The Super Summary of World History - Alan Dale Daniel [62]
Now that the world was suddenly round someone needed to circumnavigate it. Magellan, a Portuguese turned Spaniard, accomplished the feat by setting out from Spain in 1519 and returning in 1522. Well, he didn’t sail around the world, his crew did. He gets the credit for making the entire trip since he was in charge when the five ship fleet set out. The voyage made by Magellan and his crews was terribly hard. Out of 237 men only 18 managed to circle the globe; many died, some turned back. Magellan’s real test came at Cape Horn at the tip of South America. As they sailed south along the eastern edge of South America toward the Cape, the rigging froze; and no food was available along the shores they passed. It was a barren and windswept land, offering them nothing they needed for continuing the voyage. Still, on he pressed. The nearer the small fleet got to the Antarctic the worse the storms became. He sailed through the Straits of Magellan (not the Straits of Magellan then of course) that were racked with violent storms, and somehow made it to the Pacific Ocean, which he so named because of the lack of storms encountered. Of course, after the straits and its storms almost anything would look passive. Then they started across the Pacific and found it to be almost endless. Magellan claimed everything he discovered for Spain. After surviving all the previous troubles, Magellan died in the Philippines fighting the natives. Before he made the passage around South America, part of his fleet turned back to Spain and told the Spanish authorities Magellan’s fleet had perished. They were still in Spain when the sole surviving ship from Magellan’s fleet sailed in and put the lie to their story. Those who turned back were executed for mutiny. So, only one ship returned to Spain, but it was enough to claim the Philippines and most of South America (Portugal got Brazil) for the sponsors of the voyage—Spain.
Spanish thugs . . . oops . . . troops under various vicious . . . oops . . . bold leaders conquered Mexico (the Aztecs)[66] and Peru (the Incas). The Conquistadors, the name for the Spanish troops—meaning conqueror—were brave and brazen beyond all imagination. Tiny groups of men fought enormous armies of natives and won. These men were courageous, and how they managed to conquer these native kingdoms is a story in itself, but the result of these conquests was the decimation and subjugation of the American natives.
Native Empires in the Americas
Figure 21 Aztec Capitol of Tenochtitlan
The native empires of the Aztecs and the Incas were large and powerful entities with absolute rulers, majestic cities, astounding temples of worship that resembled the pyramids of Mesopotamia, significant wealth, an understanding of astronomy, written language, large trading areas, and blood sacrifice to their gods. In other words, these were major civilizations. These noteworthy societies were preceded by other important Meso-American civilizations with all the fundamental attributes of cities found in the Fertile Crescent of the Middle East. These organized empires believed in gods, sacrificed to those gods, and had armies that conquered and oppressed other tribes in their areas. Cities grew up that were large, well organized, well administered, and were fed by farmers using complex irrigation systems to assist them in growing their crops, consisting of maize (corn) and potatoes. Sound familiar? It should, because these civilizations were very much like those in the Middle East, although they grew up in isolation from other empires. We know these civilizations grew up in isolation because upon contact with Europeans they died by the hundreds of thousands from diseases carried by the white invaders. Small pox was so deadly that it alone took millions of lives. If there had been contact between the regions these diseases could not have extracted such a deadly toll because the natives would have experienced them already