history question....spanish explorers...?

Question

What Spanish exploration success prompted the King of Portugal to fund the search for India?

i've been searching for this a while and my brain is fried...x_x

Answer 1

I would say that it was the discovery of America in 1492, since Portugal's first contact with India wasn't until 1498, and a permanent settlement wasn't established until 1510.

Answer 2

That question is wrong, and here's why:

- Portugal discovered the sea route to India in 1488, 3 years before Columbu's voyage (although the first "official" major expedition was only sent to India in 1498).

So no "spanish exploration" prompted anything, the portuguese were exploring the Atlantic and the african coast since 1415, almost 80 YEARS before the spanish...

Portuguese explorations and the portuguese empire was far more important than anything the spanish ever did, but I understand that spanish history is given an exagerated importance in the US...

Take a look at this, in 1543, when the portuguese were the first europeans to reach Japan, Portugal's Empire was this:

- the entire African coast, west and east.

- Brazil, that is, 2/3 of whole South-America.

- Madagascar, Seychelles, Mauritius and all the islands in the Indian Ocean.

- Ormuz and pretty much all the area surrounding the Persian Gulf.

- All of India (400 years before the english ever reached it).

- Malaysia, Indonesia and all the area surrounding it.

- Several ports in China.

Not to mention the fact that, for example, in 1448 Joao Fernandes Lavrador, one of the many portuguese explorers sailing the north-atlantic, sighted the coast of what was to become Labrador. Later on he was actually the first european after the vikings to land on it, chart it and map it in 1498, and tha'ts why it was baptized Labrador, after him.

Back in 1474, another portuguese explorer, Joao Vaz Corte-Real was possibly the first european to reach and land on Newfoundland, and his two sons in 1500 were the first europeans to land, explore, map and chart the whole canadian coast down to the actual american coast.

- Several ports and cities in Japan (Kobe, Tanegashima), including Nagasaki that was founded by portuguese. To this day there are 250 words in japanese that come originally from the portuguese language, including arigato that derives from the portuguese word for "thank you", obrigado.

So while Portugal dominated and had the exclusive of the richest trade on earth, the european trade with India and China, the spanish had the americas (except Brazil), and they didn't made ANY money from the americas until the 1540's with the gold from the Incas.

As an historian I am a little tired and baffled as why there are so many mistakes in the teaching of the history of this period of Discoveries in the USA, the american students are getting the impression that it was the spanish who did it all when in fact they did so little and what they did was following the steps of the portuguese explorations. Not to mention the english, french and dutch that followed what the portuguese did almost 100 years after they opened all sea routes.