Not that Columbus realized it at the time. Arriving in the Americas, he was dumbfounded by the profusion of unfamiliar flora and fauna he faced. He was at times deeply frustrated by his inability to put a name to plants and animals he saw. The few learned men aboard his ships, such as his physician, Dr. Chanca, were similarly baffled.
The world was a very different place in 1492. When Columbus was journeying across the Atlantic, tomatoes, and tomato sauce, were unknown in Italy, or anywhere in Europe. The same situation applied to chocolate, widespread in the Americas for three thousand years before Columbus, but unfamiliar to European palates. Tobacco presented a similar case: deeply woven into Indian life and ritual, but unknown to Europeans. When Columbus and his men encountered these items, they did not know what to make of them. Yet, as a result of their importing these products to Europe, and transplanting flora and fauna they had brought with them in their ships, some as large as horses, others as small as microorganisms, the Old World and the New became interconnected in ways that no one, least of all Columbus, anticipated.
Nothing would ever be the same. Columbus could not have guessed that the most lasting and irreversible effects of his voyages would transcend his quest for empire and trade; instead, he inadvertently transformed the global environment. More than Christianity, or slavery, or gold, or any of the other forces with which Columbus and Spain grappled, this two-way transmission between the Old World and the New World brought about changes larger than they could have imagined. The transformation was wide-ranging, cataclysmic, and enduring. And it would take years, decades, centuries for the effects of this two-way transmission to unfold.
This slow-moving spectacle is known as the Columbian Exchange, first identified by Alfred Crosby, a professor at the University of Texas in Austin, in 1972. Within a couple of decades, Crosby’s insights gave rise to a new way of considering the Columbian legacy. “When Europeans first touched the shores of the Americas,” he wrote, “Old World crops such as wheat, barley, rice, and turnips had not traveled west across the Atlantic, and New World crops such as maize, white potatoes, sweet potatoes, and manioc had not traveled east to Europe.” These vast differences extended to animal life as well. “In the Americas, there were no horses, cattle, sheep or goats.” They were all “animals of Old World origin.” In fact, with few exceptions, the New World had no domesticated animals, no chickens, and no cattle until the coming of Columbus. And when they did arrive, their presence changed the hunting, eating, and ultimately the migratory habits and tribal structures of the Indians who made use of them for food, labor, and companionship.
Their effects percolated through the culture in ways that the Spaniards could not have imagined. Take the horses that Columbus brought along with him, for instance. At first, they terrified the Indians, who had never seen beasts such as these. In time, the horses spread north, transforming Indian life. “The horse gave the Indian the speed and stamina needed to take advantage of the opportunity to harvest the immense quantities of food represented by the buffalo herds of North America and the herds of wild cattle that propagated so rapidly in the grasslands of both Americas,” Crosby observed. There were still more unexpected consequences. “The Indians stopped farming; the work was hard, boring, and unrewarding, compared with nomadic life.” So the Indians mounted their steeds and roamed the pampas, killing more animals than ever before as they went, more animals than they needed for themselves and their families. The Indian on horseback could increase and multiply. Greater numbers of Indians led to a growing division between rich and poor, to social stratification, and to slavery. As Crosby put it, “the egalitarianism of poverty began to disappear.”
So the animals brought by Europeans were not an unmixed blessing. Along with them—and with the associated black rats and sinister Aedes aegypti mosquitoes—came deadly disease: smallpox, measles, chicken pox, influenza, yellow fever, and dengue fever. These pathogens infiltrated the New World, leaving destruction and suffering in their wake. The human animal also brought its pathogens, including syphilis.
Syphilis is the most commonly cited example of disease transmission between the Old World and the New for which Columbus’s voyages are held responsible, but there is little consensus about which way the venereal diseases traveled. Did the Indians infect the Spaniards, or was it the other way around? Accounts of syphilis arising spontaneously on both continents further complicated the question of how the disease spread. Clearly some of Columbus’s crew suffered from syphilislike symptoms, as Dr. Chanca noted. But did they acquire the disease by mingling with Indian women, or did they bring the disease with them and transmit it to their unsuspecting victims? Or were different strains passed back and forth? This notorious aspect of the Columbian Exchange remains unanswered.
On a more positive side of the ledger, the Columbian Exchange introduced staples such as white potatoes, sweet potatoes, maize, and cassava to Europe, and brought wheat, turnips, barley, apples, and rice from Europe to the Americas. In the two-way transmission of the Columbian Exchange, a fragrant and colorful stream of lilacs and daisies and daffodils, along with lemons, oranges, lettuce, cabbage, pears, peaches, bananas, and coffee traveled from the Old World to the New. Meanwhile, pumpkins, squash, lima beans, and peppers traveled from the New World to the Old, as did peanuts, chocolate, and sweet potatoes. Honeybees arrived in the Americas, turkeys in the Old.
These crops were associated with population growth and economic growth. That was fine as far as it went, and relatively benign. But the Europeans also brought with them alcohol and alcoholism, another scourge that decimated heretofore innocent local populations. The devastating effects of European agriculture and pathogens on American Indians and their land did not mean the New World’s ecosystem and its peoples were inferior; it resulted from the novelty of the assault. In time, plants, animals, and people adapted to the invaders, long after the devastation wrought by the initial contact.
Once started, the Columbian Exchange never ceased, and it continues at an ever-accelerating pace. Crosby called the phenomenon a “wild oscillation of nature” that occurs when an isolated region emerges into the larger environment. “Possibly it will never be repeated in as spectacular fashion as in the Americas in the first post-Columbian century, not unless there is, one day, an exchange of life forms between planets.”
For better or worse, or rather, for better and worse, this is Columbus’s enduring, relentless, inescapable, all-encompassing legacy.
PART THREE
Decadence
CHAPTER 8
“A Great Roaring”
Columbus labored uncertainly on muleback along stony trails and dusty plains toward Valladolid, in north central Spain. Ferdinand and Isabella had wed here twenty-eight years earlier, in 1469, and they occasionally returned to preside over their expanding empire. Columbus’s companions included two close relatives of Caonabó, the duplicitous Indian cacique with whom he had formed an alliance. The Admiral of the Ocean Sea had planned to present Caonabó himself to the Sovereigns as a trophy, but he had died of disease at sea. Only his relatives remained.
The Admiral had returned to Spain at the conclusion of his second voyage only weeks before, and he managed this overland journey as if it were an extension of that seagoing enterprise. As the party stumbled on their way, their caged parrots, souvenirs of Hispaniola, screeched in alarm. Caonabó’s brother, who had converted to Christianity and taken the name Don Diego, remained nearly as conspicuous, wearing a prominent collar fashioned from gold and his crown, said to be “big and tall, with wings on its sides like a shield and golden eyes as large as silver cups.”
Ravaged by illness, Columbus looked a decade older than his forty-six years, drained of the vigor and stamina that had propelled him as a young navigator. His fine mane of hair had gone white, and his vision constantly troubled him, his retinas scorched from long hours of gazing at the sunlit sea. His bones ached with every lurch of the mule on which he rode. Suffering from arthritis and other disorders
, he knew his time was limited, and rather than resting on his laurels, and allowing others to win glory and riches by building on the discoveries that he had made in the previous five years, he was determined to cram as much exploration as possible into the time left to him.
At times he brooded on the lack of recognition for his astonishing exploration of the Indies. “I discovered for you,” he reminded Ferdinand and Isabella between voyages, “333 leagues of mainland at the very end of the Orient and named 700 islands in addition to what was discovered on the first voyage, and I pacified for you the island of Hispaniola, which is larger than Spain and inhabited by innumerable people.” Columbus should have thought twice before making this boast. The Sovereigns had made him, and they could break him, confiscate his discoveries, and strip him of his honors, titles, and wealth if they wished.
Columbus, in contrast, believed that he had been unfairly penalized for his empire building rather than generously rewarded, as he deserved. He decried the “cursing and the scorn for the enterprise” that he had risked his life to set in motion, all because “I had not sent back ships right away laden with gold.” No one bothered to take into account the “enormous difficulties” that he faced. “For my sins, or rather, for my salvation, I was held in aversion, and obstacles were raised to whatever I said and asked.” He reminded his Sovereigns that he had, in the past, “brought you enough samples of gold and told you about the existence of gold mines and very large nuggets and also copper, and I delivered to you so many kinds of spices that it would be too long to write down,” but, he said bitterly, “all of this made no difference to some people”—his critics and rivals at court—“who had very consciously begun speaking ill of the enterprise.” He had performed the tasks that explorers through the ages had accomplished on behalf of their rulers and princes: “to serve God while expanding their own dominion.” Yet, “the more I argued for [the enterprise], the more the detractors redoubled their jokes on the subject.” He had implored Ferdinand and Isabella to hear his plea, but “Your Highnesses responded to me with a smile, saying that I should not be troubled at all by it because you did not view those who spoke ill of this enterprise as deserving authority or credence.” Nevertheless, he feared they hovered on the verge of betraying the sacred cause he shared with them.
His many discoveries had whetted his appetite for more. He was driven in part by greed and self-aggrandizement, and in part by a need to exonerate himself, to prove to the Sovereigns that he had kept his sacred promises to them, despite the incomplete and often contradictory evidence of his voyages. Even more troubling, he refused to address his monstrous blunders: the oath he had made his men swear on pain of death that Cuba belonged to the mainland of India, the fifty thousand Indians who had committed suicide in protest of his occupation of their lands, and his failure to locate the Grand Khan.
To proclaim his humility and piety, and perhaps unconsciously atone for the fatal outcome of his administration, Columbus took to wearing the habit of a Franciscan friar, woven of coarse brown cloth. Following the precepts of St. Francis of Assisi, members of this mendicant religious order emphasized penance. Presumably he belonged to the Third Order, the most secular Franciscan subdivision, which did not require its members to live in a Franciscan community but instead to work zealously to improve their lives. He scarcely resembled the imperious Admiral of the Ocean Sea, celebrated discoverer of an empire, and intimate of the Sovereigns. He had carefully concealed signs of worldly ambition and vanity in favor of devotion and humility.
Garbed in plain attire, he had visited at length with Andrés Bernáldez, who appreciated Columbus without challenging him. He entrusted his journals of the second voyage to the curate, who was compiling an ambitious history of the reign of Ferdinand and Isabella, the Catholic Sovereigns who had driven the infidels from Spanish soil. Columbus claimed a small but significant place in this history, one that had more to do with his discovery of gold than of new lands and peoples. A goldsmith named Fermín Zedo claimed that the walnut-size nuggets that Columbus had transported to Spain were alloys. No, Columbus insisted, the gold was pure, and he showed samples to prove his point, justifying himself in Bernáldez’s eyes.
Columbus showed Bernáldez the massive gold collar worn by Caonabó’s brother. “This I saw and held in my hands,” he exclaimed, together with Indian “crowns, masks, girdles, collars, and many articles woven of cotton.” On closer inspection, the curate made out the devil “represented in the shape of a monkey or owl’s head, or other, worse shapes.” Still, he beheld in amazement these souvenirs of another world, “winged crowns with gold eyes on their sides, and especially a crown they said belonged to the cacique Caonabó, which was very big and tall, with wings on its sides like a shield and golden eyes as large as silver cups weighing half a mark, each one placed there in a very strange and ingenious manner.” As if that finery were not sufficient, “the devil, too, was represented on that crown.” The Indian idolaters, he assumed, “regarded the devil as lord.”
Columbus arrived at Valladolid to learn that the Sovereigns had departed for the wedding of Don Juan and the Archduchess Margarita on April 3, 1497, at Burgos. On he went, for at Burgos he could see his sons, Diego and Ferdinand, and finally present the king and queen with the gifts and blandishments designed to secure his monopoly on the lands he had claimed in their names. His appearance there galvanized the desultory preparations for his return to Hispaniola. His Franciscan habit, his show of piety, his protestations of loyalty, his seriousness of purpose, and, above all, his experience exploring in the name of the Sovereigns combined to work in his favor. Although Columbus had compromised himself and fallen short, and others had been working strenuously to discredit him, he remained the discoverer who had brought the Sovereigns their empire.
Just days later, on April 20, they approved a third voyage, authorizing him to bring three hundred people to the colony. Another fifty would be able to go at their own expense; spurred by the promise of easy riches, takers were easy to find. Able-bodied seamen and artisans would receive wages of thirty maravedís a day; soldiers, laborers (especially those willing to dig for gold), and cabin boys would receive twenty maravedís a day. Those prepared to stay and cultivate the land would earn six thousand maravedís a year. Women were permitted to participate in the voyage, grudgingly, it seems. Very little is known about this group, but it is assumed that they were expected to work, most likely at domestic chores.
To fill out the ships’ rosters, the Sovereigns offered pardons to jailed criminals who agreed to sail with Columbus. The policy did not apply to those convicted of murder, treason, sodomy, arson, or counterfeiting, but other convicts prepared to go to “Hispaniola and the islands and mainland of the Indies” for a year or more would receive a reduced sentence. And in Hispaniola, they would be free. These inducements hardly gave the Admiral of the Ocean Sea the experienced, disciplined force required for a voyage of discovery. Instead of dedicated servants of the crown, he found himself surrounded by mercenaries, amateur gold diggers, and criminals waiting for the chance to cause mayhem.
Financial backing for the voyage was slower to materialize; eventually the Sovereigns authorized 2,824,326 maravedís. By February 17, 1498, Columbus had merely 350,094 in hand to pay for all the necessary provisions, sail, and other costly supplies related to the undertaking. Extra support came not from Spain, but from the Seville bureau of the Genoese bank that had financed his long-ago merchant voyages to the Greek island of Chios. Although the Sovereigns had set aside funds for the voyage, Columbus had to answer to their notoriously cranky administrator, Bishop Fonseca, who disliked him intensely, and blocked or delayed the transfers. When a cargo of wheat for the voyage arrived from Genoa, Columbus could not pay.
After weeks, and then months of frustration, the cantankerous Admiral himself got into a fistfight with one of Fonseca’s representatives, Jimeno Breviesca, who had been ridiculing the Enterprise of the Indies. Hearing criticism once too often, Columbus knocked th
e bureaucrat to the ground, and kicked him. Breviesca was an officer of the crown, and by losing his temper Columbus had damaged his reputation, especially in the eyes of the Sovereigns.
In fact, his problems extended far beyond this unseemly brawl. He was losing the monopoly he had held for the previous six years over Spain’s transoceanic empire. Although the boundaries of the Treaty of Tordesillas were still in place, challengers were emerging, some obtaining the backing of Ferdinand and Isabella. Columbus no longer had the Indies to himself.
The exploration squadron under his command consisted of three ships: Santa María, the flagship; El Correo (“the Courier”), a caravel owned by Columbus and his Sovereigns; and La Vaqueños, thought to be leased to the expedition by a widow in Palos, Spain. Columbus planned to sail along a southerly course to the Cape Verde Islands, an archipelago often islets off the coast of West Africa. Known, if not well understood, since antiquity, they had been rediscovered by António de Noli of Genoa, who had sailed for Prince Henry the Navigator. King Alfonso V of Portugal later appointed António de Noli as the first governor of Cape Verde.
The Cape Verde Islands proved drab and bereft of the luxurious vegetation of other landmasses. Columbus declared the name “absolutely false . . . because they are so arid that I saw nothing green on them.”
Heading into uncharted waters, he planned to go farther south than ever before, in the belief that the closer to the equator he came, the more valuable his discoveries would be. This notion circulated among cosmographers such as Jaime Ferrer, who had advised Columbus that near the equator “great and precious things such as gems and gold and spicery and drugs” could be found. According to Ferrer, Indians, Arabs, and Ethiopians agreed “the majority of precious things come from a very hot region where the inhabitants are black or tan.” Therefore, wherever Columbus found such people he would find the precious items he sought.
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