Many of them began to look west, across the Atlantic Ocean. It was not very clear what, if anything, lay there. But many explorers and patrons were willing to find out. Their most fervent wish was that navigating the Atlantic might reveal a new passage to the east that would bypass the Ottoman zone. But as it transpired, they found something very different: the islands and mainland of the Americas, and the abundant, deadly, fragile, wonderful territories of a new world.
