Up until his imprisonment in 1499 for being such a shit, Christopher Columbus held the sole right to explore the New World on behalf of Spain, a situation which unsurprisingly led to a significant amount of asshattery. However, even after Chris’ imprisonment, only a few Spanish explorers bothered to set sail in search of new lands; Alonso de Ojeda, Rodrigo de Bastidas, and Amerigo Vespucci being three of the more prominent. Despite extravagant claims of gold and spices by Columbus, the reality in the West Indies was much more limited. While some small gold mines were discovered on Hispaniola, it was nowhere near what had been promised. As a result, the King and Queen of Spain became much less interested and expeditions to the New World became much more dependent upon private financing, meaning they needed to show a profit, which they rarely ever did. This was little helped by the failure of attempts by Ojeda to found colonies on the north coast of South America in 1502 and 1510, mostly due to local natives being less than down with the general Spanish assholery, and a hurricane sinking 29 ships laden with what few treasures had been collected in Hispaniola in 1502. Spanish exploration was largely limited to the Caribbean and nearby coasts of Central and South America for the better part of two decades.
Meanwhile, the Portuguese sent their first vessels to India via sailing around Africa in 1497, opening up a new lucrative trade route which greatly enriched the small nation. Numerous other Portuguese expeditions followed, one of which went further west than planned, discovering Brazil in 1500. This sparked the funding of several exploratory expeditions by the Portuguese king, amongst them Amerigo Vespucci, who like most explorers were down with working for anyone willing to pay them. It was Amerigo who figured out that Brazil was connected to the rest of South America, which basically proved that the New World was most definitely not East Asia. Thanks to finally proving the obvious, map makers named the new continent America in Amerigo’s honor, because apparently being good at cartography doesn’t involve being good at spelling. Either way, finding little in the way of riches, the Portuguese abandoned further exploration of South America within a few years.
During this same period, a second Italian nut job was making the rounds in Europe, claiming that you could totally get to Asia just by sailing west. Giovanni Caboto made the same mathematical error as Columbus, leading him to believe the world was smaller than it actually was. The way Giovanni saw it, Columbus was totally right, he was just too far south. He eventually convinced the King of England to fund an expedition in 1496, which sailed around a bit before coming home. Undettered, Giovanni set sail again in 1497, this time managing to arrive in Newfoundland after a few months at sea. Newfoundland was most definitely not China, and if anything, it was even less interesting than the West Indies. However, when Giovanni returned to England he made it sound like Newfoundland was fricking amazing and surely China was only a little bit further on. In 1498 he departed on a third expedition, but a storm sank his ship soon after and the remaining ships of the expedition returned home. Despite this setback, the King of England funded numerous other expeditions to the area over the next decade, which explored north to the mouth of Hudson Bay and south to Chesapeake Bay, but found no easy route to China. When the King of England died in 1509, his son, much less interested in some place across the sea covered in trees, declared the expeditions to be a huge waste of money and stopped funding them. The Kings of Spain and Portugal also funded expeditions to the area of Newfoundland, but finding little of interest and no China, abandoned such ventures even more quickly.
Throughout this period, the small Spanish colony on Hispaniola struggled to survive. The colony was home to priests sent by the devout Queen of Spain to convert the natives, the desperate younger sons of merchants and minor nobles, and various poor people either just looking to earn a living or be part of some grand adventure. Though nobody exactly got rich, the only sources of income being a small gold mine and selling the natives back to Spain as slaves, which was not all that lucrative given most tended to die on the voyage or soon after arriving, living at the colony did have some benefits, mainly the fact that even the poorest Spaniard didn’t really have to work that hard to survive. Viewing the local natives as savages, the Spanish enslaved them and forced them to grow food and do whatever other work the Spanish thought needed doing. The colony also being mostly men, they of course had relationships with the native women, which even in circumstances not obviously rape involved some pretty fucked up power dynamics given any resistance to the whole setup resulted in a response involving torture and murder. While against the whole slavery aspect of what was going on, the priests did support the intermarrying, and it is likely that many of the native women pursued such relationships given the children born would enjoy a higher level of status than those born to native men.
Anyways, this dynamic was not really that great for the native population, a situation that only got worse as various Old World diseases began spreading around. Having no immunity to such things, the natives on Hispaniola began to die off in large numbers. This was not exactly all that great for the Spanish, what with them not wanting to have to work for a living, so they began raiding the other islands for more slaves. The need for new slaves, along with the discovery of further small sources of gold, eventually led to the development of new colonies on Cuba and Puerto Rico around 1510. However, this further decimated the local native populations in the Caribbean, the vast majority of whom died over the next fifty years, with the exception of those descended from the intermingling of Spanish men and native women.
The discovery of further sources of gold in the Caribbean created new interest in the West Indies, sparking the funding of several new expeditions. One of these, led by Vasco de Balboa founded the colony of Santa Maria in what is today Panama in 1510, the first European colony on the American mainland. The site was chosen due to the natives in the area seeming to have more gold than those met before. Over the next several years, Balboa attacked many of the surrounding tribes, forcing them to convert to Christianity and hand over their gold. Hearing rumors of even greater riches further from the coast, Balboa eventually made his way across the narrow isthmus, arriving on the Pacific Coast in 1513. During the same year, Ponce de Leon, leader of the Puerto Rico colony, led an expedition north to Florida, becoming the first European to set foot on what was to later become the United States. However, finding little of interest in the new land after poking around for some eight months, he returned home none the richer.
