Voyages of Exploration by Europeans The people of South America and the Caribbean got to know of the existence of European people when the latter began to sail across the Atlantic Sea. The magnetic compass, which helped identify the cardinal points accurately, had been known since , but only in the fifteenth century did people use it when they ventured on voyages into unknown areas. By this time many improvements had been made in European sailing ships. Larger ships were built, that could carry a huge quantity of cargo as well as equipment to defend themselves if attacked by enemy ships.
The circulation of travel literature and books on cosmography and geography created widespread interest right through the fifteenth century. The hilltop town of Machu Picchu. It escaped the notice of the Spaniards and was therefore not destroyed. C ONFRONTATION OF C ULTURES ACTIVITY Examine a detailed physical map of South America.
To what extent do you think geography influenced the developments of the Inca empire? T HEMES IN W ORLD H ISTORY In , Ptolemy’s Geography (written , years earlier) became available in print (see Theme ) and thus came to be widely read. According to Ptolemy, an Egyptian, the regions of the world were arranged in terms of latitudes and longitudes. Reading these texts gave Europeans some knowledge of the world, which they understood to have three continents, namely, Europe, Asia and Africa.
Ptolemy had suggested that the world was spherical, but he underestimated the width of the oceans. Europeans had no idea of the distance they would have to travel in the Atlantic before they reached land. Since they imagined it would be a short voyage, there were many who were ready to venture forth recklessly beyond the known seas. People from the Iberian peninsula – the Portuguese and the Spanish – were the pioneers in the fifteenth-century voyages of exploration.
For a long time these were called ‘voyages of discovery’. Later historians, however, argued that these were not the first voyages that people of the “Old World” made to lands unknown to them. Arabs,