Age of Exploration: Early Phases

Early Phases

Age of Exploration

9:31 min

Gunpowder weapons used in the 16th century included:

• Musket: A muzzle-loaded long gun that was initially a heavier version of the arquebus and could penetrate plate armor. Muskets were used by infantry men and were slow to load. The matchlock design was used for muskets throughout the 16th century, but was replaced by the flintlock musket in the 1690s.
• Arquebus: A weapon that was introduced around 1521, but fell out of favor by the mid-16th century.
• Bombard or lombard: An early efficient wrought-iron cannon.
• Basilisk: An early “long” cannon that could fire cast-iron projectiles.
• Folangji: A Portuguese breech-loading swivel gun that was known in South China as early as 1510.
• Fa Gong: A bronze muzzle-loading cannon that could weigh from 630 to 3,000 kilograms.
• Wheellock: A firing mechanism that was inspired by German clockworks. The wheellock required a trained specialist to make and was more expensive than the matchlock.

Other gunpowder weapons used in the 16th century included fire arrows, fire bombs, and thunderclap bombs.

16th Century Gunpoweder Weapons

Spread of Disease

Christopher Columbus lands at San Salvador in the Bahamas, 1492

Along with the people, plants and animals of the Old World came their diseases. The pigs aboard Columbus’ ships in 1493 immediately spread swine flu, which sickened Columbus and other Europeans and proved deadly to the native Taino population on Hispaniola, who had no prior exposure to the virus. In a retrospective account written in 1542, Spanish historian Bartolomé de las Casas reported that “There was so much disease, death and misery, that innumerable fathers, mothers and children died … Of the multitudes on this island [Hispaniola] in the year 1494, by 1506 it was thought there were but one third of them left.” Smallpox arrived on Hispaniola by 1519 and soon spread to mainland Central America and beyond. Along with measles, influenza, chickenpox, bubonic plague, typhus, scarlet fever, pneumonia and malaria, smallpox spelled disaster for Native Americans, who lacked immunity to such diseases. Although the exact impact of Old World diseases on the Indigenous populations of the Americas is impossible to know, historians have estimated that between 80 and 95 percent of them were decimated within the first 100-150 years after 1492.The impact of disease on Native Americans, combined with the cultivation of lucrative cash crops such as sugarcane, tobacco and cotton in the Americas for export, would have another devastating consequence. To meet the demand for labor, European settlers would turn to the slave trade, which resulted in the forced migration of some 12.5 million Africans between the 16th and 19th centuries.When it came to disease, the exchange was rather lopsided—but at least one deadly disease appears to have made the trip from the Americas to Europe. The first known outbreak of venereal syphilis occurred in 1495, among the troops led by France’s King Charles VIII in an invasion of Naples; it soon spread across Europe. More recently a genetic link has been found between syphilis and a trpical disease known as yaws, found in Gyana. Today, the disease is treated with penicillin.

of Native Americans were killed within 100-150 years of Columbus's first voyage.

80-95%

Pre-Columbian Americas

Link to pre-Columbian Americas