Motives.

During the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries European exploration was motivated primarily by economic necessity. The growing demand for the exotic and expensive luxury goods brought overland from Asia and increasing European dependence on Muslim and Venetian middlemen in this spice trade compelled western and northern merchants and monarchs to begin searching for alternate routes to the riches of the East. The Portuguese, strategically located on the Atlantic coast and drawing on a long history of maritime endeavors, were first to begin the quest for an ocean passage to the Orient. They sailed down the west coast of Africa and eventually monopolized the eastern waterway to Asia. Portugal's success left its European neighbors with little choice but to look to the west for a water route to the Indies. Following in the wake of Christopher Columbus, sixteenth-century explorers came to North...