Columbus’s Great Triumph—and Error. Although Columbus failed to grasp the true significance of the discovery (he believed that he had reached Asia), he had reached two continents that Europeans had not known existed. Europeans had long valued Asian products such as spices, tropical fruits, silk, and cotton; and Columbus had hoped to find a western route to China, Japan, and the Indies, which would eliminate both the danger and expense of overland travel, as well as Italian middlemen. By the fifteenth century, western Europeans set about discovering direct routes to the East. Prince Henry of Portugal sponsored improvements in navigation and voyages of exploration. Columbus intended to reach China by sailing west into the Atlantic. About two o’clock in the morning of October 12, 1492, a sailor on the Pinta spotted land. He had spied an island in the West Indies called Guanahani by its inhabitants. The ship’s master, Christopher Columbus, went ashore bearing the flag of Spain and named the land San Salvador. Columbus did not know it, but he had landed on islands off the coast of two continents. His voyage opened up a new world to exploitation by the people of Western Europe. When he touched land, he refused to accept the overwhelming evidence that he had encountered not Asia but a world unknown to either Europe or Asia. He called the natives Indians, because he believed that he had reached the Indies. Columbus returned to Spain convinced that he had explored the edge of Asia. Three subsequent voyages failed to shake his conviction. Spain’s American Empire. By the time Columbus died in 1506, other captains had embarked on ventures of discovery and conquest. In 1493, the Pope had divided the non-Christian world between Spain and Portugal. Portugal concentrated on Africa, leaving the western hemisphere, except for what would eventually become Brazil, to Spain. Fifty years after Columbus’s first landfall, Spain held a huge American empire covering all of South America, except Brazil, and extending to the southern fringe of North America. Explorers such as Vasco Nuñez de Balboa and Ferdinand Magellan expanded geographic knowledge. Hernan Cortes and Francisco Pizarro subdued the Aztec empire in Mexico and the Inca empire in Peru. A distinct civilization emerged in the Spanish Americas. The Spanish founded cities, set up printing presses, constructed cathedrals, and established universities. The Spanish and other Europeans encountered natives in the course of their voyages of exploration. Greed and cultural arrogance led them to cheat and abuse those peoples with whom they came in contact; European technological superiority, particularly in instruments of war, provided the tools of domination. Even some contemporary observers, such as Bartolome de Las Casas (a Dominican missionary who arrived in Hispaniola roughly a decade after Columbus), were appalled by the barbarity of the conquistadores. While Spanish military leaders and administrators imposed an economic and social system based on Spanish feudalism, Catholic missionaries attempted to impose Christianity and o