What Was the Age of Exploration?

What Was the Age of Exploration?

Imagine You Woke Up Six Hundred Years Ago

Close your eyes. Imagine you go to sleep tonight in your bedroom, with your bookshelf, your tablet, and your soft pillow, and then you wake up... and it is the year 1400. Not in a movie. Not in a game. For real. What would be different?

You would not be in your bedroom. You would probably be in a small house made of wood and stone, and there would not be a single electric light anywhere. The only light would be coming from a candle, or from the sun if it happened to be morning. There would be no car outside. No airplane overhead. No plastic anywhere. The only sounds would be chickens, maybe a dog, the wind in the trees, and people talking in a language you might not even understand, because you would not be able to choose where you were born. Where you were born is where you would stay, almost certainly, for your whole life.

Here is the part that will feel strange. If you asked the grown-ups in 1400, "What's on the other side of that big ocean over there?" most of them would not be able to give you a clear answer. Some would say, "Nothing but water, forever." Some would say, "Maybe there are lands we don't know about." A few clever sailors might even say, "We think there might be something, but no one we know has ever come back to tell us." Six hundred years ago, the world was full of mystery. Big parts of our planet were blank spots on maps, like empty pages in a book no one had finished writing yet.

Now here is the puzzle this chapter is going to help you solve. If most people six hundred years ago had never seen an ocean, and many had never traveled more than a day's walk from their house, how did we get from there to the connected world we live in today? How did the world go from being made of small, separate, isolated villages to being the busy, tangled, talking planet that you live on right now?

The answer is a 300-year chapter in human history with its own name. Historians call it the Age of Exploration. The word *exploration* is a fancy way of saying "traveling to find out what is out there." This chapter is going to explain what that Age was, when it happened, who the main characters were, and why it mattered so much that if you turned off all the changes it caused, your life today would look completely, totally, utterly different.

Let's start by stepping into a real, ordinary day in 1400 — before the Age of Exploration had really begun — so you can feel what life was like in that smaller world.

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A Day in 1400: The Smaller World

Let's say you are a kid named André, and you live in a small town in Portugal, way out on the western edge of Europe. Portugal is the country that juts out into the Atlantic Ocean like a finger pointing across the water. André is ten years old. The year is 1400. He has never, in his entire life, left the hills and valleys around his town.

His morning begins when the sun comes up. He eats bread, maybe some cheese, maybe an egg if his family is lucky. He might drink wine that has been watered down, because children drank it too — there was no such thing as juice boxes or soda in 1400. Then he goes outside to help his family. Maybe he watches goats. Maybe he carries water from the well. Maybe he learns how to sew, or how to mend a fishing net, or how to tell the difference between safe plants and poisonous ones. He learns these things the way you learn things at school, except his teacher is not a teacher at a school. His teacher is his mom, his dad, his uncle, or his older sister.

By the time André is your age, he knows a lot about his town. He knows every family on his street. He knows which wells have the best water. He knows where the wild strawberries grow in spring. He knows the names of the fields and the rocks and the trails. He probably knows how to recite parts of his family's religion. What he doesn't know — and this is important — is what is happening in the next town over, except for what travelers tell him at the market. He definitely doesn't know what is happening in India. He has never heard of America. He has never tasted a banana, a pineapple, a potato, a tomato, a peanut, or a chocolate bar. None of those things have ever reached his part of the world, because the explorers who would bring them have not sailed yet.

This was the normal way of life for almost everyone, almost everywhere, for most of human history. You were born, you lived, and you usually died within a small patch of land. Your village was, in a very real sense, your whole world. Most people's worlds were smaller than the state you live in today, or the province, or the county. The idea of flying to another country for vacation would have sounded like complete madness.

But — and this is where the story gets interesting — there were some things that did move around. Silk moved from China westward, carried along bumpy roads in heavy bundles. Spices like pepper and cinnamon traveled from places André had never heard of into kitchens of kings far to the east. Stories moved. Religions moved. Diseases moved. So the world was not completely frozen. There were threads connecting different places, but they were thin threads. Most ordinary people did not feel them.

Here is the key idea, and you can write it down or just remember it: before the Age of Exploration, the world was like a giant jigsaw puzzle with most of the pieces hidden, and each person only saw the few pieces around them. A farmer in China saw Chinese pieces. A trader in Venice saw European pieces. A fisher in West Africa saw African pieces. Nobody had put all the pieces together yet, because nobody knew enough pieces existed.

That is the world the Age of Exploration was about to change forever.

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So What Exactly Was the Age of Exploration?

The Age of Exploration was a roughly 300-year stretch of history — historians usually mark it from about the year 1400 to about the year 1700 — when people from a few countries along the Atlantic Ocean (and also from places far to the east, like China) began sailing across enormous bodies of water to find new lands, new trade routes, new riches, new creatures, new plants, new people, and new ideas.

You can think of it like this. Imagine that for thousands and thousands of years, humans had been playing a game of telephone with the whole planet, but everyone had to whisper through walls and the walls were really thick, and most of the message got lost. Then suddenly, in 1400, some people figured out how to climb up on top of the walls. They built ships big enough to cross oceans. They sailed around the walls. They shouted over them. Other people on the other side shouted back. The whole planet started hearing from parts of itself it had never heard from before. That is the Age of Exploration in one sentence.

But let's slow down and break it apart, because there is a lot packed inside those 300 years.

The Age of Exploration was not one event. It was a chain of events that fed into each other. One trip made another trip possible. One discovery led to another discovery. Kind of like knocking over the first domino in a long, long line.

Here are the five biggest pieces of the story, and we are going to come back to each one many times in this book.

Piece one: Better ships. The first piece is that, in the 1400s, shipbuilders in places like Portugal started designing new kinds of sailing ships that could travel farther than ever before. The old ships hugged the coast and were afraid of big storms. The new ships, called caravels and later carracks, were tougher, smarter, and could use wind from the side, which meant they could sail where there was not a tailwind pushing them straight. This was a huge deal. It is a bit like the jump from a slow old bicycle to a motorbike. Suddenly, you could go places that used to feel impossible.

Piece two: Better maps. The second piece is that maps got better. Not perfect,