I'm not sure that it's entirely true that "nobody except people that could colonize it really cared". Lots of people didn't know for a good while, such as those in rural areas without substantial connections to news networks, and I suspect news took longer to reach peoples further outside of Europe. I'm not aware of any literature on this, though, so I won't speak about it - and in any case, a lack of awareness isn't the same thing as not caring.

I'll discuss here European educated reactions to the European discovery of the Americas, since I'm not well-versed on popular reactions.^(1) It should be said on this front that books containing tales of the exploration of the New World were incredibly popular, though of course that was limited to people who could read and had the money to buy printed books.^(2) Hopefully someone more knowledgeable than me will be able to add detail on this! Either way, what I hope to show is that there was in fact an enormous amount of excitement around all the new stuff that could be known and done amongst the educated and elite in Europe. I'll also briefly discuss what less positive reactions were like.

There were two main causes for excitement around the Americas: things/objects and epistemological implications. The latter looks rather formidable, and it's worth saying that all it means is "what the Americas meant for how Europeans thought about truth and knowledge". It's probably also the more important.

The Americas had lots of things in them that weren't in the Old World, to put it simply. This was a cause of excitement for people like Garcia d'Orta, a Jewish Portuguese man who worked in Goa. He wrote a tract in 1563 exploring the new medicinal herbs and materials coming out of the Americas, clearly viewing it as a matter of considerable importance.^(3) This was not least because it showed that ancient encyclopaedias of plants (called herbaria, sg. herbarium) had been wrong, but we'll get more into that later.

It wasn't just the botanists and zoologists of the day who were interested, however. The influx of new stuff to know and own helped trigger a boom in collecting and collating items, famously in cabinets of curiosities.^(4) These often featured items from the Americas very prominently, precisely because they were so exciting - even to people who'd never been and never showed any interest in going to, let alone colonizing, the supercontinent. The prevalence of this excitement can perhaps be gauged by the number of fakes being sold to collectors as from the New World, or seas surrounding it. More directly, it seems that the trade links of the Fugger family to the Americas played a vital role in starting the collecting fashion.^(5)

Particularly in the late 15th and 16th centuries, when interest in the classics was at a high thanks to the Humanist movement(s), something that showed that the ancients were wrong was very dramatic - and very exciting - indeed.^(6) The Americas did a very good job of that, all things considered: it wasn't just that the ancients had missed out on some small detail of statics (basically physics) or a technical point of geometry, but that they'd missed an entire continent (or, indeed, two). D'Orta was pretty blunt about the fact that the testimony of his eyes showed that Pliny the Elder, the most famous ancient naturalist, had been totally wrong about botany, for instance.^(7)

The fact that the ancients were wrong about something this big had huge implications for how Europeans thought about knowledge. Previously, it had generally been believed that the ancients had a privileged epistemological status. This is to say that because they were older, they were closer to the creation of the world, and thus closer to God - and closeness to God meant closeness to truth.^(8) This may seem convoluted, but it makes sense in a worldview which genuinely put God at the centre of all things, truth and knowledge included. Educated Europeans were very aware of this, and very excited by it - Francis Bacon seems to have been inspired by this general attack on the authority of the ancients to publish his Novum organum in 1620, a provocatively-titled and -written book challenging Aristotelian orthodoxy. Anthony Grafton has argued that this was representative of a general turn away from the authority of texts towards the authority of experience.^(10)

There were people who were cynical about the New World and all it meant for truth and knowledge, of course. The main thing about them is that they didn't last very long, because so many people were able to visit the Americas for themselves. However, it is important to note that people did try and reconcile these new discoveries with an ancients-based epistemology, and respect for the ancients didn't disappear. It remained important to reference and discuss Aristotelian philosophy, and there continued to be lively Aristotelian work being done that incorporated all this exciting new stuff.^(11)

But, without denying it - which became increasingly hard to the point of impossibility - it seems to have been very difficult not to get excited by the Americas, for educated elites. It contained a wealth of new, exciting, and unusual things, and had incredible implications for how to look at the world, and you didn't need to have gone there to appreciate that.

Footnotes

^(1) I say "European discovery" to emphasise that it was discovery relative to them, not in general.

^(2) Logan, George M.. 2016. "Introduction" in George M. Logan ed., Robert M. Adams trans., Utopia, xi-xxxii. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

^(3) d’Orta, Garcia. 1563. “Colloquies on the Simples and Drugs of India” in Malcolm Oster ed. and trans., Science in Europe 1500–1800: a primary sources reader. Houndmills: Palgrave.

^(4) On which, see Mauriès, Patrick. 2019. Cabinets of Curiosities. London: Thames & Hudson.

^(5) Meadow, Mark A.. 2001. “Merchants and Marvels: Hans Jacob Fugger and the Origins of the Wunderkammer” in Pamela Smith and Paula Findlen eds., Merchants and Marvels: Commerce, Science, and Art in Early Modern Europe, 182-200. London: Routledge.

^(6) Bredekamp, Horst. 1995. The Lure of Antiquity and the Cult of the Machine, trans. Allison Brown. Princeton: Markus Wiener Publishers.

^(7) d'Orta 1563, at 88.

^(8) Grafton, Anthony, Shelford, April, and Siraisi, Nancy G.. 1995. New Worlds, Ancient Texts: The Power of Tradition and the Shock of Discovery. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

^(9) Bacon, Francis. 2004. The Instauratio magna Part II: Novum organum and associated texts, eds. and trans. Graham Rees and Maria Wakely. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

^(10) Grafton, Shelford, and Siraisi 1995.

^(11) See Park, Katharine and Daston, Lorraine. 2006. “Introduction: The Age of the New” in Katharine Park and Lorraine Daston eds., The Cambridge History of Science Volume 3: Early Modern Science, 1-17. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.