ABSTRACT
The year of Christopher Columbus’s first voyage to the Americas, 1492, might seem like a logical point at which to date the origin of the Atlantic World. Columbus had learned his trade plying the ports of the Mediterranean Sea, the highway of exchange between North Africa, the Near East, and southern Europe in the fifteenth century. Columbus himself was a reader of Marco Polo, whose famous thirteenth-century account of China and India shaped Columbus’s mental picture of the people he expected to meet across the Atlantic. The Portuguese and Spanish pioneered Western Europe’s navigation of the Atlantic. Merchants and monarchs in these countries were anxious to secure new trade routes to Asia and Africa that would bypass the Arab merchants who controlled overland access to those regions in North Africa and the Near East. Columbus’s contradictory descriptions of Indians as guileless innocents and fearsome cannibals profoundly influenced European approaches to the New World for generations to come.
