This Is How Columbus' Discovery Changed EVERYTHING ｜ How We Mapped The World ｜ Our History

Around 1650, the marble floor of the chamber of the town hall in Amsterdam, Holland, was inlaid with the two hemispheres of the earth. It was a glorious celebration of a world now shaped, exploited, and with the discovery of what came to be called America, largely possessed by the nations of Europe. Columbus Day in New York. Today the celebration is a take of a granted, but 500 years ago when he first arrived, Christopher Columbus had no idea what he'd found. Columbus sailed from Spain in 1492, determined to find a direct route by the west to the riches of China and the Spice Islands. When he sighted land, he thought he'd simply hit on some undiscovered islands off the coast of Asia. With the arrogance of the European, Columbus took possession of the unidentified land. In the name of their majesties, Ferdinand and Isabella, king and queen of Castile, Lear, and Aragon, I now take possession of this land and name it San Salvador. But it would be another 15 years before the new world was finally christened. Thousands of miles from Columbus's discovery lies the small Bavarian town of Wolfegg. At its heart, an imposing castle, one of the ancestral homes of the princes of Waldburg and Wolfegg. Inside, the halls aligned with statues of the family's ancestors. A reminder of their heritage, and a reminder too that 500 years ago, southern Germany was an intellectual center analyzing the latest discoveries. The present head of the family, Prince Max Willibald Waldburg Wolfegg, has a unique claim to historical fame. He is the proud possessor of the only original copy of a document which changed the world. This world map was engraved in 1507 by Martin Waldseemuller, a professor at the small town of Sandia in Lorraine. As the explorers who followed Columbus began to clarify the outlines of the new world, Waldseemuller was the man who named it America. The name came from the Florentine explorer Amerigo Vespucci, who falsely claimed to have discovered the mainland before Columbus. A contemporary illustration showed Vespucci meeting America, depicted as an Indian maiden, a potent symbol of an innocent land there to be seized and possessed. For nearly 30 years after Columbus's discovery, European explorers were only interested in finding a sea passage through the new continent to China and the Spice Islands. There, one man revolutionized Europe's attitude to this new world. His name was Hernan Cortes. In 1519, Cortes landed on the coast of Mexico. With him were just 550 men, armed with their dreams of land and luxury, silver and gold. In the coming months, Cortes would obliterate one world and impose his own. What happened with Cortes was that you have a first major overland expedition that was purposely done to explore the interior. Now, it was not done with royal approval. It wasn't done with the approval of the governor that had jurisdiction, which was the governor of Cuba. It was done completely on his own, pretty much by his own pistols, as we would say today. Cortes turned inland. The first city he came to was called Zamboala, on the fringes of the great Aztec empire. He visited the city of Zamboala, and he found that it was of immense size. It had an irrigation system. It was very green, like a garden, as they said. The walls shone white, almost like silver, as one of the chroniclers indicated. If this was a subject town, how great was the great capital of the Aztecs? We should remember that the European cities that these soldiers had seen were really quite small. Madrid was perhaps 5,000. Seville was 30,000 at best. They arrive at Zamboala, the estimates range from 80,000 to 200,000 people. They couldn't believe it. If the place was full of surprises, so too were the people. This was the city of the Totonacs, a subject race of the Aztecs who were keen to join forces with Cortes against their oppressor. The Totonacs and their dazzling rituals, like the dance of the voladores, or flyers, were an incomprehensible novelty to the Spanish interlopers. The flying dance of the Totonac voladores was no mere spectacle. It was a model of the world and the universe. As they daringly fly from the 100-foot high pole, the voladores would describe the Mexican worldview before the Europeans came to change it. The flyers represent the four cardinal points of the compass, north, east, south, and west, into which all beings are grouped. The symbolism goes further. Each direction is identified with Together with the central axis, the pole, and the dance, they are the link by which the sacred energies of the gods can descend to the earth. One of these was Quetzalcoatl, the god whom the Aztecs prophesied would return to rule over them, and whom their emperor Moctezuma believed Cortes to be. Escorted by Totonac guides, Cortes continued his march towards Tenochtitlan, the city of the Aztecs. The route was very sinuous and stretched for nearly 450 miles through the mountains over very impressive ranges, some of them with snow-capped mountains at the top and volcanoes. And so they followed the routes, the trade routes. The Americas was crisscrossed by pathways prior to Cortes and prior to Columbus. There were great numbers of trade routes that had been established in antiquity and people were aware of these and could follow them. In Tenochtitlan, today's Mexico City, Moctezuma waited in dread for Cortes. Tenochtitlan was the epicenter of Aztec civilization. Their maps showed how the Aztecs began a journey from their legendary home in Aztlan. Their priests said that when the sun, represented by an eagle, alighted upon a tiny cactus whose prickly pears were like human hearts, there they should rest and found the city. So it was. In 1325, Tenochtitlan was founded. At its center, the great temple. On their journey, the Spanish confronted a grisly Aztec ritual. For the Aztecs, human sacrifice was the vital nutrition which enabled the sun to rise again every morning. Today in Mexico, the Day of the Dead has become a Catholic celebration. But its roots lie in the two whole months devoted by the Aztecs every year to honoring the dead and performing the vital sacrifices of their prisoners. It took an awesome toll. On their way to Tenochtitlan, the Spanish counted over 100,000 skulls in one town alone. Gloom and pessimism dominated the Aztec universe. In the end, they believed, their leader, the sun, would be defeated and die amidst fearful earthquakes. Mankind would be destroyed. Life was only temporary. The earth itself was a partner of death. It was the burial place of humans and the hiding place of the stars. The earth was sometimes pictured as a monster, part shark and part alligator. Sometimes it was a fantastic frog whose mouth had great tusks and whose feet and hands were armed with claws. Infused with this desperate view of the world around him, Moctezuma waited in Tenochtitlan for Cortes. In 1519, the Spaniards arrived. They were taken to the top of the temple to view the extraordinary panorama. The sight of the great towers and temples arising from the water made some of the soldiers wonder whether it was all a dream. The Spanish painted this map of Tenochtitlan, but the city was too great. It would have to be destroyed. There is an incredible time period of eight months in duration from the moment Cortes arrived in Tenochtitlan, or Mexico City, and at that point he met Moctezuma right here where we are today in the Hospital de Jesus, and then from there they marched into the center of the city. During those eight months, lots of things happened, but the Spaniards and the Aztecs coexist. Moctezuma was taken prisoner by the Aztecs, but he ruled the Aztec empire from his imprisonment. Most tantalizing for Cortes were the Aztec tribute rolls. These economic maps of their empire showed the goods, animal skins, wheat, and above all, gold paid by the subject provinces. The Aztecs were increasingly certain the Spaniards were after the empire, but there were eight months in which people lived in this great city on the water, side by side, with different world views, looking at the markets, the temples, the rituals, the tribute coming in. The Aztecs ultimately decided they could not live with the Spaniards. The Trade was replaced by military conquest. Cortes laid bloody siege to Tenochtitlan. By August 1521, the battle was over and Cortes had won. In the following decades, the Spanish moved into California and Florida, and down into South America. The Maya and Inca civilizations were savagely destroyed. Before the Spanish came, 80 million people lived in America. By the middle of the 16th century, only 10 million were left. In Mexico alone, a population of 25 million was reduced to just one million. Such devastation brought riches to the king back in Spain. In 1563, Philip II began work on the great monastery of El Escorial outside Madrid. It was a retreat for this fanatically religious king, but it was also the belly of his empire, the place where Philip hoarded everything that was most precious to him. At its center was the king's private library, where his trusted monks guarded the royal collection. The first batch of 4,000 volumes was delivered in 1575 and then supplemented with gifts from the king's subjects. The books came in every shape and size. They spanned music, science, medicine, astronomy. In his massive collections, Philip possessed over 7,000 religious relics and vast numbers of musical instruments, watches, trinkets, jewels, coins, and medals. But above all, he desired information about the world around him. On the ceiling of the Escorial were painted figures of the ancient geographers and astronomers taking measurements from the sun and stars. Philip's interest in geography was practical as well as historical. In 1566, he commissioned a detailed survey of Spain by the mathematician Pedro de Esquivel. But Philip kept his map secret, anxious to keep such a detailed illustration of country away from prying foreign eyes. But such close personal control over his new world empire was more difficult. For in the middle of the 16th century, there was an overwhelming frustration for the ruler of the greatest empire the world had ever known. The sea journey across the Atlantic to America was fraught with danger, and Philip was always a sickly man. He could never visit his empire. The only way to see it was through maps and illustrations. So Philip commissioned the first centrally organized survey of his empire in Mexico. Questionnaires were sent out to officials in each province to provide details of the land and people. Often using Indian artists, the survey provided a wealth of information ranging from traditional pictographs to more familiar maps. By a cruel irony, the conquered peoples helped to create a picture of the new Christianized world. Philip's geographic curiosity, combined no doubt with his position as Europe's most powerful man, brought him a mark of honor. The most up-to-date world atlas designed by a Belgian called Abraham Ortelius was dedicated to him. Ortelius' atlas was printed in Antwerp in the house of a leading publisher, Christopher Plantin. Navigation, how to get around the vastly expanded horizons of the brave new world, was a craze of the day. Plantin published a host of intricately made treatises. Abraham Ortelius came to Plantin with an innovation. Maps were now best sellers in Europe as people clamored to see the new discoveries, but they were usually printed on individual sheets of differing and inconvenient sizes, loosely bound together. Ortelius simply suggested that the world should be seen in a single bound volume with every page the same size, comprising maps of the whole world and individual countries. This was the result, the first modern atlas. Ortelius went to sell his new theater of the world at the Frankfurt Book Fair. In the 16th century, as today, the book fair at Frankfurt in Germany was the publishing business's biggest jamboree, a place to buy, sell, make contacts, twist arms, and steal a march on the competition. Ortelius' atlas became an instant bestseller and brought him a flood of praise from his contemporaries. One even described him as the everlasting ornament of his country, his race, and the universe. In 16th century Europe, maps became the vogue. The pope had two galleries in the Vatican decorated with them. The grandest showed the states of Italy. There was a purpose behind this. The pope was trying to exert his authority over the Italian princes. The gallery was intended to show his domination of their territory. In the pope's private quarters, the whole world was strikingly displayed. While Mexico and South America were relatively well explored, North America still remained a mystery. In 1534, the French king, François I, decided he wanted his share of the new world. From the port of San Malo, the French explorer Jacques Cartier set out on his first transatlantic voyage. The main purpose was still to find a direct route to Asia, this time by a hoped-for northwest passage. But though Cartier found the mouth of the St. Lawrence River, there was no way through. Cartier made the first contact with the North American Indians, whose knowledge the French would later use to establish their fur trade in these remote lands. Cartier's voyages brought a new name, Canada, onto the expanding world map. Fifty years later, the first permanent European settlements in North America would begin to wipe the native Indians off the face of that map. The eyes of all things look up and put their trust in thee, O Lord. Thou givest them their meat in due season. Thou openest thine hand and fillest with thy blessing every living thing. Good Lord, bless us and these thy good gifts. The Middle Temple Inn of Court in London. Here, 400 years ago, a group of ambitious young men inspired by Sir Francis Drake's voyage around the world plotted to grab their share of America. Men like Sir Martin Frobisher, Sir John Popper, and above all, Sir Walter Raleigh. The Middle Temple was a fun university, near London's theatres and the centre of court life, an ideal atmosphere in which to plan an adventure. An English base in America held many attractions, above all as a foothold from which to launch raids on the treasure-carrying ships of England's greatest enemy, Spain. In 1585, the first group of English settlers sent by Sir Walter Raleigh arrived at the hostile and treacherous outer banks of North Carolina. But once inside the reef, the tempest calmed. The settlers had found their new home, Roanoke Island. The previous year, the area had been reconnoitred by one of Raleigh's henchmen, Arthur Barlow, who had returned with a glowing description of an apparently ideal spot. Tall cedar trees, grapes, deer, rabbits, hair and fowl existed in incredible abundance, he wrote. One member of the expedition was John White. His illustrations were Roanoke's most enduring legacy. His maps, drawn in his own hand, were highly accurate records of the coastal area. Walter Raleigh's coat of arms was prominently painted, the mark of possession. John White also drew the local Indians. His drawings are still the basis on which Indian life is recreated today. Most of the native Indians who greeted the first settlers have long since disappeared. One drawing was of a turtle. Little did White know, but it would not have occurred to a European, that this was an important symbol for Indians. In an Indian creation story, the world was once only water. Then a being tumbled down from heaven and was escorted on a turtle's back to the bottom of the ocean. A clump of mud was placed by sea animals on the turtle's back. The being danced in Indian style on the mud and it turned into a vast island. This became the island on which the Indians lived, born on the back of the turtle. The Indians simply called this island ours. That part of this island on which the first English tried to settle rejected them. It turned out to be stagnant, marshy, and diseased. The settlers begged for ships to take them home. The ships never arrived and the colony simply disappeared. Nobody has ever found out what happened to its 100 men, women, and children. But John White's maps were the evidence of British claims on this so-called virgin land, a land to which they'd return. Is that better? It was at this time back at home that the first attempt to map England precisely got underway. With these early theodolites, surveyors were recording the patchwork of the land. The most famous mapmaker was Christopher Saxton. His atlas had been commissioned by Queen Elizabeth herself and had her portrait on the front. It contained beautiful and accurate illustrations of the counties and towns of England. Local officials were ordered to escort Saxton to the prominent lookout points. Queen Elizabeth's first minister, Lord Burley, kept his own copy with annotations pointing to the weaknesses of the realm, like landing points for invaders. In 1607, James I ordered a survey of Crown property. Tenant farmers could suddenly find that the new accuracy deprived them of land. But such deprivations were nothing compared with those to be inflicted upon the Indians of North America. The United States is a nation of straight lines. The streets of its cities make uniform grids. They are the result of a long process whereby the early Europeans imposed their idea of urban order on the incomprehensible and alien forests of the Indians. The Virginia Council on Indians and the state thought it only fitting that we recognize the chiefs of the tribes who have contributed so much to the Commonwealth of Virginia. At this time, I would like to introduce to you... There are not many Indians left in Virginia these days. I'm not sure that we have all of them here. I will call all of their names. Chief Bill Miles of the Pamunkey. They're not much more than a bit of color and curiosity value to the sons and daughters of the settlers who came to take their land. In December 1606, three ships sailed from London in the second English attempt to establish a colony in North America. They arrived at the James River in Virginia and established a settlement which they called Jamestown after the king. As I have been told from the history of the old Indians that's gone passed on, they met the settlers and greeted them, took them ashore and fed them, and helped them to build their forts to live and survive through the winter. All Europeans regarded North America as a virgin land, there for the taking of whoever could mix their labor with it. And you can count on one hand the number of Europeans who felt that the Indians had some kind of sovereign right to their own property. As the Indians greeted the settlers, they had no idea that their island was about to be overwhelmed by Europeans with a possessive view of the land. Indian tribes lived communally. They shared the land among each member of the tribe. The Indians looked at the land to preserve. They tried to preserve everything that was on the land and everything in the line of nature the Indians preserved. They never would take any more gam than what they could use at that time. If there were turkeys, a flock of turkeys, they would kill one turkey what they need and let the rest go. They never kill over, you know, and destroy. They never destroyed nature. Well the English regarded land as, first of all, the source of status. Secondly, as a commodity to be bought, sold, traded, used. It's part of the capitalist worldview of all things being commodities, including people. You buy people, slaves, indentured servants. Land is no different. And the Indian view is almost diametrically opposite. Land is a living thing. It has living things on it. It, like all other living things, is not sacred, but to be respected. Life at Jamestown was grim for the early settlers. Some who arrived were craftsmen and farmers, accustomed to dirtying their hands. But many were gentlemen and ladies of leisure, whose idea of settlement consisted of lazing about while new wealth accumulated magically around them. But this was no El Dorado. The colony was kept going by one man, John Smith. Smith was a mercenary and adventurer. During the journey across the Atlantic, he'd been placed under arrest by the gentlemen on board for alleged mutiny. But now, during the harsh Virginia winter, his forceful leadership kept the colony going. John Smith began to map the local country, taking a small boat through its complex network of tributaries and rivers. With their technology of compass and map, the Europeans would seek to give order to the confusion of the forest. On one occasion, the wonders of the compass even saved Smith's life. He had been captured by Indians and taken to their king. Smith showed them his round ivory compass dial. The Indians were so impressed with the workings of the compass that Smith was taken away and feasted. In 1612, Smith produced his map of Virginia. On one level, it was a remarkable achievement. He did an excellent job. Him and Captain Argyle did an excellent job in making that map because they had to sail every one of the tributaries of the river here in Virginia to make that map and draw it by hand. Today, if you want a map of Virginia, you can go up here in an airplane and take a big camera and take the whole state of Virginia in one day, and it all will be accurate. But Smith's map was more than a technical feat. It was the symbol of dispossession. Once, the Algonquin Indians owned all of the eastern woodlands of the United States. Now in Virginia, they have just a few hundred acres. Smith used the Indians' knowledge to make his map, but now those Indians would be obliterated from the maps they had helped to create. The earliest maps have a certain number of Indian features on them, village sites, and especially place names. And gradually, almost as soon as the English step ashore and make their own claims to the land by planting a cross, by cutting a piece of sod and putting a twig with it, by writing a piece of parchment that says it's theirs, or by getting some royal decree from an absentee king who says it's now his, the names change. They become English names, and the earliest maps gradually substitute themselves for Indian names. It was as if the Indians simply did not exist. Not surprisingly, something had to give. The Jamestown colony had been sustained by the discovery of tobacco. By 1619, English acquisitiveness had gone so far that the Indians tried to massacre the settlers. They were not ruthless enough. A third survived. Reinforcements arrived, and the Indians were pushed on their long journey across the American continent. In 1616, John Smith made a map of New England. Seven years later, back in London, the scramble for land in North America was on. To divide it up between speculators, Smith's map was simply cut into 20 pieces so that the territory could be auctioned off. Born by the wealth of tobacco, the English began to lay out their straight lines over America. The new Virginians moved their capital from Jamestown inland to Williamsburg. The forests were tamed, a new order imposed on the wild landscape of America. The settlers built themselves grand new plantation houses, just like the great estates back home in England. An Englishman's home is his castle, went the old saying. The once shared land of the Indian tribes was displaced by the precise boundaries of the European. In 1683, the famous grid plan for the city of Philadelphia was designed. It was the model for all future development of America. The only thing that changes is that in the late 18th, early 19th century, the industrial revolution suggests to these people that land, which is already regarded as a commodity, should be subdivided into uniform, mutually interchangeable units. And the famous grid system of the Midwest, where everything is very either square or rectilinear, is born and nothing changes thereafter. As the 16th century ended, another European nation joined the world land grab, Holland. In 1593, two Dutch brothers, Cornelius and Frederick de Hootman, visited Lisbon. There, they acquired by bribery the latest Portuguese charts. They brought them back to their patron, Petrus Plantius, Holland's greatest expert in navigation. Plantius relayed the Portuguese secrets to a new breed of Dutch sailor, eager to profit from the trade routes to the east, which had been unlocked by the Portuguese. It was enough to launch a new commercial empire. The Dutch East India Company was founded. The first voyage to the east was made in 1597. The Dutch expelled the Portuguese from many of their most prized possessions and became the new masters of the spice trade. Amsterdam flourished. Fortunes were made. This was the golden age. As they spread over the world, the Dutch became the supreme map makers. The art of Dutch painters like Vermeer was interlaced with geography. The most dramatic expression came in Amsterdam's town hall. Its roof recalled the Greek universe. Inside, ancient science overlooked the splendors of the new world revealed by the nations of Europe. The two hemispheres of the earth were carved on the hall's gleaming marble floor. Europeans could quite literally stand over every corner of the world. The main message you might say is Amsterdam is the center of the world and that's why the figure that symbolizes Amsterdam, who's sitting right there, overlooks this big room, overlooks the whole world. Actually in the 17th century it was an open space. It's called the Burgers Hall. Everybody could come in here and walk around and a lot of people did. People made poems about this hall. Tourists who came here from all over Europe came into this hall and they actually spread the word that with the maps here, with this room, Amsterdam was in the center of the world. But in this eruption of knowledge, one thing still fooled everyone. It was called longitude. In the early 1600s, Dutch sailors on their way to the East Indies had discovered Australia by crashing into it. Since ancient times, sailors and travelers had, with a succession of instruments like the cross staff, been able to measure their north-south position or latitude from the sun and the stars. But this method was no good for calculating their east-west position or longitude. The result was frequent shipwrecks as everyone kept crashing into coastlines. In 1707 came the greatest disaster of all. An English fleet led by Sir Cloudsley Shovel crashed into the Scilly Isles off the coast of Cornwall. Over 2,000 men were lost. The Shovel disaster was absolutely immense. In fact, the Parliament were in outcry. There was a commission appointed and Sir Isaac Newton, the great scientist, actually had to report to a parliamentary select committee. And he said, what we have to do is to start up a board of longitude, which will actually look into how to find longitude at sea. And to make sure that somebody does it, we're going to have a prize of 20,000 pounds of the guy or the lady who actually goes and does it. Now, 20,000 pounds in the early 18th century, that's worth a million pounds today. So it was a great incentive for people to start going and trying to see how they could actually make navigation safe. Longitude attracted every crackpot inventor of the age. In Hogarth's drawing of a madhouse, a lunatic is hard at work in search of a solution. But the true key to longitude is time. As you travel around the world from east to west, or west to east, the time changes. You set your watch forwards or backwards. This difference in hours, minutes, and seconds could be translated into a distance, but only if you could compare local time with the time at one fixed point. Observatories like the Royal Observatory at Greenwich in London were set up all over Europe to help crack the problem. The first idea was to use the regular movements of the moon and planets as a permanent clock in the sky. But though telescopes were fine on land, they were useless on the rolling seas. The only answer was an accurate clock, which would still work when you took it to sea. But until just 200 years ago, such clocks simply did not exist. The guy who cracked the problem, though, he must have been obsessed, actually. He was a Yorkshire carpenter by the name of John Harrison. And with his brother, he started building very, very accurate clocks that sailors could take to sea with them. So you'd take British time, as it were, to sea, and then compare it with the time where you were around the world. And then, hey presto, measuring the difference between them gave you how far you'd gone around the world. Harrison's fourth attempt, this elegant, accurate, robust clock, solved the problem. But Harrison still had to struggle long and hard to win the £20,000 prize. Rival astronomers contested the accuracy of his clock. Although it proved its worth in trials. Eventually, the king himself interceded, and Harrison, in his 80th year, was finally paid the money. It afforded him a rich, if short, retirement. He died three years later, at the age of 83. The real proof of the pudding came, though, with Captain James Cook, who took a replica of H4 on his cruises down to the South Pacific, in fact, about the time that John Harrison died. And, for the first time, he was able to map the coasts of Australia and New Zealand with incredible accuracy, because he was getting such amazing longitudes. And there are some beautiful charts of Captain Cook's voyages all around the South Pacific. Cook's voyages and his charts of Australia and New Zealand provided the final clues to the shape of the world's continents. Now, European powers, seeking to spread their empires across the world, would turn to the great, unmapped interiors.