe Javanese land will experience a period of almost constant warfare for the throne of Mataram. The VOC involved itself in those feuds, the ailing heir of Mataram calling for help against rebels. The Dutch nonetheless The Spice Route: A History their support for privileges. Inthe north coast of Java was fully leased to the VOC that ruled it alone, controled the ports and regulated trade. Inanother rebellion cut the kingdom of Mataram in two : prince Mangkubumi revolted against Pakubuwana III that had moved his court from Yogyakarta to Surakarta The Spice Route: A History and proclaimed himself Sultan Hamengkubuwana I of Yogyakarta. Mataram would eventually be split in 4. The Sultanates of Yogyakarta and Surakarta that have survived until today are thus the direct heirs of Mataram kingdom. But from their inception they were under the domination of the Dutch. Inthe VOC had gone bankrupt mostly due to the costs of leading war in Java and its possession were transmitted to the Kingdom of Holland. This is the official start of the colonial era in Indonesia. Inprince Diponegoro revolted and engaged a 5 years war with the Dutch. Java was eventually pacified. Soon the colonial government recruited the now idle aristocracy to populate the rank of its administration as clerks or teachers. The submission of the Javanese aristocracy by the Dutch had a long-lasting effect on their prestige. In The Spice Route: A History, the The Spice Route: A History court poet of Surakarta R. Ronggawarsita wrote that kasekten magical power that was detained by the ancient kings of Java was now lost. From tothe colonial state imposed the so-called Culture System, in which the Javanese peasant had to supply agricultural commodities such as sugarcane, indigo, tobacco, tea … to their rulers. Towards the The Spice Route: A History of the 19th century, the Dutch rulers introduced more educational opportunities for the local populations. In the early 20th century, the first major Indonesian civil organizations were all founded in Java : Budi Utomo inSarekat Islam inMuhammadiyah inNahdlatul Ulama in …. After the short Japanese rule during the WW2, Independence of Indonesia was The Spice Route: A History on 11 Augustusbut the modern Republic of Indonesia would be effective only in August after a bitter conflict with the Dutch trying to retake control of their former colony. After independence, Indonesia was politically divided between Nationalists, Islamists and Communists. This will eventually led to a coup in when the army took power and slaughtered afterwards hundred of thousands, potentially millions, of communist supporters. Tablets of stone or metal as old as from the 8th century have been found in East Java by archeologists. They are written in an ancient form of Javanese that uses a script derived from an old Indian sanskrit script called the Palawa script. This script evolved a lot through the centuries but remained the basis of the modern Javanese script. Yet, Javanese is nowadays mostly written in latin The Spice Route: A History and the younger generation have often lost command of the Javanese script. Javanese is a also a complex hierachical language with different forms : the lower ngoko and the upper krama and krama inggil. If the ngoko is spoken as their mother tongue by The Spice Route: A History of millions of Javanese, the mastery of the upper registers of Javanese has declined in the recent decades. As everywhere in Indonesia, if the use of the local language is tolerated during the first years of elementary The Spice Route: A History, all the teachings are conducted in Indonesian afterwards. The most ancient works of Javanese literature that have survived to these The Spice Route: A History were actually found in Bali and Lombok :. But older piece of Javanese culture had passed through the centuries via the oral tradition of The Spice Route: A History shadowplay wayang and myth telling lakon. The Javanese litterature was revived under Mataram through royal chronicles like the Badad Tanah Jawi and more general books like the Serat Centhini whose detailed description of the Javanese daily life is often considered as an encyclopedia of the Javanese culture. The Javanese courts historically sponsored royal poets. Poem reading and singing was a recognized form of art tembang. In the modern era, Javanese writers, as other The Spice Route: A History ethnic groups, largely abandonned the Javanese language to the profit of Indonesian. The Javanese developed over the centuries a rich artistic tradition that can be splitted in two :. Some piece of cloth are also very closely associated to the Javanese : such as the women kebaya shirt or the male blangkon headdress. The Javenese shadowplay wayang is internationaly known as a striking feature of the Javanese art. The puppeteer dalang tells myths usually from the Javanese version of the Mahabharata or the Ramayana by acting, singing and the song of gamelan Javanese percussion orchestra accompanying him. The most ancient ones were the princess dances performed only by young girls srimpi and bedhaya. Later came the wayang wong The Spice Route: A History for both sexes that acts out the wayang stories. The court dances tends to be rather abstract. The rythm is slow and controlled, the posture must be absolutely still and perfect, breathing unoticeable, eyes kept fixed in one place. The esthetic ideal is that The Spice Route: A History controlled motion, of perfect self-contained grace. A key concept in the ethic of the Javanese aristocrats the priyayi is the opposition between alus subtle, refined, civilized The Spice Route: A History kasar impolite, rough, uncivilized. Despite being patronized by the Javanese elite, wayang shows were pretty commonsight in Javanese commoners home until more or less the 70s. They were typically given for special occasions like wedding or circumcision. In the 50s, the family and the guests of the host giving the wayang The Spice Route: A History usually sit in front of their house on the shadow side, while a crowd of uninvited guests would gather to watch the The Spice Route: A History work on the other. Several form of art were also very popular as public entertainment. We can think about popular theatre such as kethoprakludruk popular farcesreyog mask dance performance in which performers enter trance jaranan dance performance involving bamboo model horses and spirit possession s or tayuban lascive Javanese female dances. Another specific set of Javanese arts was cultivated in the traditional Islamic boarding schools pesantren : we think immediately about the indigenous martial art pencak but also some forms of music such as terbangan elaborated chanting inspired from Persia or gambusan Middle- Eastern type of orchestra with string instruments. Already in the 50s, Geertz had noted that the art form associated with the courts in particular wayang were losing popularity among the masses to the profit of movies for instance. The priyayi were left as the main patrons of traditional arts a situation quite similar to that of opera or classic music in Europe. Sincethe Sultan of Yogyakarta have been sponsoring the Habirandha school for wayang puppeteers but the number of students enrolling and graduating is diminishing every year. Wayang wong is still performed at the Sriwedari theatre in Surakarta but the audience are small. Besides the simply lack of public interest, a huge cause behind the decline of popular form of folk arts was the anti-Communist campaign after The Indonesian Communist Party had supported and associated himself to popular theatre kethoprak, ludruk, reyog … for propaganda purposes. Many members of the troups, most of them affiliated or at least sympathetic to Communism, were arrested or even killed in between and Ferdinand Magellan - Early Years, Expedition & Legacy - HISTORY

In search of fame and fortune, Portuguese explorer Ferdinand Magellan c. En route The Spice Route: A History discovered what is now known as the Strait of Magellan and became the first European to cross the Pacific Ocean. The voyage was long and dangerous, and only one ship returned home three years later. Magellan himself was killed in battle on the voyage, but his ambitious expedition proved that the globe could be circled by sea and that the world was much larger than had previously been imagined. Ferdinand Magellan c. While at the court Magellan was exposed to stories of the great Portuguese and Spanish rivalry for sea exploration and dominance over the spice trade in the East Indies, especially the Spice Islands, or Moluccas, in modern Indonesia. Intrigued by the promise of fame and riches, Magellan developed an interest in maritime discovery in those early years. InMagellan and his brother were assigned to a Portuguese fleet headed for India. Over the next seven years, Magellan participated in several expeditions in India and Africa and was wounded in several battles. In he joined the enormous ship, 15,soldier force sent by King Manuel to Morocco to challenge the Moroccan governor who refused to pay its yearly tribute to the Portuguese empire. The Portuguese easily overwhelmed the Moroccan forces, and Magellan stayed on in Morocco. While there he was seriously wounded in a skirmish, which left him with a limp for the rest of his life. In the 15th century, spices were at the epicenter of the world economy, much like oil is today. Highly valued for flavoring and preserving food as well as masking the taste of meat gone bad, spices like cinnamon, clove, nutmeg and especially black pepper were The Spice Route: A History valuable. Since spices could not be cultivated in cold and arid Europe, no effort was spared to discover the quickest sea route to the Spice Islands. Portugal and Spain led the competition The Spice Route: A History early control over this critical commodity. Europeans had reached the Spice Islands by sailing east, but none had yet to sail west from Europe to reach the other side of the globe. Magellan was determined to be the first to do so. By now an experienced seaman, Magellan approached King Manuel of Portugal to seek his support for a westward voyage to the Spice Islands. The king refused his petition repeatedly. Ina frustrated Magellan renounced his Portuguese The Spice Route: A History and relocated to Spain to seek royal support for his venture. When Magellan arrived in Seville in Octoberhe had no connections and spoke little Spanish. Just 18 years old at the time, King Charles I granted his support to Magellan, who in turn promised the young king that his westward sea voyage would bring immeasurable riches to Spain. On August 10, Magellan bade farewell to his wife and young son, neither of whom he would ever see again, and the Armada De Moluccas set sail. Magellan commanded the lead ship Trinidad and was accompanied by four other ships: the San Antoniothe Conceptionthe Victoria and the Santiago. The fleet reached South America a little more than one month later. There the ships sailed southward, hugging the coast in search The Spice Route: A History the fabled strait that would allow passage through South America. Magellan quickly quelled the uprising, executing one of the captains and leaving another mutinous captain behind. Meanwhile Magellan had sent the Santiago to explore the route ahead, where it was shipwrecked during a terrible storm. With those disastrous events behind them, the fleet left Port San Julian five months later when fierce seasonal storms abated. On October 21, Magellan finally entered the strait that he had been seeking and that came to bear his name. The voyage through the Strait of Magellan was treacherous and cold, and many sailors continued to mistrust their leader and grumble about the dangers of the journey ahead. In the early days of the navigation of the strait, the crew of the San Antonio forced its captain to desert, and the The Spice Route: A History turned and fled across the Atlantic Ocean back to Spain. They were the first known Europeans to see the great ocean, which Magellan named Mar Pacifico, the Pacific Ocean, for its apparent peacefulness, a stark contrast to the dangerous waters of the strait from The Spice Route: A History he had just emerged. In fact, extremely rough waters are not uncommon in the Pacific Ocean, where tsunamis, typhoons and hurricanes have done serious damage to the Pacific Islands and Pacific Rim nations throughout history. Little was known about the geography beyond South America at that time, and Magellan optimistically estimated that the trip across the Pacific would be rapid. In fact, it took three months for the fleet to make its way slowly across the vast Mar Pacifico. Magellan was now closer than ever to reaching the Spice Islands, but when the Cebu asked for his help in fighting their neighbors on the island of Mactan, Magellan agreed. He assumed he would command a swift victory with his superior European weapons, and against the advice of his men, Magellan himself led the attack. The Mactanese fought fiercely, and Magellan fell when he was shot with a poison arrow. Ferdinand Magellan died on April 27, In the end, only the Victoria completed the voyage around the world and arrived back in Seville, Spain, in September with a heavy cargo of spices The Spice Route: A History with only 18 men from the original crew, including Italian scholar and The Spice Route: A History Antonio Pigafetta. The journal Pigafaetta kept on the voyage is a key record of what the The Spice Route: A History encountered on their journey home. Although the trip westward from Europe to the east via the Strait of Magellan had been discovered and mapped, the journey was too long and dangerous to become a practical route to the The Spice Route: A History Islands. He found not The Spice Route: A History a massive ocean, hitherto unknown to Europeans, but he also discovered that the earth was much larger than previously thought. Though Magellan is often credited with the first circumnavigation on the globe, he did so on a technicality: He first made a trip from Europe to the Spice Islands, eastward via the Indian Ocean, and then later made his famous westward voyage that brought him to the Philippines. So he did cover the entire terrain, but it was not a strict point A to point A, round-the-world trip, and it was made in two different directions. His slave, Enrique, however, was born in either Cebu or Mallaca and came to Europe with Magellan by ship. So Enrique was the first person to circumnavigate the world in one direction, from point A to point A. But if you see something that doesn't look right, click here to contact us! Subscribe for fascinating stories connecting the past to the present. Spaniards and Portuguese made up the vast majority of the sailors, but the voyage also included mariners from Greece, Sicily, England, Sir Francis Drake participated in some of the earliest English slaving voyages to Africa and earned a reputation for his privateering, or piracy, against Spanish ships and possessions. The Portuguese explorer Ferdinand Magellan is often credited as being the first person to have circumnavigated the globe, but the reality of his journey is a bit more complicated. Magellan first set sail in September as part of an epic attempt to find a western route to the Amerigo Vespucci was an Italian-born merchant and explorer who took part in early voyages to the New World on behalf of Spain around The Spice Route: A History late 15th century. By that time, the Vikings had established settlements in present-day North America as early as 1, A. A decade later, he was serving as governor of the eastern province of Hispaniola when he decided to explore a nearby island, which became The explorer Christopher Columbus made four trips across the Atlantic Ocean from Spain: in, and He was determined to find a direct water route west from Europe to Asia, but he never did. Instead, he stumbled upon the Americas. Though he did not really John Cabot or Giovanni Caboto, as he was known in Italian was an Italian explorer and navigator who may have developed the idea of sailing westward to reach the riches of Asia while working for a Venetian merchant. Though the exact details of his life and expeditions are the The story of North American exploration spans an entire millennium and involves a wide array of European powers and uniquely American characters. The Portuguese nobleman Vasco da Gama sailed from Lisbon in on a mission to reach India and open a sea route from Europe to the East. The Spice Route: A History sailing down the western coast of Africa and rounding the Cape of Good Hope, his expedition made numerous stops in Africa Live TV. This Day In History. History at Home. Magellan: From Portugal to Spain In the 15th century, spices were at the epicenter of the world economy, much like oil is today. Strait of Magellan The Spice Route: A History August 10, Magellan bade farewell to his wife and young son, neither of whom he would ever see again, and the Armada De Moluccas set sail. Columbus Sails West. Columbus' Quest for Gold. Christopher Columbus' Last Voyage. Sir Francis Drake Sir Francis Drake participated in some of the earliest English slaving voyages to Africa and earned a reputation for his privateering, or piracy, against Spanish ships and possessions. Was Magellan the first person to The Spice Route: A History the globe? Amerigo Vespucci Amerigo Vespucci was an Italian-born merchant and explorer who took part in early voyages to the New World on behalf of Spain around the The Spice Route: A History 15th century. Christopher Columbus The explorer Christopher Columbus made four trips across the Atlantic Ocean from Spain: in, and John Cabot John Cabot or Giovanni Caboto, as he was known in Italian was an Italian explorer and navigator who may have developed the idea The Spice Route: A History sailing westward to reach the riches of Asia while working for a Venetian merchant. Exploration of North America The story of North American exploration spans an entire millennium and involves a wide array of European powers and uniquely American characters.