Explorations

By the middle of the sixteenth century, Spanish expeditions had traveled north from New Spain (present-day Mexico) into the interior of North America, north from the Caribbean, around and across Florida, up the Rio de la Plata in South America to present-day Paraguay, and directly across the Pacific to the Moluccas and the Philippines and back. In the later sixteenth century Spanish and Portuguese explorers pushed up

The Orinoco and Amazon river systems, with the discovery of gold and precious stones in Brazil attracting more adventurers into the South American interior. Meanwhile, the French, Dutch, and English tried to find a northern route to Asia that could allow them to compete with the Portuguese and the Spanish. Some expeditions searched for a Northwest Passage through North America. In the 1520s, Francis I of France sponsored the Italian Giovanni de Verrazzano (c. 1485-c. 1528) on a voyage up the east coast of North America; Verrazzano found rivers and bays, but nothing that led very far inland. Jacques Cartier’s exploration of what he named the St. Lawrence River in the 1530s was a bit more promising, but it would be seventy years before other explorers would venture further up the St. Lawrence and into the Great Lakes area.

Meanwhile, English and Dutch expeditions sought a Northeast Passage up the coast of Norway. An English expedition made it to the Russian city of Archangel in 1553, and in the 1590s a Dutch expedition under Willem Barents (1550-97) discovered the island of Spitsbergen and wintered far to the east, though ice made it impossible for his ships to continue. Russian fur-traders and whalers were also exploring the far north, traveling into the vast areas of Siberia all the way to what is now Alaska in search of fox and sable. Peter the Great sponsored the Danish captain Vitus Bering (1681-1741) on several expeditions in the 1720s and 1730s along the north and east coast of Siberia; he was the first to map this area, and on one of the voyages he discovered the strait between Asia and America that was later named for him, along with the Aleutian Islands and the northwest coast of North America. (In the late nineteenth century, a Finnish and a Russian explorer each successfully sailed the whole length of northern Russia, and during the 1930s to the 1990s the passage saw some commercial navigation, using heavy icebreakers.) The first Russian trading post in Alaska was founded in 1741, and the first permanent colony in 1784.

In the seventeenth century, the English, Dutch, and French pushed further into North America. A series of French explorers, including Samuel de Champlain (c. 1570-1635) and Jean Nicolet (1598-1642), traveled up the St. Lawrence to the Great Lakes, and in the 1670s Jacques Marquette (1637-75) and Louis Joliet (1645-1700), along with others, explored the area from the Great Lakes to the river systems of central North America. French expeditions discovered the mouth of the Mississippi River, and by the early eighteenth century the French had established a string of forts and small settlements from Quebec to the Gulf of Mexico. Dutch-sponsored voyages under the English captain Henry Hudson (c. 1570-c. 1611) and English-sponsored voyages explored various waterways in northern North America searching for a Northwest Passage; several looked promising, but turned out to be land-locked bays or ice-blocked straits. William Baffin (1584-1622), the navigator and pilot on several of these voyages, recorded astronomical, tidal, and magnetic observations that would ultimately prove more useful than many of the voyages themselves, although it would be several centuries before his findings would be confirmed and a European voyage come this far north again.

Map 13 Major European voyages, 1600-1789.

Along with the search for the elusive northern passage to Asia, much exploration was driven by the search for the huge continent that Europeans expected would be in the southern hemisphere to balance all the continents in the northern hemisphere. This “Terra Australis” (a phrase simply meaning “southern land”) showed up on maps throughout the sixteenth century, and in 1606 Europeans got their first glimpse of what was soon named Australia. Dutch expeditions explored and mapped the coasts of Australia, Tasmania, New Zealand, and other islands in the Pacific, at the same time as Dutch merchants and captains were challenging Portuguese trading dominance in the East Indies.

Australia was huge, but still not large enough to be the famed southern lands, and eighteenth-century expeditions continued the search, discovering and mapping much of the Pacific in the process. French and British ships reached Samoa, Tahiti, and other island groups, bringing back plants, animals, and often a few residents, along with reports and drawings of what they had seen. Such information fueled the European desire to classify, systematize, and understand the natural world.

The most important of these Pacific voyages were those under Captain James Cook (1728-79). Cook had been apprenticed as a young man in the merchant navy, volunteered in the British royal navy, and served in the Seven Years War in North America, primarily as a surveyor. His land and coastal surveying brought him to the attention of the Royal Society, which hired him to go to the Pacific to record a transit of Venus across the face of the sun. On this first voyage in 1768-71, Cook sailed south around South America, made the planetary observation, and then explored and mapped both

Islands of New Zealand. He sailed to Australia, landing at several points to collect botanical specimens and looking for suitable places for a settlement; one bay he found was later named Botany Bay, and the first British penal colony in Australia was established there in 1788. Cook made contact with several groups of indigenous people, and communicated well enough to adopt an aboriginal word for the most distinctive animal he had seen, a kangaroo. He confirmed the existence of the Torres Strait separating Australia from New Guinea before continuing around the world back to Britain.