1493: Uncovering the New World Columbus Created

by Charles C. Mann

  A thesis of this book is that their belief, no matter how understandable, is mistaken. The Columbian Exchange had such far-reaching effects that some biologists now say that Colón’s voyages marked the beginning of a new biological era: the Homogenocene. The term refers to homogenizing: mixing unlike substances to create a uniform blend. With the Columbian Exchange, places that were once ecologically distinct have become more alike. In this sense the world has become one, exactly as the old admiral hoped. The lighthouse in Santo Domingo should be regarded less as a celebration of the man who began it than a recognition of the world he almost accidentally created, the world of the Homogenocene we live in today.

  Every American nation promised to contribute to the Columbus memorial when it was approved in 1923, but the checks were slow in coming—the U.S. Congress, for example, didn’t appropriate its share for another six years. In May of 1930 Dominican army head Rafael Trujillo became president in a fraud-ridden election. Three weeks later a hurricane wiped out Santo Domingo, killing thousands. Deciding that the memorial would symbolize the city’s revitalization, Trujillo staged a design competition in 1931. On the jury were eminent architects, including Eliel Saarinen and Frank Lloyd Wright. More than 450 entries came in, including these by (clockwise from top left) Konstantin Melnikov, Robaldo Morozzo della Rocca and Gigi Vietti, Erik Bryggman, and Iosif Langbard. (Photo credit 1.2)

  SHIPLOADS OF SILVER

  At a busy corner in a park just south of the old city walls in Manila is a grimy marble plinth, perhaps fifteen feet tall, topped by lifesize bronze statues, blackened by pollution, of two men in sixteenth-century attire. The two men stand shoulder to shoulder, faces into the setting sun. One wears a monk’s habit and brandishes a cross as if it were a sword; the other, in a military breastplate, carries an actual sword. Compared to the Columbus Lighthouse, the monument is small and rarely visited by tourists. I found no mention of it in recent guidebooks and maps—a historical embarrassment, because it is the closest thing the world has to an official recognition of globalization’s origins.

  The man with the sword is Miguel López de Legazpi, founder of modern Manila. The man with the cross is Andrés Ochoa de Urdaneta y Cerain, the navigator who guided Legazpi’s ships across the Pacific. One way to summarize the two Spaniards’ contribution would be to say that together Legazpi and Urdaneta achieved what Colón failed to do: establish continual trade with China by sailing west. Another way to state their accomplishment would be to say that Legazpi and Urdaneta were to economics what Colón was to ecology: the origin, however inadvertent, of a great unification.

  Legazpi, slightly the more well known, was born about a decade after the admiral’s first voyage. For most of his life he showed no sign of Colón’s penchant for maritime adventure. He trained as a notary, inheriting his father’s position in the Basque city of Zumárraga, near the border with France. In his late twenties he went to Mexico, where he worked in the colonial administration for thirty-six years. His life was jerked out of its cozy rut when he was approached by Urdaneta, a friend and cousin who was among the few survivors of Spain’s failed attempt, in the 1520s, to establish an outpost in the spice-laden Maluku Islands. (Formerly known as the Moluccas, they are south of the Philippines.) Urdaneta had been shipwrecked in the Malukus for a decade, eventually being rescued by the Portuguese. After returning he had refused all further offers to go to sea and entered a monastery. Thirty years later, the next king of Spain wanted to take another stab at establishing a base in Asia. He ordered Urdaneta out of the cloister. Urdaneta’s position as a clergyman made him unable by law to serve as head of the expedition. He chose Legazpi for the job, despite his lack of a nautical background. Legazpi’s thoughts about the likelihood of success may be indicated by his decision to prepare for the voyage by selling all of his worldly possessions and sending his children and grandchildren to stay with family members in Spain.

  Because Portugal had taken advantage of the Spanish failures to occupy the Malukus, the expedition was told to find more spice islands nearby and establish a trade base on them. The king of Spain also wanted them to chart the wind patterns, to introduce the area to Christianity, and to be a thorn in the side of his nephew and rival, the king of Portugal. But the underlying goal was China—“the stimulus that pulled Spain, as the vanguard of Christendom, to search the seaways,” as the historian Antonio García-Abásolo put it in 2004. “One cannot overemphasize the continuity of the goals for the actions undertaken by Colón, [conqueror of Mexico Hernán] Cortés and Legazpi.” All of them sought China.

  Legazpi and Urdaneta left with five ships on November 21, 1564. Reaching the Philippines, Legazpi set up camp on the island of Cebu, midway up the archipelago. Meanwhile, Urdaneta set about figuring out how to return to Mexico—nobody had ever successfully made the trip. Simply retracing the expedition’s westward route was not possible, because the trade winds that had blown the ships from Mexico to the Malukus would impede their return. In a stroke of navigational genius, Urdaneta avoided the contrary currents by sailing far to the north before turning east.

  Click here to view a larger image.

  On Cebu, Legazpi was plagued by mutiny and disease and harassed by Portuguese ships. But he slowly expanded Spanish influence north, approaching China. Periodically the Spanish viceroy in Mexico City dispatched reinforcements and supplies. Important among the supplies were silver bars and coins, mined in Mexico and Bolivia, intended to pay the Spanish troops.

  A turning point occurred in May 1570, when Legazpi dispatched a reconnaissance mission: two small ships with about a hundred Spanish soldiers and sailors, accompanied by scores of native Filipino Malays in proas (low, narrow outrigger-type boats, rigged with one or two fore-and-aft sails). After two days’ northerly sail, they reached the island of Mindoro, about 130 miles south of modern Manila (which is on Luzon, the chain’s biggest island). Mindoro’s southern coast consists of a number of small bays, one next to another like tooth marks in an apple. The Malays on the expedition learned from local Mangyan people that two Chinese junks were at anchor forty miles away, in another cove—a trading post near the modern village of Maujao (mah-oo-how).

  Every spring ships from China traveled to several Philippine islands, Mindoro among them, to exchange porcelain, silk, perfumes, and other goods for gold and beeswax.4 Shaded by parasols made of white Chinese silk, the Mangyan descended from their upland homes to meet the Chinese, who beat small drums to announce their arrival. Maujao, which has a freshwater spring a few feet back from the beach, had long been a meeting point; local officials told me that archaeology students have found Chinese porcelain there that dates to the eleventh century. Legazpi had ordered the excursion’s commander to contact—politely, not aggressively—any Chinese he encountered. Hearing of the junks’ presence, the commander sent one of the two Spanish ships and most of the proas to meet the Chinese “and to request peace and friendship with them.”

  Leading the contact group was Juan de Salcedo, Legazpi’s twenty-one-year-old grandson, popular with and respected by the soldiers despite his youth. Unluckily, high winds separated the vessels; Salcedo’s ship was pushed badly off course. The vessels spent the night in different harbors, protected from the storm by the high, narrow fingers of rock that define the coves. Temporarily leaderless but eager to gain the riches of China, the Spanish soldiers in the proas moved east at first light. Rounding a narrow, rocky promontory on the southern side of Maujao, they came upon the Mangyan and Chinese. The Chinese put on a show of force, one of Salcedo’s men later recalled, “beating on drums, playing on fifes, firing rockets and culverins [a kind of small, portable cannon], and making a great warlike display.” Taking this as a challenge, the Spaniards attacked—a rash act, “for the Chinese ships were large and high, while the proas were so small and low that they hardly reached to the lower bollards on the enemy’s ships.” They raked the junks’ decks with musket fire, threw grappling hooks over the sides, clambered onto the decks, and killed lots of
Chinese traders. Onboard, the attackers found small quantities of silk, porcelain, gold thread, “and other curious articles.”

  When Salcedo finally arrived in Maujao, hours after the battle, he was “not at all pleased with the havoc.” Far from requesting “peace and friendship,” as he had ordered, his men had wantonly slain Chinese sailors and left their ships in ruins. (The chronicle, probably written by Martín de Goiti, Salcedo’s right-hand man, makes no mention of the Mangyan, whom the Spaniards didn’t care about; one assumes they fled the carnage.) Salcedo apologized, freed the survivors, and returned the meager plunder. The Chinese, the expedition member reported, “being very humble people, knelt down with loud utterances of joy.” Still, there was a problem. One of the junks was totally destroyed; the other was salvageable, but the ship rigging was so different from European rigging that nobody in the expedition knew how to mend it. Salcedo ordered some of his troops to help the surviving vessel limp to the Spanish headquarters, where Legazpi’s men might be able to help.

  The Chinese sailed home in their reconstructed junk and reported that Europeans had appeared in the Philippines. Amazingly, they had come from the east, though Europe lay to the west. And the barbarians had something that was extremely desirable in China: silver. Meanwhile, Legazpi took over Manila and waited for their return.

  In the spring of 1572, three junks appeared in the Philippines. They contained a carefully chosen selection of Chinese manufactured goods—a test of what Legazpi would pay for, and pay the most for. It turned out the Spaniards wanted everything, a result, Legazpi’s notary reported, that “delighted” the traders. Especially coveted were silk, rare and costly in Europe, and porcelain, made by a technology then unknown in Europe. In return, the Chinese took every ounce they could of Spanish silver.

  More junks came the next year, and the year after that. Because China’s hunger for silver and Europe’s hunger for silk and porcelain were effectively insatiable, the volume of trade grew enormous. The “galleon trade,” as it would become known, linked Asia, Europe, the Americas, and, less directly, Africa. (African slaves were integral to Spain’s American empire; as I will describe later, they dug and refined the ore in Mexico’s silver mines.) Never before had so much of the planet been bound in a single network of exchange—every populous area on earth, every habitable continent except Australia. Dawning with Spain’s arrival in the Philippines was a new, distinctly modern era.

  That era was regarded with suspicion from the beginning. China was then the earth’s wealthiest, most powerful nation. By virtually any measure—per capita income; military strength; average lifespan; agricultural production; culinary, artistic, and technical sophistication—it was equal to or superior to the rest of the world. Much as rich nations like Japan and the United States today buy little from sub-Saharan Africa, China had long viewed Europe as too poor and backward to be of commercial interest. Its principal industry was textiles, mainly wool. China, meanwhile, had silk. Reporting to the Spanish king in 1573, the viceroy in Mexico lamented that “neither from this land nor from Spain, so far as can now be learned, can anything be exported thither that they do not already possess.” With silver, though, Spain finally had something China wanted. Badly wanted, in fact—Spanish silver literally became China’s money supply. But there was an unease about having the nation’s currency in the hands of foreigners. The court feared that the galleon trade—the first large-scale, uncontrolled international exchange in Chinese history—would usher in large-scale, uncontrolled change to Chinese life.

  The fears were entirely borne out. Although emperor after emperor refused entry to almost all human beings from Europe and the Americas, they could not keep out other species. Key players were American crops, especially sweet potatoes and maize;5 their unexpected arrival, the agricultural historian Song Junling wrote in 2007, was “one of the most revolutionary events” in imperial China’s history. The nation’s agriculture, based on rice, had long been concentrated in river valleys, especially those of the Yangzi and Huang He (Yellow) rivers. Sweet potatoes and maize could be grown in the dry uplands. Farmers moved in numbers to these areas, which had previously been lightly settled. The result was a wave of deforestation, followed by waves of erosion and floods, which caused many deaths. The regime, already straining under many problems, was further destabilized—to Europe’s benefit.

  Spain, too, was uneasy about the galleon trade. The annual shipments of silver to Manila were the culmination of a centuries-long quest to trade with China. Nonetheless, Madrid spent almost the entire period trying to limit the exchange. Again and again, royal edicts restricted the number of ships allowed to travel to Manila, cut the amount of allowable exports, set import quotas for Chinese goods, and instructed Spanish merchants to form a cartel to raise prices.

  From today’s perspective the Spanish discontent is surprising. Both sides gained by the exchange of silk for silver, as economic theory would predict. But it was Europe that emerged in the stronger position. With the galleon trade, declaimed the historian Andre Gunder Frank, “Europeans bought themselves a seat, and then even a whole railway car, on the Asian train.” Legazpi’s encounter with the Chinese signaled the arrival of the Homogenocene in Asia. And following it, gliding in the slipstream, came the rise of the West.

  As close to a monument to globalization as the world is likely to see, this statue to Miguel López de Legazpi and Andrés de Urdaneta, initiators of the silver trade across the Pacific, occupies a little-frequented corner of a park in central Manila. (Photo credit 1.3)

  The statue of Legazpi and Urdaneta was not intended to commemorate any of these ideas or events. It was proposed in 1892 by Manila’s Basque community to celebrate the Basque role in the city’s history (Legazpi and Urdaneta were Basques, as were many of their men). By the time Catalan sculptor Agustí Querol i Subirats cast the bronze, the United States had seized the Philippines from Spain. The islands’ new rulers had little interest in a monument to dead Spaniards; the statue languished at a customs house until 1930, when it was finally erected.

  Walking around the monument, I wished that it were larger, given that it is the closest equivalent to a formal commemoration of globalization we have today. I also wished it were more complete. To truly mark the galleon trade, Legazpi and Urdaneta would have to be surrounded by Chinese merchants: equal partners in the exchange. Such a monument probably will never be built, not least because the worldwide network is still viewed with unease, even by many of its beneficiaries.

  Across the street from the monument is another, more popular park, named after José Rizal, a writer, doctor, and martyred anti-Spanish revolutionary who is a national hero in the Philippines. At the center of Rizal Park is a reflecting pool edged with flower gardens and statuary. All the statues are bronze busts on concrete columns. All depict Filipinos who died fighting Spanish rule.

  On the side of the pool facing the Legazpi monument is a bust of Rajah Sulayman, identified by a plaque as “the brave Muslim ruler of the kingdom of Maynila (Manila) who refused the offer of ‘friendship’ by the Spaniards … under Miguel Lopez de Legazpi.” (Parentheses in original.) Good editors deride fake quotation marks like those around “friendship” as “scare quotes” and tell reporters not to use them. Here they may be merited. Legazpi approached Sulayman soon after encountering the Chinese. The Spaniards wanted to use Manila’s harbor as a launching point for the China trade. When Sulayman said he didn’t want the Spaniards around, Legazpi leveled his principal village, killing him and three hundred of his fellows. Modern Manila was established on the ruins.

  Sulayman and the other people around the pool were, in effect, the first antiglobalization martyrs. They have been awarded a place considerably more prominent than the deserted corner given to Legazpi and Urdaneta. In the end, though, they lost, each and every one of them.

  Big speakers mounted on iron columns at the corners of the pool issue bulletins from the redoubts of Classic Rock. Walking around the area, I was nearly run ov
er by a train fashioned into a replica of Thomas the Tank Engine, a children’s-book and -television character owned by Apax Partners, a British private-equity firm said to be among the world’s largest. Over Thomas’s smiling, tooting head I could see the towers of the hotels and banks in Manila’s tourist district. The birthplace of globalization looked a lot like many other places. In the Homogenocene, Kentucky Fried Chicken, McDonald’s, and Pizza Hut are always just minutes away.

  REVERSALS OF FORTUNE

  The Homogenocene? A new epoch in the history of life, brought into being by the abrupt creation of a world-spanning economic system? The claim seems grandiose. But imagine a thought experiment: flying around the earth in 1642, a century and a half after Colón’s first voyage, threescore and ten after the first Chinese silk from Manila arrived in Mexico. Think of it as a round-the-world cruise at 35,000 feet of a planet in the first stages of a great disturbance. The brochure promises that the cruise will hit the highlights of the nascent Homogenocene. What will the passengers see?