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The so-called Age of Discovery was a period from the early 15th century and continuing into the early 17th century, during which European ships traveled around the world to search for new trading routes and partners to feed burgeoning capitalism in Europe. In the process, Europeans encountered peoples and mapped lands previously unknown to them. Among the most famous explorers of the period were Christopher Columbus, Vasco da Gama, Pedro Alvares Cabral, John Cabot, Yermak, Juan Ponce de Leon, and Ferdinand Magellan.

The Age of Exploration was rooted in new technologies and ideas growing out of the Renaissance, these included advances in cartography, navigation, and shipbuilding. Many people wanted to find a route to Asia through the west of Europe. The most important development was the invention of first the carrack and then caravel in Iberia. These that were a combination of traditional European and Arab designs were the first ships that could leave the relatively passive Mediterranean and sail safely on the open Atlantic.

Between the middle of the fifteenth century and the late seventeenth, Europeans learned to think of the world as a whole and of all seas as one. Their lessons were those of experience and eye-witness report. During those two and a half centuries European explorers actually visited most of the habitable regions of the globe; nearly all those, in fact, which were accessible by sea. They found vast territories formerly unknown to them, and drew the rough outlines of the world which we know. The period, especially the earlier half of it, is commonly called the Age of Discovery, and with reason. Geographical exploration, however, is only one of many kinds of discovery. The age saw not only the most rapid extension of geographical knowledge in the whole of European history; it saw also the first major victories of empirical inquiry over authority, the beginnings of that close association of pure science, technology, and everyday work which is an essential characteristic of the modern western world. During this period, especially the latter half of it, European scientists sketched the outline of the physical universe which, broadly speaking, is that accepted by the ordinary educated man today, and formulated the laws they deduced from the movement and interaction of its parts. All forms of discovery, all forms of original thought, are connected in some way, however distant: and it is natural to see a connection between these particular forms. The seaman, exploring uncharted seas, needed the help of learned men, especially men learned in mathematics, astronomy, and physical science; also, though this came later, in medical science. The student of science, seeing the achievements of geographical exploration (most empirical of all forms of inquiry, and most destructive of purely a priori reasoning) was naturally stimulated to further exploration in his chosen field. Both kinds of discovery further stimulated, and were stimulated by, the work of philosophers, poets and pamphleteers.

Connection there undoubtedly was; but its precise nature was both complex and elusive. The modern historian, accustomed to finding as the result of seeking, to discovery as the product of research, is tempted both to exaggerate and to anticipate. It is confidently expected today that every decade will produce new and important additions to the mounting sum of human knowledge. In the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries people--even educated people--had no such confident expectation. The intellectual temper of the sixteenth century, particularly, was conservative, respectful of authority. Even with evidence before their eyes that seamen were in fact finding lands formerly unknown and unsuspected, learned men were slow to draw analogies in other fields of inquiry. The idea that there was an America of learning and understanding beyond the horizon of the classics, ancient philosophy and the teachings of religion, was still in those years new and strange--the vision of comparatively few men. Students of science were concerned less with research than with attempts to provide neat and consistent explanations of known phenomena. It is significant that Copernicus--perhaps the most original figure in sixteenth-century science--reached his momentous conclusions by a mixture of reasoning and intuition, and made little or no attempt to check his hypotheses by actual observation. The first major European astronomical research to be based upon careful detailed observation over a long span of years was undertaken in the late sixteenth century and the early seventeenth by that perverse and unmanageable enthusiast, Tycho Brahe, and by Kepler, the mathematical genius into whose hands Tycho's mass of raw data providentially fell. Until towards the end of our period, certainly until the time of Tycho and Kepler, scientific inquiry in general tended to remain hypothetical and tentative, more given to broad speculation than to precise observation and experiment. Scientists had still, moreover, to be a little wary of charges of heresy; a danger which they commonly avoided by framing as hypotheses conclusions which in some instances they really regarded as proven fact. Galileo's difficulties with the ecclesiastical authorities arose chiefly from his neglect of this elementary precaution. In these circumstances, it was only by very slow degrees that science and technology, intuition and experience, experiment and everyday skill, could be brought together freely to illuminate one another. . . 

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