1493: Uncovering the New World Columbus Created (3 page)

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Almost immediately the colonists ran short of food and, worse, water. In a sign of his inadequacy as an administrator, the admiral had failed to inspect the water casks he had ordered; they, predictably, leaked. Ignoring all complaints of hunger and thirst, the admiral decreed that his men would clear and plant vegetable patches, erect a two-story fortress, and enclose the main, northern half of the new enclave within high stone walls. Inside the walls the Spaniards built perhaps two hundred houses, “small like the huts we use for bird hunting and roofed with weeds,” one man complained.
¹

Most of the new arrivals viewed these labors as a waste of time. Few actually wanted to set up shop in La Isabela, still less till its soil. Instead they regarded the colony as a temporary base camp for the quest for riches, especially gold. Colón himself was ambivalent. On the one hand, he was supposed to be governing a colony that was establishing a commercial entrepôt in the Americas. On the other hand, he was supposed to be at sea, continuing his search for China. The two roles conflicted, and Colón was never able to resolve the conflict.

On April 24 Colón sailed off to find China. Before leaving, he ordered his military commander, Pedro Margarit, to lead four hundred men into the rugged interior to seek Indian gold mines. After finding only trivial quantities of gold—and not much food—in the mountains, Margarit’s charges, tattered and starving, came back to La Isabela, only to discover that the colony, too, had little to eat—those left behind, resentful, had refused to tend gardens. The irate Margarit hijacked three ships and fled to Spain, promising to brand the entire enterprise as a waste of time and money. Left behind with no food, the remaining colonists took to raiding Taino storehouses. Infuriated, the Indians struck back, setting off a chaotic war. This was the situation that confronted Colón when he returned to La Isabela five months after his departure, dreadfully sick and having failed to reach China.

A loose alliance of four Taino groups faced off against the Spaniards and one Taino group that had thrown its lot in with the foreigners. The Taino, who had no metal, could not withstand assaults with steel weapons. But they made the fight costly for the Spaniards. In an early form of chemical warfare, the Indians threw gourds stuffed with ashes and ground hot peppers at their attackers, unleashing clouds of choking, blinding smoke. Protective bandannas over their faces, they charged through the tear gas, killing Spaniards. The intent was to push out the foreigners—an unthinkable course to Colón, who had staked everything on the voyage. When the Spaniards counterattacked, the Taino retreated scorched-earth style, destroying their own homes and gardens in the belief, Colón wrote scornfully, “that hunger would drive us from the land.” Neither side could win. The Taino alliance could not eject the Spaniards from Hispaniola. But the Spaniards were waging war on the people who provided their food supply; total victory would be a total disaster. They won skirmish after skirmish, killing countless natives. Meanwhile, starvation, sickness, and exhaustion filled the cemetery in La Isabela.

Humiliated by the calamity, the admiral set off for Spain on March 10, 1496, to beg the king and queen for more money and supplies. When he returned two years later—the third of what would become four voyages across the Atlantic—so little was left of La Isabela that he landed on the opposite side of the island, in Santo Domingo, a new settlement founded by his brother Bartolomé, whom he had left behind. Colón never again set foot in his first colony and it was almost forgotten.

Despite the brevity of its existence, La Isabela marked the beginning of an enormous change: the creation of the modern Caribbean landscape. Colón and his crew did not voyage alone. They were accompanied by a menagerie of insects, plants, mammals, and microorganisms. Beginning with La Isabela, European expeditions brought cattle, sheep, and horses, along with crops like sugarcane (originally from New Guinea), wheat (from the Middle East), bananas (from Africa), and coffee (also from Africa). Equally important, creatures the colonists knew nothing about hitchhiked along for the ride. Earthworms, mosquitoes, and cockroaches; honeybees, dandelions, and African grasses; rats of every description—all of them poured from the hulls of Colón’s vessels and those that followed, rushing like eager tourists into lands that had never seen their like before.

Cattle and sheep ground American vegetation between their flat teeth, preventing the regrowth of native shrubs and trees. Beneath their hooves would sprout grasses from Africa, possibly introduced from slave-ship bedding; splay-leaved and dense on the ground, they choked out native vegetation. (Alien grasses could withstand grazing better than Caribbean groundcover plants because grasses grow from the base of the leaf, unlike most other species, which grow from the tip. Grazing consumes the growth zones of the latter but has little impact on those in the former.) Over the years forests of Caribbean palm, mahogany, and ceiba became forests of Australian acacia, Ethiopian shrubs, and Central American logwood. Scurrying below, mongooses from India eagerly drove Dominican snakes toward extinction. The change continues to this day. Orange groves, introduced to Hispaniola from Spain, have recently begun to fall to the depredations of lime swallowtail butterflies, citrus pests from Southeast Asia that probably came over in 2004. Today Hispaniola has only small fragments of its original forest.

Natives and newcomers interacted in unexpected ways, creating biological bedlam. When Spanish colonists imported African plantains in 1516, the Harvard entomologist Edward O. Wilson has proposed, they also imported scale insects, small creatures with tough, waxy coats that suck the juices from plant roots and stems. About a dozen banana-infesting scale insects are known in Africa. In Hispaniola, Wilson argued, these insects had no natural enemies. In consequence, their numbers must have exploded—a phenomenon known to science as “ecological release.” The spread of scale insects would have dismayed the island’s European banana farmers but delighted one of its native species: the tropical fire ant
Solenopsis geminata
.
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S. geminata
is fond of dining on scale insects’ sugary excrement; to ensure the flow, the ants will attack anything that disturbs them. A big increase in scale insects would have led to a big increase in fire ants.

So far this is informed speculation. What happened in 1518 and 1519 is not. In those years, according to Bartolomé de Las Casas, a missionary priest who lived through the incident, Spanish orange, pomegranate, and cassia plantations were destroyed “from the root up.” Thousands of acres of orchards were “all scorched and dried out, as though flames had fallen from the sky and burned them.” The actual culprit, Wilson argued, was the sap-sucking scale insects. But what the Spaniards
saw
was
S. geminata
—“an infinite number of ants,” Las Casas reported, their stings causing “greater pains than wasps that bite and hurt men.” 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. They “could not be stopped in any way nor by any human means.”

Overwhelmed and terrified, Spaniards abandoned their homes to the in-sects. Santo Domingo was “depopulated,” one witness recalled. In a solemn ceremony, the remaining colonists chose, by lottery, a saint to intercede with God on their behalf—St. Saturninus, a third-century martyr. They held a procession and feast in his honor. The response was positive. “From that day onward,” Las Casas wrote, “one saw by plain sight that the plague began to diminish.”

From the human perspective, the most dramatic impact the Columbian Exchange was on humankind itself. Spanish accounts suggest that Hispaniola had a large native population: Colón, for instance, casually described the Taino as “innumerable, for I believe there to be millions upon millions of them.” Las Casas claimed the population to be “more than three million.” Modern researchers have not nailed down the number; estimates range from 60,000 to almost 8 million. A careful study in 2003 argued that the true figure was “a few hundred thousand.” No matter what the original number, though, the European impact was horrific. In 1514, twenty-two years after Colón’s first voyage, the Spanish government counted up the Indians on Hispaniola for the purpose of allocating them among colonists as laborers. Census agents fanned across the island but found only 26,000 Taino. Thirty-four years later, according to one scholarly Spanish resident, fewer than 500 Taino were alive. The destruction of the Taino plunged Santo Domingo into poverty. The colonists had wiped out their own labor force.

Spanish cruelty played its part in the calamity, but its larger cause was the Columbian Exchange. Before Colón none of the epidemic diseases common in Europe and Asia existed in the Americas. The viruses that cause smallpox, influenza, hepatitis, measles, encephalitis, and viral pneumonia; the bacteria that cause tuberculosis, diphtheria, cholera, typhus, scarlet fever, and bacterial meningitis—by a quirk of evolutionary history, all were unknown in the Western Hemisphere. Shipped across the ocean from Europe these maladies consumed Hispaniola’s native population with stunning rapacity. The first recorded epidemic, perhaps due to swine flu, was in 1493. Smallpox entered, terribly, in 1518; it spread to Mexico, swept down Central America, and then continued into Peru, Bolivia, and Chile. Following it came the rest, a pathogenic cavalcade.

Throughout the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries novel microorganisms spread across the Americas, ricocheting from victim to victim, killing three-quarters or more of the people in the hemisphere. It was as if the suffering these diseases had caused in Eurasia over the past millennia were concentrated into a span of decades. In the annals of human history there is no comparable demographic catastrophe. The Taino were removed from the face of the earth, though recent research hints that their DNA may survive, invisibly, in Dominicans who have African or European features, genetic strands from different continents entangled, coded legacies of the Columbian Exchange.

TO THE LIGHTHOUSE

A placid, whispering river runs through Santo Domingo, capital of the Dominican Republic. On the west bank of the river stands the stony remains of the colonial town, including the palace of Diego Colón, the admiral’s firstborn son. From the east bank rises a vast mesa of stained concrete, a monolith 102 feet high and 689 feet long. It is the Faro a Colón—the Columbus Lighthouse. The structure is called a lighthouse because 146 four-kilowatt lights are mounted on its summit. They point straight up, assaulting the heavens with a fusillade of light intense enough to cause blackouts in surrounding neighborhoods.

Like a medieval church, the lighthouse is laid out as a cross, with a long nave and two short transepts projecting from the sides. At the central intersection, inside a crystal security box, is an ornate golden sarcophagus said to contain the admiral’s bones. (The claim is disputed; in Seville, Spain, another ornate sarcophagus also is said to house Colón’s remains.) Beyond the sarcophagus are a series of exhibits from many nations. When I visited not long ago, most focused on the hemisphere’s original inhabitants, depicting them as the passive or even grateful recipients of European largesse, cultural and technological.

Unsurprisingly, native people rarely endorse this view of their history, and Colón’s part in it. An army of activists and scholars has bombarded the public with condemnations of the man and his works. They have called him brutal (he was, by today’s standards) and racist (he wasn’t, strictly speaking—modern concepts of race had not yet been invented); incompetent as an administrator (he was) and as a seaman (he wasn’t); a religious fanatic (he surely was, from a secular point of view); and a greedy monomaniac (a charge, the admiral’s supporters would say, that could be leveled against all ambitious souls). Colón, his detractors charge, never understood what he had found.

Completed in 1992, this huge, cross-shaped memorial to Columbus in Santo Domingo was designed by the young Scottish architect Joseph Lea Gleave, who attempted to capture in stone what he regarded as Columbus’s most important role: the man who brought Christianity to the Americas. The structure, he said modestly, would be “one of the great monuments of the ages.” (
Photo credit 1.2
)

How different it was in 1852, when Antonio del Monte y Tejada, a celebrated Dominican
litterateur,
closed the first of the four volumes of his history of Santo Domingo by extolling Colón’s “great, generous, memorable and eternal” career. The admiral’s every action “breathes greatness and elevation,” del Monte y Tejada wrote. Do not “all nations … owe him eternal gratitude”? The best way to acknowledge this debt, he proposed, would be to erect a gigantic Columbus statue, “a colossus like the one in Rhodes,” sponsored by “all the cities of Europe and America,” that would spread its arms benevolently across Santo Domingo, the hemisphere’s “most visible and noteworthy place.”