Lesser Beasts: A Snout-to-Tail History of the Humble Pig

by Mark Essig

  These voyages started what has become known as the “Columbian exchange.” The landmasses of the Americas had been separated from those of Eurasia and Africa for millions of years, and the people of the New World had had no contact with those of the Old World since the first migrants crossed over the Bering Land Bridge into the Americas ten or twenty millennia earlier. Columbus and his fellow explorers changed all that by inaugurating the era of transatlantic travel, which transformed the biota of the entire world.

  Plants and animals flowed in both directions across the Atlantic. In the realm of food, the New World contributed the potato, sweet potato, and corn, as well as chocolate and tomatoes. Within a few hundred years, these foods had reshaped the diets of people from Ireland to Africa to China, often for the better. The people of the New World, by contrast, experienced the Columbian exchange in a more immediate and catastrophic way. First, European epidemic disease, to which Indian peoples had no immunity, killed off much of the indigenous population. Then Spanish soldiers conquered the survivors and set about plundering the continent’s gold and silver.

  In conquest and colonization, the Spanish had a key ally that has earned little credit: the pig. An army travels on its stomach, and Spanish soldiers filled their bellies with pork.

  Feeding the invading soldiers proved difficult at first. Columbus set up base on the north side of the island of Española, in what is now the Dominican Republic. Wheat and other European crops failed in the hot, wet climate, so Spaniards ate mostly cassava, the starchy root that was the dietary staple of the Taino, the island’s native residents. Sheep, like wheat, wilted in the damp heat. Cattle showed more promise but would need a few generations to acclimate to the weather and build up a herd—time the conquerors didn’t have.

  Pigs never missed a beat. As soon as their cloven hooves landed in the soft jungle mud of the Caribbean islands, they started eating and breeding. Just two years after Columbus’s second expedition made landfall, one Spaniard noted that the pigs “reproduced in a superlative manner.” In a few more years the number of hogs running wild was infinitos, and “all the mountains swarmed with them.”

  Pigs are the weediest domestic animal—opportunistic, tough, and fecund. Like rats, they can live nearly anywhere; unlike rats, they taste good. Spanish and Portuguese sailors dumped breeding pairs of pigs on uninhabited islands. “A sow and a boar have been left to breed” on a certain island, one Spanish explorer told another in a letter. “Do not kill them. If there should be many, take those you need, but always leave some to breed, and also, on your way, leave a sow and a boar on the other islands.” In 1609 the ship Sea Venture, on a mission to bring supplies to starving colonists at Jamestown, Virginia, was blown off course by a hurricane and ran aground on the shoals off Bermuda. When the 150 people aboard made it to shore, they were overjoyed to find plenty of pigs, descendants of a batch left by the Spanish a century before.

  Pigs loved the warmth of Española, the dense forests, the coastal marshes, the plentiful rainfall, and the lack of predators. They especially loved its food. Columbus wrote that the trees and plants there were “as different from ours [in Europe] as day from night,” but they were agreeable to pigs, which rooted up the Tainos’ cassava and sweet potatoes and devoured their guavas and pineapples. They snatched baby birds out of nests and lizards and snakes from the ground. Their favorite food was the jobo, a plum-sized fruit from a tree native to the American tropics. One Spaniard risked blasphemy by claiming that pork from pigs fattened on this fruit tasted even better than the acorn-fed variety back home.

  The Spaniards shipped pigs to other islands as well. The Jamaican mountains soon held what one witness called “countless herds,” and in 1514 the governor of Cuba told King Ferdinand that the herd of 24 pigs he had carried to the island less than two decades before had ballooned to 30,000.

  The European pigs had strolled into an empty niche. Before Columbus’s expedition, the only mammals living in the Greater Antilles—the island chain that comprises Cuba, Hispaniola, Jamaica, and Puerto Rico—had been the Taino people, bats, and a largish rodent called the hutia. The mainland of North and South America hosted thousands of land mammals, but few were domestic: the peoples of the Andes had domesticated llamas, alpacas, and guinea pigs, and further north some tribes kept turkeys and ducks. From Patagonia to the Arctic, native peoples kept dogs, which had made the trip with the first humans to colonize the Americas. All of these beasts had their uses, but none could match Europe’s livestock for the purposes of transport, traction, and meat production.

  There’s a simple reason for this disparity: the Americas contained few wild animals suitable for domestication. Peccaries, the American cousins to Eurasian pigs, are territorial and lack the strong dominance hierarchy vital to the process. Bison, though similar to cattle, are prone to stress disorders, while deer and moose are solitary and skittish. Two good candidates, horses and camels, had become extinct in North America around 11,000 bc, probably as a result of overhunting by humans. American societies had developed without the livestock that had contributed so much to the strength and wealth of European peoples.

  That lack of livestock also left the Indians vulnerable to disease. For thousands of years Europeans had lived in dense communities thick with domestic animals. This formed the perfect breeding ground for pathogens, which spread from person to person and often jumped the species barrier between humans and animals, evolving new ways to kill. When Spaniards and their animals arrived in the Americas, they carried with them smallpox, measles, whooping cough, bubonic plague, malaria, yellow fever, diphtheria, amoebic dysentery, and influenza—along with the antibodies necessary to survive these scourges. Europeans, that is, had grown up with these diseases and therefore developed some immunity to them. The Indians had not. What followed is known as a “virgin-soil epidemic,” when the deadly diseases of the Old World infected Indian peoples whose immune systems had no defenses against them.

  The mortality rates of these epidemics made the Black Death seem relatively minor by comparison. In the century after Hernando Cortez invaded Mexico, the Indian population plummeted by as much as 90 percent. Disease swept through the Americas so quickly that most Indians encountered European pathogens long before they met any European people. Spanish soldiers, brutal as they were, merely administered the coup de grâce when they defeated Native Americans in battle.

  The islands of Española and Cuba functioned as advance bases for military forces intent on conquering the American mainland and plundering gold and silver. Outfitting an army from Spain would have been nearly impossible, given the long ocean voyage to the New World. The Caribbean islands, with their rapidly breeding herds of animals, served as a Spanish commissariat. Within three decades of Columbus’s first landing, the Spanish had assembled everything they needed to conquer most of the Western Hemisphere.

  Starting in 1492, corn, tomatoes, and potatoes were shipped to the Old World, and the full complement of European domestic plants and animals—as well as infectious diseases—arrived in the New World. Pigs, appearing at bottom left in this sixteenth-century illustration, played an unheralded but crucial role in the Spanish conquest of the Americas.

  To assist its soldiers, Spain relied on horses, dogs, and pigs. The horses allowed speedy travel over great distances and also intimidated opponents, who had never before seen a horse, let alone a man on horseback. The dogs, similar to mastiffs and wolfhounds, attacked and killed the enemy. Pigs formed a mobile food supply, trailing along at the rear of the column. Horses and dogs found glory in battle. Pigs, cast in a supporting role, have been largely forgotten. A Spanish historian has argued that, though the horse contributed greatly to the conquest, “the hog was of greater importance and contributed to a degree that defies exaggeration.”

  Having bred so promiscuously on the islands, pigs were the cheapest source of meat available to the hordes of soldiers amassing in the Caribbean. Once ashore on the
mainland, swine could be counted on to start breeding just as prolifically as they had on the islands. Unlike cows, they didn’t require pastures but could pick up their living along the trail. The one supposed downside—the difficulty of herding pigs—was not a problem at all: pigs can be herded quite easily, as the Spaniards knew well.

  The conquistadores Hernán Cortés, Francisco Pizarro, and Hernando De Soto hailed from Extremadura, a highland region in the west of Spain known for its pig herds. Legend has it that Pizarro, conqueror of Peru, was a bastard who had been abandoned as an infant and survived by suckling at a sow’s teats. This last charge was plainly a slander, although Pizarro was, in fact, a bastard. His father was a member of the lesser nobility whose moderate wealth derived in part from hog raising; his mother was a peasant girl working as a convent maid when she became pregnant. Pizarro grew up with his mother’s family, and, like most peasant boys in Extremadura, he probably tended hogs. His enemies called him a swineherd to insult him, but the barb carried little sting in his home region.

  Since Roman times, writers have noted that the oak forests of Extremadura are especially suitable for pig grazing. The region is known, these days, as the home of jamón ibérico de bellota, or ham from acorn-fattened hogs. The key tree variety is the holm oak, which yields abundant crops of sweet acorns. On sandy soils closer to the coast, cork oaks provide acorns as well as bark to plug wine bottles.

  Given the ample supply of mast for hogs, nearly everyone in Extremadura kept pigs: a traveler once observed that settlements in the region should be described not as villages but as “coalitions of pigsties.” In 1554 one community in Extremadura reported that 100,000 pigs had been fattened there. The mountains also offered a climate ideal for curing pork, cooler than the lowlands in the summer and drier in the winter. By the time Columbus sailed for America, hams from the region had already become famous, and ships heading for the New World carried a stock of Extremaduran hams as well as live pigs.

  Hernán Cortés, a native of the Extremaduran town of Medellín, counted heavily on pigs in his conquest of the Aztecs. Before his 1519 expedition, he purchased a large herd of swine in Cuba. Once on the mainland in Veracruz, he ordered one of his men to establish a pig farm to keep up the expedition’s supply. After gaining control of Mexico, Cortés commanded that more pigs be brought from Española, Jamaica, and Cuba. And when he left Mexico to conquer Honduras, swine trailed behind the soldiers.

  In 1531 Pizarro, a distant cousin of Cortés, loaded a herd of pigs aboard his ship and set sail from Panama to South America. He dropped off men and hogs on the island of Flores and later in the Peruvian mountains at Tumbes to establish breeding herds, then marched with the rest to conquer the Incan capital. In 1541 Pizarro’s brother Gonzalo assembled a herd of more than 4,000 pigs in his expedition searching for the “Land of Cinnamon” east of Quito. Even that astonishing number wasn’t enough: by the end of the journey, all the pork was gone, and the men resorted to eating their horses and dogs.

  With South and Central America colonized by Spanish pigs, it was only a matter of time before North America followed. The invasion began in 1539, when Hernando De Soto, another Extremaduran, and his small army of Spanish soldiers stepped ashore in what is now Tampa, Florida. De Soto, who had helped defeat the Incas, had persuaded King Charles V to let him search North America for riches; he felt certain he would discover mines of gold and silver to rival those in Mexico and the Andes. He brought six hundred soldiers, two hundred horses, and thirteen pigs. Compared to Gonzalo Pizarro’s enormous swine herd, that was a pitiful number. But De Soto took good care of his baker’s dozen, the very first representatives of Sus scrofa domesticus to reach North America. He and his men marched at the pace of their pigs, about twelve miles a day. The expedition covered hundreds of miles through what is now Georgia, the Carolinas, Tennessee, Alabama, Mississippi, and Arkansas. When they encountered rivers, the Spaniards built rafts to ferry the pigs across.

  De Soto rarely allowed his pigs to be eaten, viewing them as the core of a breeding herd required for permanent colonization. The soldiers primarily ate corn confiscated from the Indians, sometimes going for months at a time without meat. Only in dire circumstances would the leader grudgingly allow a pig to be killed: his chronicler recounts one such instance, when, having gone three or four days without corn, De Soto “ordered half a pound of flesh to be given to each man.”

  The pig coddling worked. When De Soto died of illness along the Mississippi River in 1542, his property consisted of four slaves, three horses, and seven hundred pigs—an increase of more than 5,000 percent in less than four years during an arduous journey across mountains and through swamps.

  De Soto’s expedition didn’t find the precious metals it had sought, so Spain devoted few resources north of Florida. In Central and South America, though, the colonial enterprise thrived, with pork as the main food for Europeans. The Spanish had learned that colonization didn’t work without pigs. The first settlement of Buenos Aires proved disastrous, in part because it lacked a foundation of livestock. That’s why the crown, when granting licenses to settlers, required that their ships transport as many as five hundred pigs each. In Peru, vast amounts of pork were required at Potosi to feed the miners, who labored under horrendous conditions and lived scarcely longer than the pigs driven to the mines to feed them. Masters as well as slaves ate pork. Toluca, in the highlands of central Mexico, developed a reputation for making hams and sausages nearly as delicious as those from Extremadura.

  Pigs proved essential to the exploration, conquest, and initial colonization of Latin America, but their heyday lasted less than a century. By 1600 beef had replaced pork as the dominant meat among colonists in the Americas. Cows and sheep bred more slowly than pigs, but over time they built up herds and provided wool and hides in addition to meat. Compared to pigs, both were better equipped by nature to deal with the hot, dry climates found in much of Central and South America. Spanish cattle, ancestors of the tough Texas longhorn, adapted to the grassy plains of central Mexico and the vast pampas of Argentina, a resource the Indians had rarely used because they kept no large grazing animals. Sheep, which needed even less moisture than cattle, thrived in the Gran Chaco, the lowland plain that extends through Argentina, Paraguay, and Bolivia, as well as in the highlands of the Andes and Mexico. In most places pigs became village scavengers, food for peasants, just as they had been back in Europe.

  Colonial economics hastened the change. Hogs were best suited to the warm, wet tropics and subtropics of the Caribbean and Brazil, but those lands were soon dedicated to a crop far more lucrative than pork: sugarcane. Hogs became so scarce that, to feed their slaves, sugar planters had to import salted pork from a new source, the English colonies in North America.

  Spain’s settlement of Latin America had been a project of conquest, with pork as the key military food supply. In New England and Virginia, by contrast, the typical European was not a soldier but a farmer. Even so, the pig became even more essential in the English colonies than it had been for the Spanish. Pork served as food for colonists and a commodity for export, while the pigs themselves became a pestilence, helping to drive away the native peoples and clear the land for the English.

  TEN

  “A Great Unkindness for Our Swine”

  The English arrived late to the game of empire. By the time Sir Walter Raleigh landed on Roanoke Island in 1585, Spain had ruled the Caribbean for nearly a century. Back home in England, many suggested that New World colonists should concentrate on farming, but Raleigh treated agriculture with contempt. Spain derived its power from “Indian gold,” he explained, not from “sacks of Seville oranges.” Raleigh planned to follow the example of the Spanish, who colonized with the single-minded purpose of mining gold and silver.

  Raleigh, however, found no precious metals along the eastern seaboard of North America; nor did other English explorers. So they chose to make a virtue of necessity. The English began t
o describe the New World’s gold and silver mines as a “poisoned chalice” that had corrupted the Spanish soul. Under cover of papal authority, the Spanish had stolen the land and riches of the native peoples. The English, good Protestants, vowed to operate differently. They would be the anti-Spanish—farmers rather than soldiers. Instead of mining for gold, they would grow crops. Instead of killing Indians, they would convert them to Christianity and train them as farmers.

  This posture nicely suited the Englishman’s idea of himself. Neat fields, tidy hedgerows, healthy animals—all spoke to his virtue and godliness. Farmers needed to follow daily and seasonal schedules, plan for the future, and save against the unknown. They maintained fences and hedgerows to show that their land had been wrested from a state of nature and brought under human control. The best symbol of the connection between agriculture and virtue, however, was the domestic animal, a creature that had been civilized and made to serve man’s needs. The English saw themselves as fulfilling God’s decree in Genesis: “Let them have dominion over the fish of the sea, and over the fowl of the air, and over the cattle, and over all the earth.”

  In one sense, the plan worked. Britain built an empire to rival Spain’s, and its colonies in North America became among the wealthiest societies the world has ever known, with an economy built almost entirely on agricultural goods.