Practice questions: European Exploration and the Columbian Exchange

Answer: (A) Portugal's hunt for gold, trade and allies on the coast of Africa

1. Henry paid for voyages down the African coast to reach West African gold and trade, find Christian allies against the Muslim powers of North Africa, and win converts.
2. Spain and Portugal began dividing American lands only after Columbus returned in 1493, almost sixty years after Henry spoke.
3. The Protestant Reformation began in 1517, more than eighty years after Henry urged Eanes past Cape Bojador.
4. Companies that sold shares to pay for overseas ventures appeared in England in the 1550s, a century after Henry's voyages.

Answer: (C) sail far into the open Atlantic and find their way home

1. The astrolabe measured latitude; sailors could not fix longitude reliably at sea until marine clocks were built in the 1700s.
2. The lateen sail let a caravel sail closer to the wind, but no sailing ship of the time could sail straight into it.
3. The compass gave direction, and caravels with lateen sails swung far out into the Atlantic to catch the winds that carried them back to Portugal.
4. No European crossed the Pacific until Magellan's voyage of 1520–1521, and regular Spanish trade across it began in the 1560s.

Answer: (B) Sugar plantations worked by enslaved Africans on Atlantic islands

1. Encomienda grew out of Castile's wars against Muslim Spain and claimed the labor of Native towns, not of captives shipped from Africa.
2. Portugal went on to put enslaved Africans to work growing sugar on Madeira and later São Tomé, the plantation system Europeans later carried to the Americas.
3. English joint-stock companies, from the 1550s on, were a way to raise money for trade and colonies and did not grow out of slave raiding.
4. Spanish missions in New Mexico began after 1598 and grew out of the Catholic drive to convert Native peoples, not the African slave trade.

Answer: (D) Castile's royal advisers objected that Asia lay too far to the west to reach

1. João II's refusal shows opposition but not its reason, and his own experts also judged Columbus's distance too short.
2. Columbus's appeal to Aristotle shows his own view of a small round world, not the reasons his opponents gave.
3. The monarchs' delay during the war against Granada says nothing about whether their advisers thought the Earth was flat.
4. The scholars who advised Ferdinand and Isabella accepted that the Earth was round and rejected Columbus's plan because he had badly underestimated the distance to Asia.

Answer: (B) Monarchs of a newly united kingdom seeking wealth and power overseas

1. Joint-stock companies spread risk among private investors and took hold in England after the 1550s; this bargain was made by the crown.
2. Ferdinand and Isabella had joined Castile and Aragon and conquered Granada, and they backed Columbus for Asian riches, an edge over Portugal, and converts.
3. The Protestant Reformation began in 1517, a generation after this voyage.
4. Venice profited from the old trade routes through the eastern Mediterranean and did not sponsor Columbus; the Spanish crown did.

Answer: (A) persuade the crown that his islands were worth more voyages

1. Columbus wrote to a royal official who had helped fund the voyage and promised gold, spices, cotton and slaves to win backing for a return voyage.
2. He described the islanders as guileless and generous, the opposite of a warning that they would fight Spanish rule.
3. Columbus offered to ship the islanders as slaves, and in 1495 he sent hundreds of Taíno captives to Spain for sale.
4. Ferdinand and Isabella, not Columbus, asked Pope Alexander VI for the grant of May 1493, and this letter went to a royal official.

Answer: (D) Spanish enslavement of Native people from the Caribbean islands

1. Portuguese raiders and traders had been taking African captives since the 1440s, so this practice came before the letter.
2. Indentured servants were mostly English laborers under contract on tobacco farms in the 1600s, not Caribbean captives.
3. Alliances such as Guacanagarí's came from Native rulers' own rivalries and interests, not from an offer to ship slaves.
4. Columbus shipped hundreds of Taíno captives to Spain in 1495, and Spanish raiders later carried Lucayans from the Bahamas to forced labor on other islands.

Answer: (C) Portugal's claim to Brazil on the coast of South America

1. Cabot sailed for England's Henry VII in 1497, and England ignored a treaty that only Spain and Portugal had signed.
2. Jacques Cartier's voyages of the 1530s gave France its claim, and France rejected the Spanish-Portuguese division.
3. The line ran through eastern South America, so when Pedro Álvares Cabral reached Brazil in 1500, Portugal claimed it.
4. Henry Hudson's voyage of 1609 for the Dutch gave them their claim, more than a century later and outside the treaty.

Answer: (D) The fort Columbus left behind was found burned and its garrison dead

1. Guacanagarí helped for his own political reasons, and his cooperation did not test whether a small force could rule the islanders.
2. Leaving men behind shows Columbus acting on his confidence, not evidence against it.
3. Trading gold for hawk's bells was exchange on Taíno terms and neither tested nor challenged a claim about conquest.
4. When the second fleet reached Hispaniola in November 1493, La Navidad had been burned and every Spaniard left there was dead, which showed that Taíno communities could and did fight back.

Answer: (B) Spanish colonists unloading livestock and seeds on Hispaniola

1. Horses reached the Great Plains in the 1600s, more than a century after 1492.
2. Columbus's second fleet loaded calves, goats, sheep, pigs, chickens and seeds in the Canary Islands in 1493, and pigs and cattle multiplied fast on Hispaniola.
3. Potatoes spread through Irish farming over the 1600s and 1700s, long after 1492.
4. The Manila galleons began sailing in the 1560s and 1570s, and they moved silver rather than plants, animals or germs.

Answer: (A) reached the Asian markets that both kingdoms sought

1. Da Gama sailed around Africa to Calicut in 1498 and opened a sea route to the spice trade, while Columbus never reached Asia.
2. Da Gama followed the African coast into the Indian Ocean, where Arab and Indian merchants already traded, while Columbus crossed the Atlantic.
3. Columbus's second voyage of 1493 carried settlers and animals, while da Gama's small fleet went to trade.
4. The Portuguese crown paid for da Gama's voyage; voyages paid for by shareholders, such as England's of 1553, came later.

Answer: (B) needed royal backing for a conquest begun without approval

1. Cortés wrote this letter in October 1520, less than a year after the meeting; it was Bernal Díaz who wrote decades later.
2. Cortés had sailed from Cuba against the governor's orders, so he needed Charles V to accept his conquest and reward him.
3. Cortés was at the meeting on the causeway, with Malintzin translating between the two leaders.
4. The Nahua accounts in the Florentine Codex were gathered by Sahagún in the 1550s and later, long after Cortés wrote.

Answer: (C) Spanish leaders depended on Native people's knowledge of languages

1. No Spaniard on the expedition spoke Nahuatl, which is why Cortés relied on Malintzin.
2. Moctezuma did receive Cortés peacefully, but the Mexica later drove the Spanish out by force, and the statement concerns language, not Mexica strategy.
3. Malintzin, a Nahua woman handed to the Spanish at Tabasco, spoke Nahuatl and Maya, and with Jerónimo de Aguilar putting her Maya into Spanish, she made talks with the Mexica possible.
4. Horses and steel mattered in battle, but a statement about interpreting is not evidence about weapons.

Answer: (D) Spanish expeditions searching for other rich empires to conquer

1. England founded no lasting American colony until Jamestown in 1607, far from Mexico.
2. Portugal settled Brazil from the 1530s for brazilwood and sugar, on its side of the Tordesillas line, not because of reports from Mexico.
3. Spain and Portugal signed the Treaty of Tordesillas in 1494, a generation before Cortés reached Mexico.
4. News of Mexico's wealth drew Spaniards to new conquests, such as Pizarro's war on the Inca in the 1530s and the expeditions of de Soto and Coronado.

Answer: (A) Native allies supplied much of the siege's labor and strength

1. About eight thousand Tlaxcalan porters carried the parts of thirteen warships over the mountains, and tens of thousands of Native allies fought in the siege.
2. Smallpox did kill many in the city in 1520, including Cuitláhuac, but a scene of porters is evidence about allied labor, not disease.
3. Some Spanish reinforcements did arrive, but Native soldiers far outnumbered Spaniards in the siege, and the porters were Tlaxcalan.
4. Steel and horses helped in battle, but they could not carry a fleet over the mountains or besiege a lake city without Native armies.

Answer: (D) The fall of Tenochtitlan to Spanish and Native forces

1. Cortés took Moctezuma hostage in November 1519, a year before smallpox swept the city.
2. The Mexica drove the Spanish out at the end of June 1520, before the epidemic spread through the city that autumn.
3. Tlaxcala allied with Cortés in September 1519, before smallpox reached central Mexico.
4. Smallpox killed many of the city's people and its new ruler, Cuitláhuac, in late 1520, weakening Tenochtitlan before the siege of 1521.

Answer: (B) Colonists' growing use of enslaved Africans as workers

1. Franciscan missionaries came to Mexico in 1524 to win converts, a religious goal that did not depend on the population collapse.
2. As Native workers died, colonists bought enslaved Africans, first for Hispaniola's sugar mills by the 1520s and later for mines and plantations across the empire.
3. Spain's claim rested on the Treaty of Tordesillas of 1494, decades before Mexico's population collapsed.
4. Spain sought a western route to Asian spices and trade from 1492 on, not because Native populations fell.

Answer: (C) how Nahua people remembered and judged the invaders

1. The account gives a judgment, not a count; royal treasury records show how much gold reached Spain.
2. Spanish soldiers' own reasons appear in their letters and memoirs, such as Díaz's, not in a Nahua account.
3. Nahua elders told this history to Sahagún in the 1550s, so it records how the conquered remembered the Spanish hunger for gold.
4. Moctezuma died in 1520, and this account was compiled by other Nahua people decades later.

Answer: (C) The steep fall of Native populations during new epidemics

1. Spanish towns grew in the 1500s, a trend of growth like the one in the excerpt rather than its opposite.
2. Mixed populations grew in Spanish colonies, another growth trend rather than a contrast.
3. While American crops later fed growth across the Old World, smallpox, measles and other diseases cut central Mexico's Native population by about 65 to 95 percent in the 1500s.
4. Pigs and cattle multiplied quickly in the Americas, which parallels the growth in the excerpt rather than reversing it.

Answer: (A) Merchants and bankers growing richer alongside landed nobles

1. American silver paid for trade and backed loans, so money invested in commerce came to matter as much as land, part of the slow shift from feudalism toward capitalism.
2. Spain's kings borrowed more against the silver, not less: Philip II took about two-thirds of his short-term loans from Genoese bankers and stopped payment four times.
3. Protestant churches spread through religious disputes that began in 1517, almost thirty years before Potosí's silver was found in 1545.
4. American silver let Europeans buy more Asian silk and porcelain, much of it through Manila after 1571.

Answer: (B) English colonies paid for by investors, like Jamestown

1. Portugal's posts in India were run by the crown, not by companies of private shareholders.
2. The Virginia Company sold shares to investors and founded Jamestown in 1607, using the method these merchants had tried in 1553.
3. Encomienda grants came from the Spanish crown and assigned Native labor, not shares in a venture.
4. Spain's treasure fleets were convoys organized by the crown, not ventures paid for by shareholders.

Answer: (D) Rivalry between Protestant England and Catholic Spain

1. Jamestown, England's first lasting colony, was founded in 1607, more than twenty years after Hakluyt wrote, and the Roanoke colony of the 1580s failed.
2. Samuel de Champlain founded Quebec in 1608, long after Hakluyt wrote.
3. Potatoes became a common field crop in England in the 1700s, and Hakluyt argued from religion, trade and rivalry with Spain.
4. The Reformation had split Western Christianity, and Hakluyt urged a Protestant queen to spread her faith, win trade and check Catholic Spain in America.