| CUSR1815 Matt Madeira The Columbian Exchange: A Clash With Nature It should no longer come as any great surprise that Columbus was not the first to discover the AmericasCarthaginians, Vikings, and even St. Brendan may have set foot on the Western Hemisphere long before Columbus crossed the Atlantic. But none of these incidental contacts made the impact that Columbus did. Columbus and company were bound to bring more than the benefits of Christianity and double entry bookkeeping to America. His voyages started the Columbian Exchange, a hemispherical swap of peoples, plants, animals and diseases that transformed not only the world he had discovered but also the one he had left. The Old and New Worlds had been separated for millions of years before this voyage (except for periodic reconnections in the far north during the Ice Ages). This period of separation resulted in great species divergence and evolvement. There were still many similar species, such as deer and elm, but Europe had nothing like hummingbirds, rattlesnakes, and hickory and pecan trees. The differences were even greater in the southern hemispheres; the biggest mammal in Africa was the elephant, and the biggest mammal in South America was the cow-sized tapir. Both of these environmental systems struggled for a delicate sense of balance and homeostasis but their collision in 1492 began a whole new time of competition and struggle for dominance. The environmental impact of such a collision is enormous and should be looked at as part of our understanding of the Age of Discovery. PLANTS Thomas Jefferson once said that, " The greatest service which can be rendered to any country is to add a useful plant to its culture." By this standard, Columbus was the greatest benefactor of all time because by bringing the agriculture of the Old and New Worlds into contact, he added many useful plants to each. He enormously increased the number of kinds of foods and quantities of food by both plant and animal sources. New food crops have enabled people to live in places where they previously had only slim means of feeding themselves. Each new cargo brought new changes to the European diet, helping to improve eating and strengthening national identities with cultural foods. Some of the exotic new crops had humble beginnings; before the tomato made its way into European diets, it was a weed in the Aztec maize fields. The potatoes which hung on to Spanish ships wasn't welcomed at first either; Europeans found it unappetizing. But packing more calories per acre than any European grain, the potato eventually became the dominant food of northern Europe's working class. A few of the other plants that took root in the European palate was the cacao bean for chocolate, lima beans, corn, peanuts, pumpkins, squash, cashews, and pineapples. Sunflowers, petunias, marigolds and poinsettias also made their way to Europe. Several other plants of importance include quinine, tobacco, and sugar cane. Quinine is a malaria fighting plant found in the Peruvian Andes. Sugar cane is especially important because of its impact on slavery. While originally a European plant, it thrived in tropical American forests. Scholars estimate that each ton of sugar cost the life on one worker in the New World. As Indians perished, African slaves were ferried in. The slave-based plantation system that sugar started spread to Georgia and the Carolinas to raise rice, indigo, and cotton. While Europe was coming to learn to like the potato and tomato, the Americas were invaded by olives, coffee, vegetable seeds, wheat, lemons, oranges, lettuce and cabbage. These were great additions to the tortilla, bean, grub, insect eggs and pond scum that some Mexican dishes called for. Europeans also brought crab grass, dandelions, carnations, daffodils, and lilacs to the New World. Jacques Cartier, a shipmaster of Saint-Malo offered the Indians hardtack (a hard biscuit) and red wine when he first explored the St. Lawrence region in 1534 and 1535. As a result, the Indians thought the French ate wood and drank blood. ANIMALS For almost every purposemeat, milk, leather, fiber, power, speed, and even manurethe European domesticated animals were superior to those few species domesticated by Amerindians of either North or South America. Old World livestock, which had evolved in a somewhat rougher league than the New World's, often outfought, outran, or at least out-produced American predators. Free of the diseases and pests that had killed them at home, the European animals thrived and went wild. Their numbers grew to amazing proportions, providing mounts, meat, milk and leather more cheaply in the New World than the Old. Animals were so plentiful that by the 17th century, fences were not used for keeping livestock in, but for keeping livestock out. The islanders reasoned that only dogs walked on four legs and got along with people, but the two dozen mares and stallions Columbus unloaded quickly fit in to the New World's environment. Cortes's animals terrified the Aztecs, who thought each rider and his steed were one gigantic god. The "sky dogs" propagated quickly, and great herds ran wild from northern Mexico to the pampas of Argentina within a century. Before the Spaniards brought horses to America, buffalo were taken by stalking them on foot. They were then driven into traps or stampeded over cliffs. Tribes that existed for centuries on small game and nuts moved west to harvest buffalo, a task which the horse made easy. Pigs found more food available to them in the New World and increased their numbers dramatically. The 24 pigs that Diego Velazquoz de Cuellar brought to the islands jumped to 30,000 in only 16 years. The 13 pigs that Hernando DeSoto brought to Florida increased to 700 in 3 years. Descendants of DeSoto's swine are still devouring wild plants and animals. In the Arizona Ozarks they are called "razorbacks," and in Georgia's Okefenokee Swamp they are called "piney woods rooters." These great amounts of swine guaranteed a steady supply of protein and fresh meat never before seen in the New World. Unfortunately, swine on the islands ate roots, snakes, grasses, lizards, fruit and baby birds and probably contributed to the extinction of hundreds of plants and animals never recorded. The only domesticated animals of the native people of North America were the dog and the turkey. South America domesticated guinea pigs, llamas, domesticated birds and dogs. Amerindians quickly adopted many of the new livestock and took advantage of the new animals. The horse populations were enormous in a rather short amount of time, but other animal populations grew quickly in the New World as well. DISEASE The decisive advantage of the human invaders of America was not their plants or animals, and certainly not their muskets and rifles, but their diseases. The aboriginal Americans had their own diseases, but the number of these was insignificant compared to the sum of those entering the New World. Early Americans already had tuberculosis, parasitism, and dysentery. The European invasion contributed whooping cough, smallpox, measles, bubonic plague, influenza, and diphtheria. Native communities lost between 50 and 90 percent of their people, most without ever seeing a white man. It is probable that a number of these diseases were exchanged from domesticated animals as well as human contact. Old World peoples had adjusted to these infections and were relatively immune to the diseases which wiped out native populations. The Valley of Mexico alone experienced 50 devastating epidemics between 1519 and 1810, including smallpox, typhus, measles, mumps, and pneumonia. The exchange of pathogens between the Old and New Worlds has been almost entirely one-way, as with the exchange of weeds and animals. Syphilis is sometimes called the "vengeance of the vanquished." It is one of the few diseases that Columbus's men took back to the Old World. A lethal epidemic swept Europe in five yearssome scholars believe a mild form of syphilis already existed in the Old World, but the American strain turned it into a virulent form. One of Columbus's largest impacts has been from a biological and disease-laden standpoint. Its victims have been manypassenger pigeons, Carolina parakeets, Wampanoags, Omahas, Modocs, Comanches, and so on. Among its most obvious beneficiaries are the humans who make up the great majority of the population of North America. PEOPLE The expanded supply of money paid for the European conquest of the Americas as well as the transportation and re-settlement of countless emigrants from the Old World to the New. Some were farmers, some were adventurers, but many of the people in the exchange were slaves. Columbus helped foster the human exchange when he took 500 native islanders to be sold as slaves in the Old World. He also demanded that everyone over age 14 be required to produce a hawk's bell filled with gold every three months. Those found without their quota were killed or brutally beaten, while those who fled were hunted down by dogs. In despair, hundreds turned to suicide. About one-third of Hispaniola's indigenous population of 300,000 were dead in the first two years, eventually leading to wipeout. This left the islands so depleted that black slaves were eventually shipped in from Africa by the million to toil on plantations. These American plantations were the reason for the Atlantic slave trade. Sugar cane's success brought some island populations to 20 African slaves for every one white person. The peopling of the New World by Europeans owes much of its success to the disease which wiped out native populations. Some scholars feel that the cheap milk, meat, and benefits of the new land would not have been sufficient in and of itself to have enabled them to accomplish a demographic and military takeover. Instead, the birth rate of the Amerindians plunge and the death rate soared. Every tribe shrank in numbers initially, and many of them died out completely. The human exchange is definitely a one-sided story. In summary, Christopher Columbus crossed the Atlantic in 1492 and opened a period of massive exchanges between the Old and New Worlds. The influence of his voyage on the history of commerce, religion, the nation-state, war, and literature has been immense. Columbus had not only discovered a new world, but his success had encouraged other discoverers and opened new windows to science and to all knowledge. The results of the Columbian Exchange come with mixed feelings, owing to the degree of death and slavery that such a clash of natures caused. But whatever the outcome of the two worlds "re-uniting," the Exchange was a major event in the process of discovery. Suggested Readings Crosby, Alfred W. The Columbus Voyages, the Columbian Exchange, and Their Historians: Essays on Global and Comparitive History. Washington, D.C.:American Historical Association, 1987. -. The Voyages of Columbus: A Turning Point in World History. Bloomington, IN: ERIC Clearinghouse for Social Studies/Social Science Education, 1989. Patrick, John J. "Columbus in the Curriculum: Ideas and Resources for Teachers of History in Elementary and Secondary Schools." International Journal of Social Education. 7.1 | |
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