1493 : Uncovering the New World Columbus Created
1493 : Uncovering the New World Columbus Created
Click to enlarge
Author(s): Mann, Charles C.
ISBN No.: 9780307278241
Pages: 720
Year: 201207
Format: Trade Paper
Price: $ 30.36
Dispatch delay: Dispatched between 7 to 15 days
Status: Available

The Seams of Panagaea Although it had just finished raining, the air was hot and close. Nobody else was in sight; the only sound other than those from insects and gulls was the staticky low crashing of Caribbean waves. Around me on the sparsely covered red soil was a scatter of rectangles laid out by lines of stones: the outlines of now- vanished buildings, revealed by archaeologists. Cement pathways, steaming faintly from the rain, ran between them. One of the buildings had more imposing walls than the others. The researchers had covered it with a new roof, the only structure they had chosen to protect from the rain. Standing like a sentry by its entrance was a hand- lettered sign: Casa Almirante , Admiral''s House. It marked the first American residence of Christopher Columbus, Admiral of the Ocean Sea, the man whom generations of schoolchildren have learned to call the discoverer of the New World.


La Isabela, as this community was called, is situated on the north side of the great Caribbean island of Hispaniola, in what is now the Dominican Republic. It was the initial attempt by Europeans to make a permanent base in the Americas. (To be precise, La Isabela marked the beginning of consequential European settlement--Vikings had established a short-lived village in Newfoundland five centuries before.) The admiral laid out his new domain at the confluence of two small, fast- rushing rivers: a fortified center on the north bank, a satellite community of farms on the south bank. For his home, Columbus--Cristóbal Colón, to give him the name he answered to at the time--chose the best location in town: a rocky promontory in the northern settlement, right at the water''s edge. His house was situated perfectly to catch the afternoon light. Today La Isabela is almost forgotten. Sometimes a similar fate appears to threaten its founder.


Colón is by no means absent from history textbooks, of course, but in them he seems ever less admirable and important. He was a cruel, deluded man, today''s critics say, who stumbled upon the Caribbean by luck. An agent of imperialism, he was in every way a calamity for the Americas'' first inhabitants. Yet a different but equally contemporary perspective suggests that we should continue to take notice of the admiral. Of all the members of humankind who have ever walked the earth, he alone inaugurated a new era in the history of life. The king and queen of Spain, Fernando (Ferdinand) II and Isabel I, backed Colón''s first voyage grudgingly. Transoceanic travel in those days was heart-toppingly expensive and risky--the equivalent, perhaps, of spaceshuttle flights today. Despite relentless pestering, Colón was able to talk the monarchs into supporting his scheme only by threatening to take the project to France.


He was riding to the frontier, a friend wrote later, when the queen "sent a court bailiff posthaste" to fetch him back. The story is probably exaggerated. Still, it is clear that the sovereigns'' reservations drove the admiral to whittle down his expedition, if not his ambitions, to a minimum: three small ships (the biggest may have been less than sixty feet long), a combined crew of about ninety. Colón himself had to contribute a quarter of the budget, according to a collaborator, probably by borrowing it from Italian merchants. Everything changed with his triumphant return in March of 1493, bearing golden ornaments, brilliantly colored parrots, and as many as ten captive Indians. The king and queen, now enthusiastic, dispatched Colón just six months later on a second, vastly larger expedition: seventeen ships, a combined crew of perhaps fifteen hundred, among them a dozen or more priests charged with bringing the faith to these new lands. Because the admiral believed he had found a route to Asia, he was sure that China and Japan-- and all their opulent goods--were only a short journey beyond. The goal of this second expedition was to create a permanent bastion for Spain in the heart of Asia, a headquarters for further exploration and trade.


The new colony, predicted one of its founders, "will be widely renowned for its many inhabitants, its elaborate buildings, and its magnificent walls." Instead La Isabela was a catastrophe, abandoned barely five years after its creation. Over time its structures vanished, their very stones stripped to build other, more successful towns. When a U.S.-Venezuelan archaeological team began excavating the site in the late 1980s, the inhabitants of La Isabela were so few that the scientists were able to move the entire settlement to a nearby hillside. Today it has a couple of roadside fish restaurants, a single, failing hotel, and a little-visited museum. On the edge of town, a church, built in 1994 but already showing signs of age, commemorates the first Catholic Mass celebrated in the Americas.


Watching the waves from the admiral''s ruined home, I could easily imagine disappointed tourists thinking that the colony had left nothing meaningful behind-- that there was no reason, aside from the pretty beach, for anyone to pay attention to La Isabela. But that would be a mistake. Babies born on the day the admiral founded La Isabela--January 2, 1494-- came into a world in which direct trade and communication between western Europe and East Asia were largely blocked by the Islamic nations between (and their partners in Venice and Genoa), sub- Saharan Africa had little contact with Europe and next to none with South and East Asia, and the Eastern and Western hemispheres were almost entirely ignorant of each other''s very existence. By the time those babies had grandchildren, slaves from Africa mined silver in the Americas for sale to China; Spanish merchants waited impatiently for the latest shipments of Asian silk and porcelain from Mexico; and Dutch sailors traded cowry shells from the Maldive Islands, in the Indian Ocean, for human beings in Angola, on the coast of the Atlantic. Tobacco from the Caribbean ensorcelled the wealthy and powerful in Madrid, Madras, Mecca, and Manila. Group smoke-ins by violent young men in Edo (Tokyo) would soon lead to the formation of two rival gangs, the Bramble Club and the Leather- breeches Club. The shogun jailed seventy of their members, then banned smoking. Long-distance trade had occurred for more than a thousand years, much of it across the Indian Ocean.


China had for centuries sent silk to the Mediterranean by the Silk Road, a route that was lengthy, dangerous, and, for those who survived, hugely profitable. But nothing like this worldwide exchange had existed before, still less sprung up so quickly, or functioned so continuously. No previous trade networks included both of the globe''s two hemispheres; nor had they operated on a scale large enough to disrupt societies on opposite sides of the planet. By founding La Isabela, Colón initiated permanent European occupation in the Americas. And in so doing he began the era of globalization --the single, turbulent exchange of goods and services that today engulfs the entire habitable world. Newspapers usually describe globalization in purely economic terms, but it is also a biological phenomenon; indeed, from a long-term perspective it may be primarily a biological phenomenon. Two hundred and fifty million years ago the world contained a single landmass known to scientists as Pangaea. Geological forces broke up this vast expanse, splitting Eurasia and the Americas.


Over time the two divided halves of Pangaea developed wildly different suites of plants and animals. Before Colón a few venturesome land creatures had crossed the oceans and established themselves on the other side. Most were insects and birds, as one would expect, but the list also includes, surprisingly, a few farm species--bottle gourds, coconuts, sweet potatoes--the subject today of scholarly head-scratching. Otherwise, the world was sliced into separate ecological domains. Colón''s signal accomplishment was, in the phrase of historian Alfred W. Crosby, to reknit the seams of Pangaea. After 1492 the world''s ecosystems collided and mixed as European vessels carried thousands of species to new homes across the oceans. The Columbian Exchange, as Crosby called it, is the reason there are tomatoes in Italy, oranges in the United States, chocolates in Switzerland, and chili peppers in Thailand.


To ecologists, the Columbian Exchange is arguably the most important event since the death of the dinosaurs. Unsurprisingly, this vast biological upheaval had repercussions on human kind. Crosby argued that the Columbian Exchange underlies much of the history we learn in the classroom--it was like an invisible wave, sweeping along kings and queens, peasants and priests, all unknowing. The claim was controversial; indeed, Crosby''s manuscript, rejected by every major academic publisher, ended up being published by such a tiny press that he once joked to me that his book had been distributed "by tossing it on the street, and hoping readers happened on it." But over the decades since he coined the term, a growing number of researchers have come to believe that the ecological paroxysm set off by Colón''s voyages--as much as the economic convulsion he began--was one of the establishing events of the modern world. On Christmas Day, 1492, Colón''s first voyage came to an abrupt end when his flagship, the Santa María , ran aground off the northern coast of Hispaniola. Because his two remaining vessels, the Niña and Pinta , were too small to hold the entire crew, he was forced to leave thirty- eight men behind. Colón departed for Spain while those men were building an encampment-- a scatter of makeshift huts surrounded by a crude palisade, adjacent to a larger native village.


The encampment was called La Navidad (Chri.


To be able to view the table of contents for this publication then please subscribe by clicking the button below...
To be able to view the full description for this publication then please subscribe by clicking the button below...