On August 3, 1492, Columbus, a Portuguese who had moved to Spain, led nearly 100 sailors from Puerto Barros in three ships, arrived at the island of Gomera in the Canary Islands in early September, and then sailed west and then southwest into the vast Atlantic Ocean.
After 34 days and nights of arduous sailing, it finally reached the island of Samana in the southeast of the Bahamas in the early morning of October 12, and Columbus immediately occupied it in the name of the King of Spain and named it "San Salvador".
He believed that the place he visited was India (in fact, the New World of the Americas), so he called the local inhabitants "Indians". Columbus and his party then continued south, reaching Cuba on the 28th.
Mistaking Cuba for a barren part of China, the fleet turned to the east in search of Japan, which was located in the east of China. On 7 December, they arrived in Haiti and saw that its mountains and rivers were as beautiful as Spain's, so they named it "Little Spain".
On Christmas Day, the ship Santa Maria ran aground on the north coast of Haiti, and Columbus used the hull to build the first colonial stronghold, named "Christmas City", leaving 39 people stationed.
On March 15, 1493, Columbus returned to Baros Harbor and was greeted with great solemnity. Columbus's voyage opened up new routes from Western Europe to the Americas, ending the isolation of the Americas.
Six months after returning from the voyage, Columbus organized a second larger-scale voyage to the west. On September 25, 1493, Columbus led a team of missionaries, officials, and nobles who wanted to make a fortune overseas, armed with guns and ammunition, and in 17 ships, left the port of Cadiz and soon arrived in the Lesser Antilles of Dominica, Guadeloupe, and Puerto Rico in the Virgin Islands, where they carried out large-scale colonial plunder.
On November 27, the convoy reached Haiti, and Columbus discovered that the original colonial stronghold had been razed to the indians, so he led the Spanish colonists to start collecting poll taxes on the Indians, and even took the Indians into slavery or massacred them. In May 1498 and 1502 Columbus made the third and fourth voyages to the west.
As Columbus opened up a new route to the Americas, the Spaniards began to conquer and plunder the Caribbean islands. At the end of 1492, Columbus established the first colonial stronghold in northern Haiti.
In 1496, Columbus's brother Bartholomew built the city of Santo Domingo on the south coast of Haiti as the capital of the Caribbean islands, conquering Jamaica, Puerto Rico, Cuba and the entire Caribbean island, and establishing the Indian Affairs Department in Seville.
When Da Gama opened a new route to India, it brought amazing profits to Portugal. Although Columbus opened up a new route to the Americas, he did not reach the rich East, nor did he immediately bring considerable wealth to Spain.
The Spanish authorities hoped that a new route to the East would also be found, and that the hero of Fernando Magellan would have a place to play.
After the Portuguese king rejected his plan to find the strait to the "Great South Sea (i.e., the Pacific)", the Portuguese knight Magellan moved to Spain in October 1517, and after less than half a year in Spain, King Charles I received him and signed an ocean expedition agreement with him.
On September 20, 1519, Magellan set sail from San Luca, the outer port of Seville, with nearly 300 men in 5 ships. In March 1521, Magellan's fleet sailed to Masawa Island (Masohua Island) in the Philippine Archipelago.
Magellan returned from the East to the West 8 years ago, and now he has circled from the West to the East. On 27 April, Magellan led dozens of colonists to attack The Island of Mactan, east of Cebu, forcing the islanders to pay tribute to Chenna, but were killed by fighters led by local leader Rapp Rapp.
Soon, Spanish colonists conquered the region with bloody means and named it after Prince Philip, which is today's Philippines.
On 6 September 1522, the convoy returned to the port of San Luca, where they had departed. Magellan's fleet took three years to complete the first circumnavigation of the globe in human history, irrefutably justifying the theory of the circle of the earth, and making a significant contribution to the expansion of people's geographical knowledge and the development of science.
After taking on new shipping routes, the Spaniards began to plunder everywhere. In April 1519, the Spanish nobleman Cortis led about 800 men, carrying cannons and horses, landed on Veracruz on the east coast of Mexico and launched an attack on Mexico City. King Montezuma II sent a large amount of gold and silver jewelry to Cortis to request the retreat, while Cortis did his best to stir up dissension and designed to arrest Montezuma.
In June 1520, the Indians, whom Adam Smith called "poor, weak Americans", rose up in revolt, and Cortis and his gang fled in a hurry, killing and drowning in the lake, and the treasures that fell to the bottom of the lake were innumerable, known as the "Night of Sorrows".
In August 1521, Cortis again invaded Mexico City and turned Mexico into a Spanish colony, known as "New Spain". From 1523 to 1524, the Spaniards invaded Guatemala, Honduras and Nicaragua.
By the 1540s, there were only 500 indians left on the island of Haiti of more than 60,000, while hundreds of thousands of Indians in Jamaica, Puerto Rico, and Cuba had been exterminated.
The opening of new shipping routes and the consequent colonial plunder have had a profound impact on the history of countries around the world. Since then, many countries in Asia, Africa and the Americas have gradually become colonies or semi-colonies, and have become the objects of plunder by Western colonists.
However, the opening of new shipping routes is also conducive to economic and cultural exchanges, prompting some regions such as the Americas to form a unique cultural circle on the basis of absorbing foreign cultures, and promoting the convergence of world civilizations.
The opening of new shipping routes and the colonial plundering also had a major impact on Western Europe, giving rise to the commercial revolution and the price revolution, which were the main factors in the primitive accumulation of capital, which made the class contradictions more acute and complex, and accelerated the decline of feudalism and the development of capitalism.
Since then, capitalism in western Europe has developed rapidly and has begun to surpass many countries in Asia, Africa and the Americas.
