How loud was that cry of “Done to Death!”?
"I felt a great disturbance in the board as if millions of voices suddenly cried out in terror and were suddenly silenced."
This scale, roughly.
Columbus first voyage never returns to Europe. What happens in Europe next?
It wouldn't be the first navigator to just lost himself on sea. Past the round of "told you so", Castille-Aragon resumes its African and Mediterranean policy.
Don't forget it was one of the main meditteranean power at this time, rather than atlantic; and that Ottoman Navy while powerful wasn't comparable to what it became in the XVIth.
You could see them being more focused on North Africa, maybe doing what Portuguese aimed to do, controlling the coast and points of African trade (gold, silver, salt,).
I don't think Italian Wars would be butterflied by this PoD, and Spanish kingdoms would have still to deal with that. While Spain and Habsburgs managed to finance a good part of it thanks to European (Castille, Netherlands) ressources rather than American gold itself, it's going to turn even more in a war of attrition they would have an harder time winning if Spain doesn't get its hands on America before the 40's.
Spain had financed part of Chris’ voyage, but that seems now to have been a waste of money.
Giving they had quite on them, and the quite limited loss (three ships aren't exactly bleeding to death) it's written on red ink. And that's about it.
What's going to be more of a drain is the rivality with Portugal on more classical roads around Africa AND still imposing itself on Meditteranean basin.
Cabral still bumps into Brazil, so I expect that the Portuguese explorations would continue to a great extent s in OTL.
I don't see why they wouldn't. Their goal was Indias. SPICE,
GOLD.
NAKED AND EXOTIC WOMEN...err...you got the point.
The merchants of Bristol England had sent several expeditions out searching for
Hy-Brazil beginning around 1480. It was an Island somewhere off the coast of Ireland and had been shown on maps in the early 1400s. Would John Cabot still have been sent on his voyages by those merchants?
Imaginary islands were quite a carthographic trend, but reflected as well reality than, say Tropic line doesn't represent an actual line running along the globe.
Most important problem with Bristol expeditions is that they may have been the result of the confusion between Hy Brazil (an old myth) and Brasilwood that was a common name for several essences of precious wood. Basically, another search for Indias but based on an even more weird stuff than Colombus'.
I suspect that, would they find searching randomly, they would not pay much attention to it; critically when the land discovered would be less interesting themselves (agriculturally speaking, for huge-profit production as sugar; that was something that boosted Spanish interest very much).
Discoveries could happen, but I'm not sure they would be seen as as relevant than Colombus' IOTL.
João Vaz Corte-Real supposedly discovered
Terra Nova do Bacalhau in 1470, possibly Newfoundland, although this claim does not appear in writing until the 1570s. Might Cabot and others have heard of this “discovery”?
It's possible, but I don't think they would have seen the connexion there, in the same way he could very well have heard of Atlantic fishermen going to cod fishing (not only Basques as people often say, but as well Galicians, Asturians, Gascons, etc.)
Early discoverers were a bit monomaniacs : if something didn't fit what they wanted to find, they often disregarded it.
