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The Voyages That Found America

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Caleb Remund
Ms. Degreef
English IV
10 March 2017
The Voyages that Found America
America got its recognition from an Italian explorer named Amerigo Vespucci. Even though Amerigo visited America after Christopher Columbus did, he was the first person to recognize North and South America as different continents. These continents were first unknown to the Europeans, Asians, and Africans. Columbus made four trips over the Atlantic Ocean from Spain where he was originally from. He really wanted to find a direct water route from Europe to Asia. Instead of finding his waterway that he was hunting for, he accidentally stumbled upon what would be now days the North and South Americas. He didn’t really discover the Americas because there were many …show more content…

Columbus married a girl named Dona Felipa Perestrello E Moniz. They had two kids, Diego and Fernando. Diego was the oldest and was born in 1480. Fernando was born in 1488 (“Christopher Columbus”).
While Columbus was working as a merchant sailor in Portugal, they were really looking for a route that went east from Europe across the sea over to Asia. They couldn’t get to Asia by land because the route between Europe and Asia was blocked off by Muslim Nations. The European people wanted traded goods from Asia, but they had a very difficult time finding a route around the continent of Africa and they soon were afraid they were never going to find an eastern route across the sea. Columbus’s brother Bartholomew made it around the tip of Africa in 1488 but did not make any progress up the coast after that. Christopher had heard some things through the grapevine that it might have been possible to make it to Asia by sailing west. Columbus had hoped that he could make that voyage himself. The thought of Columbus sailing west had people extremely nervous. People at that time in the world believed the earth was flat and no one knew for sure how big the earth actually was. No one had a clue how long it would take him to get to the other side of the earth or how long of a distance it was. Because people didn’t really know much about the world back then, some of the higher educated people put together many different ideas on

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