Reconquista was the military reconquest of the Iberian Peninsula by Christian kings from the Arabs in . Nao means a heavy ship in Spanish. It is derived from Arabic, and this is explained by the fact of Arab occupation of the region till . C ONFRONTATION OF C ULTURES T HEMES IN W ORLD H ISTORY people, proclaimed himself viceroy.
He enlisted their cooperation in pressing forward to the larger islands of Cubanascan (Cuba, which he thought was Japan!) and Kiskeya (renamed Hispaniola, today divided between two countries, Haiti and the Dominican Republic). Gold was not immediately available, but the explorers had heard that it could be found in Hispaniola, in the mountain streams in the interior. But before they could get very far, the expedition was overtaken by accidents and had to face the hostility of the fierce Carib tribes. The men clamoured to get back home.
The return voyage proved more difficult as the ships were worm-eaten and the crew tired and homesick. The entire voyage took weeks. Three more voyages followed, in the course of which Columbus completed his explorations in the Bahamas and the Greater Antilles, the South American mainland and its coast. Subsequent voyages revealed that it was not the ‘Indies’ that the Spaniards had found, but a new continent.
Columbus’s achievement had been to discover the boundaries of what seemed like infinite seas and to demonstrate that five weeks’ sailing with the trade wind took one to the other side of the globe. Since places are often given the names of individuals, it is curious that Columbus is commemorated only in a small district in the USA and in a country in north-western South America (Columbia), though he did not reach either of these areas. The two continents were named after Amerigo Vespucci, a geographer from Florence who realised how large they might be, and described them as the ‘New World’. The name ‘America’ was first used by a German publisher in .
‘Vice-roy’ means in place of the king (in this case the King of Spain). Europeans meet native Americans –