Exploring Portugal's Impact on World History

Portugal's Exploration and the Search for New Trade Routes

• Portugal was the first European nation to acquire an overseas empire through exploration.
• Prince Henry the Navigator played a significant role in Portuguese expansion and made contact with Africa for trade in ivory, gold, and slaves.
• Henry sponsored many explorers and trained them in mapmaking, ship design, and navigation.
• The Portuguese were looking for a faster sea route to Asia by sailing around Africa.
• Bartolomeu Dias became the first European to sail around the Cape of Good Hope at the southern tip of Africa in 1488.
• Vasco da Gama sailed south from Portugal, rounded the Cape of Good Hope, and reached India in 1497, establishing a vast trading empire.
• The Portuguese seized key ports in the Indian Ocean, and da Gama confirmed Portugal's status as a world power.
• Exploration was connected to trade, and the Portuguese hoped to convert Africans to Christianity while looking for new trade routes.
• Christopher Columbus sailed west in search of a sea route to the Fast Indies, but he underestimated the distance and encountered North and South America.
• Dutch merchants reached Asia and were successful in the East Indies spice trade, establishing trading colonies in Suriname, South Africa, and Indonesia.
• Pedro Alvares Cabral is credited as the discoverer of modern-day Brazil, and Amerigo Vespucci concluded that the lands Columbus called "the Indies" were part of a "New World."
• A German mapmaker named the newly encountered lands "America," a Latin version of Vespucci's first name.