Christopher Columbus sailed from Cadiz in 1492

Humans have navigated the seas since antiquity. The Ancient Egyptians and Phoenicians navigated the Mediterranean Sea and the Red Sea, while the Egyptian Hannu sailed along the Red Sea, reaching the Arabian Peninsula and the African Coast around 2750 BC.[61] In the 1st millennium BC, Phoenicians and Greeks established colonies throughout the Mediterranean and the Black Sea.[62] The seas along the eastern and southern Asian coast were used by the Arabs, Chinese and Pacific islanders for navigation.[63] The Polynesians were experts at navigation, passing their knowledge on verbally from generation to generation. In their timber boats lashed together with braided fibres, they travelled thousands of miles between tiny islands using the stars, the direction of swells and other signs to find their way.[64]

In the early Mediaeval period, the Vikings in their longships navigated the North Atlantic from Scandinavia as far north and west as Iceland, Greenland, and Newfoundland, and as far south as the Mediterranean. It is possible they reached the Indian Ocean, rounding the Cape of Good Hope, but they made little contact with the Arab navigators.[65]

Columbus discovers America

The Eurocentric view: on 12 October 1492, the Italian Christopher Columbus discovers The Americas for the king of Spain.
Starting in the late fifteenth century, Western European mariners made voyages of exploration in search of trade. Bartolomeu Dias rounded the Cape of Good Hope in 1487. Vasco de Gama reached India via the Cape in 1498. Christopher Columbus sailed from Cadiz in 1492, attempting to reach the eastern lands (of India or Japan) by going westwards around the world, making landfall instead on an island in the Caribbean Sea. The Venetian navigator John Cabot reached Newfoundland in 1497, again hoping to reach the profitable East. The Italian Amerigo Vespucci reached South America in voyages between 1497 and 1502, sailing south to the mouth of the River Amazon; the Americas were named after him.[65]

The Portuguese navigator Ferdinand Magellan led the first expedition to sail around the world. He started in 1519, reaching the Straits of Magellan in 1520 having lost two of his five ships, and crossing the Pacific, nearly starving, reaching Guam in March 1521. Magellan was killed soon afterwards; only one of his ships, under Sebastian del Cano, returned safely to Seville in September 1522

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