of Ceuta, Henry encouraged seafarers to travel around the coasts of Africa The Italian Marco Polo in 1271–95 and a few other intrepid adventurers had reached China by land, but with the Ottoman Turks in control of much of the Middle East and Central Asia, the cost of importing spices into Europe was very high and Henry was in the position to encourage many people to embark on great voyages, even if he himself never traveled farther than Morocco dias and columbus In 1434, Portuguese ships reached Cape Bojador in West Africa, and it was another 26 years before they reached modern-day Senegal Some 22 years after that, Portuguese mariners were off the coast of modern-day Angola, and in 1488 the navigator Bartolomeu Dias (c 1450– 1500) passed the Cape of Good Hope and found a route to the Indian Ocean Being on the westernmost part of the European mainland had put the Portuguese in an ideal position to begin the European age of voyages of discovery, but other mariners from other countries had already achieved some enormous feats English ships sailed regularly to Scandinavia and the Baltic There are also references in English court records to a ship returning from “Brazil” in the 1470s This does not necessarily mean the country of that name, but scholars have conjectured, more plausibly, that this might be Newfoundland, where some English sailors probably went in search of fish Arab sailors were also involved in voyages down the east coast of Africa and around the Indian Ocean Many settled in places like Zanzibar, the Maldives, and Sumatra One of the great Arab travelers of the period was Ibn Batuta, who, between 1325 and 1353, traveled around north Africa, into Mali, down the east coast of Africa, throughout the Middle East and Central Asia, into parts of Russia, and around the coasts of India, and modern-day Myanmar (Burma), Malaysia, and Vietnam to China, keeping a detailed record of the voyages When Christopher Columbus (1451–1506), an Italian in the service of Spain, set sail across the Atlantic Ocean in 1492 and returned in the following year, news of his voyage and discovery of the Americas swept across the capitals of Europe like wildfire By this period, most people accepted that the world was a sphere, and some had even worked out, correctly, its size For this reason it was thought that a voyage from Europe to China, India, or Japan would be far too long and it would be impossible to equip a ship for that voyage Columbus believed that the world was smaller, and hence it was possible to reach China or Japan, and this idea gave him enough confidence to lead his men on their first voyage voyages of discovery 399 One of the results of the first voyage of Columbus was that the Treaty of Tordesillas in 1494 was signed between Portugal and Spain by which they divided the world at a line 370 leagues west of the Cape Verde Islands The land to the west went to Spain, and that to the east to Portugal As a result, Portuguese seafarers limited themselves to Africa, to the Indian Ocean, and to establishing of the Portuguese Empire in Africa and Asia It was only later that Brazil was discovered and found to be in the Portuguese sphere Spain, on the other hand, sent ships to the Americas An Italian in the service of Spain, Amerigo Vespucci (1454–1512), sailed to modern-day Brazil in the late 1490s and had the honor of America’s being named after him In 1513, Vasco Núñez de Balboa (c 1475–1519) was the first European to sight the Pacific Ocean and realize that Columbus was wrong in his estimation of the size of the world cortés and pizarro As well as voyages purely of discovery, the Portuguese were able to trade extensively and their ships brought back large quantities of spices, and also slaves The initial Spanish voyages found very little in the way of gold or silver until 1521, when Hernán Cortés (1484–1547) sacked the Aztec capital of Tenochtitlán, and 13 years later Francisco Pizarro (c 1475–1541) plundered and destroyed the Inca Empire This wealth suddenly made Spain the richest country in Europe Many of the early explorers also found much agricultural land, and in August 1535, one of the largest expeditions to leave Spain for the New World during that century sailed from Cádiz Led by Pedro de Mendoza, it had 11 ships, more than 1,000 men, 100 horses, pigs, and cattle The voyages of discovery had led to a desire to colonize the Americas This expedition sailed up the river Plate and then the Río Paraguay in search of the Inca kingdoms In a bend in the river they established the city of Asunción (now the capital of Paraguay) Within 50 years of Columbus’s first voyage, the kings of Spain had carved out an empire nearly 23 times the size of Spain itself The Portuguese had also embarked on more ambitious voyages, and their great navigator Vasco da Gama (c 1469–1525) was able to take a fleet on a two year voyage the 13,000 miles to Calicut in India, from which he was able to take back spices The next of the great explorers was Ferdinand Magellan (c 1480–1521) from Portugal, who sailed in the service of the king of Portugal from 1505 until 1512 and then in the service of the king of Spain from 1519 He sailed down the eastern coast of South America until he found what were later named the Straits of Magellan Sailing through them, he