1493: Uncovering the New World Columbus Created (2 page)

The
second section
shifts the focus to the Pacific, where the era of globalization began with vast shipments of silver from Spanish America to China. It opens with a chronicle of cities: Potosí in what is now Bolivia, Manila in the Philippines, Yuegang in southeast China. Once renowned, now little thought of, these cities were the fervid, essential links in an economic exchange that knit the world together. Along the way, the exchange brought sweet potatoes and corn to China, which had accidental, devastating consequences for Chinese ecosystems. As in a classic feedback loop, those ecological consequences shaped subsequent economic and political conditions. Ultimately, sweet potatoes and corn played a major part in the flowering and collapse of the last Chinese dynasty. They played a small, but similarly ambiguous role in the Communist dynasty that eventually succeeded it.

The
third section
shows the role of the Columbian Exchange in two revolutions: the Agricultural Revolution, which began in the late seventeenth century; and the Industrial Revolution, which took off in the early and mid-nineteenth century. I concentrate on two introduced species: the potato (taken from the Andes to Europe) and the rubber tree (transplanted clandestinely from Brazil to South and Southeast Asia). Both revolutions, agricultural and industrial, supported the rise of the West—its sudden emergence as a controlling power. And both would have had radically different courses without the Columbian Exchange.

In the
fourth section
I pick up a theme from the first section. Here I turn to what in human terms was the most consequential exchange of all: the slave trade. Until around 1700 about 90 percent of the people who crossed the Atlantic were African captives. (Native Americans made up part of the remainder, as I explain.) In consequence of this great shift in human populations, many American landscapes were for three centuries largely dominated, in demographic terms, by Africans, Indians, and Afro-Indians. Their interactions, long hidden from Europeans, are an important part of our human heritage that is just coming to light.

The meeting of red and black, so to speak, took place against a backdrop of other meetings. So many different peoples were involved in the spasms of migration set off by Columbus that the world saw the rise of the first of the now-familiar polyglot, world-encompassing metropolises: Mexico City. Its cultural jumble extended from the top of the social ladder, where the conquistadors married into the nobility of the peoples they had conquered, to the bottom, where Spanish barbers complained bitterly about low-paid immigrant barbers from China. A planetary crossroads, this great, turbulent metropolis represents the unification of the two networks described in the first part of this book. A
coda
set in the present suggests that these exchanges continue unabated.

In some respects this image of the past—a cosmopolitan place, driven by ecology and economics—is startling to people who, like me, were brought up on accounts of heroic navigators, brilliant inventors, and empires acquired by dint of technological and institutional superiority. It is strange, too, to realize that globalization has been enriching the world for nigh on five centuries. And it is unsettling to think of globalization’s equally long record of ecological convulsion, and the suffering and political mayhem caused by that convulsion. But there is grandeur, too, in this view of our past; it reminds us that every place has played a part in the human story, and that all are embedded in the larger, inconceivably complex progress of life on this planet.

·    ·    ·

As I write these words, it’s a warm August day. Yesterday my family picked the first tomatoes from our garden—the somewhat improved successor of the tomato patch I planted after my visit to the college twenty years ago.

After I planted the seeds from the catalog, it didn’t take me long to discover why so many people love puttering in their gardens. Messing around with the tomatoes felt to me like building a fort as a child: I was both creating a refuge from the world and creating a place of my own in that world. Kneeling in the dirt, I was making a small landscape, one that had the comfortable, comforting timelessness evoked by words like
home
.

To biologists this must seem like poppycock. At various times my tomato patch has housed basil, eggplant, bell peppers, kale, chard, several types of lettuce and lettuce-like greens, and a few marigolds, said by my neighbors to repel bugs (scientists are less certain). Not one of these species originated within a thousand miles of my garden. Nor did the corn and tobacco grown in nearby farms; corn is from Mexico, tobacco from the Amazon (this species of tobacco, anyway—there was a local species that is now gone). Equally alien, for that matter, are my neighbors’ cows, horses, and barn cats. That people like me experience their gardens as familiar and timeless is a testament to the human capacity to adapt (or, less charitably, to our ability to operate in ignorance). Rather than being a locus of stability and tradition, my garden is a biological record of past human wandering and exchange.

Yet in another way my feelings are correct. Almost seventy years ago the Cuban folklorist Fernando Ortiz Fernández coined the awkward but useful term “transculturation” to describe what happens when one group of people takes something—a song, a food, an ideal—from another. Almost inevitably, Ortiz noted, the new thing is transformed; people make it their own by adapting, stripping, and twisting it to fit their needs and situation. Since Columbus the world has been in the grip of convulsive transculturation. Every place on the earth’s surface, save possibly scraps of Antarctica, has been changed by places that until 1492 were too remote to exert any impact on it. For five centuries now the crash and chaos of constant connection has been our home condition; my garden, with its parade of exotic plants, is a small example. How
did
those tomatoes get to Ukraine, anyway? One way to describe this book would be to say that it represents, long after I first asked the question, my best efforts to find out.

INTRODUCTION
In the Homogenocene

1
Two Monuments

THE SEAMS OF PANGAEA

Although it had just finished raining, the air was hot and close. Nobody else was in sight; the only sound other than those from insects and gulls was the staticky low crashing of Caribbean waves. Around me on the sparsely covered red soil was a scatter of rectangles laid out by lines of stones: the outlines of now-vanished buildings, revealed by archaeologists. Cement pathways, steaming faintly from the rain, ran between them. One of the buildings had more imposing walls than the others. The researchers had covered it with a new roof, the only structure they had chosen to protect from the rain. Standing like a sentry by its entrance was a hand-lettered sign:
Casa Almirante
, Admiral’s House. It marked the first American residence of Christopher Columbus, Admiral of the Ocean Sea, the man whom generations of schoolchildren have learned to call the discoverer of the New World.

La Isabela, as this community was called, is situated on the north side of the great Caribbean island of Hispaniola, in what is now the Dominican Republic. It was the initial attempt by Europeans to make a permanent base in the Americas. (To be precise, La Isabela marked the beginning of
consequential
European settlement—Vikings had established a short-lived village in Newfoundland five centuries before.) The admiral laid out his new domain at the confluence of two small, fast-rushing rivers: a fortified center on the north bank, a satellite community of farms on the south bank. For his home, Columbus—Cristóbal Colón, to give him the name he answered to at the time—chose the best location in town: a rocky promontory in the northern settlement, right at the water’s edge. His house was situated perfectly to catch the afternoon light.

Today La Isabela is almost forgotten. Sometimes a similar fate appears to threaten its founder. Colón is by no means absent from history textbooks, of course, but in them he seems ever less admirable and important. He was a cruel, deluded man, today’s critics say, who stumbled upon the Caribbean by luck. An agent of imperialism, he was in every way a calamity for the Americas’ first inhabitants. Yet a different but equally contemporary perspective suggests that we should continue to take notice of the admiral. Of all the members of humankind who have ever walked the earth, he alone inaugurated a new era in the history of life.

Lines of stones mark the outlines of now-vanished buildings at La Isabela, Christopher Columbus’s first attempt to establish a permanent base in the Americas. (
Photo credit 1.1
)

The king and queen of Spain, Fernando (Ferdinand) II and Isabel I, backed Colón’s first voyage grudgingly. Transoceanic travel in those days was heart-stoppingly expensive and risky—the equivalent, perhaps, of space-shuttle flights today. Despite relentless pestering, Colón was able to talk the monarchs into supporting his scheme only by threatening to take the project to France. He was riding to the frontier, a friend wrote later, when the queen “sent a court bailiff posthaste” to fetch him back. The story is probably exaggerated. Still, it is clear that the sovereigns’ reservations drove the admiral to whittle down his expedition, if not his ambitions, to a minimum: three small ships (the biggest may have been less than sixty feet long), a combined crew of about ninety. Colón himself had to contribute a quarter of the budget, according to a collaborator, probably by borrowing it from Italian merchants.

Everything changed with his triumphant return in March of 1493, bearing golden ornaments, brilliantly colored parrots, and as many as ten captive Indians. The king and queen, now enthusiastic, dispatched Colón just six months later on a second, vastly larger expedition: seventeen ships, a combined crew of perhaps fifteen hundred, among them a dozen or more priests charged with bringing the faith to these new lands. Because the admiral believed he had found a route to Asia, he was sure that China and Japan—and all their opulent goods—were only a short journey beyond. The goal of this second expedition was to create a permanent bastion for Spain in the heart of Asia, a headquarters for further exploration and trade.

The new colony, predicted one of its founders, “will be widely renowned for its many inhabitants, its elaborate buildings, and its magnificent walls.” Instead La Isabela was a catastrophe, abandoned barely five years after its creation. Over time its structures vanished, their very stones stripped to build other, more successful towns. When a U.S.–Venezuelan archaeological team began excavating the site in the late 1980s, the inhabitants of La Isabela were so few that the scientists were able to move the entire settlement to a nearby hillside. Today it has a couple of roadside fish restaurants, a single, failing hotel, and a little-visited museum. On the edge of town, a church, built in 1994 but already showing signs of age, commemorates the first Catholic Mass celebrated in the Americas. Watching the waves from the admiral’s ruined home, I could easily imagine disappointed tourists thinking that the colony had left nothing meaningful behind—that there was no reason, aside from the pretty beach, for anyone to pay attention to La Isabela. But that would be a mistake.

Babies born on the day the admiral founded La Isabela—January 2, 1494—came into a world in which direct trade and communication between western Europe and East Asia were largely blocked by the Islamic nations between (and their partners in Venice and Genoa), sub-Saharan Africa had little contact with Europe and next to none with South and East Asia, and the Eastern and Western hemispheres were almost entirely ignorant of each other’s very existence. By the time those babies had grandchildren, slaves from Africa mined silver in the Americas for sale to China; Spanish merchants waited impatiently for the latest shipments of Asian silk and porcelain from Mexico; and Dutch sailors traded cowry shells from the Maldive Islands, in the Indian Ocean, for human beings in Angola, on the coast of the Atlantic. Tobacco from the Caribbean ensorcelled the wealthy and powerful in Madrid, Madras, Mecca, and Manila. Group smoke-ins by violent young men in Edo (Tokyo) would soon lead to the formation of two rival gangs, the Bramble Club and the Leather-breeches Club. The shogun jailed seventy of their members, then banned smoking.

Long-distance trade had occurred for more than a thousand years, much of it across the Indian Ocean. China had for centuries sent silk to the Mediterranean by the Silk Road, a route that was lengthy, dangerous, and, for those who survived, hugely profitable. But nothing like this worldwide exchange had existed before, still less sprung up so quickly, or functioned so continuously. No previous trade networks included both of the globe’s two hemispheres; nor had they operated on a scale large enough to disrupt societies on opposite sides of the planet. By founding La Isabela, Colón initiated permanent European occupation in the Americas. And in so doing he began the era of
globalization
—the single, turbulent exchange of goods and services that today engulfs the entire habitable world.

Newspapers usually describe globalization in purely economic terms, but it is also a biological phenomenon; indeed, from a long-term perspective it may be
primarily
a biological phenomenon. Two hundred and fifty million years ago the world contained a single landmass known to scientists as Pangaea. Geological forces broke up this vast expanse, splitting Eurasia and the Americas. Over time the two divided halves of Pangaea developed wildly different suites of plants and animals. Before Colón a few venturesome land creatures had crossed the oceans and established themselves on the other side. Most were insects and birds, as one would expect, but the list also includes, surprisingly, a few farm species—bottle gourds, coconuts, sweet potatoes—the subject today of scholarly head-scratching. Otherwise, the world was sliced into separate ecological domains. Colón’s signal accomplishment was, in the phrase of historian Alfred W. Crosby, to reknit the seams of Pangaea. After 1492 the world’s ecosystems collided and mixed as European vessels carried thousands of species to new homes across the oceans. The Columbian Exchange, as Crosby called it, is the reason there are tomatoes in Italy, oranges in the United States, chocolates in Switzerland, and chili peppers in Thailand. To ecologists, the Columbian Exchange is arguably the most important event since the death of the dinosaurs.

Unsurprisingly, this vast biological upheaval had repercussions on humankind. Crosby argued that the Columbian Exchange underlies much of the history we learn in the classroom—it was like an invisible wave, sweeping along kings and queens, peasants and priests, all unknowing. The claim was controversial; indeed, Crosby’s manuscript, rejected by every major academic publisher, ended up being published by such a tiny press that he once joked to me that his book had been distributed “by tossing it on the street, and hoping readers happened on it.” But over the decades since he coined the term, a growing number of researchers have come to believe that the ecological paroxysm set off by Colón’s voyages—as much as the economic convulsion he began—was one of the establishing events of the modern world.

On Christmas Day, 1492, Colón’s first voyage came to an abrupt end when his flagship, the
Santa María
, ran aground off the northern coast of Hispaniola. Because his two remaining vessels, the
Niña
and
Pinta
, were too small to hold the entire crew, he was forced to leave thirty-eight men behind. Colón departed for Spain while those men were building an encampment—a scatter of makeshift huts surrounded by a crude palisade, adjacent to a larger native village. The encampment was called La Navidad (Christmas), after the day of its involuntary creation (its precise location is not known today). Hispaniola’s native people have come to be known as the Taino. The conjoined Spanish-Taino settlement of La Navidad was the intended destination of Colón’s second voyage. He arrived there in triumph, the head of a flotilla, his crewmen swarming the shrouds in their eagerness to see the new land, on November 28, 1493, eleven months after he had left his men behind.

He found only ruin; both settlements, Spanish and Taino, had been razed. “We saw everything burned and the clothing of Christians lying on the weeds,” the ship’s doctor wrote. Nearby Taino showed the visitors the bodies of eleven Spaniards, “covered by the vegetation that had grown over them.” The Indians said that the sailors had angered their neighbors by raping some women and murdering some men. In the midst of the conflict a second Taino group had swooped down and overwhelmed both sides. After nine days of fruitless search for survivors Colón left to find a more promising spot for his base. Struggling against contrary winds, the fleet took almost a month to crawl a hundred miles east along the coast. On January 2, 1494, Colón arrived at the shallow bay where he would found La Isabela.