What was the main goal of the earliest explorers who reached the Americas?

to find a faster sea root to Asia, were they got tere spices and alot of gold but they also wanted t avoid getting atttacked by pirates so tehy didnt explore much, also they had many myths of sea monsters and that if you went to far away from home you would fall off the earth because it was flat which is not true. so that kept them from exploring until Columbus decided to try to go the opposite way to reach Asia by going around the world but instead he hit the carribean islands and no one knew he had discovered a "new world" until Amerigo Vespucci made a map of the coasts of the new world.