This text comes from our book, All Ye Lands.
The modern history of Latin America began with Christopher Columbus’s discovery of the American continents in 1492. In Chapter 9, we saw how, after much trying, Columbus was able to convince King Fernando and Queen Isabel of Spain to pay for an expedition to reach the Indies by sailing west over the Atlantic Ocean. Columbus’s mission was to find gold and wealth for himself and Spain’s “Catholic Monarchs” (as Fernando and Isabel were called.) Yet he had greater aim—to carry the Catholic Faith to the heathen overseas.
On August 3, 1492, in three small ships, the Niña, Pinta, and Santa Maria, Columbus and his crew set out on their quest across the Atlantic. It was a long and difficult voyage. As the weeks and months passed, the crews feared that they would run out of water and food. They worried, too, that there would be no wind to blow them back to Spain. By October 10, the crews had had enough. They could see no land. They wanted to return to Spain. Columbus tried to calm his men. He agreed that, if they saw no land after two or three days, the fleet would return home. But, finally, at 2:00 a.m. on October 12, the crew heard the cry of “Land! Land!” They had reached land at last.
Columbus had landed on a small island, but it was just the beginning of his discoveries. In this, his first expedition and in others that he later made, Columbus discovered Hispaniola, Cuba, and the Virgin Islands. On his last expedition, he discovered the northern coast of South America. But to the day of his death, on May 10, 1506, Columbus thought he had reached the Indies instead of a “New World.”
Not just Spain, but all of Europe took great interest in Columbus’s discoveries. Portugal, which had been the first to reach the Indies by sea, was worried Spain would take some of its colonies in India and the Orient. To keep Spain and Portugal from quarrelling over the new lands, Pope Alexander VI in 1493 set a dividing line in the Atlantic. The pope decreed that Spain could claim all lands in the Indies that fell west of this line, while Portugal could claim all the lands that fell east of the line. Because of the pope’s decision, most of Latin America came under the power of Spain. Only Brazil, which jutted out east of the line, went to Portugal. This is why, even to this day, the people of Brazil speak Portuguese, while most of the rest of Latin America speaks Spanish.
Even during Columbus’s lifetime, other adventurers set out to discover new lands in the “Indies.” One of these was an Italian named Amerigo Vespucci, who explored the northern coast of South America. Because of a book that told of Vespucci’s adventures, people in Europe began to call the newly discovered lands America after him. (Americus is the Latin form of the name Amerigo.)
In 1513, a Spanish captain, Vasco Nuñez de Balboa, plunged into the interior of Darien (Panama) with 170 men. On September 24, 1513, standing on a mountaintop, Balboa sighted a new ocean. He called it the South Sea; later, it would be called the Pacific. It was Balboa’s discovery of the Pacific that showed that what Columbus had discovered and explored was not Asia or the Indies, but an entirely new world.
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