David Wooton's "The Invention of Science" puts a lot of importance on the changes to the European psyche from 1492 and other voyages: the idea there was an entire landmass that all the ancients had no idea about was earthshaking to a society that assumed basically everything had already been discovered in antiquity. The idea that the world was full of new discoveries (a concept that Portuguese didn't even have a real word for at the time of Columbus), that Europe could "progress" and gaze into the future rather than merely discuss and revere the past had profound implications in the development of modernity. After all, what is modernity if it isn't the ideology of "progress"?
This is a very attractive idea, a very logical idea and it really ought to be true. The problem is that the early Spanish explorers were not in the least bit interested in anything other than gold or commercially exchangeable alternatives. There is a remarkable little section in The Loss of El Dorado in which Naipaul points out how utterly bizarre it is that the first written descriptions of the great hosts of flying fish that used to populate the Eastern Caribbean came not from those early Spanish explorers, but from English adventurers some time later.
In all fairness (I annoyingly lost the book when leaving university, so can't cite his reasoning) I think Wootton was referring to the individuals back home who realized the implications of what the explorers had found rather than the sort of mercenary who signed up to become a petty tyrant to find a magical gold city.
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