Christopher Colombus and Cortez

Around the time of the late fifteen hundreds and sixteen hundreds, there were certain individuals that would change the lives of almost everyone around the world. This all started with the want to go to India and make a trade route. This was after Marco Polo and his discovery of China and the countries near it. It was originally easy for the European countries and then the rising of the Ottoman empire. This made importing goods a problem, because they were fined heavy taxes because the ottomans owned the land that they had to cross in order to get the goods and get them to their destination. The Europeans always thought that the world was flat, so the Spanish figured that if the world was flat, that if they kept sailing West, that they would reach India in no time. By the 1840's, they they had plans to try to get to India. Columbus used this idea to take three ships and thousands of men to sail their and come back to what ever country allowed the funding. The king of Portugal decided that it was to costly, and The Kings of england was too late. The Spanish had already hired Columbus to do this. On August 3, 1492, he departed on his way to sail into something no one had been on, in the history of European history. He sailed and sailed, but he had measured the distance to far, this had caused the sailors to go mad. A storm kicked in and destroyed two ships and hundreds of men. Mutiny, which means when the crew of a ship go against the orders of a captain, and usually result in the captain being thrown off the ship, was about to happen, land was spotted. This day was October 12, 1492. When he arrived, he saw the natives, this is why they called them Indians, because they believed that they were actually in India, but they were in the present day Bahamas. However, as they explored the land on his fourth voyage, they discovered Central and South America. This was when conquistadors was introduced. They were pretty much like generals, they controlled big armies and were used to conquer distant lands. Hernando Cortez was assigned to conquer the Aztecs, who were superstitious people who believed that sacrifice was necessary for the gods to favor them. The conquered these lands with no problem because of the fact that he had guns, meanwhile the natives used rocks and spears to fight. The natives had never seen, Horses, guns and these Spanish people, who they thought were originally gods. After conquering and wiping out the natives, with extreme labor and diseases such as small pox . They took the gold and other materials that they could, such as gold, silver and jade. In review, Christopher Columbus sailed to the Bahamas and The conquistadors used their superior soldiers and guns to kill the natives to take the gold and other useful items. They would hold these lands for a long time and they would be the first of their era to reach South America.