This is C-SPAN's Lectures in History podcast.

This week, a class about early Atlantic exploration, Christopher Columbus,

and the discovery of the Caribbean and the Americas by Europeans.

Northeastern University professor William Fowler describes the ventures of the Vikings, Portuguese,

and Spanish. Well, welcome back and good morning. Remember the last time we met, we were

talking about the Portuguese discoveries, the exploration that they made down the coast of Africa,

and also the navigational techniques that they developed,

the astrolabe and the compass, the ship's log, etc., etc.

And that the Portuguese were the first Europeans to really venture out onto the Atlantic.

But they ventured south. They didn't venture west.

Keep in mind, too, as someone mentioned in the last class, about the world being flat,

Europeans did not believe that.

Thirteenth, 14th century Europeans knew that the world was round.

This map, which is not meant for navigation, shows you that this is a 13th century European map of the world, and you might

not be able to make out the continents and the countries here, certainly, but you can

see that indeed they saw the world as round.

The question was not how the shape of the earth, the question was whether or not you could

actually make it around the earth.

That they knew, theoretically, that if you sailed west, you'd come to the east.

But how far that would be, what dangers they would encounter, none of that was known to them.

None of that was known to them.

While the Portuguese were working their way down the southern coast towards the tip of Africa,

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