Francisco López de Gómara once wrote that “the greatest event which has happened since the creation of the world is the discovery of the Indies”. For the majority of human history mankind has not been aware of how vast and immense the world really is. Throughout the ages, different cultures held their own beliefs, understandings and conceptualizations of the world. The ancient Mayans for example viewed their world as a four-sided temple where a “Water lily Jaguar” was the day sun who illumined the Earth . But by the time of the Age of Exploration in the mid fifteenth century, the European community had begun to perceive that the world was spherical and that the Earth did not sit “motionless in the center of the universe surrounded by a set of giant revolving concentric spheres” . European countries began to send out explorers because they wanted to find trading partners, acquire riches such as spices, gold and silver, and wanted to spread their religion. When explorers such as Vasco Núñez de Balboa, Amerigo Vespucci, and Christopher Columbus came back from their travels, they brought back a wealth of knowledge about a ‘new world’ – a completely separate entity from Asia. With the Age of Exploration came the improvement of cartographic technology which enabled the European community to have a greater understanding and conceptualization about their world. Two maps by Martin Waldseemüller created in 1507 and 1516 depict that the European view of the world was enlarged by the discovery and presence of the Western Hemisphere.
The fifteenth century began the Age of Exploration, which was a period of about one hundred years, and where European governments sent ships to find new trade routes and shorter alternatives to standard routes; established routes tended to go around large land-masses, which took up time and money. Vasco da Gama for example was only funded by the royal crown because of the existence of the West African gold trade. John Darwin affirms that by...