Juan Sebastián Elcano

Exploring America (Story Time with Mr. Beat)

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• published: 27 Jul 2015
• views: 8418

Here is the story of the first American explorers, from Leif Eriksson to Christopher Columbus to Samuel de Champlain. If you like these Story Time videos, please subscribe to my podcast! http://iammrbeat.podomatic.com. Music by Electric Needle Room. http://www.electricneedleroom.com. All images in the public domain. Once upon a time, for thousands of years, the human beings on two continents, Europe and North America, just ignored each other. Then, in the late 980s, a group known as the Norsemen, more famously known as Vikings, left Iceland, heading west. Led by Erik the Red, who had been banished from Iceland for murder, they eventually came across the island of Greenland, and settled there. Later, Erik had a son named Leif Eriksson (get it, Erik SON), who grew up to head even further west, leading a ship to what is today known as Labrador, the Baffin Islands, and Newfoundland. Thus, Eriksson became the first known European to explore North America. Almost 500 years later, Christopher Columbus became the next European to explore the Americas. In 1492 Columbus sailed the ocean blue. Sorry about that. Anyway, after ten weeks at sea, Columbus reached what is now known as the Bahamas. He named the place they landed San Salvador. Thinking he had reached Asia, he kept going until he reached modern-day Cuba, which he assumed was China. When Columbus returned to Spain the next year, he had products with him totally unknown to Europe like coconuts, tobacco, and potatoes. He also had stories of darker-skinned native peoples he encountered whom he called “Indians” because he had thought he was sailing in the Indian Ocean. Columbus later made three more trips to America between 1494 and 1502, exploring modern day Puerto Rico, the Virgin Islands, Jamaica, and Trinidad. After all this, he still was convinced he was exploring Asia. Others weren’t so convinced. Spain and Portugal sent many other ships to explore this “New World” in those early years, and on one of the ships sent by Portugal was a dude named Amerigo Vespucci, an Italian who was not convinced they were exploring Asia. After his trip viewing modern-day Brazil, he was sure this land was part of a new continent. Vespucci spread the word about the new continent, convincing people he was right and Columbus was wrong. In 1507, the German cartographer Martin Waldseemuller made a world map in which he named the new continent America after the Latin feminine version of Vespucci’s first name, which is Americus. Meanwhile, it became clear there were two Americas, meaning a North America and a South America, after Spanish explorers went exploring like crazy up north. In 1513, Juan Ponce de Leon went searching for the Fountain of Youth and ended up finding and naming Florida. By the way, he never found a Fountain of Youth. That same year, Vasco Nunez de Balboa made it through the Isthmus of Panama to be the first European to reach the eastern coast of the Pacific Ocean. In 1519, the Portuguese explorer Ferdinand Magellan and his crew sailed around the bottom tip of South America, across the Pacific to the Philippines, where Magellan was killed in the Battle of Mactan. But his crew kept on going afterwards, with Juan Sebastian Elcano now leading, sailing around the southern tip of Africa and returning to Europe in 1522, becoming the first expedition to circumnavigate the entire planet. In the 1500s, Spain became the richest country in the world because of its explorers who were also conquistadors. The same year Magellan’s crew sailed out from Spain, Hernando Cortes and his army conquered the Aztec Empire of modern day Mexico. By 1521, Cortes had taken control of all of the Aztecs gold and silver mines. In 1531, Francisco Pizarro and his expedition took out the Inca Empire of Peru, gaining access to the Inca silver mines of Potosi. So yeah, Spain had so much precious metals they didn’t know what to do with it all, and even caused prices to skyrocket in Western Europe because of it. However, they killed a bunch of people to get it.