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[Institution’s Name]
Essay on Expansion of Maritime Trade
In August of 1492, when Columbus set off from Spain on one of history's most momentous journeys, he thought he was on his way to the original Spice Islands, islands within Southeast Asia’s maritime trade. Since Europe had no direct link by sea to the Indies (a term that referred to both the Indian subcontinent and Southeast Asia)or to China, he might have tried to repeat the 1487-88 feat of the Portuguese navigator Bartholomeu Dias and sail around the tip of Africa in order to reach the Indian Ocean, but he was convinced that there was a better way. He thought he could find the islands by sailing westward across the unknown ocean that presumably stretched between western Europe and Asia.
Thus he was seeking islands that had been not only sought but found by long-distance traders for more than fifteen hundred years before Columbus embarked on his fateful journey, islands that in 1492 were already known to mariners all the way from East Africa to Okinawa. The first outsiders to set out in pursuit of the wealth of Southeast Asia's maritime trade were Indians, from the Indian subcontinent, who arrived in the last centuries B.C.E. (Wheatley, 1973: 184). They had come seeking gold and were the first to name a part of the trade "The Land of Gold," a name that later voyagers from the Middle East and China would also give to various locales on the peninsulas and islands of Southeast Asia.
By the first century C.E. this Asian El Dorado had proven to have much more than gold. Indian merchants were also interested in its pepper, eager to augment their own supplies so that they could meet the Roman demand. Although for several centuries thereafter the maritime trade’s most important exports would be aromatic woods and resins, gradually the traders of the Eastern Hemisphere discovered the even more profitable rare and "fine spices," cloves, nutmeg, and mace......
