What’s So Bad About the Badlands? - Don't Know Much About Geography - page 39

Gradually, the word took on a new meaning related to turning to face the east. Cathedrals, for instance,
were built to face east, to be “oriented” toward Jerusalem. But it wasn't until the nineteenth century that
the word orient was used in the more general sense of ascertaining direction, or, to borrow another com-
pass term, “to get your bearings.” Nowadays, when a man fumbles with a road map while lost and says he
only needs to get oriented, he is obviously not looking for China.
His sensible wife, of course, just says, “Honey, let's stop in a gas station and get directions.”
Milestones in Geography II
The 16th Century
1512 Portuguese explorers António de Abreu and Francisco Serrao reach the Moluccas, or Spice
Islands.
1513 After a twenty-five-day trek through the dense rain forests of Central America, Spaniard Vasco
Núñez de Balboa (1475-1519) sights the Pacific Ocean and names it Mar del Sur (Southern Sea).
But political rivals later accuse Balboa of treason and he is beheaded in a public square along with
four of his followers, with their remains thrown to the vultures.
1518 Smallpox, a common though not necessarily deadly affliction in Europe, is introduced to the
island of Hispaniola (what is now Haiti and the Dominican Republic). Far more than Spanish guns,
horses, or military tactics, smallpox would be responsible for decimating much of the native popu-
lation, which had developed no natural immunity to the disease.
1519 Believed to be the returning Aztec god Quetzalcoatl, Hernán Cortés (1485-1547) enters
Tenochtitlán (Mexico City) and captures Emperor Montezuma II, beginning the Spanish conquest
of the Aztec Empire in Mexico. Although Cortés was initially driven out, he returned in 1521 with
a larger force and completed the conquest of Mexico, extending Spanish rule into lower California.
1519-22 Magellan's ship circumnavigates the globe.
1524-28 Still searching for a sea path to the Orient, Giovanni da Verrazzano maps the Atlantic coast
of North America as he searches for a northwest passage that will be simpler and more direct than
sailing around Africa or around South America as Magellan had done.
c. 1525 French physician Jean Fernel is the first to calculate the length of a degree of latitude at very
near its accepted length of 110.567 kilometers at the equator.
1532 Spain's Francisco Pizarro undertakes the conquest of Peru's Inca Empire, already devastated
by smallpox and civil war. Pizarro captures the Inca ruler Atahualpa, executes him, and conquers
Peru.
1533 First report of triangulation, a surveying method using a network of triangles, by Dutch car-
tographer Reiner Gemma Frisius, whose topic De Principis Astronomiae et Cosmographiae also
points out that longitude can be found by comparing clock time to the sun's position.