The Discovery of the New World
发现新大陆

The term “New World” originated in the early 16th century after Europeans made landfall in what would later be called “the Americas” in the age of discovery, expanding the geographical horizon of classical geographers, who had thought of the world as consisting of Africa, Asia, and Europe, collectively now referred to as the Old World.
“新大陆”这个词起源于16世纪早期的地理大发现时代。欧洲航海家们登上了后来人们所称的“美洲大陆”，发现了与“旧大陆”(即主张地理扩张的老一辈地理学家所认为的由非洲、亚洲、欧洲组成的世界)相对应的“新大陆”。

In the late 15th century, under the support of the Spanish royal family, an Italian navigator Christopher Columbus led his men to sail across the vast ocean in 1492 and got to some small islands in the now West Indies. He deemed that he had arrived in Asia and didn't know he had discovered a New Continent. The scholar Ameriga Vespucci, who sailed to America in the years following Columbus' first voyage, was the first to speculate that the land was not part of Asia but in fact constituted some wholly new continent previously unknown to Eurasians. Therefore, the land was named America after him.
15世纪后期，在西班牙王室的支持下，意大利航海家克里斯多弗·哥伦布于1492年率领船队穿越浩瀚的大西洋，抵达了现在西印度群岛的一些小岛。他以为到达的是亚洲，却不知道自己发现了一片新大陆。在哥伦布第一次航海之后到达美洲的学者亚美利加·韦斯普奇(Ameriga)首次发现，这块陆地并不是亚洲的一部分，而是欧亚人所不知道的一片全新的大陆。因此这块陆地便以他的名字命名为“美洲”(America)。

Although there had been previous trans-oceanic contact, large-scale European colonization of the Americas began with the first voyage of Christopher Columbus in 1492. The first English colony in the Americas was founded at Jamestown, Virginia, in 1607.
虽然有以前的越洋接触，但欧洲在美洲的大规模殖民始于哥伦布在1492年的第一次航行。美洲的第一块英国殖民地于1607年在弗吉尼亚的詹姆斯敦建立。