1493: Uncovering the New World Columbus Created (8 page)

When Colón founded La Isabela, the world’s most populous cities clustered in a band in the tropics, all but one within thirty degrees of the equator. At the top of the list was Beijing, cynosure of humankind’s wealthiest society. Next was Vijayanagar, capital of a Hindu empire in southern India. Of all urban places, these two alone held as many as half a million souls. Cairo, next on the list, was apparently just below this figure. After these three, a cluster of cities were around the 200,000 mark: Hangzhou and Nanjing in China; Tabriz and Gaur in, respectively, Iran and India; Tenochtitlan, dazzling center of the Triple Alliance (Aztec empire); Istanbul (officially Kostantiniyye) of the Ottoman empire; perhaps Gao, leading city of the Songhay empire in West Africa; and, conceivably, Qosqo, where the Inka emperors plotted their next conquests. Not a single European city would have made the list, except perhaps Paris, then expanding under the vigorous rule of Louis XII. Colón’s world was centered around hot places, as had been the case since
Homo sapiens
first stared in amazement at the African sky.

Now, a century and a half later, that order is in the midst of change. It is as if the globe has been turned upside down and all the wealth and power are flowing from south to north. The once-lordly metropolises of the tropics are falling into ruin and decrepitude. In the coming centuries, the greatest urban centers will all be in the temperate north: London and Manchester in Britain; New York, Chicago, and Philadelphia in the United States. By 1900 every city in the top bracket will be in Europe or the United States, save one: Tokyo, the most Westernized of eastern cities. From the vantage of an extraterrestrial observer, the change would have seemed shocking; an order that had characterized human affairs for millennia had been overturned, at least for a while.

Today the tumult of ecological and economic exchange is like the background radiation of our ever more crowded and unstable planet. It seems distinctly contemporary to find Japanese loggers in Brazil and Chinese engineers in the Sahel and Europeans backpacking in Nepal or occupying the best tables in New York niteries. But in different ways all of these occurred hundreds of years ago. If nothing else, the events then remind us that we are not alone in our current jumbled condition. It seems worthwhile to take a look at how we got to where we are today.

¹
Short of water, the expedition drank from rivers. Some researchers believe that Colón and his men thus caught shigellosis, a disease caused by a feces-borne bacterium native to the American tropics. In reaction to the bacterium, the body can develop Reiter’s syndrome, an autoimmune disease that makes sufferers feel as if large chunks of the body, including the eyes and bowels, are swollen and inflamed—symptoms that afflicted Colón later that summer. Reiter’s is always painful and sometimes fatal. If, as these scientists suspect, Reiter’s led, years later, to the admiral’s death, Columbus himself was an early victim of the Columbian Exchange.

²
Every species has a scientific name with two parts: the name of its genus—the group of related species it belongs to—and the species name proper. Thus
Solenopsis geminata
belongs to the genus
Solenopsis
and is the species geminata. By convention, the genus is abbreviated after the first time it appears with the species name:
S. geminata.

³
It is conceivable that Colón knew before his departure that the Atlantic could be crossed. He wrote in the margin of one of his books that while in Ireland he’d seen “people from Cathay [China]”—“a man and a wife brought in on a couple of logs in an extraordinary manner.” Some writers argue that the “logs” were dugout canoes, and the people therefore Inuit or Indians. Most historians do not agree, though, because there is little evidence that Colón visited Ireland, let alone that he saw two Indians there. The couple could have been Sami from Finland, who often have Asian features. In addition it seems implausible that the sole record of this amazing event—Indians paddling a canoe to Europe!—should be a few marginal scribbles in a book.

⁴
Because China did not make enough beeswax for its needs, many Chinese made candles from a substitute: the lower-quality wax produced by a scale insect. The Philippines house both the Asian honeybee and the giant honeybee; the huge nests of the latter are rich sources of wax.

⁵
In the United States the name is “corn.” I use “maize” hereafter for two reasons. First, multicolored Indian maize, which was usually eaten after drying and grinding, is strikingly unlike the sweet yellow kernels conjured up in the U.S. by the word “corn.” Second, “corn” in Britain refers to a region’s most important cereal crop—oats in Scotland, for example.

PART ONE
Atlantic Journeys

2
The Tobacco Coast

“LOWLY ORGANIZED CREATURES”

It is just possible that John Rolfe was responsible for the worms. Earthworms, to be precise—the common nightcrawler and the red marsh worm, creatures that did not exist in the Americas before 1492. Rolfe was a colonist in Jamestown, Virginia, the first successful English settlement in the Americas. Most people know him today, if they know him at all, as the man who married Pocahontas, the “Indian princess” in countless romantic stories. A few history buffs understand that Rolfe was a primary force behind Jamestown’s eventual success. The worms hint at a third, still more important role: all inadvertently, Rolfe helped to unleash a permanent change in the American landscape.

Like many young English blades, Rolfe smoked—or “drank,” as the phrase was then—tobacco, a fad since the Spanish had brought back
Nicotiana tabacum
from the Caribbean. Indians in Virginia also drank tobacco, but it was a different species,
Nicotiana rustica
.
N. rustica
was awful stuff, wrote colonist William Strachey: “poor and weak and of a biting taste.” After arriving in Jamestown in 1610, Rolfe talked a shipmaster into bringing him some
N. tabacum
seeds from Trinidad and Venezuela. Six years later Rolfe returned to England with his wife, Pocahontas, and his first big shipment of tobacco. “Pleasant, sweet, and strong,” as Rolfe’s friend Ralph Hamor described it, Virginia tobacco was a hit.

Exotic, intoxicating, addictive, and disdained by stuffy authorities, smoking had become an aristocratic craze. When Rolfe’s shipment arrived, one writer estimated, London already had more than seven thousand tobacco “houses”—café-like places where the city’s growing throng of nicotine junkies could buy and drink tobacco. Unfortunately, because the sole source of fine tobacco were the colonies of hated Spain, the weed in England was hard to obtain, costly (the best tobacco sold for its weight in silver), and vaguely unpatriotic. London tobacco houses were thrilled by the sudden appearance of an English alternative: Virginia leaf. They clamored for more. Ships from London tied up to the Jamestown dock and took in barrels of rolled-up tobacco leaves. Typically four feet tall and two and a half feet across at the end, each barrel held half a ton or more. To balance the weight, sailors dumped out ballast, mostly stones, gravel, and soil—that is, for Virginia tobacco they swapped English dirt.

That dirt very possibly contained the common nightcrawler and the red marsh worm. So, almost certainly, did the rootballs of plants the colonists imported. Until the nineteenth century, worms like these were viewed as agricultural pests. Charles Darwin was among the first to realize they were something more; his last book was a three-hundred-page celebration of earthworm power. Huge numbers of these beasts, he noted, live beneath our feet; indeed, the total mass of the earthworms in a cow pasture may be many times the mass of the animals grazing above them. Literally eating their way through the soil, earthworms create networks of tunnels that let in water and air. In temperate places like Virginia, earthworms can turn over the upper foot of soil every ten or twenty years; tiny ecological engineers, they reshape entire expanses. “It may be doubted,” Darwin wrote, “whether there are many other animals which have played so important a part in the history of the world, as have these lowly organized creatures.”

The exact path of these migrants into North America is impossible to trace. What is clear is that before the arrival of Europeans, New England and the upper Midwest had no earthworms—they were wiped out in the last Ice Age. Earthworms from the south didn’t move north after the glaciers melted because the creatures don’t travel long distances unless they are transported by human agency. “If they’re born in your backyard, they’ll stay inside the fence their whole lives,” John W. Reynolds, editor of
Megadrilogica
, perhaps the premier U.S. earthworm journal, explained to me. They arrived with Europeans, probably in Virginia, and spread with them. Like the colonists, the worms were conquering a new place. In both cases, the arrival of foreigners was an ecological watershed.

In worm-free woodlands, leaves pile up in drifts on the forest floor. When earthworms are introduced, they can do away with the leaf litter in a few months, packing the nutrients into the soil in the form of castings (worm excrement). As a result, according to Cindy Hale, a worm researcher at the University of Minnesota, “everything changes.” Trees and shrubs in wormless places depend on litter for food. If worms tuck nutrients into the soil, the plants can’t find them. Many species die off. The forest becomes more open and dry, losing its understory, including tree seedlings. Meanwhile, earthworms compete for food with small insects, driving down their numbers. Birds, lizards, and mammals that feed in the litter decline as well. Nobody knows what happens next. “Four centuries ago, we launched this gigantic, unplanned ecological experiment,” Hale told me. “We have no idea what the long-term consequences will be.”

In some ways this is unsurprising: Jamestown itself was a case study in unintended consequences. The Virginia colony was an attempt by a group of merchants to snatch up the vast stores of gold and silver they imagined—incorrectly, alas—existed around Jamestown, in the big, shallow estuary of Chesapeake Bay. Equally important, the merchants wanted to find a route through North America, which they imagined, again incorrectly, to be only a few hundred miles wide, less than a month’s journey. And when the colonists came to the Pacific coast, they would be able to sail, possibly with Virginia silver, to the colony’s ultimate reason for existence: China. In the anodyne language of economics, Jamestown’s founders intended to integrate isolated Virginia into the world market—to globalize it.

Purely as a business venture, Jamestown was a disaster. Despite the profits from tobacco, its backers suffered such heavy losses that their venture collapsed ignominiously. Nonetheless the colony left a big mark: it inaugurated the great struggles over democracy (the colony established English America’s first representative body) and slavery (it brought in English America’s first captive Africans) that have long marked U.S. history. Rolfe’s worms, as one might call them, illustrate another aspect of its course: Jamestown was the opening salvo, for English America, of the Columbian Exchange. In biological terms, it marked the point when
before
turns into
after
. Setting up camp on the marshy Jamestown peninsula, the colonists were, without intending it, bringing the Homogenocene to North America. Jamestown was a brushfire in a planetary ecological conflagration.

STRANGE LAND

On May 14, 1607, three small ships anchored in the James River, at the southern periphery of Chesapeake Bay. In movies and textbooks they are often depicted as arriving in a pristine forest of ancient trees, small bands of Indians gliding, silent as ghosts, beneath the canopy. Implicit in this view is the common description of the colonists as “settlers”—as if the land was unsettled before they came on the scene. In fact, the English ships landed in the middle of a small but rapidly expanding Indian empire called Tsenacomoco.

Three decades before, Tsenacomoco had comprised six small, separate clusters of villages. By the time the foreigners came from overseas, its paramount leader, Powhatan, had tripled its size, to about eight thousand square miles. Tsenacomoco stretched from Chesapeake Bay to the Fall Line, the bluffs at the edge of the Appalachian plateau. In its scores of villages lived more than fourteen thousand people. Europeans would have been impressed by these numbers; Michael Williams, a historical geographer at Oxford, argued that the eastern U.S. forest may have been more populous in 1600 than even “densely settled parts of western Europe.”

The ruler of this land was known by multiple names and titles, a hallmark of kings everywhere; Powhatan, the name used most often by the colonists, was also the name of the village in which he was born. Wary, politically shrewd, ruthless when needed, Powhatan was probably in his sixties when the English landed—“well beaten with many cold and stormy winters,” according to colonist Strachey, but still “of a tall stature and clean limbs.”

The only known likeness of Powhatan created in his lifetime, this sketch ornamenting a 1612 map by John Smith depicts him in a longhouse, smoking a tobacco pipe while surrounded by wives and advisers. (
Photo credit 2.1
)

His capital of Werowocomoco (“king’s house”) was on the north bank of the York River, in a little bay where three streams come together. (The York runs more or less parallel to the James and a few miles to its north.) Projecting from the shore was a peninsula dominated by a low rise, twenty-five feet at its highest point, which held most of the village’s houses. Behind it, separated by a double moat from the rest of Werowocomoco, was a second, smaller hill, with several structures at its base that combined the function of temples, armories, and treasure houses. Generally closed to commoners, they contained the preserved bodies of important chiefs and priests, mounted on scaffolds and ringed by emblems of wealth and power. Atop the hill was the biggest structure in Tsenacomoco: a great, windowless barrel vault, perhaps 150 feet long, its walls made of overlapping sheets of chestnut bark, with gargoyle-like statues at each corner. At the far end, lighted by torches, was the royal chamber. Inside, the sovereign greeted visitors from a raised, pillow-covered divan, surrounded by wives and advisers, long gray hair tumbling over his shoulders, ropes of fat pearls descending from his neck. Confronted with this regal spectacle, colonist John Smith was awed; the Indian men, who generally had better diets than the English, “seemed like Giants,” with deep voices “sounding from them, as a voyce in a vault.” Sitting in the center, Powhatan himself, Smith thought, had “such a Majestie as I cannot expresse.”

To the English, Powhatan was a recognizable figure: the king of a small domain, with the lofty bearing that they expected from royalty. Any strangeness adhered not to the man in the foreground of the picture but the background against which he appeared: the fields, forests, and rivers of Tsenacomoco. It could hardly have been otherwise. Chesapeake Bay was shaped by ecological and social forces unknown to the colonists. Speaking broadly, the most important ecological force was the region’s different tally of plant and animal species; the social force, just as consequential, was the Indians’ different land-management practices.

By a quirk of biological history, the pre-Columbian Americas had few domesticated animals; no cattle, horses, sheep, or goats graced its farmlands. 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. In all of history, humankind has been able to domesticate only twenty-five mammals, a dozen or so birds, and, possibly, a lizard. Just six of these creatures existed in the Americas, and they played comparatively minor roles: the dog, eaten in Central and South America and used for labor in the far north; the guinea pig, llama, and alpaca, which reside in the Andes; the turkey, raised in Mexico and the U.S. Southwest; the Muscovy duck, native to South America despite its name; and, some say, the iguana, farmed in Mexico and Central America.
¹