Tools of Navigation
This tool invented in China uses a magnetized pointer inside a directional box to show cardinal directions like North and South.
What is the magnetic compass?
European rulers were driven to finance voyages across the ocean by three core motivations starting with the letter "G".
What are God, Gold, and Glory?
This term describes the widespread transfer of plants, animals, diseases, people, and ideas between the Old World and the New World starting in 1492.
What is the Columbian Exchange?
Built on an island in Lake Texcoco with aqueducts, markets, and over 200,000 residents, this grand city served as the capital of the Aztec Empire.
What is Tenochtitlan?
In 1587, Governor John White brought more than 100 settlers to establish a colony on this island off the coast of present-day North Carolina.
What is Roanoke Island?
This multi-purpose navigation instrument was used by sailors to observe the sun and stars to figure out time, daily routines, and latitude.
What is the astrolabe?
This Portuguese leader, known as "the Navigator," created a specialized school for shipbuilders, cartographers, and navigators in the early 1400s.
Who is Prince Henry?
Brought over by Europeans, this animal revolutionized Native American life on the Great Plains by changing hunting, warfare, and mobility.
What is the horse?
This Spanish conquistador led the brutal military campaign that defeated the Aztecs in 1521.
Who is Hernán Cortés?
Upon returning in 1590 after a three-year delay caused by war with Spain, John White found the colony deserted with only this single word carved into a post.
What is CROATOAN?
Created in 1569 by Flemish cartographer Gerardus Mercator, this map projection made compass routes straight lines for ocean navigation, but distorted land size near the poles.
What is the Mercator Projection?
Representing England in 1497, this explorer was the first person to reach the New World for the English crown.
Who is John Cabot?
These two essential staple crops from the Americas could grow in poor soil or cold climates, enriching European diets and causing massive population growth in the Old World.
What are maize (corn) and potatoes?
On the destroyed ruins of Tenochtitlan, Spanish colonizers built this major city to serve as the center of their empire in the Americas.
What is Mexico City?
This historical term describes the leading theory that lost Roanoke colonists merged into friendly local Native tribes over time.
What is assimilation?
This small, fast, and sturdy European ship design allowed explorers to maneuver effectively against the wind during ocean voyages.
What is a caravel?
In 1498, Portuguese explorer Vasco da Gama achieved a major navigational breakthrough by completing this specific sea voyage.
What is sailing around the southern tip of Africa to India (finding a direct water route to Asia)?
Unknowingly carried across the Atlantic Ocean, diseases like smallpox and measles wiped out up to this percentage of Indigenous populations due to a lack of natural immunity.
What is 90%?
Under Spanish colonial rule, this forced labor system required Native Americans to work on plantations or in mines and pay tribute to Spanish lords.
What is the Encomienda System?
John White's 1580s drawings portrayed Native Americans as peaceful, smiling, and welcoming for this specific underlying purpose.
What is encouraging or promoting English colonization (serving as early propaganda)?
Portuguese maps were kept strictly secret under severe penalty of law because they contained precise calculations of this coordinate—the distance north or south of the equator.
What is latitude?
While he didn't command a ship himself, Amerigo Vespucci made this crucial intellectual contribution to global cartography.
What is proving through biology, astronomy, and anthropology that the "New World" was a separate continent and not Asia?
The destruction of Native populations created a severe labor shortage on cash-crop plantations, prompting European powers to establish this system.
What is the Transatlantic Slave Trade?
Aside from superior military weaponry and disease, Cortés was able to defeat the vast Aztec army primarily because he formed alliances with these people.
Who are neighboring Native enemies of the Aztecs?
While a modern history textbook analyzing Roanoke is a secondary source, a 1607 diary entry written by a Jamestown settler is categorized as this type of historical evidence.
What is a primary source?