3 The Americas and Columbus

The Columbian Exchange

Most of humanity’s major diseases originated in animals and crossed from domesticated species to their human keepers. Whooping cough and influenza came from pigs; measles and smallpox from cattle; malaria and avian flu from chickens. Without the inherited protection enjoyed by most Eurasians and Africans, even a routine childhood disease such as chickenpox was initially devastating for Native Americans, who did not have domesticated animals and thus little acquired immunity to these diseases.

The introduction of a disease into an area without inherited immunity is called a virgin soil epidemic. Virgin soil epidemics spread across the Americas when explorers and colonists introduced Eurasian diseases to the Native Americans. The Eurasian diseases that attacked native populations included smallpox, measles, chickenpox, influenza, typhus, cholera, typhoid, diphtheria, bubonic plague, scarlet fever, whooping cough, and malaria.

The impact of these Eurasian diseases on Native Americans was one of human history’s most abrupt and severe population disasters. American native populations had no safeguards, and disease spread virulently. For example, there were over a million people living on the Caribbean island of Hispaniola in 1492 when Columbus left his 39 sailors in La Navidad. By 1548, there were only 500 natives left alive. 999,500 people had disappeared in a little over 50 years.

The populations of other Caribbean islands like Cuba were similarly wiped out. Whole societies disappeared, and this was not only a tragedy for the cultures that vanished. The reduction of native populations began a cycle of violence that became central to the history of the Americas. Once there were no natives left to work on European sugar plantations, enslaved Africans were considered crucial to the survival of the West Indies sugar economy.

The greater population densities of Central and South America enabled contagious diseases to spread more quickly there. Heavily-traveled roads in central Mexico actually helped spread disease beyond  areas that had been reached by Spanish explorers. Cities were wiped out that had never seen a white man. The population of the Aztec heartland dropped from about 25 million on the eve of the Spanish conquest in 1519 to just under 17 million a decade later. After another decade the Aztec population was reduced to about 6 million. By 1580, the Aztec empire had been hollowed out to less than 2 million people, from a starting point of 25 million.

Traditional European or Eurocentric American histories of exploration often present the victory of the Spanish over the Aztec as an example of the superiority of Europeans over the savage Indians. The reality is far more complex! In addition to using the Aztec’s enemies against them Cortés was also aided by an enslaved Nahua woman, Malintzin (also known as La Malinche or Doña Marina, her Spanish name), whom the natives of Tabasco gave him as a tribute slave. In addition to speaking Nahua and Maya, Malintzin quickly learned Spanish and translated for Cortés in his dealings with Aztec emperor Moctezuma.

Willingly or under pressure, Malintzin, entered into a physical relationship with Cortés. Their son, Martín, was one of the first “mestizos” in Spanish America. Malintzin remains a controversial figure, seen as a traitor because she helped Cortés conquer the Aztecs and as a victim of European imperialism whose choices were very limited. In either case, she demonstrates one way in which native peoples responded to the arrival of the Spanish. Without her, Cortés would not have been able to communicate, and without the language bridge, he surely would have been less successful in destabilizing the Aztec Empire. By this and other means, native people helped shape the conquest of the Americas.

The Inca Empire in the Andes suffered the same fate. 90% of the South Americans died, and they started dying BEFORE the white invaders arrived in 1532, which caused confusion and dismay. When Pizarro crossed the Andes with eighty conquistadors, he found social chaos. Huayna Capac, the Inca leader who had triumphantly extended the empire into Chile and Ecuador, had died of smallpox in 1527. His two sons fought a brutal civil war for control of the empire, the younger son Atahualpa finally defeating and assassinating his older brother Huáscar. The civil war exacerbated the effects of epidemics, and the weakness of the reduced Inca population gave Pizarro the opportunity he needed to capture and kill Atahualpa in 1533, beginning the end of the Inca empire.

Although the conquistadors focused much of their energy on Central and South America, they brought disease to North America as well. After helping Pizarro conquer the Inca, Hernando De Soto landed an expedition in Florida in 1539 and explored territory now in the states of Georgia, South Carolina, North Carolina, Tennessee, Alabama, Mississippi, and Oklahoma. Everywhere he went, the conquistador reported the land was “thickly settled with large towns.”

De Soto didn’t stay long. He died of fever in Louisiana in 1542, and although the region was visited by a few missionaries, it was not seriously considered again by Europeans until the French aristocrat, La Salle, traveled down the Mississippi River in 1670. Where De Soto had seen fortified towns, La Salle saw none. The entire region had been emptied by the diseases which accompanied De Soto and his men, and had returned to wilderness. The French explorer reported traveling hundreds of miles without passing a single village. Historians were actually unaware until recently that the American South had once been heavily populated before the arrival of contagious Spanish explorers and missionaries.

Spanish invaders had not deliberately infected the natives with all these diseases (Europeans still had no idea at this time how viruses or bacteria worked), but they were quick to take advantage of the opportunities provided by the social chaos and military weakness of native societies in crisis.  In both Mexico and Peru, the conquistadors found allies among different indigenous groups who often thought of themselves as the victors, with Spanish help, rather than the other way around. Still, within a few years, the Spaniards took over the capital cities of the Inca and Aztec empires, inserting themselves into the top positions in the pre-existing governments. Patterns of tribute were maintained, as well as the labor draft of the Inca mita; although now labor would be devoted to the silver mines and not just road, irrigation, and building projects.

As they had been in Spain during the Reconquista, conquistadors were rewarded for military service with encomiendas. From a root word meaning “entrusting,” encomiendas were grants of captured territory and the people that lived on it, who the encomendero was theoretically responsible for bringing into the Christian community. This technique had been used in Spain to keep track of conquered Muslims and make sure they did not backslide after their forced conversions. In Spanish America, there was a much greater emphasis on taxing and working the new peasants, rather than leading them to religion.

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Europe

As previously mentioned, American staple crops were successfully adopted by farmers in Europe, providing better and more reliable nutrition which sparked a population boom. New foods like potatoes were so important in preventing the cyclical famines that regularly hit Europe, that they became a key topic in Adam Smith’s classic, On the Wealth of Nations. Many plant species developed by native Americans are still crucial to the world economy, including not only maize, potatoes, and cassava, but also tomatoes, sweet potatoes, cacao, chili peppers, natural rubber, tobacco, and vanilla. Quinine, a medicine made from the bark of the Peruvian cinchona tree, was effective treating malaria and helped open the African and Asian tropics to European colonization. Eurasian plants like sugar, soybeans, oranges, bananas, and rice (which probably reached America from Africa along with enslaved women who were experts growing it) were also extensively cultivated in the Americas for profitable shipment back to European markets. Exports of native and transplanted crops helped feed growing cities and, by the mid-18th century, freed agricultural workers to enter Europe’s new industries. Without inexpensive and abundant Native American foods, there might have been no Industrial Revolution.

Like the Portuguese in their exploration of Africa, the Spanish were also interested in finding sources of gold and silver for the European commerce.  Although they never found El Dorado, Europeans did find a fair amount of gold and they found even more silver.

For example, the Bolivian city of Potosí, located in the Andes at an elevation of 13,420 feet (over 4,000 meters), still has the largest population of any city at that altitude. Established by the Spanish in 1542, it is the site of a long-standing native mining village at the foot of the Cerro Rico, which is a literal mountain of silver. 

Every year between 1566 and 1815, a treasure fleet sailed from Acapulco to Manila laden with silver for the trade in China and India. Another fleet carried not only precious metals but spices and expensive Chinese ceramics acquired in Asia from Veracruz to Spain.

Once again, products originating in the Americas were a spur to the Industrial Revolution. Without the money minted from Latin America’s silver and gold, there might have been no global commercial boom to finance European industrialization. And Potosí’s story is not over yet. Although most of the easily-extractible silver was taken out of the mountain centuries ago, the Cerro Rico is still being worked by Bolivian children whose story is told in the award-winning documentary, The Devil’s Miner, which you can view on the web if you’re interested in learning more.

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Mestizos

As the majority of the Spanish in the New World were male soldiers in the first decades of the conquest, women were taken, often forcibly, from native communities to be wives and mistresses. One high-ranking Inca native named Felipe Guaman Poma de Ayala wrote to the King of Spain around 1600, complaining that Spaniards are taking all the Indian women of childbearing age, so the place was being flooded with mestizos who were not required to work as the Indians were. Worse, the fathers were not supporting their illegitimate children, and “if a Spaniard steals away four Indian women to make little mestizos, he will bribe the judges and refuse to recognize his paternity,” leaving their support up to the state. “Spaniards ought to live like Christians,” Guaman argued, “marrying ladies of equal status and leaving the poor Indian women alone so they can have Indian children.”

Most of the countries of Latin America are built on mixed or mestizo populations; so much so that in the 1700s, the colonists tried to make distinctions between all the various types of people they believed made up their societies, to “prove” to the Spanish Crown that a logical caste system existed in the colonies. Although these distinctions were somewhat arbitrary and were often used to uphold the power of the group at the top, in the long run many of these mixed Euro-American populations have developed strong ethnic identities. A similar process happened in New France–today’s Quebec in Canada. There were only about twenty-five hundred French people in the province by 1663. Most of them were voyageurs, fur traders who went into the northern forests to make their fortunes. Voyageurs frequently married local Indian women, and their Canadian descendants are now recognized as a distinct ethno-cultural group called Métis.

 

The social caste system developed in Latin America was based on both blood and origin. Meaning…

The Portuguese were initially more interested in dominating trade routes in the Indian Ocean, so they mostly ignored their new possession in Brazil until French Huguenots, protestant Christians fleeing Catholic France, tried to establish a colony near present-day Rio de Janeiro in the mid-1500s. By that time, the Portuguese had watched the Spanish become successful cultivating sugar cane in the Caribbean. Thus, Portuguese entrepreneurs decided to bring cane and slaves to Brazil and set up plantations along the northern coast.  By this time, the Catholic Church had prohibited the enslavement of Indians, but not of Africans. Native Brazilians did not establish the complex societies found in Mexico, Central America, and Andean South America, so it was actually harder to “conquer” them, as they escaped deeper into the interior jungles and forests. However, the Portuguese already had established colonies and trade ties in Africa, which soon supplied enslaved labor to the sugar plantations.

As described in the previous chapter, slavery was a traditional element in all world societies, including those of Africa, but Europeans quickly grasped the usefulness of having enslaved Africans in European communities because it would be harder for them to blend in with the local population. The sugar trade spurred the slave trade, as well as European notions of racial superiority to justify the enslavement of people with darker skins.

By the mid-1500s in Europe, Spanish wealth began to cause problems. Wealthy Spanish nobles married into aristocratic families like the Austrian Hapsburgs. In 1519 (the same year Cortés attacked Tenochtitlán and Magellan set out to circle the Earth) the grandson of Ferdinand and Isabella, Charles V, became Holy Roman Emperor. Charles was also King of Spain and (by marriage) Portugal, which gave him legal control of all the American colonies. When his wife Isabella died in 1555, Charles was inconsolable. He abdicated in 1556 and retired to a monastery, leaving his younger brother Ferdinand in charge of the Holy Roman Empire in Europe and his son Philip II in control of Spain, Portugal, and their possessions (including the “Spanish Netherlands” on the European coast).

 

Although Philip II was called “The Prudent,” and was also briefly King of England while married to Queen (Bloody) Mary, after she died in 1558, he lost control of the rebellious Protestant Dutch Republic and Spain declared bankruptcy five times. Spain’s financial troubles were partly due to debts Philip’s father Charles V had accumulated as Holy Roman Emperor. After Queen Mary’s death, Philip proposed to her successor, Elizabeth I, who turned him down. Elizabeth’s father, King Henry VIII, had separated the Church of England from Rome in the 1530s, after a dispute with the Pope over the annulment of his marriage to Catherine of Aragon, daughter of Ferdinand and Isabella and aunt to Charles V. Philip supported the claim of Mary Queen of Scots to the British throne, but when she was executed in 1587, Philip decided to invade and return England to Catholicism.

In 1588, the Spanish Armada organized by Philip was hampered by bad weather on the English Channel and then defeated by the British Royal Navy, which lost no ships while Spain lost five before withdrawing. During the retreat, most of the Spanish navy was destroyed by storms, leaving the British and the Dutch in control of the Atlantic. Later that year an English fleet sailed into the harbor at Cadiz, burned 200 Spanish ships and made off with the annual silver shipment. It was the beginning of the end of the Spanish Empire as a major European power.

Another reason Spain did not permanently dominate the European economy was that for centuries most of the silver they shipped from Peru and Mexico ended up in China, where silver was the basis of the earth’s largest economy. Buoyed by China’s economic dominance, the Asian population increased from 60% of the world’s people to 67% between 1500 and 1800. In addition to the Mings in China, the Mughals in India ruled an empire of 150 million people, and they were very interested in expanding trade with the West. India was also highly productive; between the two empires, Asia produced 80% of all the world’s goods.  Even though we are concentrating in this chapter on the intricacies of the Atlantic World and the intersection of Africa, Europe, and the Americas, until the mid-1700s, it is important to remember that China and India dominated world commerce and industry.

Chinese silks and Indian cotton were the world’s best quality and lowest-cost textiles, and clothes made from them were worn throughout the world – even in Spain’s colonies where the law required people to trade only with the home country. The national costume of Mexico is called the China Poblana; it was originally a contraband silk dress worn by women of the towns. The British were so intimidated by Asian textiles that they imposed tariffs to try to protect their own weavers from being driven out of the business. Mercantilism, in which colonies served the home country as both a market and a source of raw materials in a closed economy, was actually not a primitive economic system that evolved into free market capitalism. It was an attempt to shield British and European merchants from an already-existing international free market in which they were too often the losers to the dominant Asian powers.

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This is an adaptation from Modern World History (on Minnesota Libraries Publishing Project) by Dan Allosso and Tom Williford, and is used under a CC-BY-NC-SA 4.0 International license.