by David Boyle
The so-called Columbian exchange, the flora and fauna that passed from East to West and vice versa, had to come. The diseases that spread so rapidly—the smallpox that destroyed the Incas and the syphilis that ravaged Europe in return—had to happen in the same way. It may be possible to imagine a different combination of the awe, joy, and greed with which Europe pounced upon the Americas, but given Europe—given humanity perhaps—it is hard to imagine any other result.
Those in Europe today who rather smugly criticize America and American mores might consider that what made that continent—and what drove this story—is not the nature of America, but the nature of Europe. It was European values that built the continent which came to dominate the twentieth century. Now that it gives back some of that mixture of values—the idealistic New World as well as the drive for profit—it remains a mirror of the European world that created it.
It was the best of times; it was the worst of times. It was the golden hope of a brave new start for humanity, of new cultures of sophistication and tolerance; it was the cruel destruction of whole races, forests, and knowledge. It was the source of unparalleled wealth; it was the cause of impoverishment. It was the crucible of empires; it was the destroyer of nations. The collision between the Old World and the New was all those things.
Most immediately, it was the source of an extraordinary exchange between East and West of produce, flora, fauna, and know-how that took place over the following decades. Not all of this happened immediately. It was not until 1586 that the English adventurer Francis Drake is supposed to have seized a cargo of potatoes from what he believed to be a Spanish treasure ship from America, and caused their introduction into the European diet, especially among the poor.* There are rival stories that the first potatoes in Ireland, which was the first nation to embrace them as a food, washed ashore there from the Spanish Armada two years later.
Along with potatoes also came pumpkins, squash, peanuts, tomatoes, avocados, tobacco, papayas, mahogany, rubber, cocoa, and maize—from the Arawak word mais meaning “stuff of life.” Like potatoes, maize took a roundabout route to Europe, seized by Barbary pirates preying on Spanish shipping and taken to Turkey, which meant it was known originally as turkey wheat (turkeys also came from the New World). Tobacco came to dominate the world’s economies, despite the best efforts of England’s King James I, whose pamphlet A Counterblaste to Tobacco was published in 1604. Cocoa plus sugar became chocolate. Chocolate was believed to have health-giving effects while tobacco was always known to be harmful. We know about their successors all too well: Cocaine arrived in the very late stages of the Columbian Exchange.
Going the other way were wheat, barley, almonds, mulberries, cherries, walnuts, apples, indigo, oranges, lemons, grapefruit, and rice—sent for the first time in 1512, the year Vespucci died. Most of these were undoubtedly enriching for both sides.
Perhaps it was the New World that gained most from the exchange of animals, when the descendants and successors to the few horses and cattle in the holds of Columbus’s second voyage spread out across the continent. Horses had been extinct in the Americas for ten thousand years, but by the 1580s massive wild packs of them were storming north, and for the Indians who adopted them, they enormously broadened their conception of manageable areas and distances. Cattle ranching also expanded enormously during the same period, although not to the benefit of the indigenous population in the same way. Cattle became a product, like sugar and cotton, which was exported to the Americas to export back to the Old World. A century after Columbus, massive fleets carrying hundreds of thousands of cattle hides were making their way back across the Atlantic.
The enterprise of the Indies was born out of two men steeped in the European cloth trade, sailing from the cloth trade centers of Seville and Bristol, so it is hardly surprising that one of the exchanges from which Europe benefited was an expanded sense of color. The colors of the parrots and the plants staggered Columbus and Vespucci; all three pioneers sought out brazilwood and other dyestuffs. But they were particularly driven by the demand among Europe’s merchant classes for ever more brilliant versions of red, and here the New World delivered after the conquistadores came across Aztecs selling cochineal in the marketplaces of Mexico in 1519. This was a dye so powerful and brilliant that it overshadowed all previous methods of making scarlet dye. Its source was kept obsessively secret by the Spanish, and it was still banned by the Venetians two generations later. The portraits of European rulers that followed gloried in the new reds. When the peasants of Germany rose in revolt in 1526, one of their demands was the right to wear red.
But of all the colors of discovery, it was the gold that had obsessed Columbus and the others above all. The staggering increase in precious metals flowing into Europe through Seville made Spain, for a while, the richest place in the world. Once vast silver deposits had been found in Bolivia in the 1540s, this process began to accelerate. But Spain was simply a staging post. The Spanish used this vast influx of money to buy the spices, silks, and Eastern luxuries they craved, and the silver and gold began to filter through those intricate networks of merchants that Cabot had failed to unravel in Mecca in 1485, and out to India and China. Often it found its way into the hands of merchants from Portugal and then England who had followed Vasco da Gama to the East in search of wealth. These were the days when a small sack of cloves brought back from there could set up a trader with a mansion outside London or Lisbon.
The silver and gold also filtered north, partly because of the activities of pirates who preyed on the Spanish convoys, and partly because of the consumption of dried cod on the Iberian peninsula. The English had also hoped for spices, silks, and gold from Cabot’s voyages, and when all they got was a profusion of cod off the Newfoundland coast, they temporarily gave up the whole idea of serious exploration. In fact the European discovery of cod in the frozen north was to have even wider political implications, and, by the end of the sixteenth century, they were being hauled out of the North Atlantic at the rate of 200 million a year.
Two centuries after Cabot, when war broke out between England and France in 1689, it was a dispute about cod off Newfoundland that was at the heart of the dispute. By 1784 one English politician could say that the Newfoundland fishery “was a more inexhaustible and infinitely more valuable source of wealth than all the mines in the world.” The supreme irony was that the dried cod caught off Newfoundland in the centuries to come was beginning to earn the gold and silver from Spain that they were mining and transporting so laboriously from the New World.
If these were the long-term positive effects of Columbus, Cabot, and Vespucci, and their contemporaries, on that same side of the scales must be thrown the later history of the Americas—the struggle for democracy, the tolerance of the United States Constitution and its example to the world, the great culture of music, painting, and literature from the American Arctic to the Antarctic that has emerged in the centuries since, the grandeur of the landscape and its effect on the world, the experiments in living, and the lessons of liberty. Also the weight of American civilization in our own times, flung to the defense of Europe in two world wars, and the haven for the dispossessed of Europe in the centuries before. Whatever crimes may have been committed by North and South Americans since independence, none can quite outweigh those contributions to the world.
But the other side of the scales weighs heavily too, and perhaps heaviest has been the miserable cruelty with which the native Americans were treated in the north and the south; the destruction of their landscapes and cultures, their torture and enslavement, the murder of their families that goes on deep in the Amazon even today, as indigenous tribes come up against loggers or rubber-plantation bosses. The natives of both North and South America faced what amounted to a last stand as independent people in the 1870s, after which their mere existence has depended largely on the whims of the descendents of the European settlers and their economic interests. Though recent events in Bolivia and Ecuador suggest they may be
making a political comeback.
Even by the time Las Casas was writing his books, he believed the discovery of America had led to the deaths of up to 40 million Indians. His figures have remained controversial ever since, but it was quite clear that a terrifying number had died, either from disease and poverty, or being forced to sell their children and their land to pay taxes—or from outright murder. There was a similar story in the north, where there was no record of royal concern, as there had been in Castile. The Fernandez brothers and their Bristol colleagues had brought back three Inuit men, presumably against their will. By the 1520s Giovanni da Verrazzano was taking an Inuit baby with him to Europe just to be able to demonstrate what it was like back home. By the middle of the century on Newfoundland, the Beothuk Indians were being hunted down and shot by official policy, on the grounds that they carried disease. Like the Tainos, they were extinct by the twentieth century.
The Spanish inherited the blame for what has been a continuing crime, a horrific blot on human history, and the Protestants of northern Europe justified their piracy against the Spanish empire partly by this “Black Legend” of Hispanic cruelty. But in some ways the northern settlers were worse. There was no enslavement and no conversion to Christianity that followed the early settlements in what is now Canada, because to the English-empire builders the Indians were less than human.
Here Vespucci was a key influence, from the precision with which he set out the nature of the indigenous people of the New World, as the intellectuals back home struggled to define their legal position. They were human. Vespucci lived among them and described them as fellow human beings. They were innocent and therefore not pagan, and having never heard of Christ, deserved tolerance. Vespucci the slave trader would not have encouraged profits from slavery, based on these descriptions. But he also described them particularly as owning nothing. the implication of this was that their status was like that of a European serf: they were bound to the land and therefore to the landowner. Vespucci may not actually have been an apologist for slavery, though he profited from the sale of American Indians, but he was, thanks to his definitions, an apologist for the notorious encomienda system, which dominated the development of Latin America.
It is true that had Columbus not arrived, the poor Tainos of Hispaniola would undoubtedly have been wiped out with equal cruelty by the advancing Caribs, who were themselves well practiced in the art of taking slaves, and also possibly eating their enemies. But the European colonization was done in the name of God, and with a cruelty and recklessness that implied that the New World was so far away, that neither God nor the colonial authorities could see the truth of what was happening. It was a cruelty meted out by colonists drawn from a class of adventurers who often were seriously in debt or former convicts, uncontrolled by anything approaching the rule of law.
It also paved the way for a new kind of industrial-scale slavery, bringing Africans to the New World to fuel the new industries and investments. In the quest for sugar, rubber, cotton, and tobacco on the new plantations, 10 million Africans were enslaved and shipped to the New World, to the great profit of Columbus’s adopted home of Seville and Cabot’s adopted home of Bristol, where the street names Whiteladies Road, Blackboy Hill still reveal the truth about how the proud mansions and broad avenues were paid for.
But the most ferocious result of the fusing of the two worlds was probably that great peril of any kind of globalization: disease. Europe encountered syphilis and polio in the New World, and it spread rapidly eastward. In return they brought smallpox, measles, diphtheria, plague, typhoid, cholera, and influenza, against which the native Americans had no resistance. The arrival of smallpox among the Aztecs was a major factor in the extraordinary conquest of Mexico by Cortés, just as it was a factor in the Christian conversion of the Indians, who watched this terrifying epidemic sweep through their communities while it left the Christian newcomers unharmed.
Also in this Columbian balance are the unintended consequences of the benefits to Europe of the encounter. The arrival of wheat turned the great grasslands of South America into wheat fields, and the great forests were felled and turned over to cattle ranching: By 1900 there were 20 million head of cattle in Argentina alone, displacing those who had lived there and threatening the ecosystems of the world. By the end of the twentieth century, cod was almost extinct from the Grand Banks off Newfoundland. The fate of the Amazonian rain forest—the guarantee of a temperate climate for mankind—now also hangs in the balance.
Having tamed the Atlantic, the European pioneers, with their shared terror of the wild, began the slow but inexorable process of taming the wildness they found in the Americas, making way for their ranches and plantations. And the final results of this still-unresolved process seem a frightening prospect for humanity itself.
The other peculiar side-effect emerged from the very wealth the Spanish dragged home across the ocean. Once the gold from the New World began pouring into Europe, it was used less as an investment in production and more for the purchase of Eastern luxuries from the Portuguese empire. This caused galloping inflation, which eventually came to ruin the Spanish empire itself. The silver and gold, which were the justification for empire at the beginning, were the seeds that guaranteed its eventual destruction.
By 1660 the amount of silver in Europe had tripled, Spanish money was worth a third of its value in 1505, and most of the fifths of this massive injection of wealth siphoned off by the Spanish kings had been frittered away to service debts incurred for their incessant European wars. Bankers profited but the Spanish crown did not. Worse, Spain soon forgot how to make things, believing that the import of money itself was sufficient for their economy. As much as 80 percent of the goods shipped from Spain to their new colonies had been imported from elsewhere in Europe. The business of money for its own sake, the sophistication of financial services, tends to price other productive businesses out of existence, and that was the corrosive effect it had on the Spanish economy.
The idea of gold had achieved a powerful grip on the European imagination. It wasn’t just that it represented stability in a period of economic and political uncertainty in the days of Columbus, Cabot, and Vespucci, but it represented the secret heart of a body of esoteric knowledge that was suddenly popular in intellectual circles. The Renaissance fascination for forgotten classical wisdom and alchemical texts gave gold a mystery and luster that it had never quite attained before. Columbus used to insist that his men go to confession before collecting it. He even told Pope Alexander that he had found King Solomon’s mines on Hispaniola. Pope Julius was treated in his final illness with molten gold. This religious fixation on gold, as well as the economic fixation, redoubled the inflationary confusion of the generations that followed. Gold—and therefore money—became more important than the wealth it represented, and so drove out productive wealth.
The inflation soon took hold across Europe, under the impact of Spanish spending. The more precious metal there was, the more bankers could extend their credit. The more interest-bearing debt was in circulation, the more power went to bankers and the more prices rose. Even in England, prices of manufactured goods had risen by 300 percent by the end of the sixteenth century, and food prices had soared by 700 percent.
Precious metals came to be the meaning of the New World for southern Europeans. (Northern Europeans were stuck with cod.) The silver settlement of Potosí came to be the largest city in the New World, and the silver convoys made their way first to Lima, then along the coast to Panama, across the land to Cartagena, then to Havana, and then home by convoy. These transport systems proved an overwhelming temptation to the adventurers of those European countries locked out by the Treaty of Tordesillas.
Ironically it was the gold and silver Sir Francis Drake stole from Spain on his circumnavigation of the globe, and which provided Queen Elizabeth of England with a profit of nearly 5,000 percent, that formed the basis of all British overseas investment. The great economist John Maynard Keynes described
how the money was used to set up the Levant Company, and the profits from that to set up the East India Company, and that Elizabeth’s forty-thousand-pound windfall at average rates of interest came out to the total of British investment in 1930, when he was writing. If the Spanish empire mined the money, its effects were widespread, far-reaching, and unpredictable.
I
“The idiocy of the man who killed his goose that he might get the golden eggs, was wisdom compared to the folly of the European nations, in outraging and destroying the Indian races, instead of civilizing them . . . and the wonderful variety of their natural productions which they would have sent us in exchange.”
WILLIAM HOWITT, English Quaker, 1838
The fall of Constantinople was one event that spurred the explosion of exploration in the 1490s. So was the development of navigation techniques and technology, the emergence of the astrolabe and the caravel. But then so was the Renaissance, and its fascination with classical knowledge. The first texts of Ptolemy’s Geography came to Europe via the Crusades, but it was the Renaissance scholars who translated it in the generation before Vespucci, and who made it available and so launched the fascination for cosmography of which Toscanelli was such a pioneer. It is no coincidence that people like Botticelli, Ghirlandaio, Michelangelo, and Leonardo da Vinci appear in this story: the New World was a Renaissance project.