History Script

Team members: Alyssa, Claire, Charlene, Katherine
History Script
(Spaces after paragraph means next slides)
Good morning/afternoon everyone, and welcome to our group presentation.
Today we will be summarizing the events of Unit 2 in your textbooks, The
‘New World’. These are my team members, Charlene, Claire, and Katherine.
In 1502, an Italian explorer, Amerigo Vespucci, who was working for the
Portuguese sailed south along the coast of Brazil to the tip of Patagonia.
Vespucci concluded that this was no outlying Asian island, but a whole new
continent. When he returned to Lisbon in the spring of 1503, Vespucci wrote a
letter to his friend, a member of the Medici family in Florence. Vespucci
explained that Columbus was not in the right, and that the land across the
Atlantic was a ‘New World’.
The conquistadors
From 1516. Spain's ruler Charles V authorised further exploration of the
American mainland, and his Spanish explorers became known as
Conquistadors. In 1519, a conquistador named Hernan Cortes sailed from Cuba
with 600 men, 16 horses and 14 cannon to explore the American mainland
Cortes arrived in Mexico, ruled at the time by the great Aztec Empire Their
capital was Tenochtitlan, a magnificent city of 200 000 inhabitants, built on an
island in the middle of a lake.
The Aztec emperor Montezuma had no reason to fear Cortes' piffling force, so
he invited them into his city Here, Cortes found enormous, unimaginable
stockpiles of gold. Relations between the Aztecs and the Spanish soured, and
Montezuma was killed. Cortes fled the city, and returned in April 1521 with a
much larger invasion force Though the Aztecs were fearsome warriors, they
were still a Stone Age civilisation Cortes's army had steel swords, handguns and
cannon, whilst the Aztecs had arrows, slings, and clubs made with sharpened
volcanic stone Cortes defeated the Aztecs, destroyed Tenochtitlan, and built a
new, European style city in its place. A similar story occurred when a Spanish
conquistador called Francisco Pizarro landed in Peru, then ruled by another
great civilisation, the Inca Empire. This time, European diseases had reached
the native population before the Europeans themselves, and the Incas were
ravaged by smallpox. In one of the most famously uneven battles in human
history, Pizarro managed to defeat an Inca force of 80 000 with just 168 men,
thanks to the panic and confusion caused by his cannon and galloping horses
The Incan emperor agreed to buy off the Spanish with rooms full of gold and
silver.
Global Trade
In the age of global exploration, Spain had won the lottery. Before long, a
continual supply of gold and silver was flowing from their South American
colonies to the Spanish crown. As well as precious metals, the discovery of the
New World brought new foods such as tomatoes, potatoes, chocolate, peanuts
and vanilla, and new luxuries such as tobacco. In countries where the local
population was harder to subdue, the Spanish and Portuguese established
coastal trading stations instead of colonies. Known as factories, these spread
along the coasts of West and East Africa, India, China, Malaysia and the
Philippines. Portugal and Spain would dominate overseas trade for most of the
16th century, building the world’s first truly global empires.
Ferdinand Magellan
In September 1519, a Portuguese sailor working for the Spanish set sail with
five ships and 265 men for Indonesia, then known as the Spice Islands.
Ferdinand Magellan plotted an audacious route heading west not east, intending
to be the first European to sail around the tip of South America Magellan sailed
towards Patagonia, where he claimed to encounter a race of giants, twice the
size of Europeans He then found a narrow channel leading to the other side of
the continent Freezing cold and beset with storms, the Magellan Strait, as it
became known, is a dangerous route to sail.
One ship sank, and another turned back. But after 38 days, Magellan and his
men came out the other side, reaching an enormous ocean, which seemed calm
in comparison. So, they called it the Pacific, meaning 'peaceful'. In March 1521,
Magellan and his men reached the Philippines, where a local chieftain asked
them to help him in a war against a rival tribe. Magellan agreed, but was killed
by poisoned arrows during the battle In September 1522, a single ship from
Magellan's original expedition finally returned to Spain, with just 18 surviving
men on board. However, they had earned their place in history as the first crew
to circumnavigate the world
END
Thank you for listening to our rough summary of ‘The New Word’.

History Script

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History Script

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Team members: Alyssa, Claire, Charlene, Katherine

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