Prologue: An Age of Discovery
The initial voyage of Christopher Columbus (Cristoforo Colombo) from Palos de la Frontera in August 1492 would change the world forever. The idea of a navigable overseas trade route to the East Indies dated back to 1453 when the land route, also known as the Silk Road, prohibited Christian traders under the Ottoman Empire following the fall of Constantinople. In the 1480s, he had developed a plan by sailing directly across the Atlantic Ocean, which was the only ocean believed to exist then, with no landmasses in between other than the mythical island of Antillia. Of course, for various reasons, it was difficult for his plan to gain support. It was only in early 1492 when his plan was picked up by a monarchy, who was Queen Isabella of Spain. By then, Portugal had found an eastern route and was no longer interested in dealing with Christopher. In April 1492, in the "Capitulations of Santa Fe" between Columbus and Isabella, the former was promised the title of, "Admiral of the Ocean Sea" and the appointment of the titles of viceroy and governor of any successfully claimed colonies for the Spanish Crown. For his westward voyage in his quest to find a shorter route to the Indies, Columbus and his crew took three medium-sized ships: The Niña, the Pinta, and the Santa Maria. The ships departed into the Atlantic Ocean from Spain on August 3, 1492.
On October 12, Columbus and his crew had finally sighted land, which was a small island that he had named San Salvador. The indigenous Lucayan peoples had called it Guanahani. Columbus called them, along with the nearby Taínos and Arawaks, Indios (which was the Spanish term for "Indians” as he had believed he was in Asia), and believed they would be easy to convert to Christianity. He took note of their gold earrings and took some Arawaks prisoner so they could guide him to the source of gold. Later that month, he explored the northeastern coast of Cuba. By the end of the year, he had researched the northwest coast of Hispaniola, where the Santa Maria ran aground and was abandoned. There, he left 39 men behind, including his interpreter Luis de Torres, and founded the settlement of La Navidad. In January 1493, he completed his journey along the northeast coast of Hispaniola where he encountered the Ciguayos and found the inlet where he met them, the Bay of Arrows. As he returned to Europe, most people initially accepted that he had reached the East Indies. On May 4, 1493, the Pope decreed that the non-European world would be divided between Spain and Portugal along a north to south meridian 100 leagues west of either the Azores and Cape Verde Islands, granting Spain everything that was discovered by Columbus. The 1494 Treaty of Tordesillas moved the line an additional 270 leagues west. Columbus would take three more voyages into the West Indies before his death in 1506.
It was not until Amerigo Vespucci came along that the new landmass was disputed not to be part of Asia. In 1501, King Manuel I of Portugal commissioned an expedition to investigate a landmass far in the western Atlantic Ocean (which would eventually be renamed Brazil). Vespucci claimed much of the landmass that laid east of the line created by the Treaty of Tordesillas. In August 1501, he described the region as something that could only, “properly be called a New World,” and that it was not an island but rather a continent by itself. The Age of Exploration was now underway. In 1513, Spanish explorer Vasco Núñez de Balboa crossed the Panamanian Isthmus and reached the Pacific Ocean. Exploration of both the Eastern and Western hemispheres was bridged in 1522 when Ferdinand Magellan completed the first circumnavigation of the world, passing through the Straits of Magellan near the tip of South America and what was later named the Philippine Archipelago off the Pacific Coast of China. Of course, Spain and Portugal were not the only European countries involved in discovering new lands. The expedition of John Cabot of England to the North in 1497 came right on the heels of Columbus and his southward expeditions. The Dutch soon followed suit with their own explorations and discoveries. But this tale focuses on yet another player in this game: France.
One of the first major expeditions under the French flag was by Italian explorer Giovanni da Verrazzano, who was motivated by indignation over the division of the world between Spain and Portugal. In 1524, he explored the Atlantic Coast of North America from Florida to Newfoundland. From 1534 to 1536, French explorer Jacques Cartier traveled into the Gulf of Saint Lawrence and then into the St. Lawrence River. He named the land, “The Country of Canadas,” and claimed it for France. Europeans outside the Iberian Peninsula recognized neither the Treaty of Tordesillas nor Pope Alexander VI's donation to Spanish finds in the New World. Two of these new competitors were Protestant, England and the Netherlands, which did not recognize the Pope anyway and the other was France despite itself being Catholic. It did, though, have a significant Protestant minority in the form of Huguenots, who were French Calvinists and adopted the Huguenot name in 1560. Concentrated in western and southern France, they were initially tolerated. When the Edict of St. Germaine was issued in 1562, which granted them religious freedom with limitations, France had two million Huguenots within its borders. On March 1, the ultra-Catholic Francis, Duke of Guise, massacred dozens (if not hundreds of Huguenots) and injured up to 200 in the town of Vassy, beginning the French Wars of Religion. Desperate for escape, some Huguenots sought refuge across the Atlantic Ocean.
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