Introduction
For Europeans of the medieval and early modern periods, the Atlantic Ocean con-
jured images of the vast unknown, the sea beyond the Strait of Gibraltar, or the
Pillars of Hercules, the world known to the Greeks, and, therefore, the world of
civilization. Eu ro peans had been venturing into the Atlantic abyss since at least the
ninth century CE, when Norsemen traversed the North Atlantic to Iceland, Green-
land, and, eventually, Newfoundland. Other adventurers—mostly Portuguese—
probed southward. They harnessed the winds and currents to explore the coast of
Africa, and eventually rounded the Cape of Good Hope. As important as striking
across the Atlantic would become, Eu ro peans of the fifteenth century did not look
in that direction. The lure of wealth and power beckoned from the East, from China
and India, as it had since antiquity. Explorers sailed the Atlantic for shorter Asian
routes, to bypass Arab middlemen, thus raising Eu ro pean profit margins on trade.
Moreover, domestic affairs mattered more. The clash of kingdoms in Europe occu-
pied more than enough attention for merchants and monarchs, not to mention for
ordinary people scratching out a subsistence living.
Other zones of what would become the Atlantic world were similarly focused
away from the Atlantic Ocean. In Africa, trade, warfare, and political rivalry brought
the continent’s many peoples in contact with a Mediterranean sphere. Islam, hav-
ing expanded from the Arabian Peninsula, was an important force. East Africa was
linked to the Indian Ocean. Yet, much trade, and many people, moved overland
or via rivers, especially in West Africa, where the Atlantic Ocean was a place for
coastal fishing not exploration. For some cultures, the Atlantic was a foreboding
site. It was the world of the dead, their ancestors, and the line between land and
sea marked the division between the living and the dead.
In the Americas, some groups lived from the seas, and the islands of the Carib
bean had beckoned to settlers as early as 2000 BCE, when people known as the
Arawaks migrated from mainland South America to the islands. Like Europeans
and Africans, Native Americans were focused more on land-based and internal con-
tacts than on venturing across the waters, though plenty of contact between a
variety of peoples took place. The Aztecs, to take but one example, had entered
today’s Mexico in the thirteenth century and, over time, they asserted their domi-
nance over the land’s other inhabitants. By the mid-fifteenth century, before the
arrival of the Spanish, the Aztecs ruled over a network of tributaries from their
fortified imperial capital, Tenochtitlán.
Christopher Columbus’s voyage took place in 1492 against a backdrop of peoples
engaged in many activities other than searching for new worlds. If a generaliza-
tion about such vast territories and diverse people is possible, then from Europe to
