<Tr> <Td> Hawaii </Td> <Td> James Cook </Td> <Td> 1778 </Td> <Td> George III </Td> </Tr> <P> The Portuguese began systematically exploring the Atlantic coast of Africa from 1418, under the sponsorship of Prince Henry . Under Henry's direction, a new and much lighter ship was developed, the caravel, which could sail further and faster, and, above all, was highly manoeuvrable and could sail much nearer the wind, or into the wind . In 1488 Bartolomeu Dias reached the Indian Ocean by this route . In 1492 the Catholic Monarchs of Castile and Aragon funded Christopher Columbus's plan to sail west to reach the Indies by crossing the Atlantic . He landed on a continent uncharted by Europeans and seen as a new world, the Americas . To prevent conflict between Portugal and Castile (the crown under which Columbus made the voyage), the Treaty of Tordesillas was signed dividing the world into two regions of exploration, where each had exclusive rights to claim newly discovered lands . </P> <P> In 1498, a Portuguese expedition commanded by Vasco da Gama reached India by sailing around Africa, opening up direct trade with Asia . While other exploratory fleets were sent from Portugal to northern North America, in the following years Portuguese India Armadas also extended this Eastern oceanic route, touching sometimes South America and by this way opening a circuit from the New World to Asia (starting in 1500, under the command of Pedro Alvares Cabral), and explored islands in the South Atlantic and Southern Indian Oceans . Soon, the Portuguese sailed further eastward, to the valuable Spice Islands in 1512, landing in China one year later . In 1513, Spanish Vasco Núñez de Balboa crossed the Isthmus of Panama and reached the "other sea" from the New World . Thus, Europe first received news of the eastern and western Pacific within a one - year span around 1512 . East and west exploration overlapped in 1522, when a Castilian (Spanish) expedition, led by Portuguese navigator Ferdinand Magellan and later by Spanish Basque navigator Juan Sebastián Elcano, sailing westward, completed the first circumnavigation of the world, while Spanish conquistadors explored the interior of the Americas, and later, some of the South Pacific islands . </P> <P> Since 1495, the French and English and, much later, the Dutch entered the race of exploration after learning of these exploits, defying the Iberian monopoly on maritime trade by searching for new routes, first to the western coasts of North and South America, through the first English and French expeditions (starting with the first expedition of John Cabot in 1497 to the north, in the service of England, followed by the French expeditions to South America and later to North America), and into the Pacific Ocean around South America, but eventually by following the Portuguese around Africa into the Indian Ocean; discovering Australia in 1606, New Zealand in 1642, and Hawaii in 1778 . Meanwhile, from the 1580s to the 1640s, Russians explored and conquered almost the whole of Siberia, and Alaska in the 1730s . </P>

The leader of the first european expedition to reach asia by sailing west was