It’s probably worth taking a moment to look at exactly how it was that the New World was explored. Now during the time, which some asshat historians have dubbed the Age of Discovery, the the nations of western Europe were in a period of transition. Throughout most of the Middle Ages, the economy was basically just a giant pyramid scheme with serfs on the bottom and kings on the top, and a whole bunch of various lords and other other nobles in between. The serfs were basically required to pay their local lords, usually in the form of free labor, for the right to raise crops for themselves, and the lords were then required to pay the king for the right to own the land on which the serfs were exploited. However, this system began changing pretty rapidly in the mid-fourteenth century when the Bubonic Plague killed around half the population. Thanks to a rather pronounced labor shortage, lords found themselves increasingly having to pay people in return for their labor, sparking the beginnings of the transition from a feudal to capitalistic society.
Now when looking at the so-called Age of Discovery, most of the early exploration from western Europe was funded by the government, which at the time was the king and his various lackeys. Similar to the U.S. government sending people to the moon, the rulers of Spain, Portugal, England, France, and so on, threw money at crazy ideas that seemed rather impractical at the time in hopes for a big score. Sending people sailing randomly into the ocean in hopes of somehow reaching the riches of Asia was not exactly a cheap endeavor. It wasn’t just something thrown together by a bunch of idiots after talking about it at the tavern one night, and few people had the cash available to fund such risky ventures except for the schmucks running whole countries. Most of the big names; Columbus, Vespucci, Cabot, Cartier; were all funded by kings and queens.
Things began to change as the understanding and knowledge of the New World began to expand, and ships began to more regularly sail across the Atlantic. After all, its one thing to set sail into the unknown, its another to set sail knowing full well that you’re eventually going to hit a giant land mass. As a result, exploration of the New World shifted away from grandiose ideas being completely funded by royalty to investment opportunities. Basically the way it worked was somebody would get an idea of wanting to go exploring or start a colony. They would then go to the ruling monarch to get royal assent to do so, which was basically asking a monarch to put their stamp of approval on the venture, which aside from helping limit the chances of the king cutting off your head if they decided they didn’t like what you were doing, also was great advertising. Now the sponsoring monarch might throw in some money to help out, but overall it was up to the person planning the venture to find people to invest in the idea, usually various members of the nobility and increasingly over time members of the merchant class. Explorers were basically running joint stock companies, a concept becoming increasingly popular across western Europe for all sorts of things during this period.
Now of course, if people are investing in something, it means they are most likely expecting some kind of return on investment. After all, there are very few people who just hand out money will nilly with no expectations. As a result, exploration of the New World increasingly become driven by the need for profit, and new lands weren’t added to the map just out of curiosity, but rather in hopes that the blank spot on the map contained something that could be turned into cold hard cash. About the only exception to this was explorations taken on behalf of the Catholic church, which was much less interested in making money as it was in saving souls in the new lands discovered. Especially with Spain and Portugal, where the Catholic church held a significant amount of sway and power throughout the Age of Discovery, getting royal assent often meant also supporting the church’s mission of converting Native Americans, though for the people actually leading the expeditions, unless they were a particularly pious bastard, this was most often treated as a secondary objective.
Anyways, as explorers found new sources of income, investments increased, which in turn led to the construction of increasingly complex infrastructure, which led to colonies growing into cities and the creation of systems of government to manage everything and ensure that everyone, including the king, back home was getting their share of the profits. So was born what we would later call the United States.
