1493: Uncovering the New World Columbus Created

by Charles C. Mann

Like other books, this one began in a garden.

July 19, 2018 mjp

To ecologists, the Columbian Exchange is arguably the most important event since the death of the dinosaurs.

The hordes of ants swarmed through houses, blackening roofs “as if they had been sprayed with charcoal dust,” covering floors in such numbers that colonists could sleep only by placing the legs of their beds in bowls of water.

(The claim is disputed; in Seville, Spain, another ornate sarcophagus also is said to house Colón’s remains.)

Legazpi and Urdaneta left with five ships on November 21, 1564.

Dinner at Le Reve with Troy, Phil, and Trevor . 7/24/2018 mjp

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.

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.

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.

Spain defeated the Ottomans in 1571,

Batyle of Lepanto. Mjp 7/25/18

It was today’s climate change in reverse, with human action removing greenhouse gases from the atmosphere rather than adding them—a stunning meteorological overture to the Homogenocene.

A troubled, teeming, polyglot metropolis with an opulent center and seething ethnic neighborhoods at its periphery that is struggling to fend off ecological disaster—from today’s perspective, the Mexico City of 1642 seems strikingly familiar. It is the world’s first twenty-first-century city.

Most big animals are tamable, in the sense that they can be trained to lose their fear of people, but only a few species are readily domesticable—that is, willing to breed easily in captivity, thereby letting humans select for useful characteristics.

Skeptics have been scoffing at this buckle and swash since 1662,

England shipped about seven thousand people to Virginia between 1607 and 1624. Eight out of ten died.

Tobacco is a sponge for nitrogen and potassium. Because the entire plant is removed from the soil, harvesting and exporting tobacco was like taking those nutrients from the earth and putting them on ships.

Fun, exciting, and wildly addictive, tobacco was an instant hit around the globe—the first time people in every continent simultaneously became enraptured by a novelty. N. tabacum was the leading edge of the Columbian Exchange.

The first dictionary of the Spanish language appeared in 1611,

Despite a global eradication program that began in the 1950s, malaria is still responsible for unimaginable suffering: some three-quarters of a million deaths per annum, the great majority of them children under the age of five.

ineluctably,

threnodies

Calamity usually has many fathers,

African diseases slew so many Europeans, Curtin discovered, that slave ships often lost proportionately more white crewmen than black slaves—this

Disease claimed so many that Guyane became known as a “dry guillotine”—a blade that killed without needing to wet itself with blood.

Mjp 8/7/2018

Confederate generals did not control malaria or even know what it was, but it was an extra arrow in their quiver. Plasmodium likely delayed the Union victory by months or even years.

Beijing easily could have sent Zheng past Africa to Europe, observed the George Mason University political scientist Jack Goldstone. But the empire stopped long-range exploration “for the same reason the United States stopped sending men to the moon—there was nothing there to justify the costs of such voyages.”

(if business is outlawed, only outlaws will do business).

Asking large-scale Chinese traders to use them was like asking today’s mergers-and-acquisition bankers to buy companies with rolls of quarters.

They had effectively become what economists call fiat money. Fiat money has no intrinsic value, and is worth something only because a government declares it is. The U.S. dollar is an example, as is the euro.

He ended up in bitter retirement in Lima, where a street bears his name.

Despite these obstacles the Americas produced a river of silver—150,000 tons or more between the sixteenth and eighteenth centuries, according to the silver trade’s most prominent historians, Dennis O. Flynn and Arturo Giráldez of the University of the Pacific.

The well-off felt beggared; the beggars felt desperate.

Nice line. Mjp 8/9/2018

Incredibly, they sold silk from China—silk that had crossed two oceans!—in Spain for less than silk produced in Spain.

Waiting for a CT scan. mjp 8/10/2018

Today violence is less common, if only because powerful weapons are so cheap that all sides have them,

Interesting point. mjp 8/10/18

Actually, it was worse: the silver stocks had to be constantly replenished, incurring further costs, because the metal was constantly worn away as it passed from hand to hand. (Paper money wears out, too, but costs next to nothing to replace.)

Then as now, smoking was made to order for the boredom and inertia of army life.

Recall BD's comment that he smoked in the army because there was "nothing else to do." mjp 8/10/2018

Part of the reason China is the world’s most populous nation is the Columbian Exchange.

fact, though, the world’s farmers have more than kept pace. Between 1961 and 2007 humankind’s numbers doubled, roughly speaking, while global harvests of wheat, rice, and maize tripled. As population has soared, in fact, the percentage of chronically malnourished has fallen—contrary to Malthus’s prediction. Hunger still exists, to be sure, but the chance that any given child will be malnourished has steadily, hearteningly declined.

Between 1841 and 1911, the Qing faced more than thirteen major floods a year—a Katrina every month, as one historian put it to me.

out maize. There was no response. In the kind of phenomenon that makes one despair of the human race’s ability to govern itself, the pace of land clearing actually accelerated in the first part of the nineteenth century.

Vaclav Smil, a University of Manitoba geographer who has long studied China’s environment (his first book on the subject, The Bad Earth, appeared in 1984).

Today the potato is the fifth most important crop worldwide, surpassed in harvest volume only by sugarcane, wheat, maize, and rice.

Panicked farmers turned to the first inorganic pesticide: a widely available form of arsenic, sprayed with enthusiasm over the field.

Archaeologists have turned up evidence of people eating potatoes thirteen thousand years ago in southern Chile—not

Timing, too, is unclear: archaeologists have established only that Andean peoples were eating wholly domesticated potatoes by 2000 B.C.

Breaks were accompanied by mugs of chicha (maize beer) and handfuls of coca leaves to chew.

Familiar! Mjp 8/16/18

Ultraconservative Russian Orthodox priests denounced it as an incarnation of evil, using as proof the undeniable fact that potatoes are not mentioned in the Bible.

The effects of this transformation were so striking that any general history of Europe without an entry in its index for S. tuberosum should be ignored.

It was said that the islands gave off a stench so intense that they were difficult to approach.

Over time they have covered the islands with a layer of guano as much as 150 feet thick.

Even among birds, though, Chincha-style guano deposits—heaps as big as a twelve-story building—are uncommon. To make them, the birds must be relatively large, form big flocks, and defecate where they live (gulls, for instance, release their droppings away from their breeding grounds).