European Exploration in the Americas

In 1584, the English writer Richard Hakluyt handed Queen Elizabeth I a private memorandum, A Discourse Concerning Western Planting, that laid out more than twenty reasons England should plant colonies across the Atlantic. The first was spreading the Protestant gospel. Others promised new markets for English wool, work for the unemployed, a naval base to raid Spanish treasure fleets, and a route to China. Hakluyt did not think these motives competed; to him they were one project. Historians sort the causes of European exploration into three groups (wealth, competition between states, and Christianity), but the real skill is seeing how they reinforced one another and how their weight differed from one nation to the next.

Wealth: the search for new sources of riches

Europeans first sailed into the Atlantic for trade, not land. Spices, silk and other Asian goods sold for many times their cost by the time they reached Lisbon or Seville, after passing through Arab, Ottoman and Venetian hands (Topic 1.1 covers that trade). A sea route that bypassed the middlemen promised fortunes to whoever controlled it.

Portugal pursued the eastern route around Africa, trading for gold, ivory and enslaved people along the way, and reached India with Vasco da Gama in 1498. Christopher Columbus, a Genoese navigator, proposed reaching Asia by sailing west. He underestimated the size of the earth by thousands of miles, and Portugal's experts turned him down. Ferdinand and Isabella of Spain agreed in 1492, and the contract they signed promised Columbus the title "Admiral of the Ocean Sea," the governorship of any lands he found, and a tenth of the profits. Those terms show what was expected from the voyage: trade income, and a share for the man who found it.

When the Caribbean islands yielded little gold and no spices, the search for wealth turned into conquest. Hernán Cortés's defeat of the Mexica (1521) and Francisco Pizarro's capture of the Inca emperor Atahualpa (1532), whose subjects filled a room with gold and silver as ransom before the Spanish killed him, proved that the Americas held more treasure than anyone had imagined. That success drove later expeditions. Hernando de Soto (1539 to 1542) marched through the Southeast and Francisco Vásquez de Coronado (1540 to 1542) through the Southwest and onto the Plains, both looking for another Mexico or Peru. Coronado was chasing rumors of golden cities, the Seven Cities of Cíbola and then Quivira; he found Zuni pueblos and Wichita grass-house villages instead, and returned in debt.

Wealth meant different things to different nations. For Spain it soon meant silver mines and Native labor. For France, after Jacques Cartier's voyages up the St. Lawrence (1534 to 1542) found no passage to Asia and no gold, it came to mean fish and beaver furs bought from Native traders. For England it meant, at first, plundering Spain: Francis Drake's raid around the world (1577 to 1580) brought home Spanish treasure worth more than the Crown's annual income.

Competition between nations

Exploration was also a race. Each kingdom feared that a rival would gain the trade, the gold or the land first, and the profits of empire would pay for armies and fleets that could be turned on neighbors in Europe.

Portugal and Spain. The two Iberian kingdoms competed from the start. When Columbus returned in 1493, Spain obtained papal decrees granting it the lands he had found, and the Treaty of Tordesillas (1494) split the world outside Europe along a line west of the Cape Verde Islands: lands to the west for Spain, to the east for Portugal. The line put the bulge of South America on Portugal's side, which is why Brazil, claimed by Pedro Álvares Cabral in 1500, speaks Portuguese.

The excluded powers. France, England and later the Netherlands rejected a division that left them nothing. Francis I of France reportedly asked to see the clause in Adam's will that gave the world to Spain and Portugal. England's first claim came early, from John Cabot's 1497 voyage to Newfoundland for Henry VII, but for most of the 1500s the challengers had more ambition than resources. They sent explorers in search of a Northwest Passage to Asia through North America, licensed privateers (private captains authorized to attack enemy ships) to seize Spanish treasure, and tried small colonies that failed: Fort Caroline, built in Florida by French Protestants (Huguenots) and destroyed by Spain in 1565, and England's Roanoke colony (1585 to 1590), which vanished.

Rivalry with Spain explains why the English case for colonies was so often military. Hakluyt argued that a base in North America would let England attack the Spanish fishing fleet off Newfoundland and the treasure ships from the Caribbean, and that Spain's American silver paid for armies that threatened England. Spain's attempt to invade England with its Armada in 1588 showed the threat was real, and its defeat gave English promoters confidence that colonies were possible.

Spreading Christianity

Religion was not a cover story. Most explorers and their sponsors sincerely believed that converting non-Christians was a duty and that God rewarded those who did it, and they also used religion to claim a right to land.

For Spain, religious motives came straight out of the Reconquista, the centuries of war against Muslim kingdoms in Iberia that ended at Granada in January 1492 (Topic 1.1). The papal decrees of 1493 granted Spain its new lands on the condition that it convert their people, which gave conquest a religious license. Spanish conquistadors read a formal demand called the requerimiento (1513) to Native peoples, ordering them to accept the authority of the pope and the Spanish monarchs or face war; it was read in Spanish, often to people who could not understand it. Franciscan, Dominican and Jesuit missionaries followed or accompanied the conquerors.

After the Protestant Reformation began in 1517, religion also sharpened competition. Catholic Spain saw its empire as a defense of the true faith; Protestant English writers such as Hakluyt argued that England had a duty to plant the reformed religion in America before Spain spread Catholicism everywhere, and they publicized Spanish cruelty to Native peoples to make the point. Catholic France sent missionaries to New France, though most of that work came after 1607.

How historians weigh the causes

The usual shorthand is "God, gold, and glory." It is a useful memory aid but a weak argument, because it treats the three as separate and equal. Historians have weighted them differently. Writers in the 1800s, such as William H. Prescott in his histories of the conquests of Mexico (1843) and Peru (1847), told the story as one of daring individuals seeking fame and fortune. Many twentieth-century historians emphasized economic forces: merchants' capital, the rising Atlantic economy, and the profits of sugar and silver. Others, such as historians of the Spanish missions, stress the sincerity of religious motives. A strong essay does not choose one and dismiss the rest; it argues which cause mattered most for a particular nation or moment and explains how the others supported it.

It also helps to separate motives (why Europeans wanted to explore) from means (what made exploration possible). New ships, navigation tools and ways of financing voyages explain how Europeans could cross the Atlantic, not why they wanted to. Topic 1.4 covers those means.

Worked examples

Where students lose points

On the exam

Questions on this topic can set a document written by an explorer, a monarch or a promoter like Hakluyt and ask which motive it shows or what development explains it. The strongest short answers and essays explain how motives overlapped and how they varied by nation, using specific evidence. On a long essay about causes, a thesis that ranks causes ("Competition with Spain mattered more than religion for England because...") sets up a line of reasoning better than one that lists them.