American History - Exchange

It’s probably good to take a moment to pause here to talk a bit about what a bunch of high falutin science types call the Columbia Exchange, which is of course named after good old Christopher Columbus because being a good person is historically not a factor in getting stuff named after you. Anyways, the Columbian Exchange is how historians refer to the various things that started getting passed back and forth between the Old World and New World after 1492. In many ways, these two parts of the world had effectively been on two completely different planets for thousands of years, developing unique biomes that suddenly got smashed back together again. Though we tend to think of it just in terms of the Old World and the New World, the Columbian Exchange was actually just one of many such exchanges brought about by the development of effective long-range sailing ships at the end of the fifteenth century, opening up extensive trade routes which cut out multitudes of middle men who previously moved goods over long distances to Europe. The opening of these trade routes were the first steps towards globalization, steps which led to many benefits as new ideas and commodities made their way around the globe, and to many consequences as new diseases reached far off shores and western Europe rose to culturally and politically dominate the world. It was the start of a new epoch in human history.

Anyways, regarding the Columbia Exchange specifically, the exchange of agricultural goods had a significant effect. The introduction of high yielding New World crops like corn and potatoes to the Old World allowed for extensive population growth in both Europe and Asia. Concurrently the introduction of wheat allowed for agriculture to develop in parts of the New World previously thought too dry and the introduction of livestock and horses completely transformed the cultures and diets of some Native American tribes. However, an even more immediate and significant effect was the spreading of diseases. Prior to 1492, the world effectively had two human populations, both with their own separate worlds of germs and microbes.

In case for some reason your a little thick and don’t already know, the Native Americans definitely got the shittier end of the stick when it came to disease. Though the first Europeans proved themselves to be rather douchey when they arrived in the New World, even if they had been the most perfect of guests, the die was cast the moment they set foot in the New World. In 1492, it is estimated that the Native American population was somewhere in the vicinity of 50 to 100 million people. For comparison, the population of Europe at the time was around 90 million with a total of around 350 million living in the entirety of the Old World. Within 150 years of initial contact, 90 percent of the Native Americans were dead from diseases like measles and small pox, dangerous diseases in the Old World, but an outright Armageddon in the New World. Advanced civilizations across the Americas collapsed before the onslaught, emptying entire regions and leaving behind scattered post-apocalyptic survivors, struggling to re-establish themselves in a world no longer familiar, battling against expanding waves of pale faced invaders. Few moments in human history can match these pandemics in terms of devastation and destruction. There’s more that can be said, but this certainly isn’t the last time this topic is going to come up.

Anyways, of course, the Columbian Exchange was not a one sided affair when it came to disease. Several mysterious ailments spread amongst early explorers and colonists, but by far the worse of them was a little sexually transmitted disease called syphilis. Brought back by sailors from Columbus’ very first voyage, syphilis quickly spread across Europe. For the Native Americans, it was a slow burning disease involving drippy genital sores and one’s brain rotting away over decades. For the Europeans it was a horrifying shit show of open sores turning into sloughing off rotting flesh, exposing bones and muscle underneath. It literally turned people into the living dead, melting them over a period of months and leaving survivors horrificaly scarred. Over a thirty year period, syphilis killed some 5% of Europe’s population before shifting into something more similar to what the Native Americans experienced. However, even afterwards it had long term effects on European society, infecting some 20% of the population, affecting everything from politics to culture, to fashion.

Now of course after reading all of this, it is perfectly fair to ask the question, why in the hell did the Native Americans see such comparitively devastating losses compared to their European counterparts when it came to coming into contact with new diseases. Well, in the end it comes down to immune systems and the fact that the Europeans of the era were pretty fucking gross. The first major factor was the fact that the Old World had five times the population of the New World. This meant five times the opportunities for new diseases to develop, mutate, and what have you. The second factor was the fact that the Old World was chock full of domesticated animals, something the New World decidedly lacked. Living in close proximity to domesticated animals meant there was a much higher chance of diseases making the leap from animals to humans. This only got worse as people moved into crowded cities where people basically just dumped shit onto the street and into the same rivers where they got their water. The final factor was that Europe had recently been through the Black Death some 150 years prior, which killed around 30 to 50% of the European population. Now for some reason, the lesson Europeans took from this experience was that they should really avoid bathing, so that by the time 1492 rolled round it was not uncommon for some Europeans to spend their entire lives never once taking a bath. Taken all together, the final result is a group of people with some super robust immune systems. Comparatively, most Native American cultures tended to put a lot of emphasis on keeping clean and not shitting in their own water supplies.

All of this is not to say that the way Europeans treated Native Americans over the past 500 years is in any way okay. There is plenty of fucked up history that in no way had to happen. However, even if Columbus had never sailed the ocean blue, contact between the two worlds was likely to happen at some point. Unfortunately, in many ways the pandemics that followed were inevitable.

American History - Less Exciting Than Expected

Up until his imprisonment in 1499 for being such a shit, Christopher Columbus held the sole right to explore the New World on behalf of Spain, a situation which unsurprisingly led to a significant amount of asshattery. However, even after Chris’ imprisonment, only a few Spanish explorers bothered to set sail in search of new lands; Alonso de Ojeda, Rodrigo de Bastidas, and Amerigo Vespucci being three of the more prominent. Despite extravagant claims of gold and spices by Columbus, the reality in the West Indies was much more limited. While some small gold mines were discovered on Hispaniola, it was nowhere near what had been promised. As a result, the King and Queen of Spain became much less interested and expeditions to the New World became much more dependent upon private financing, meaning they needed to show a profit, which they rarely ever did. This was little helped by the failure of attempts by Ojeda to found colonies on the north coast of South America in 1502 and 1510, mostly due to local natives being less than down with the general Spanish assholery, and a hurricane sinking 29 ships laden with what few treasures had been collected in Hispaniola in 1502. Spanish exploration was largely limited to the Caribbean and nearby coasts of Central and South America for the better part of two decades.

Meanwhile, the Portuguese sent their first vessels to India via sailing around Africa in 1497, opening up a new lucrative trade route which greatly enriched the small nation. Numerous other Portuguese expeditions followed, one of which went further west than planned, discovering Brazil in 1500. This sparked the funding of several exploratory expeditions by the Portuguese king, amongst them Amerigo Vespucci, who like most explorers were down with working for anyone willing to pay them. It was Amerigo who figured out that Brazil was connected to the rest of South America, which basically proved that the New World was most definitely not East Asia. Thanks to finally proving the obvious, map makers named the new continent America in Amerigo’s honor, because apparently being good at cartography doesn’t involve being good at spelling. Either way, finding little in the way of riches, the Portuguese abandoned further exploration of South America within a few years.

During this same period, a second Italian nut job was making the rounds in Europe, claiming that you could totally get to Asia just by sailing west. Giovanni Caboto made the same mathematical error as Columbus, leading him to believe the world was smaller than it actually was. The way Giovanni saw it, Columbus was totally right, he was just too far south. He eventually convinced the King of England to fund an expedition in 1496, which sailed around a bit before coming home. Undettered, Giovanni set sail again in 1497, this time managing to arrive in Newfoundland after a few months at sea. Newfoundland was most definitely not China, and if anything, it was even less interesting than the West Indies. However, when Giovanni returned to England he made it sound like Newfoundland was fricking amazing and surely China was only a little bit further on. In 1498 he departed on a third expedition, but a storm sank his ship soon after and the remaining ships of the expedition returned home. Despite this setback, the King of England funded numerous other expeditions to the area over the next decade, which explored north to the mouth of Hudson Bay and south to Chesapeake Bay, but found no easy route to China. When the King of England died in 1509, his son, much less interested in some place across the sea covered in trees, declared the expeditions to be a huge waste of money and stopped funding them. The Kings of Spain and Portugal also funded expeditions to the area of Newfoundland, but finding little of interest and no China, abandoned such ventures even more quickly.

Throughout this period, the small Spanish colony on Hispaniola struggled to survive. The colony was home to priests sent by the devout Queen of Spain to convert the natives, the desperate younger sons of merchants and minor nobles, and various poor people either just looking to earn a living or be part of some grand adventure. Though nobody exactly got rich, the only sources of income being a small gold mine and selling the natives back to Spain as slaves, which was not all that lucrative given most tended to die on the voyage or soon after arriving, living at the colony did have some benefits, mainly the fact that even the poorest Spaniard didn’t really have to work that hard to survive. Viewing the local natives as savages, the Spanish enslaved them and forced them to grow food and do whatever other work the Spanish thought needed doing. The colony also being mostly men, they of course had relationships with the native women, which even in circumstances not obviously rape involved some pretty fucked up power dynamics given any resistance to the whole setup resulted in a response involving torture and murder. While against the whole slavery aspect of what was going on, the priests did support the intermarrying, and it is likely that many of the native women pursued such relationships given the children born would enjoy a higher level of status than those born to native men.

Anyways, this dynamic was not really that great for the native population, a situation that only got worse as various Old World diseases began spreading around. Having no immunity to such things, the natives on Hispaniola began to die off in large numbers. This was not exactly all that great for the Spanish, what with them not wanting to have to work for a living, so they began raiding the other islands for more slaves. The need for new slaves, along with the discovery of further small sources of gold, eventually led to the development of new colonies on Cuba and Puerto Rico around 1510. However, this further decimated the local native populations in the Caribbean, the vast majority of whom died over the next fifty years, with the exception of those descended from the intermingling of Spanish men and native women.

The discovery of further sources of gold in the Caribbean created new interest in the West Indies, sparking the funding of several new expeditions. One of these, led by Vasco de Balboa founded the colony of Santa Maria in what is today Panama in 1510, the first European colony on the American mainland. The site was chosen due to the natives in the area seeming to have more gold than those met before. Over the next several years, Balboa attacked many of the surrounding tribes, forcing them to convert to Christianity and hand over their gold. Hearing rumors of even greater riches further from the coast, Balboa eventually made his way across the narrow isthmus, arriving on the Pacific Coast in 1513. During the same year, Ponce de Leon, leader of the Puerto Rico colony, led an expedition north to Florida, becoming the first European to set foot on what was to later become the United States. However, finding little of interest in the new land after poking around for some eight months, he returned home none the richer.

American History - Columbus

In 1453 CE, the Ottoman Turks conquered the city of Constantinople sitting at the mouth of the Black Sea, sweeping away the last vestiges of the old Roman Empire. While there is a whole lot involved in all of this, in the end this is U.S. history, not European or world history, so if you want to know more about it, then you’ll just have to read some other book. However, the main thing you need to know is that the fall of Constantinople closed Europe’s last direct links to the Silk Road, a series of trade routes which connected Europe to the Far East and its exotic goods, the most important being spices. This was rather disappointing to the European elites, who suddenly found themselves being forced to pay even more outrageously high prices to have their food taste like something besides salt. Being the furthest west, the elite of Portugal were especially pissed off about this, which is probably why they got the bright idea in their heads to just try sailing around Africa to get to India and beyond. This was a rather novel idea, what with none of them having any idea at the time if you could even sail around Africa, and even rumors claiming all sorts of things like boiling seas and sea monsters, but they said fuck it and gave it a go anyways. It took them some thirty years, mostly because the stars change when you go far enough south meaning all the things the sailors knew about navigation had to be re-learned, but eventually in 1488, Bartholomew Dias found the bottom of Africa, opening up the riches of the Far East to the Portuguese.

Not liking the ramifications of Portugal’s success, namely it was obviously soon to become ridiculously wealthy, the neighboring King and Queen of Spain decided to take a long-shot bet on a crazy Italian schmuck named Christopher Columbus. Now old Chris was convinced that the Portuguese were going about reaching the riches of Asia the wrong way. After all, everyone knew the world was round, so obviously the best way to do it would be to just sail west across the open ocean. Chris was convinced this could easily be done in a matter of two months, mostly because he basically forgot to carry the one and so therefore thought the world was smaller than it actually was. The scholars in the Spanish court of course quickly pointed this out, but being rather desperate and rather worried about what would happen if the Portuguese suddenly became fabulously wealthy, the Spanish monarchs decided to forget common sense and gave Chris three ships in 1492 to try sailing west. Amazingly enough, after two months at sea, they arrived in the Caribbean.

Now of course Chris felt completely vindicated by finding what he thought was Asia, even though there were none of the promised riches in sight aside from some gold earrings worn by the local Taino and Carib peoples he encountered. However, not being one to ever think of himself as wrong, Chris declared the rich parts of Asia were probably just a little further west and then declared the islands he found to be the West Indies and their inhabitants to be Indians. After sailing around a bit, losing one of his ships, and leaving a small group of men on the island of Hispaniola, he sailed home to Spain where he loudly and proudly declared he had totally found Asia, sparking a wave of excitement that confused the hell out of scholars who were pretty damn sure Asia should be farther away. Within six months of his return home, he set out for the Caribbean once more, this time with seventeen ships and some 1,200 men eager to claim the riches of the New World. After sailing around exploring small islands for a bit, Chris returned to his original landing point on Hispaniola where he discovered the locals had slaughtered all of his men. Not really liking the vibe, he headed to a different location to the island to start his new colony. This of course quickly turned into an epic shit show. Believe it or not, being an asshat who is not good at math rarely makes you a good administrator.

The first year of the new colony was not an easy one. Not only was the New World not as overflowing with gold as promised, but a combination of disease, perhaps syphilis or some other previously unknown New World plague, and starvation killed off two-thirds of them within the first year. In order to maintain control, Chris began executing colonists for even minor crimes, and when that didn’t work, he unleashed the colonists on the local natives, allowing his men to beat, kill, rape, and enslave as they saw fit. Now it should be mentioned that some of the native tribes were openly hostile to the Spanish from the beginning, and that some tribes practiced some fucked up versions of cannibalism, such as keeping sex slaves, castrating any male children born to these slaves, and then eating them when they grew old enough. However, the Spanish didn’t differentiate between one tribe and another at all, treating them all the same. After about a year of this, Chris established something similar to the feudal system on the island. In Spain, the feudal system was still very much a thing at the time, serfs being forced to work the lands owned by nobles in return for a place to live. It’s every bit as fucked up as it sounds, but Chris kicked it up a notch by cutting off the hands of any native who failed to deliver a certain amount of gold, cotton, or food. There being overall fairly limited resources on Hispaniola, this resulted in a lot of cut off hands. The natives, finally deciding enough was enough at this point, openly revolted, but were quickly slaughtered by the Spanish whose steel armor and weapons, guns, crossbows, and horses gave them a decided advantage. In response, Columbus began shipping hundreds of natives back to Spain to be sold as slaves, most dying of various Old World diseases during the voyage or soon after arrival.

Chris returned to Spain in 1496, where he was treated like a hero, and then sailed back to the New World in 1498 to search for a large continent believed to be to the south. Though he found South America, he continued to refuse to admit that what he had found was totally not Asia. When he returned to Hispaniola, he found the colonists less than happy to see him, which Chris dealt with by having anyone openly against him tortured. The colonists finally got so tired of his crap, that they sent word of the atrocities back to the King and Queen of Spain, who were less angry about such as things as they were the fact that Chris was not converting the natives to Christianity as they had asked. In 1500, he was arrested and returned to Spain in chains. However, being apparently still a smooth talking bastard, he convinced the King and Queen to not only release him in 1502, but to also fund a new voyage west to most definitely find the riches of Asia this time. Chris explored the Caribbean and the coast of Central America for a year before a storm left him shipwrecked on Jamaica, where he stayed another year because nobody wanted to bother rescuing his sorry ass. He returned to Spain in 1504, never again to sail west. He spent the next two years of his life suffering from various terrible ailments and refusing to acknowledge what he had found was not Asia. He died in 1506 at the age of 54, though his body was sent to Hispaniola in 1536.