The voyages that first joined the oceans into one world — round the Cape to India, across the Atlantic to the Americas, and on to the Spice Islands.
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The Portuguese sea road to the East: down the African coast, round the Cape of Good Hope, and across the Indian Ocean to the pepper ports of India — the voyage that broke the old overland spice monopoly.
Lisbon → Cape Verde → Cape of Good Hope → Calicut → Goa
Columbus sailed west from Iberia by way of the Atlantic islands, reaching the Caribbean in 1492 — the crossing that opened two continents to European empire and joined two hemispheres for good.
Seville → Madeira → Hispaniola
From Goa the Portuguese pressed east through the strait of Malacca to the Moluccas themselves — the clove and nutmeg islands that were the ultimate prize of the whole enterprise — and on to China.
Goa → Malacca → Ternate → Macau
American silver from Potosí crossed to Veracruz, sailed up to the treasure ports, and rode the Manila galleon across the Pacific to be traded for Chinese silk — the last link that closed the world's first global trade circuit.
Potosí → Veracruz → Manila
The convoy system that gathered Peruvian silver at Cartagena and shipped it under escort across the Atlantic to Seville — bullion that paid Spain's armies and, spent across Europe, set off a century of inflation.
Potosí → Cartagena → Seville
The Atlantic triangle in its cruelest form: European goods to the forts of the Gold Coast, enslaved Africans across the ocean to the plantations, and gold and sugar back to Europe.
Lisbon → Elmina → Hispaniola
The Portuguese capital from which Vasco da Gama sailed for India, its Casa da Índia the clearing-house of a seaborne empire whose spice fleets returned laden from the East.
The Spanish river-port granted a monopoly on trade with the Americas, where the Casa de Contratación registered every ship and every bar of New World silver that entered Europe.
The pepper port of the Malabar coast where Vasco da Gama landed in 1498, the first European to reach India by sea — breaking the Venetian and Arab monopoly on the spice trade.
The Indian port that Afonso de Albuquerque seized to become the capital of the Portuguese Estado da Índia — the fortified heart of a chain of forts commanding the Indian Ocean trade.
The Spanish city in the Philippines and the western terminus of the Manila galleon, where American silver was exchanged for Chinese silk in the first truly global trade circuit.
The Andean 'silver mountain' whose mines, worked by conscripted labour at brutal cost, poured out the bullion that financed the Spanish empire and flooded the whole world's economy.
The first European fort in sub-Saharan Africa, built by the Portuguese on the Gold Coast to trade for gold — and later one of the darkest depots of the transatlantic slave trade.
The great emporium commanding the strait between the Indian Ocean and the South China Sea — whoever held Malacca held the throat of the whole spice trade of the East.
The Portuguese trading enclave on the south China coast, the bridgehead through which Chinese silk and porcelain flowed west and New World silver flowed into Ming China.
The Caribbean island where Columbus founded the first lasting European settlement in the Americas in 1492 — the beachhead of Spanish conquest and of a catastrophe for its native peoples.
The port Cortés founded on the Gulf coast, the doorway to the conquest of the Aztec empire and the shipping point for the silver of Mexico bound for Seville.
The fortified Caribbean port where the silver of Peru, hauled overland and up the coast, was gathered onto the treasure fleets that crossed the Atlantic to Spain.
The Portuguese Atlantic island whose sugar plantations, worked by enslaved labour, became the deadly template later carried across the ocean to Brazil and the Caribbean.
The islands off the African bulge that became the staging post of the Atlantic — a provisioning stop for the Cape fleets and a grim hub of the early slave trade.
The southern tip of Africa that Dias first rounded in 1488, proving the Atlantic and Indian oceans joined — the hinge on which the whole sea route to the East swung open.
One of the tiny Molucca islands that were the world's only source of cloves — the fabled Spice Islands whose fragrant harvest drew fleets halfway round the planet.