Genoese sailors of the generations preceding the exploits of Raleigh and his contemporaries had laid out the two main passages to a "new world" in their voyages of exploration.
Cristòffa Cómbo
The first to do so was Cristòffa Cómbo, the Ligurian name of Genoese mariner who is called Christopher Columbus in the Anglophone world (an Anglicisation of the Latin Christophorus Columbus). In Italian he is known as Cristoforo Colombo and in Spanish Cristóbal Colón. It was this Genoese adventurer and mariner who charted islands and coasts of what was to become known as the Spanish main.
He was born before 31 October 1451 in the territory of the Republic of Genoa, though the exact location remains disputed. His father was Domenico Colombo, a middle-class wool weaver who worked both in Genoa and Savona and who also owned a cheese stand at which young Christopher worked as a helper. In one of his writings, he says he went to sea at the age of 10. In 1470, the Columbus family moved to Savona, where Domenico took over a tavern. In the same year, Christopher was on a Genoese ship hired in the service of René of Anjou to support his attempt to conquer the Kingdom of Naples.
In 1473, Columbus began his apprenticeship as business agent for the important Centurione, Di Negro and Spinola families of Genoa. Later, he allegedly made a trip to Chios, an Aegean island then ruled by Genoa. In May 1476, he took part in an armed convoy sent by Genoa to carry valuable cargo to northern Europe. He docked in Bristol, England and Galway, Ireland. In 1477, he was possibly in Iceland. In the autumn of 1477, he sailed on a Portuguese ship from Galway to Lisbon, where he found his brother Bartolomeo, and they continued trading for the Centurione family. Columbus based himself in Lisbon from 1477 to 1485.
Ambitious in his enterprises, Columbus learned Latin, Portuguese, and Castilian. He read widely about astronomy, geography, and history, including the works of Claudius Ptolemy; Cardinal Pierre d'Ailly's Imago Mundi, a work of cosmography that influenced Christopher Columbus in his estimates of the size of world land-mass; The Travels of Marco Polo; The Travels of Sir John Mandeville; and Pliny's Natural History.
According to historian Edmund Morgan:
Columbus was not a scholarly man. Yet he studied these books, made hundreds of marginal notations in them and came out with ideas about the world that were characteristically simple and strong and sometimes wrong.
Columbus's copy of The Travels of Marco Polo, with his handwritten notes in Latin written on the margins
After years of lobbying, the Catholic Monarchs of Spain agreed to sponsor a journey west, in the name of the Crown of Castile. Columbus left Spain in August 1492 with three ships, and after a stopover in the Canary Islands made landfall in the Americas on 12 October (now celebrated as Columbus Day). His landing place was an island in the Bahamas, known by its native inhabitants as Guanahani; its exact location is uncertain. Columbus subsequently visited Cuba and Hispaniola, establishing a colony in what is now Haiti—the first European settlement in the Americas since the Norse colonies almost 500 years earlier. He arrived back in Spain in early 1493, bringing a number of captive natives with him. Word of his discoveries soon spread throughout Europe.
Columbus would make three further voyages to the New World, exploring the Lesser Antilles in 1493, Trinidad and the northern coast of South America in 1498, and the eastern coast of Central America in 1502. Many of the names he gave to geographical features—particularly islands—are still in use. He continued to seek a passage to the East Indies, and the extent to which he was aware that the Americas were a wholly separate landmass is uncertain; he gave the name indios ("Indians") to the indigenous peoples he encountered. Columbus's strained relationship with the Spanish crown and its appointed colonial administrators in America led to his arrest and removal from Hispaniola in 1500, and later to protracted litigation over the benefits that he and his heirs claimed were owed to them by the crown.
Columbus's expeditions inaugurated a period of exploration, conquest, and colonization that lasted for centuries, helping create the modern Western world. The transfers between the Old World and New World that followed his first voyage are known as the Columbian exchange, and the period of human habitation in the Americas prior to his arrival is known as the Pre-Columbian era. Columbus's legacy continues to be debated. He was widely venerated in the centuries after his death, but public perceptions have changed as recent scholars have given attention to negative aspects of his life, such as his role in the extinction of the Taíno people, his promotion of slavery, and allegations of tyranny towards Spanish colonists. Many landmarks and institutions in the Western Hemisphere bear his name, including the country of Colombia.
Giovanni Caboto
Another navigator and explorer associated with Genoa and the English Tudor monarchy was John Cabot, or to use his Italian name, Giovanni Caboto; c. 1450 – c. 1500. His 1497 discovery of the coast of North America under the commission of Henry VII of England is the earliest known European exploration of coastal North America since the Norse visits to Vinland in the eleventh century.
Leaving Bristol, John Cabot's 1497 expedition sailed past Ireland and across the Atlantic, making landfall somewhere on the coast of North America on 24 June 1497. The exact location of the landfall has long been disputed, with different communities vying for the honor. Historians have proposed Cape Bonavista and St. John's, Newfoundland; Cape Breton Island, Nova Scotia; as well as Labrador and Maine as possibilities. Since the discovery of the "John Day letter" in the 1950s, it seems most likely that the initial landfall was either on Newfoundland or Cape Breton Island. This is because Day's letter implies that the coastline explored in 1497 lay between the latitudes of Bordeaux, France and Dursey Head in southern Ireland. The initial landfall seems to have taken place close to the southern latitude, with the expedition returning home after reaching the northern one.
In 1508–09 Sebastian Cabot, son of the aforementioned John Cabot, led one of the first expeditions to find a North-West passage through North America. He is generally credited with gaining "the high latitudes," where he told of encountering fields of icebergs and reported an open passage of water, but was forced to turn back. Some later descriptions suggest that he may have reached as far as the entrance of Hudson Bay. According to Peter Martyr's 1516 account Sebastian then sailed south along the east coast of North America, passing the rich fisheries off the coast of Newfoundland, going on until he was 'almost in the latitude of Gibraltar' and 'almost the longitude of Cuba'. This would imply that he reached as far as Chesapeake Bay. Returning home 'he found the King dead, and his son cared little for such an enterprise'. This suggests Sebastian arrived back in England shortly after the death of Henry VII (April 1509) and the accession of Henry VIII, who did indeed show much less interest in the exploration of the New World than his father.
