So we learnt about the Crusades and the Middle Ages and then the Renaissance. Next we moved on to (drumroll please)……. THE AGE OF EXPLORATION. The age of exploration was a time after the renaissance where people, mostly in Europe, started to explore North America but European people’s such as the Portugese extensively explored Africa and South America . This led to a lot of things, most of which I consider a bad idea in my opinion.

So why was Europe the perfect place to explore

A) Travel was made easy because of access to sea side countries. That made travel by sea much easier.

B) The renaissance sparked a very epicenter of trade in Europe, so if you didn’t have access to materials to travel you could easily acquire them.

C) The exchange of materials was vital but not as much as the exchange of information, which was also ignited by trade, was used to travel with more ease.

Tools used to explore 

So there was a boat involved in this and some tools too. There were several different types of boats though, the Arab Dough was a fast boat, The caravel, a Portugese ship, also made to travel fast, that’s just to name a few.

Now there were tools too!

An astrolabe, an instrument used to find ships coordinates.

A compass, used to find ones whereabouts and directions on a map.

A  backstaff and Sextant used to determine the latitude for coordinate purposes.

Encounters with the Natives

Okay, great so the Europeans got to North America. Whoop dee doo. They discovered a New Land! Umm no they didn’t, there were already people there. Small problem right? Pff! Try huge, giant problem. Sure they benefited from the natives such as setting up trading posts with  them but they also brought diseases that killed off most of the First Nation populations and they brought war. They had guns that they used to kill the Natives.

I 

The awful thing known as Slavery

So while Europeans such as the French, the Dutch and The British were exploding America, the Portuguese were sneaking their way down the Coast of Africa. Well what were they doing? Only committing  to history one of the most inhuman and disgusting things ever to happen i.e. the beginning of Slave trade.

My classmates and I were reading about the conditions on the Slavs ships going from Africa to the Southern United States and it was awful. Not to mention that, like the First Nation peoples, the African Slaves were not equipped to deal with the “white person dieseases and influenza’s” and many of them died before even reach America.

You may think that that was the worst part. BUT NO! In fact African chiefs were SELLING their own people to the Slave traders knowing full well what would happen to them. What people do for Money.

Long term effects 

After we learnt about Slave trading we learnt about the effects of exploration. I think a very prevalent example is the fact that European dieseases wiped out 2/3 of Native Population, which changed today the concentration of native people in Canada.

PROJECT ALERT!

Moving on from that, the whole goal of our unity was to study European explorers, each group got assigned a nationality of explorers i.e. British, French, Spanish, Portugese etc. And then an explorer from said nationality. We had to research that explorer and then create a COMIC about our Explorers journey. We then had to create a presentation about why we would do better that our explorer if funded a journey. We then presented to the Royal Majesty, A.K.A our teacher. Also , side note, we read a bunch of comics to learn abiht different comic techniques.

I got assigned Martin Frobisher. I pointed out that I would be better than Martin Frobisher since he had lost five of his men to natives there and caused some terrible relations.

Creating the comic

As I said we studied comics. We learnt about different types of boxes, the little frames around comic images. Like the full bleed, which is when an image is focused on to the point where some of it goes out of the frames boundaries, Splash pannels where it’s baskcally one big panel wit a lot of stuff going on inside, not just a close up like the full bleed.

We used comic life 3 to create our comics. I used an image of my brother with “renaissance” style clothes super imposed ontop to represent Captain Martin Frobisher.

My reflection on the Unit

I thought this was a very interesting unit. Expecially learning about all the technology navigators used back then. It was also interesting to look at the socially Impacts explorers had on Native Populations if not a bit gruesome.

That’s it for today! Than you for reading and have a nice day/evening/morning/night.