The Europeans imported far more than disease into America. They also brought Old World plants and animals with them, species that had never before been introduced into the New World: plants such as wheat, rye, and bananas and animals such as horses, sheep, pigs, and cattle. Old World plants and animals experienced such amazing success that historian Alfred Crosby has deemed this development a “biological revolution.” The Pleistocene is an excellent place to go looking for an answer to the enormous biological success the Europeans experienced. Once again, the massive animal extinctions some 13,000 years ago shaped the course of modern history. The elimination of the bulk of the continent’s large mammals may have created huge, empty eco-niches into which European livestock entered with spectacular success. Meanwhile, the introduction of Old World plants may have doubled or perhaps even tripled the number of food crops available for cultivation in the Americas.18
HOW HORSE WILL TRAVEL
Transporting large animals such as horses to North America necessitated special devices and extreme care. Despite such measures, many of the animals died en route. (Robert M. Denhardt, The Horse of the Americas [Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1975])
More than just seeds came to the Americas. An entire knowledge base too had to be imported. Rice is a case in point. Of the 20 or so species of rice found on earth, only two ever became domesticated. One of those species originated along the Niger River in Mali. Although it is commonly believed that Europeans brought rice to the Americas, in truth, Africans played the key role in this particular intercontinental biological exchange. Only West Africans, enslaved and shipped across the Atlantic from their homeland along the “Rice Coast” from Senegal to Liberia, knew how to cultivate the crop productively. African women, in particular, possessed the detailed knowledge of soil and water conditions and the ins and outs of processing and cooking rice necessary for success with this staple. Racist notions, however, seem to have kept scholars from recognizing the truly fundamental role played by Africans in the biological revolution that swept across the New World.19
“TO BE SOLD”
Slaves from the west coast of Africa, where tidal rice cultivation had long been practiced, provided indispensable knowledge to southern planters. This late-eighteenth-century advertisement calls attention to the homeland of newly arrived slaves being auctioned outside of Charleston, South Carolina. (Library of Congress)
In some respects, Eurasian biology succeeded all too well. In 1609, rats stowed aboard British ships overran the Jamestown colony, while black flies, cockroaches, and a host of plant weeds—dandelions, chickweed, and stinging nettles—found their way across the Atlantic, much to the chagrin of the colonists. Even the Indians commented on the weeds. They dubbed plantain “Englishman’s Foot” after watching it repeatedly sprout wherever the colonists ventured. As one Indian source observed, the weed “was never known before the English came into this country.”20
On balance, the European settlers greatly benefited from the biological exchange that accompanied the journey to America. Perhaps the most important payoff came as New World plant foods such as maize, potatoes, beans, and squash crossed the Atlantic in the other direction, allowing farmers to optimize the use of European soil and weather conditions. The importance of maize alone, which can flourish in areas that are too dry for planting rice and too wet for planting wheat, cannot be overstated. The plant went on to become one of the world’s premier food crops. “The Indian Corn, or Maiz,” wrote one colonist in 1701, “proves the most useful Grain in the World.” Maize could grow in a large number of different environmental settings. “It refuses no Grounds, unless the barren Sands, and when planted in good Ground, will repay the Planter seven or eight hundred fold.”21 It is unlikely that the population of Europe could have surged to the extent that it did in the two and a half centuries after Columbus without the New World crops.
KEEP OUT
Apart from the biological baggage, the colonists also brought a variety of cultural beliefs and practices that profoundly affected the land. Chief among these was a commitment to private property—the idea that people could erect boundaries and claim exclusive use of a parcel of earth. But first the colonists had to gain possession of the land itself. The Indians, as already noted, engaged in a complex relationship with the land, relying on mobility to exploit the natural environment’s seasonal diversity. Thus they did not settle permanently and improve property in the way that the English expected. According to one seventeenth-century British observer, Indians had “no particular property in any part or parcell of the country, but only a general residencie there, as wild beasts have in the forest.”22 In other words, Indians did not establish private property in land. They did not improve the land by fencing and farming the soil in the way the English expected, choosing instead, as the Europeans saw it, to merely roam the landscape like wild animals. This view of Indian subsistence thus served as a convenient means for dispossessing the Native Americans. What the Indians did not improve and own the colonists were free, they reasoned, to take and use for themselves.
Instead of establishing exclusive rights to ownership, the Indian concept of property was far more fluid. Native Americans claimed not the land itself, but what existed on it, such as wild berries, acorns, fish, or game animals. The names the Indians gave to different parts of the landscape are suggestive. It was common for Indian place names to describe the kinds of plants or animals that could be found in a particular locale. Abessah in Maine, for example, translated as “clam bake place.”23 Other place names described locales where eggs could be gathered, where fish could be caught, and so on. In contrast, the colonists tended to use more arbitrary language to describe the landscape, naming places after people and places in their homeland. When the British seized New Amsterdam from the Dutch in 1664, they named it New York in honor of King Charles II’s younger brother, James, Duke of York.
Not surprisingly, given their different views of how to relate to the land, the Indians and colonists clashed over the question of ownership. Indians often conveyed land to the colonists. But what the Indians thought they were giving and what the colonists thought they were getting were two different matters. Native Americans commonly believed that they were simply supplying whites with the same rights to land that they themselves had: to use it for planting corn, hunting, or whatever other subsistence activity was possible there. The colonists of course thought they were being given the exclusive right to own the property.
Although they had a less fixed understanding of property, the Indians were not at all cavalier about their land rights. In fact, they were quite aware of the limits and boundaries of their claims. Roger Williams noted that the Native Americans were “very exact and punctuall in the bounds of their Lands, belonging to this or that Prince or People.”24 Although it is tempting to assume that only the colonists possessed the requisite cartographic knowledge to dominate the land, in truth the Indians used their knowledge of the continent to map it, and even to contest the Europeans’ efforts to dispossess them. Some deeds even included graphic renderings of the landscape drawn by Indians themselves that reserved for them rights to continue their subsistence practices. In 1703, for example, the Weantinock Indians, who lived and fished for shad and eels along the banks of the present-day Housatonic River in Connecticut, conveyed land to white settlers. But in a map accompanying the deed, the Indians explicitly reserved the right to continue fishing.25
Nevertheless, the colonists did ultimately manage to convert the landscape into private property. Eventually, the land would be bought and sold for the purposes of profit, a development that has had enduring ecological consequences. “More than anything else,” historian William Cronon has written, “it was the treatment of land and property as commodities traded at market that distinguished English conceptions of ownership from Indian ones.”26
THE FUR TRADE
Private property had a profound effect on human relations with the natural world. But it was not alone among
European institutions in terms of its far-reaching ecological consequences. European commodities markets, and North America’s incorporation into them, also had tremendous impact on the continent. Animals such as deer and beaver that Indians had hunted to survive were swept into a burgeoning fur trade and, in places, annihilated.
WEANTINOCK DEED
Although the original deed, drawn up on February 8, 1703 is lost, this rendering in Edward R. Lambert, History of the Colony of New Haven (1838), shows the graphic Indians drew to reserve their right to fish at the falls. (Kelvin Smith Library, Case Western Reserve University)
Prior to the emergence of a full-fledged market in game in the seventeenth century, beavers existed in huge numbers. These creatures were (and are) herbivores, meaning that they survived chiefly on plant species. They also constructed dams and canals as a way of creating a suitable habitat near their food sources. Their projects—and they have been known to erect dams 18 feet high and 4,000 feet long—radically altered ecosystems, creating ponds and changing streamflows. The Europeans chiefly valued beavers because their underhairs made excellent felt hats. In the late sixteenth century, such hats were all the rage in England and France, a trend that led to the eventual annihilation of Europe’s beavers and the shift in focus toward America. As early as the end of the seventeenth century, overhunting in response to the rise of a market in furs caused the beaver population of southern New England to crash.
Some have held that Indians killed beavers, deer, and other game animals because the Europeans had tricked them into giving up the conservation impulse implicit in their elaborate game taboos. In this view, the Indians saw game animals as family members and only killed what they needed to survive. Then the Europeans entered the picture and perverted this relationship by seducing Indians with various trade goods. One historian has even put forth the controversial view that the Indians blamed beaver and moose for the epidemics that raged through their society, a development that undermined their spiritual relationship with such creatures. This belief then spurred them on an extermination campaign.27
One thing we can be sure of: When epidemic disease led to the collapse of the Native American population, the stage was set for a change in the way these people related to game animals. Whether Indians blamed such animals for their illnesses or not, when Europeans arrived bearing trade goods, many Indians willingly accepted them in return for beaver pelts, in part at least to enhance their battered political prospects in a period of extreme stress and demographic upheaval. Wampumpeag, or wampum, beads made from the shells of whelks and quahogs, soon took on enormous symbolic significance among the Indians of southern New England, playing a central role in the fur trade. Eventually, Indians realized that beaver pelts could command a price on the market. By killing the animals and exchanging them for wampum they could bolster their personal power and political prospects.28
The decline in beaver had ecological effects that radiated out across the New England landscape. Ecologists consider the beaver a “keystone species,” an animal that many other life forms rely on to survive. Beavers create ponds and in the process furnish habitats for turtles, frogs, fish, and waterfowl. Woodpeckers and chickadees nest and forage in the trees downed by these creatures. Thus the decline in the beaver population presaged important changes for species throughout the ecosystem. From the standpoint of humankind, however, the decline had at least one positive effect. With the animals no longer around to tend to them, beaver dams throughout New England collapsed, exposing soils rich in organic matter and creating an ideal environment for grass, which the colonists used as forage for their livestock.
In the South, deer more than beavers played the key role in the emerging fur trade. The warmer climate prevented southern beavers from developing the thick furs so common further north. That fact made the animals far less viable commodities. Europeans used deerskins, however, to make leather—fashioning gloves, saddles, bookbindings, and other items out of them. Until the early eighteenth century, leather workers relied on European cattle for their raw material. But when disease broke out among the French cattle herds, they turned to America’s deer to make up for the shortfall.
Southern Indians, like tribes in the North, were initially swayed to kill more deer in exchange for a range of goods, including guns, metal kettles, knives, hoes, linen, and silk. As early as 1699, overhunting spurred the Virginia legislature, in an early preservation effort, to ban the killing of white-tailed deer between February and July. Other efforts to regulate hunting followed. Beginning in the eighteenth century, market forces combined with the Indians’ appetite for alcohol to put even heavier pressure on the southern deer population. By 1801, Mad Dog, a Creek chieftain, remarked, “our deer and game is almost gone.” In all probability, however, the species never went extinct in the southern colonies. That was because Europeans, concerned about the safety of their livestock, were also killing wolves and other animals that preyed on deer.29 In this respect, at least, ecology may have gotten the better of capitalism and its markets.
IN THE WOODS
New World timber, like fish and fur-bearing animals, also entered very early into the web of transatlantic commerce. By the late sixteenth century, a wood shortage had descended across Britain, a nation that was heavily dependent on this commodity for meeting its industrial, naval, and energy needs. Indeed, the demand for wood had never been greater. The British fishing fleet, with its sights set on Newfoundland, expanded rapidly in this period, requiring large amounts of wood for building the new vessels. Carpenters used huge quantities of timber for mine shafts, factories, and furnaces. Coopers required staves and hoops in an age when nearly everything of importance was stored and shipped in barrels. Brickmakers, glassmakers, ironmakers, and even bakers used wood for fuel. Producing a single ton of iron required burning all the trees on a two-acre piece of woodland. The late sixteenth-century timber shortage thus struck at the very heart of British economic dominance, and its effects trickled down the social scale. As the price of firewood doubled between the 1540s and the 1570s and then tripled again in another six decades, Britain’s poor found themselves shivering through the winter. The development of a transatlantic timber trade would do little to ease this burden, but it did play a major role in bolstering British naval power and in serving commercial needs throughout the Atlantic world.30
British shipbuilders had for some time been relying on the forests of northern Europe. But war in the 1650s had severely interfered with this trade. Moreover, these forests rarely had trees that were tall enough to completely satisfy the requirements of British shipwrights. New England’s supply of white pines proved especially enticing. Reaching as high as 150 feet and commonly three to four feet in diameter, the trees—more because of their sheer numbers than their actual size—impressed the British colonists.
Beginning in the 1640s, New England’s forests also played a vital role in facilitating trade across the Atlantic Ocean. Merchants in heavily deforested Atlantic and Caribbean islands desperately sought wood for shipping wine and sugar. For them, the forests of New Hampshire and Maine were a godsend, supplying the raw material they needed for making the barrels and casks so crucial to the free flow of commodities.
It was not just the forests of New England that suffered to pay for Europe’s commercial and naval expansion. The pinelands of the South also experienced significant change. A nearly unbroken 100-mile-wide band of longleaf pines stretched all the way from southeastern Virginia to Texas, a distance of some 1,500 miles. Among the first of the trees to grow in a recently burned or cleared forest, pines produce strong and durable wood perfect for a variety of building purposes. They are also an important source of pitch and tar. Tar helped to preserve wooden fences, and when smeared on the rigging of ships it prevented fraying. Pitch is an even heavier and stickier substance, often painted onto a boat’s hull to prevent leaks. War between Russia and Sweden in the early eighteenth century had severely curtailed Britain’s access to these products, known col
lectively as “naval stores” because of their role in maritime pursuits. Conveniently, increased settlement in the Carolinas put the longleaf pine belt near at hand. By 1715, American lumber supplied about half of Britain’s naval needs.31
At the same time that the forests of the East catered to European economic and military pursuits, cities began to sprout in America, placing an added burden on the continent’s woodlands. Within 10 years of Boston’s founding, the nearby woods were so depleted that wood had to be imported from as far away as Cape Ann, 30 miles to the north. By the late eighteenth century, one observer near Philadelphia noted that “the forests are everywhere thin.” In 1745, Benjamin Franklin bemoaned the depletion of the wood supply, which had once been “at any man’s door” but now required shipping of up to 100 miles from hinterlands to coastal cities.32 And the problem was not confined to the North alone. Just a handful of years after the founding of Georgia in 1732, the city of Savannah was already importing firewood from distant plantations. The scarcity of wood in urban areas became so acute that the colonists felt the need to appoint official “corders,” who helped prevent firewood suppliers from shortchanging customers. New York appointed its first corder in 1680, and Boston shortly thereafter.
The depletion of the forest had three main ecological consequences. First, by destroying animal habitat, it affected species diversity. Animals such as bears, dependent on the acorns supplied by oak trees, found it far more difficult to survive in a world without woods. Panthers and wolves also felt the effects of the decline. But like many ecological changes, the results were not always simple. Some species of birds actually flourished as the forests disappeared. Foxes and wolves adversely affected by the clearing trend could no longer prey on bobwhite quail, for example. Other animals such as opossums even preferred the new, cultivated habitat created by the colonists in the South.33
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