A prevailing superstition among sailors was that a woman on board a ship was bad luck. Some believed that a woman’s presence would anger the sea and endanger them all, while others believed female mermaids would pull them into rocky coastlines. Mythical or not, superstition dictated that it was best to avoid women while on board. In reality, few crews included women primarily because they were considered a distraction to the male crew. Likewise, sailors were also notoriously drunkards, and social customs encouraged women to avoid such behavior.

Their ships, however, were addressed in the feminine as “she” and “her.” In ancient history, ships were named after goddesses, but by this period, European ships were increasingly named after mortal women - typically, noblewomen, wives, daughters, and so on. Further, despite their reservations about women aboard their ships, sailors believed that naked women calmed the sea, so most figureheads depicted beautiful and topless women as a gift to the sea gods.

Nonetheless, when one thinks of the exploration of the New World, visions of ships filled with men claiming new lands come to mind. Yet, beyond being figureheads on ships, when the Old and New Worlds are on the brink of connection, women found themselves at the helm, writing the checks, or authorizing these explorations.

Gudrid the Viking

There were millions of diverse peoples living in the Americas before the arrival of the Old World. Studies show that nomadic groups were crossing a now submerged land bridge between Russia and Alaska between 23,000 and 15,000 years ago, spreading down the West Coast of the Americas before spreading eastward over thousands of years. Ancient Egyptians are believed to have explored and settled in the Americas over 3,000 years ago, and another wave of African exploration is said to have begun several hundred years before Columbus. While Columbus’ 1492 voyage is remembered as the start of European exploration, the Vikings had already explored and attempted settlement of the far reaches of North America nearly 500 years prior. One of those women at the helm of exploration was Gudrid Thorbjarnardóttir, who took part in exploration of Canada, more than 1,000 years ago.

Map of Viking explorations in the Atlantic Ocean. Gudrid would be associated with her husband, Thorfinn Karlsefni’s voyage

Gudrid is a bit of a mystery. She is described as beautiful, smart, and political. She appears in a few Viking sagas, but in some she is a poor Icelandic woman who never reached Greenland during her venture, while in other versions, she is a wealthy explorer who not only made it to Greenland but sailed on to Canada with her husband and a small crew. She landed in what the Vikings called Vinland (“wine land”), modern Newfoundland, where she created a settlement and lived for three years around 1000 CE. She later returned to the more established Viking settlements in Iceland, and archaeologists have found what they believe to be Gudrid’s home in Iceland based on the sagas. It is built in the style of those found in Newfoundland settlements, including the one she and her husband were said to have founded, adding further credence to the story. While Gudrid was the most famous, there were likely other Viking women that sailed to North America to help form these settlements. 

The sagas indicate that Gudrid explored well into her forties and fifties. In her lifetime, it is said that she made eight crossings of the North Atlantic Sea. She may have traveled farther than any other Viking, with the sagas indicating that she sailed from Scandinavia to Greenland to North America to Rome and back again in her later life. Yet, generally, historians have not given Gudrid the same respect as others who made such voyages. Historian Nancy Marie Brown points out that Gudrid was an adventurer, “She was not dragged along. This was her choice. She could have very easily stayed home in Greenland. She wanted to go.” 500 years before Columbus, and another several hundred years before even the heartiest of men were willing to make the leap to settle the New World, Gudrid had already come and gone.   

Chinese Voyagers

The Chinese under the last imperial dynasty - the Ming Dynasty, ruling from 1368-1644 - sent explorers into the Pacific and Indian Oceans in the early 1400s. These voyages, under the leadership of Zheng He between 1405 and 1433, put those of the contemporary Europeans to shame. At its peak, He’s fleet was 100x the size of Columbus’ 1492 voyage. In fact, all three of his ships, all of his crewmen, and all of his equipment could have fit on the deck of the largest Chinese ship. To protect his massive fleets, Zheng He called on the help of Tianfei, the goddess of seafarers.

Map of Zheng He’s voyages

But these explorations stopped just as quickly as they had begun, owing to a concern that investment in ships did not make economic sense and China retreated into a state of isolationism. Their oceanic retreat led to the rise of European traders seeking to fill the void in the India trade. They began to explore the Atlantic, looking for a more efficient trading path to the rich spices and teas of Asia. While for some Europeans this led to exploration along the west coast of Africa, for others, it led to the “discovery” of the Americas, launching a whole new wave of exploration, conquest, and colonization. Eventually, silver obtained from mines in Spanish America enriched Western Europe and was brought to China and India in exchange for tea and spices. Europeans became the primary actors in the now “global” economy. 

Despite ongoing Confucian ideology that dictated a level of segregation of men and women, women who lived and worked in Chinese harbor cities and coastal regions increasingly engaged with Europeans, which had the potential to put pressure on existing cultural norms. Patricia Ebrey notes that the purveying belief was that, 

The natural relationship between yin and yang is the reason that men lead and women follow. If yin unnaturally gains the upper hand, order at both the cosmic and social level are endangered. Maintaining a physical separation between the worlds of men and the worlds of women was viewed as an important first step toward assuring that yin would not dominate yang. The Confucian [...] sentiment was expressed in the Book of Documents in proverbial form: “When the hen announces the dawn, it signals the demise of the family.”

Isabella of Spain

With Viking explorations of the New World dismissed and forgotten in the historical record, the “discovery” of the New World is often credited to Christopher Columbus. Columbus, like other explorers, was seeking to find an alternative path to the spice markets of India and “Oriental” markets of China. These places were the center of most of the Old World’s trade and each country was seeking greater (and cheaper) access to these markets. The primary path was through the Mediterranean to trade in the Levant or gain access to the Red Sea and into the Indian Ocean. Each required interaction with the empires and kingdoms of the Middle East that stood as middlemen in this lucrative trade. There was not only profit to be made here, but also 

centuries of hostility toward European powers that influenced how amicable or contentious these trade relationships would be. The nature of the relationship with these middlemen invariably affected the cost of goods being traded. Thus, most Europeans were hungry for a new path to these markets which could cut out the middleman altogether. With the difficulty of travel by land, this meant one of two paths: around the unknown reaches of Africa, or into the unknown reaches of the Atlantic Ocean to reach the other side of China (given that they knew the world was round, but not that there was another series of continents in their path). 

Columbus explaining his discovery of America to King Ferdinand and Queen Isabella

However, Christopher Columbus would not have had the money, ships, or crew for his “discovery” of the Americas without the support of Queen Isabella of Spain. Columbus asked Queen Isabella and her husband, King Ferdinand, to support his exploration. New access to these markets was not only key to his proposed journey, it was also essential to the queen and king’s continued unification of Catholic Spain and for their systematic targeting of all non-Catholics in their newly unified state. Beyond just professed faith, they sought to exile or eliminate anyone of Jewish, Muslim, and other ancestries in the name of the “purity of blood.” If conversion wasn’t enough to save someone from Spanish persecution, it calls into question if the Inquisition and other such religious efforts were ever truly about faith. Nonetheless, finding a new route to the Asian spice markets would save the Spanish money, thus providing further financing for their unification efforts.

Columbus, mistakenly, believed that he had reached the East Indies when he made landfall in October of 1492, when he actually reached an island of the Bahamas. He was certain he had successfully found a “backdoor” to Asia, and to prove this, he returned with a number of indigenous captives, who he mistakenly called “Indians,” but were actually Taino people. Isabella ordered some of these enslaved people to be freed, and was even considering the prospect of rights for them under the Spanish crown, but she died in 1504, before the full extent of his discovery was known. 

While Columbus was incorrect about his discovery, it set off a firestorm of exploration anyway, as the mere potential of a new route to Asia was too tempting to ignore. Exploration of the Atlantic and the Americans increased dramatically in the coming years, including three additional voyages by Columbus before it was formally recognized as something new, rather than the far reaches of Asia. 

Isabella was not the only Spanish monarch to fund expeditions to the New World, but she did help to unify Spain and established a strong and profitable court which made Columbus’ and future expeditions possible. The wealth left behind after her reign allowed for Spain to hold a monopoly on the exploration and riches of the New World for hundreds of years.  Yet, as Spain’s influence grew throughout South and Central America, the indigenous people suffered terribly. 

Queen Elizabeth and England

​By the turn of the 16th century, the New World became the obsession of all Europeans, and soon the Spanish were not the only nation to explore and conquer the Americas. The Portuguese, French, Dutch, and Swedish all made their presence known, and England’s Queen Elizabeth I made exploration the cornerstone of her reign. Queen of England from 1558-1603, Elizabeth remains one of the most famous and successful European monarchs. However, her reign was not without controversy, just like her mother’s before her [see “Queens of England” in Chapter 19]. Executions, bursts of rage, political manipulation, attempts to subjugate the Irish, famines, and more framed her reputation. At the same time, she not only defeated the mighty Spanish Armada in 1588, she also dominated politics, economic growth, and art, and set the stage for England to become a primary power in the New World. 

She was well-educated, with one of her tutors, Roger Ascham, stating that “Her mind has no womanly weakness, […] her perseverance is equal to that of a man, and her memory long keeps what it quickly picks up.” For example, the number of people she witnessed being executed by her father, Henry the VIII - including her mother - taught her to keep her political and religious views to herself until she found herself in power. Once on the throne, Elizabeth quickly reorganized England’s power structure. 

Portrait of Queen Elizabeth I at her coronation

She was perpetually scrutinized by a society that viewed women as mere detours to the real figures of power: men. Britons largely believed women unfit and too temperamental for power. Their job as monarchs was to bring the right men into power by marrying or birthing them. Elizabeth, however, refused to play this role. Both before and after her coronation, she refused to marry. English nobles and international nobles courted her, but still she refused each; proclaiming that she had to make a careful decision for the protection of England. Sometimes she rejected them outright, proclaiming the need to be married only to her country, while other times she used their efforts to charm her to forge treaties, alliances, and more. In reality, she likely didn’t want to give up her power. While many feared a civil war if the queen did not bear a natural heir, she played her game well, and set England on the path that would see them become one of the largest and most formidable empires in world history. 

Throughout her reign, Elizabeth faced opposition, both internal and external, religious and secular, but she remained vigilant in her vision of an England rising in power. She poked the European bears of France and Spain with sanctioned privateering and raids on their international ports in the New World. Despite its initial weakness, her actions -  including her controversial decision of appointing some of her nation’s most famous pirates in leadership roles - allowed naval forces to grow dramatically in size and skill which was pivotal in their defeat of the Spanish Armada in 1588.

Amid England’s rise in the latter half of the 16th century, in her efforts to compete with her European counterparts, she also looked to the possibilities of the New World. This included the financing and sponsoring of Sir Francis Drake’s explorations and raids of Spanish holdings in the Caribbean, Latin, and South America, as well as his circumnavigation of the globe between 1577 and 1580. English domination in North America would take a long time to develop, but Elizabeth’s patronage of Sir Walter Raleigh and his founding of the colony of Virginia would lay the foundation. 

Conclusion 

While histories examining the discovery of the New World tend to focus on the men commanding ships and governing new colonies, women were side-by-side with the men in these efforts. Some, in disguise as men, crewed the ships. Many were the early colonists and settlers of the New World, bringing stability and connection to these early European ventures. Many more remained in Europe, providing the labor, crops, and materials that made these voyages and settlements possible. 

Women were at the forefront of European exploration and the discovery of the New World, but why are they not remembered for being so? How do women’s roles in this process compare to that of men? How are women’s efforts remembered, and how can they be better celebrated or analyzed?