1493: Uncovering the New World Columbus Created / 1493: открытие Нового Света, созданного Колумбом (by Charles C. Mann, 2011) - аудиокнига на английском

PROLOGUE Like other books, this one began in a garden. Almost twenty years ago I came across a newspaper notice about some local college students who had grown a hundred different varieties of tomato. Visitors were welcome to take a look at their work. Because I like tomatoes, I decided to drop by with my eight-year-old son. When we arrived at the school greenhouse I was amazed—I’d never seen tomatoes in so many different sizes, shapes, and colors. A student offered us samples on a plastic plate. Among them was an alarmingly lumpy specimen, the color of an old brick, with a broad, green-black tonsure about the stem. Occasionally I have dreams in which I experience a sensation so intensely that I wake up. This tomato was like that—it jolted my mouth awake. Its name, the student said, was Black from Tula. It was an “heirloom” tomato, developed in nineteenth-century Ukraine. “I thought tomatoes came from Mexico,” I said, surprised. “What are they doing breeding them in Ukraine?” The student gave me a catalog of heirloom seeds for tomatoes, chili peppers, and beans (common beans, not green beans). After I went home, I flipped through the pages. All three crops originated in the Americas. But time and again the varieties in the catalog came from overseas: Japanese tomatoes, Italian peppers, Congolese beans. Wanting to have more of those strange but tasty tomatoes, I went on to order seeds, sprout them in plastic containers, and stick the seedlings in a garden, something I’d never done before. Not long after my trip to the greenhouse I visited the library. I discovered that my question to the student had been off the mark. To begin, tomatoes probably originated not in Mexico, but in the Andes Mountains. Half a dozen wild tomato species exist in Peru and Ecuador, all but one inedible, producing fruit the size of a thumbtack. And to botanists the real mystery is less how tomatoes ended up in Ukraine or Japan than how the progenitors of today’s tomato journeyed from South America to Mexico, where native plant breeders radically transformed the fruits, making them bigger, redder, and, most important, more edible. Why transport useless wild tomatoes for thousands of miles? Why had the species not been domesticated in its home range? How had people in Mexico gone about changing the plant to their needs? These questions touched on a long-standing interest of mine: the original inhabitants of the Americas. As a reporter in the news division of the journal Science, I had from time to time spoken with archaeologists, anthropologists, and geographers about their increasing recognition of the size and sophistication of long-ago native societies. The botanists’ puzzled respect for Indian plant breeders fit nicely into that picture. Eventually I learned enough from these conversations that I wrote a book about researchers’ current views of the history of the Americas before Columbus. The tomatoes in my garden carried a little of that history in their DNA. They also carried some of the history after Columbus. Beginning in the sixteenth century, Europeans carried tomatoes around the world. After convincing themselves that the strange fruits were not poisonous, farmers planted them from Africa to Asia. In a small way, the plant had a cultural impact everywhere it moved. Sometimes not so small—one can scarcely imagine southern Italy without tomato sauce. Still, I didn’t grasp that such biological transplants might have played a role beyond the dinner plate until in a used-book store I came across a paperback: Ecological Imperialism, by Alfred W. Crosby, a geographer and historian then at the University of Texas. Wondering what the title could refer to, I picked up the book. The first sentence seemed to jump off the page: “European emigrants and their descendants are all over the place, which requires explanation.” I understood exactly what Crosby was getting at. Most Africans live in Africa, most Asians in Asia, and most Native Americans in the Americas. People of European descent, by contrast, are thick on the ground in Australia, the Americas, and southern Africa. Successful transplants, they form the majority in many of those places—an obvious fact, but one I had never really thought about before. Now I wondered: Why is that the case? Ecologically speaking, it is just as much a puzzle as tomatoes in Ukraine. Before Crosby (and some of his colleagues) looked into the matter, historians tended to explain Europe’s spread across the globe almost entirely in terms of European superiority, social or scientific. Crosby proposed another explanation in Ecological Imperialism. Europe frequently had better-trained troops and more-advanced weaponry than its adversaries, he agreed, but in the long run its critical advantage was biological, not technological. The ships that sailed across the Atlantic carried not only human beings, but plants and animals—sometimes intentionally, sometimes accidentally. After Columbus, ecosystems that had been separate for eons suddenly met and mixed in a process Crosby called, as he had titled his previous book, the Columbian Exchange. The exchange took corn (maize) to Africa and sweet potatoes to East Asia, horses and apples, to the Americas, and rhubarb and eucalyptus to Europe—and also swapped about a host of less-familiar organisms like insects, grasses, bacteria, and viruses. The Columbian Exchange was neither fully controlled nor understood by its participants, but it allowed Europeans to transform much of the Americas, Asia, and, to a lesser extent, Africa into ecological versions of Europe, landscapes the foreigners could use more comfortably than could their original inhabitants. This ecological imperialism, Crosby argued, provided the British, French, Dutch, Portuguese, and Spanish with the consistent edge needed to win their empires. Crosby’s books were constitutive documents in a new discipline: environmental history. The same period witnessed the rise of another discipline, Atlantic studies, which stressed the importance of interactions among the cultures bordering that ocean. (Recently a number of Atlanticists have added movements across the Pacific to their purview; the field may have to be renamed.) Taken together, researchers in all these fields have been assembling what amounts to a new picture of the origins of our world-spanning, interconnected civilization, the way of life evoked by the term “globalization.” One way to summarize their efforts might be to say that to the history of kings and queens most of us learned as students has been added a recognition of the remarkable role of exchange, both ecological and economic. Another way might be to say that there is a growing recognition that Columbus’s voyage did not mark the discovery of a New World, but its creation. How that world was created is the subject of this book. The research has been greatly aided by recently developed scientific tools. Satellites map out environmental changes wreaked by the huge, largely hidden trade in latex, the main ingredient in natural rubber. Geneticists use DNA assays to trace the ruinous path of potato blight. Ecologists employ mathematical simulations to simulate the spread of malaria in Europe. And so on—the examples are legion. Political changes, too, have helped. To cite one of special importance to this book, it is much easier to work in China nowadays than it was in the early 1980s, when Crosby was researching Ecological Imperialism. Today, bureaucratic suspicion is minimal; the chief obstacle I faced during my visits to Beijing was the abominable traffic. Librarians and researchers there happily gave me early Chinese records—digital scans of the originals, which they let me copy onto a little memory stick that I carried in my shirt pocket. What happened after Columbus, this new research says, was nothing less than the forming of a single new world from the collision of two old worlds—three, if one counts Africa as separate from Eurasia. Born in the sixteenth century from European desires to join the thriving Asian trade sphere, the economic system for exchange ended up transforming the globe into a single ecological system by the nineteenth century—almost instantly, in biological terms. The creation of this ecological system helped Europe seize, for several vital centuries, the political initiative, which in turn shaped the contours of today’s world-spanning economic system, in its interlaced, omnipresent, barely comprehended splendor. Ever since violent protests at a 1999 World Trade Organization meeting in Seattle brought the idea of globalization to the world’s attention, pundits of every ideological stripe have barraged the public with articles, books, white papers, blog posts, and video documentaries attempting to explain, celebrate, or attack it. From the start the debate has focused around two poles. On one side are economists and entrepreneurs who argue passionately that free trade makes societies better off—that both sides of an uncoerced exchange gain from it. The more trade the better! they say. Anything less amounts to depriving people in one place of the fruits of human ingenuity in other places. On the other side is a din of environmental activists, cultural nationalists, labor organizers, and anti-corporate agitators who charge that unregulated trade upends political, social, and environmental arrangements in ways that are rarely anticipated and usually destructive. The less trade, they say, the better. Protect local communities from the forces unleashed by multinational greed! Whipsawed between these two opposing views, the global network has become the subject of a furious intellectual battle, complete with mutually contradictory charts, graphs, and statistics—and tear gas and flying bricks in the streets where political leaders meet behind walls of riot police to wrangle through international-trade agreements. Sometimes the moil of slogans and counter-slogans, facts and factoids, seems impenetrable, but as I learned more I came to suspect that both sides may be correct. From the outset globalization brought both enormous economic gains and ecological and social tumult that threatened to offset those gains. It is true that our times are different from the past. Our ancestors did not have the Internet, air travel, genetically modified crops, or computerized international stock exchanges. Still, reading the accounts of the creation of the world market one cannot help hearing echoes—some muted, some thunderously loud—of the disputes now on the television news. Events four centuries ago set a template for events we are living through today. · · · What this book is not: a systematic exposition of the economic and ecological roots of what some historians call, ponderously but accurately, “the world-system.” Some parts of the earth I skip entirely; some important events I barely mention. My excuse is that the subject is too big for any single work; indeed, even a pretense at completeness would be unwieldy and unreadable. Nor do I fully treat how researchers came to form this new picture, though I describe some of the main landmarks along the intellectual way. Instead in 1493 I concentrate on areas that seem to me to be especially important, especially well documented, or—here showing my journalist’s bias—especially interesting. Readers wishing to learn more can turn to the sources in the Notes and Bibliography. Following an introductory chapter, the book is divided into four sections. The first two lay out, so to speak, the constituent halves of the Columbian Exchange: the separate but linked exchanges across the Atlantic and Pacific. The Atlantic section begins with the exemplary case of Jamestown, the beginning of permanent English colonization in the Americas. Established as a purely economic venture, its fate was largely decided by ecological forces, notably the introduction of tobacco. Originally from the lower Amazon, this exotic species—exciting, habit-forming, vaguely louche—became the subject of the first truly global commodity craze. (Silk and porcelain, long a passion in Europe and Asia, spread to the Americas and became the next ones.) The chapter sets the groundwork for the next, which discusses the introduced species that shaped, more than any others, societies from Baltimore to Buenos Aires: the microscopic creatures that cause malaria and yellow fever. After examining their impact on matters ranging from slavery in Virginia to poverty in the Guyanas, I close with malaria’s role in the creation of the United States. The second section shifts the focus to the Pacific, where the era of globalization began with vast shipments of silver from Spanish America to China. It opens with a chronicle of cities: Potos? in what is now Bolivia, Manila in the Philippines, Yuegang in southeast China. Once renowned, now little thought of, these cities were the fervid, essential links in an economic exchange that knit the world together. Along the way, the exchange brought sweet potatoes and corn to China, which had accidental, devastating consequences for Chinese ecosystems. As in a classic feedback loop, those ecological consequences shaped subsequent economic and political conditions. Ultimately, sweet potatoes and corn played a major part in the flowering and collapse of the last Chinese dynasty. They played a small, but similarly ambiguous role in the Communist dynasty that eventually succeeded it. The third section shows the role of the Columbian Exchange in two revolutions: the Agricultural Revolution, which began in the late seventeenth century; and the Industrial Revolution, which took off in the early and mid-nineteenth century. I concentrate on two introduced species: the potato (taken from the Andes to Europe) and the rubber tree (transplanted clandestinely from Brazil to South and Southeast Asia). Both revolutions, agricultural and industrial, supported the rise of the West—its sudden emergence as a controlling power. And both would have had radically different courses without the Columbian Exchange. In the fourth section I pick up a theme from the first section. Here I turn to what in human terms was the most consequential exchange of all: the slave trade. Until around 1700 about 90 percent of the people who crossed the Atlantic were African captives. (Native Americans made up part of the remainder, as I explain.) In consequence of this great shift in human populations, many American landscapes were for three centuries largely dominated, in demographic terms, by Africans, Indians, and Afro-Indians. Their interactions, long hidden from Europeans, are an important part of our human heritage that is just coming to light. The meeting of red and black, so to speak, took place against a backdrop of other meetings. So many different peoples were involved in the spasms of migration set off by Columbus that the world saw the rise of the first of the now-familiar polyglot, world-encompassing metropolises: Mexico City. Its cultural jumble extended from the top of the social ladder, where the conquistadors married into the nobility of the peoples they had conquered, to the bottom, where Spanish barbers complained bitterly about low-paid immigrant barbers from China. A planetary crossroads, this great, turbulent metropolis represents the unification of the two networks described in the first part of this book. A coda set in the present suggests that these exchanges continue unabated. In some respects this image of the past—a cosmopolitan place, driven by ecology and economics—is startling to people who, like me, were brought up on accounts of heroic navigators, brilliant inventors, and empires acquired by dint of technological and institutional superiority. It is strange, too, to realize that globalization has been enriching the world for nigh on five centuries. And it is unsettling to think of globalization’s equally long record of ecological convulsion, and the suffering and political mayhem caused by that convulsion. But there is grandeur, too, in this view of our past; it reminds us that every place has played a part in the human story, and that all are embedded in the larger, inconceivably complex progress of life on this planet. · · · As I write these words, it’s a warm August day. Yesterday my family picked the first tomatoes from our garden—the somewhat improved successor of the tomato patch I planted after my visit to the college twenty years ago. After I planted the seeds from the catalog, it didn’t take me long to discover why so many people love puttering in their gardens. Messing around with the tomatoes felt to me like building a fort as a child: I was both creating a refuge from the world and creating a place of my own in that world. Kneeling in the dirt, I was making a small landscape, one that had the comfortable, comforting timelessness evoked by words like home. To biologists this must seem like poppycock. At various times my tomato patch has housed basil, eggplant, bell peppers, kale, chard, several types of lettuce and lettuce-like greens, and a few marigolds, said by my neighbors to repel bugs (scientists are less certain). Not one of these species originated within a thousand miles of my garden. Nor did the corn and tobacco grown in nearby farms; corn is from Mexico, tobacco from the Amazon (this species of tobacco, anyway—there was a local species that is now gone). Equally alien, for that matter, are my neighbors’ cows, horses, and barn cats. That people like me experience their gardens as familiar and timeless is a testament to the human capacity to adapt (or, less charitably, to our ability to operate in ignorance). Rather than being a locus of stability and tradition, my garden is a biological record of past human wandering and exchange. Yet in another way my feelings are correct. Almost seventy years ago the Cuban folklorist Fernando Ortiz Fern?ndez coined the awkward but useful term “transculturation” to describe what happens when one group of people takes something—a song, a food, an ideal—from another. Almost inevitably, Ortiz noted, the new thing is transformed; people make it their own by adapting, stripping, and twisting it to fit their needs and situation. Since Columbus the world has been in the grip of convulsive transculturation. Every place on the earth’s surface, save possibly scraps of Antarctica, has been changed by places that until 1492 were too remote to exert any impact on it. For five centuries now the crash and chaos of constant connection has been our home condition; my garden, with its parade of exotic plants, is a small example. How did those tomatoes get to Ukraine, anyway? One way to describe this book would be to say that it represents, long after I first asked the question, my best efforts to find out. INTRODUCTION In the Homogenocene 1 Two Monuments THE SEAMS OF PANGAEA Although it had just finished raining, the air was hot and close. Nobody else was in sight; the only sound other than those from insects and gulls was the staticky low crashing of Caribbean waves. Around me on the sparsely covered red soil was a scatter of rectangles laid out by lines of stones: the outlines of now-vanished buildings, revealed by archaeologists. Cement pathways, steaming faintly from the rain, ran between them. One of the buildings had more imposing walls than the others. The researchers had covered it with a new roof, the only structure they had chosen to protect from the rain. Standing like a sentry by its entrance was a hand-lettered sign: Casa Almirante, Admiral’s House. It marked the first American residence of Christopher Columbus, Admiral of the Ocean Sea, the man whom generations of schoolchildren have learned to call the discoverer of the New World. La Isabela, as this community was called, is situated on the north side of the great Caribbean island of Hispaniola, in what is now the Dominican Republic. It was the initial attempt by Europeans to make a permanent base in the Americas. (To be precise, La Isabela marked the beginning of consequential European settlement—Vikings had established a short-lived village in Newfoundland five centuries before.) The admiral laid out his new domain at the confluence of two small, fast-rushing rivers: a fortified center on the north bank, a satellite community of farms on the south bank. For his home, Columbus—Crist?bal Col?n, to give him the name he answered to at the time—chose the best location in town: a rocky promontory in the northern settlement, right at the water’s edge. His house was situated perfectly to catch the afternoon light. Today La Isabela is almost forgotten. Sometimes a similar fate appears to threaten its founder. Col?n is by no means absent from history textbooks, of course, but in them he seems ever less admirable and important. He was a cruel, deluded man, today’s critics say, who stumbled upon the Caribbean by luck. An agent of imperialism, he was in every way a calamity for the Americas’ first inhabitants. Yet a different but equally contemporary perspective suggests that we should continue to take notice of the admiral. Of all the members of humankind who have ever walked the earth, he alone inaugurated a new era in the history of life. Lines of stones mark the outlines of now-vanished buildings at La Isabela, Christopher Columbus’s first attempt to establish a permanent base in the Americas. (Photo credit 1.1) The king and queen of Spain, Fernando (Ferdinand) II and Isabel I, backed Col?n’s first voyage grudgingly. Transoceanic travel in those days was heart-stoppingly expensive and risky—the equivalent, perhaps, of space-shuttle flights today. Despite relentless pestering, Col?n was able to talk the monarchs into supporting his scheme only by threatening to take the project to France. He was riding to the frontier, a friend wrote later, when the queen “sent a court bailiff posthaste” to fetch him back. The story is probably exaggerated. Still, it is clear that the sovereigns’ reservations drove the admiral to whittle down his expedition, if not his ambitions, to a minimum: three small ships (the biggest may have been less than sixty feet long), a combined crew of about ninety. Col?n himself had to contribute a quarter of the budget, according to a collaborator, probably by borrowing it from Italian merchants. Everything changed with his triumphant return in March of 1493, bearing golden ornaments, brilliantly colored parrots, and as many as ten captive Indians. The king and queen, now enthusiastic, dispatched Col?n just six months later on a second, vastly larger expedition: seventeen ships, a combined crew of perhaps fifteen hundred, among them a dozen or more priests charged with bringing the faith to these new lands. Because the admiral believed he had found a route to Asia, he was sure that China and Japan—and all their opulent goods—were only a short journey beyond. The goal of this second expedition was to create a permanent bastion for Spain in the heart of Asia, a headquarters for further exploration and trade. The new colony, predicted one of its founders, “will be widely renowned for its many inhabitants, its elaborate buildings, and its magnificent walls.” Instead La Isabela was a catastrophe, abandoned barely five years after its creation. Over time its structures vanished, their very stones stripped to build other, more successful towns. When a U.S.–Venezuelan archaeological team began excavating the site in the late 1980s, the inhabitants of La Isabela were so few that the scientists were able to move the entire settlement to a nearby hillside. Today it has a couple of roadside fish restaurants, a single, failing hotel, and a little-visited museum. On the edge of town, a church, built in 1994 but already showing signs of age, commemorates the first Catholic Mass celebrated in the Americas. Watching the waves from the admiral’s ruined home, I could easily imagine disappointed tourists thinking that the colony had left nothing meaningful behind—that there was no reason, aside from the pretty beach, for anyone to pay attention to La Isabela. But that would be a mistake. Babies born on the day the admiral founded La Isabela—January 2, 1494—came into a world in which direct trade and communication between western Europe and East Asia were largely blocked by the Islamic nations between (and their partners in Venice and Genoa), sub-Saharan Africa had little contact with Europe and next to none with South and East Asia, and the Eastern and Western hemispheres were almost entirely ignorant of each other’s very existence. By the time those babies had grandchildren, slaves from Africa mined silver in the Americas for sale to China; Spanish merchants waited impatiently for the latest shipments of Asian silk and porcelain from Mexico; and Dutch sailors traded cowry shells from the Maldive Islands, in the Indian Ocean, for human beings in Angola, on the coast of the Atlantic. Tobacco from the Caribbean ensorcelled the wealthy and powerful in Madrid, Madras, Mecca, and Manila. Group smoke-ins by violent young men in Edo (Tokyo) would soon lead to the formation of two rival gangs, the Bramble Club and the Leather-breeches Club. The shogun jailed seventy of their members, then banned smoking. Long-distance trade had occurred for more than a thousand years, much of it across the Indian Ocean. China had for centuries sent silk to the Mediterranean by the Silk Road, a route that was lengthy, dangerous, and, for those who survived, hugely profitable. But nothing like this worldwide exchange had existed before, still less sprung up so quickly, or functioned so continuously. No previous trade networks included both of the globe’s two hemispheres; nor had they operated on a scale large enough to disrupt societies on opposite sides of the planet. By founding La Isabela, Col?n initiated permanent European occupation in the Americas. And in so doing he began the era of globalization—the single, turbulent exchange of goods and services that today engulfs the entire habitable world. Newspapers usually describe globalization in purely economic terms, but it is also a biological phenomenon; indeed, from a long-term perspective it may be primarily a biological phenomenon. Two hundred and fifty million years ago the world contained a single landmass known to scientists as Pangaea. Geological forces broke up this vast expanse, splitting Eurasia and the Americas. Over time the two divided halves of Pangaea developed wildly different suites of plants and animals. Before Col?n a few venturesome land creatures had crossed the oceans and established themselves on the other side. Most were insects and birds, as one would expect, but the list also includes, surprisingly, a few farm species—bottle gourds, coconuts, sweet potatoes—the subject today of scholarly head-scratching. Otherwise, the world was sliced into separate ecological domains. Col?n’s signal accomplishment was, in the phrase of historian Alfred W. Crosby, to reknit the seams of Pangaea. After 1492 the world’s ecosystems collided and mixed as European vessels carried thousands of species to new homes across the oceans. The Columbian Exchange, as Crosby called it, is the reason there are tomatoes in Italy, oranges in the United States, chocolates in Switzerland, and chili peppers in Thailand. To ecologists, the Columbian Exchange is arguably the most important event since the death of the dinosaurs. Unsurprisingly, this vast biological upheaval had repercussions on humankind. Crosby argued that the Columbian Exchange underlies much of the history we learn in the classroom—it was like an invisible wave, sweeping along kings and queens, peasants and priests, all unknowing. The claim was controversial; indeed, Crosby’s manuscript, rejected by every major academic publisher, ended up being published by such a tiny press that he once joked to me that his book had been distributed “by tossing it on the street, and hoping readers happened on it.” But over the decades since he coined the term, a growing number of researchers have come to believe that the ecological paroxysm set off by Col?n’s voyages—as much as the economic convulsion he began—was one of the establishing events of the modern world. On Christmas Day, 1492, Col?n’s first voyage came to an abrupt end when his flagship, the Santa Mar?a, ran aground off the northern coast of Hispaniola. Because his two remaining vessels, the Ni?a and Pinta, were too small to hold the entire crew, he was forced to leave thirty-eight men behind. Col?n departed for Spain while those men were building an encampment—a scatter of makeshift huts surrounded by a crude palisade, adjacent to a larger native village. The encampment was called La Navidad (Christmas), after the day of its involuntary creation (its precise location is not known today). Hispaniola’s native people have come to be known as the Taino. The conjoined Spanish-Taino settlement of La Navidad was the intended destination of Col?n’s second voyage. He arrived there in triumph, the head of a flotilla, his crewmen swarming the shrouds in their eagerness to see the new land, on November 28, 1493, eleven months after he had left his men behind. He found only ruin; both settlements, Spanish and Taino, had been razed. “We saw everything burned and the clothing of Christians lying on the weeds,” the ship’s doctor wrote. Nearby Taino showed the visitors the bodies of eleven Spaniards, “covered by the vegetation that had grown over them.” The Indians said that the sailors had angered their neighbors by raping some women and murdering some men. In the midst of the conflict a second Taino group had swooped down and overwhelmed both sides. After nine days of fruitless search for survivors Col?n left to find a more promising spot for his base. Struggling against contrary winds, the fleet took almost a month to crawl a hundred miles east along the coast. On January 2, 1494, Col?n arrived at the shallow bay where he would found La Isabela. Click here to view a larger image. 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. Col?n himself was ambivalent. On the one hand, he was supposed to be governing a colony that was establishing a commercial entrep?t in the Americas. On the other hand, he was supposed to be at sea, continuing his search for China. The two roles conflicted, and Col?n was never able to resolve the conflict. On April 24 Col?n 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 Col?n 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 Col?n, 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, Col?n 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 Bartolom?, whom he had left behind. Col?n 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. Col?n 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 Col?n’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.2 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 Bartolom? 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: Col?n, 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 Col?n’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 Col?n 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 Col?n, 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 Col?n—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 Col?n’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 Col?n’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). Col?n, 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 Col?n’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.” A grand monument to the admiral! To del Monte y Tejada, the merits of the idea seemed obvious; Col?n was a messenger from God, his voyages to the Americas the result of a “divine decree.” Nonetheless, building the monument took almost a century and a half. The delay was partly economic; most nations in the hemisphere were too poor to throw money at a monstrous statue on a faraway island. But it also reflected the growing unease about the admiral himself. Knowing what we know today about the fate of the Indians on Hispaniola, critics asked, should there be any monument to his voyages at all? Given his actions, what kind of person was buried in the golden box at its center? The answer is hard to arrive at, even though his life is among the best documented of his time—the newest edition of his collected writings runs to 536 pages of small print. During his lifetime, nobody knew him as Columbus. The admiral was baptized as Cristoforo Colombo by his family in Genoa, Italy, but changed his name to Cristovao Colombo when he moved to Portugal, where he was an agent for Genoese merchant families. He called himself Crist?bal Col?n after 1485, when he moved to Spain, having failed to persuade the Portuguese king to sponsor an expedition across the Atlantic. Later, like a petulant artist, he insisted that his signature be an incomprehensible glyph: (No one is sure what he meant, but the third line could invoke Christ, Mary, and Joseph—Xristus Maria Yosephus—and the letters up top may stand for Servus Sum Altissimi Salvatoris, “Servant I am of the Highest Savior.” ??? FERENS is probably Xristo-Ferens, “Christ-Bearer.”) “A well-built man of greater than average stature,” according to a description attributed to his illegitimate son Hern?n, the admiral had prematurely white hair, “light-colored eyes,” an aquiline nose, and fair cheeks that readily flushed. He was a mercurial man, moody and inconstant one hour to the next. Although subject to fits of rage, Hern?n remembered, Col?n was also “so opposed to swearing and blasphemy that I give my word I never heard him say any oath other than ‘by San Fernando.’ ” (St. Ferdinand). His life was dominated by overweening personal ambition and, arguably more important, profound religious faith. Col?n’s father, a weaver, seems to have scrambled from debt to debt, which his son apparently viewed with shame; he actively concealed his origins and spent his entire adult life striving to found a dynasty that would be ennobled by the monarchy. His faith, always ardent, deepened during the long years in which he was vainly begging rulers in Portugal and Spain to back his voyage west. During part of that time he lived in a politically powerful Franciscan monastery in southern Spain, a place enraptured by the visions of the twelfth-century mystic Joachim di Fiore, who believed that humankind would enter an age of spiritual bliss after Christendom wrested Jerusalem from the Islamic forces who had conquered it centuries before. The profits from his voyage, Col?n came to believe, would both advance his own fortunes and fulfill di Fiore’s vision of a new crusade. Trade with China would pour so much money into Spain, he predicted, “that in three years the Monarchs will be able to set about preparing for the conquest of the Holy Land.” Integral to this grand scheme were Col?n’s views on the size and shape of the earth. As a child, I—like countless students before me—was taught that Columbus was ahead of his time, proclaiming the planet to be large and round in an era when everyone else believed it to be small and flat. My fourth-grade teacher showed us an etching of Columbus brandishing a globe before a platoon of hooting medieval authorities. A shaft of sunlight illuminated the globe and the admiral’s flowing hair; his critics, by contrast, squatted like felons in the shadows. My teacher, alas, had it exactly backward. Scholars had known for more than fifteen hundred years that the world was large and round. Col?n disputed both facts. The admiral’s disagreement with the second fact was minor. The earth, he argued, was not perfectly round but “in the shape of a pear, which would all be very round, except for where the stem is, where it is higher, or as if someone had a very round ball, and in one part of it a woman’s nipple would be put there.” At the very tip of the nipple, so to speak, was “the Earthly Paradise, where nobody can go, except by divine will.” (During a later voyage he thought he had found the nipple, in what is now Venezuela.) The king and queen of Spain cared not a whit about the admiral’s views of the world’s shape or heaven’s location. But they were keenly interested in his ideas about its size. Col?n believed the planet’s circumference to be at least five thousand miles smaller than it actually is. If this idea were true, the gap between western Europe and eastern China—the width, we know today, of both the Atlantic and Pacific oceans and the lands between them—would be much smaller than it actually is. The notion enticed the monarchs. Like other European elites, they were fascinated by accounts of the richness and sophistication of China. They lusted after Asian textiles, porcelain, spices, and precious stones. But Islamic merchants and governments stood in the way. If Europeans wanted the luxuries of Asia, they had to negotiate with powers that Christendom had been at war with for centuries. Worse, the mercantile city-states of Venice and Genoa had already cut a deal with Islamic forces, and now monopolized the trade. The notion of working with Islamic entities was especially unwelcome to Spain and Portugal, which had been conquered by the armies of Muhammad in the eighth century and had spent hundreds of years in an ultimately successful battle to repel them. But even if they did make arrangements with Islam, Venice and Genoa stood ready to use force to maintain their privileged position. To cut out the unwanted middlemen, Portugal had been trying to send ships all the way around Africa—a long, risky, expensive journey. The admiral told the rulers of Spain that there was a faster, safer, cheaper route: going west, across the Atlantic. In effect, Col?n was challenging the Greek polymath Eratosthenes, who in the third century B.C. had ascertained the earth’s circumference by a method, the science historian Robert Crease wrote in 2003, “so simple and instructive that it is reenacted annually, almost 2,500 years later, by schoolchildren all around the globe.” Eratosthenes concluded that the world is about twenty-five thousand miles around. The east-west width of Eurasia is approximately ten thousand miles. Arithmetic would require that the gap between China and Spain be about fifteen thousand miles. European shipbuilders and potential explorers both knew that no fifteenth-century vessel could survive a voyage of fifteen thousand miles, let alone make the return trip. Col?n believed that he had, as it were, disproved Eratosthenes. A skilled intuitive seaman, the admiral had plied the eastern Atlantic from Africa to Iceland. During these travels he used a sailor’s quadrant in an attempt to measure the length of a degree of longitude. Somehow he convinced himself that his results vindicated the claim, attributed to a ninth-century caliph in Baghdad, that a degree was 560 miles. (It is actually closer to sixty-nine miles.) Col?n multiplied this value by 360, the number of degrees in a circle, to calculate the circumference of the earth: 20,400 miles. Coupling this figure with an incorrectly large estimate of the east-west length of Eurasia, Col?n argued that the journey across the Atlantic could be as little as three thousand miles, six hundred miles of which could be cut off by setting sail from the newly conquered Canary Islands. This distance could easily be traversed by Spanish vessels. Crossing their fingers that Col?n was right, the monarchs submitted his proposal to a committee of experts in astronomy, navigation, and natural philosophy. The committee of experts rolled its collective eyes. From its perspective, Col?n’s claim that he—a poorly educated man fumbling with a quadrant on a wave-tossed ship—had refuted Eratosthenes was like someone claiming to have demonstrated in a backwoods shack that gravity didn’t pull iron as much as scientists thought, and that one could therefore hoist an anvil with a loop of thread. In the end, though, the king and queen ignored the experts—they told Col?n to try the thread. After landing in the Americas in 1492, the admiral naturally claimed that his ideas had been vindicated.3 The delighted monarchs awarded him honors and wealth. He died in 1506, a rich man surrounded by a loving family; nevertheless, he died a bitter man. As evidence had emerged of his failings, personal and geographical, the Spanish court had revoked most of his privileges and shunted him aside. In the anger and humiliation of his later years, he slid into religious messianism. He came to believe that he was God’s “messenger,” destined to show the world “the new heaven and earth of which Our Lord spoke through Saint John in the Apocalypse.” In one of his last reports to the king, the admiral suggested that he, Col?n, would be the ideal person to convert the emperor of China to Christianity. Much the same mix of grandiosity and disappointment characterized the Columbus monument. Del Monte y Tejada’s proposal for a memorial to the admiral was finally approved in 1923, at a meeting of the Western Hemisphere’s governments. Progress was slow—the design competition wasn’t held for another eight years, and the monument itself wasn’t built for another six decades. During most of that time the Dominican Republic was ruled by the tyrant Rafael Trujillo. A classic case of narcissistic personality disorder, Trujillo erected scores of statues to himself and hung a giant neon sign that read “God and Trujillo” over the harbor of Santo Domingo, which he had renamed Trujillo City. As his reign grew more barbarous, international enthusiasm for the lighthouse waned—supporting the project was seen as endorsing the dictator. Many nations boycotted the inauguration, on October 12, 1992. Pope John Paul II reneged on his promise to celebrate a Mass at the opening, though he did appear nearby a day before. Meanwhile, protesters set police barricades on fire, denouncing the admiral as “the exterminator of a race.” Residents of the walled-off slums around the monument told reporters that they thought Col?n deserved no commemoration at all. A thesis of this book is that their belief, no matter how understandable, is mistaken. The Columbian Exchange had such far-reaching effects that some biologists now say that Col?n’s voyages marked the beginning of a new biological era: the Homogenocene. The term refers to homogenizing: mixing unlike substances to create a uniform blend. With the Columbian Exchange, places that were once ecologically distinct have become more alike. In this sense the world has become one, exactly as the old admiral hoped. The lighthouse in Santo Domingo should be regarded less as a celebration of the man who began it than a recognition of the world he almost accidentally created, the world of the Homogenocene we live in today. Every American nation promised to contribute to the Columbus memorial when it was approved in 1923, but the checks were slow in coming—the U.S. Congress, for example, didn’t appropriate its share for another six years. In May of 1930 Dominican army head Rafael Trujillo became president in a fraud-ridden election. Three weeks later a hurricane wiped out Santo Domingo, killing thousands. Deciding that the memorial would symbolize the city’s revitalization, Trujillo staged a design competition in 1931. On the jury were eminent architects, including Eliel Saarinen and Frank Lloyd Wright. More than 450 entries came in, including these by (clockwise from top left) Konstantin Melnikov, Robaldo Morozzo della Rocca and Gigi Vietti, Erik Bryggman, and Iosif Langbard. (Photo credit 1.2) SHIPLOADS OF SILVER At a busy corner in a park just south of the old city walls in Manila is a grimy marble plinth, perhaps fifteen feet tall, topped by lifesize bronze statues, blackened by pollution, of two men in sixteenth-century attire. The two men stand shoulder to shoulder, faces into the setting sun. One wears a monk’s habit and brandishes a cross as if it were a sword; the other, in a military breastplate, carries an actual sword. Compared to the Columbus Lighthouse, the monument is small and rarely visited by tourists. I found no mention of it in recent guidebooks and maps—a historical embarrassment, because it is the closest thing the world has to an official recognition of globalization’s origins. The man with the sword is Miguel L?pez de Legazpi, founder of modern Manila. The man with the cross is Andr?s Ochoa de Urdaneta y Cerain, the navigator who guided Legazpi’s ships across the Pacific. One way to summarize the two Spaniards’ contribution would be to say that together Legazpi and Urdaneta achieved what Col?n failed to do: establish continual trade with China by sailing west. Another way to state their accomplishment would be to say that Legazpi and Urdaneta were to economics what Col?n was to ecology: the origin, however inadvertent, of a great unification. Legazpi, slightly the more well known, was born about a decade after the admiral’s first voyage. For most of his life he showed no sign of Col?n’s penchant for maritime adventure. He trained as a notary, inheriting his father’s position in the Basque city of Zum?rraga, near the border with France. In his late twenties he went to Mexico, where he worked in the colonial administration for thirty-six years. His life was jerked out of its cozy rut when he was approached by Urdaneta, a friend and cousin who was among the few survivors of Spain’s failed attempt, in the 1520s, to establish an outpost in the spice-laden Maluku Islands. (Formerly known as the Moluccas, they are south of the Philippines.) Urdaneta had been shipwrecked in the Malukus for a decade, eventually being rescued by the Portuguese. After returning he had refused all further offers to go to sea and entered a monastery. Thirty years later, the next king of Spain wanted to take another stab at establishing a base in Asia. He ordered Urdaneta out of the cloister. Urdaneta’s position as a clergyman made him unable by law to serve as head of the expedition. He chose Legazpi for the job, despite his lack of a nautical background. Legazpi’s thoughts about the likelihood of success may be indicated by his decision to prepare for the voyage by selling all of his worldly possessions and sending his children and grandchildren to stay with family members in Spain. Because Portugal had taken advantage of the Spanish failures to occupy the Malukus, the expedition was told to find more spice islands nearby and establish a trade base on them. The king of Spain also wanted them to chart the wind patterns, to introduce the area to Christianity, and to be a thorn in the side of his nephew and rival, the king of Portugal. But the underlying goal was China—“the stimulus that pulled Spain, as the vanguard of Christendom, to search the seaways,” as the historian Antonio Garc?a-Ab?solo put it in 2004. “One cannot overemphasize the continuity of the goals for the actions undertaken by Col?n, [conqueror of Mexico Hern?n] Cort?s and Legazpi.” All of them sought China. Legazpi and Urdaneta left with five ships on November 21, 1564. Reaching the Philippines, Legazpi set up camp on the island of Cebu, midway up the archipelago. Meanwhile, Urdaneta set about figuring out how to return to Mexico—nobody had ever successfully made the trip. Simply retracing the expedition’s westward route was not possible, because the trade winds that had blown the ships from Mexico to the Malukus would impede their return. In a stroke of navigational genius, Urdaneta avoided the contrary currents by sailing far to the north before turning east. Click here to view a larger image. On Cebu, Legazpi was plagued by mutiny and disease and harassed by Portuguese ships. But he slowly expanded Spanish influence north, approaching China. Periodically the Spanish viceroy in Mexico City dispatched reinforcements and supplies. Important among the supplies were silver bars and coins, mined in Mexico and Bolivia, intended to pay the Spanish troops. A turning point occurred in May 1570, when Legazpi dispatched a reconnaissance mission: two small ships with about a hundred Spanish soldiers and sailors, accompanied by scores of native Filipino Malays in proas (low, narrow outrigger-type boats, rigged with one or two fore-and-aft sails). After two days’ northerly sail, they reached the island of Mindoro, about 130 miles south of modern Manila (which is on Luzon, the chain’s biggest island). Mindoro’s southern coast consists of a number of small bays, one next to another like tooth marks in an apple. The Malays on the expedition learned from local Mangyan people that two Chinese junks were at anchor forty miles away, in another cove—a trading post near the modern village of Maujao (mah-oo-how). Every spring ships from China traveled to several Philippine islands, Mindoro among them, to exchange porcelain, silk, perfumes, and other goods for gold and beeswax.4 Shaded by parasols made of white Chinese silk, the Mangyan descended from their upland homes to meet the Chinese, who beat small drums to announce their arrival. Maujao, which has a freshwater spring a few feet back from the beach, had long been a meeting point; local officials told me that archaeology students have found Chinese porcelain there that dates to the eleventh century. Legazpi had ordered the excursion’s commander to contact—politely, not aggressively—any Chinese he encountered. Hearing of the junks’ presence, the commander sent one of the two Spanish ships and most of the proas to meet the Chinese “and to request peace and friendship with them.” Leading the contact group was Juan de Salcedo, Legazpi’s twenty-one-year-old grandson, popular with and respected by the soldiers despite his youth. Unluckily, high winds separated the vessels; Salcedo’s ship was pushed badly off course. The vessels spent the night in different harbors, protected from the storm by the high, narrow fingers of rock that define the coves. Temporarily leaderless but eager to gain the riches of China, the Spanish soldiers in the proas moved east at first light. Rounding a narrow, rocky promontory on the southern side of Maujao, they came upon the Mangyan and Chinese. The Chinese put on a show of force, one of Salcedo’s men later recalled, “beating on drums, playing on fifes, firing rockets and culverins [a kind of small, portable cannon], and making a great warlike display.” Taking this as a challenge, the Spaniards attacked—a rash act, “for the Chinese ships were large and high, while the proas were so small and low that they hardly reached to the lower bollards on the enemy’s ships.” They raked the junks’ decks with musket fire, threw grappling hooks over the sides, clambered onto the decks, and killed lots of Chinese traders. Onboard, the attackers found small quantities of silk, porcelain, gold thread, “and other curious articles.” When Salcedo finally arrived in Maujao, hours after the battle, he was “not at all pleased with the havoc.” Far from requesting “peace and friendship,” as he had ordered, his men had wantonly slain Chinese sailors and left their ships in ruins. (The chronicle, probably written by Mart?n de Goiti, Salcedo’s right-hand man, makes no mention of the Mangyan, whom the Spaniards didn’t care about; one assumes they fled the carnage.) Salcedo apologized, freed the survivors, and returned the meager plunder. The Chinese, the expedition member reported, “being very humble people, knelt down with loud utterances of joy.” Still, there was a problem. One of the junks was totally destroyed; the other was salvageable, but the ship rigging was so different from European rigging that nobody in the expedition knew how to mend it. Salcedo ordered some of his troops to help the surviving vessel limp to the Spanish headquarters, where Legazpi’s men might be able to help. The Chinese sailed home in their reconstructed junk and reported that Europeans had appeared in the Philippines. Amazingly, they had come from the east, though Europe lay to the west. And the barbarians had something that was extremely desirable in China: silver. Meanwhile, Legazpi took over Manila and waited for their return. In the spring of 1572, three junks appeared in the Philippines. They contained a carefully chosen selection of Chinese manufactured goods—a test of what Legazpi would pay for, and pay the most for. It turned out the Spaniards wanted everything, a result, Legazpi’s notary reported, that “delighted” the traders. Especially coveted were silk, rare and costly in Europe, and porcelain, made by a technology then unknown in Europe. In return, the Chinese took every ounce they could of Spanish silver. More junks came the next year, and the year after that. Because China’s hunger for silver and Europe’s hunger for silk and porcelain were effectively insatiable, the volume of trade grew enormous. The “galleon trade,” as it would become known, linked Asia, Europe, the Americas, and, less directly, Africa. (African slaves were integral to Spain’s American empire; as I will describe later, they dug and refined the ore in Mexico’s silver mines.) 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. That era was regarded with suspicion from the beginning. China was then the earth’s wealthiest, most powerful nation. By virtually any measure—per capita income; military strength; average lifespan; agricultural production; culinary, artistic, and technical sophistication—it was equal to or superior to the rest of the world. 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. Its principal industry was textiles, mainly wool. China, meanwhile, had silk. Reporting to the Spanish king in 1573, the viceroy in Mexico lamented that “neither from this land nor from Spain, so far as can now be learned, can anything be exported thither that they do not already possess.” With silver, though, Spain finally had something China wanted. Badly wanted, in fact—Spanish silver literally became China’s money supply. But there was an unease about having the nation’s currency in the hands of foreigners. The court feared that the galleon trade—the first large-scale, uncontrolled international exchange in Chinese history—would usher in large-scale, uncontrolled change to Chinese life. The fears were entirely borne out. Although emperor after emperor refused entry to almost all human beings from Europe and the Americas, they could not keep out other species. Key players were American crops, especially sweet potatoes and maize;5 their unexpected arrival, the agricultural historian Song Junling wrote in 2007, was “one of the most revolutionary events” in imperial China’s history. The nation’s agriculture, based on rice, had long been concentrated in river valleys, especially those of the Yangzi and Huang He (Yellow) rivers. Sweet potatoes and maize could be grown in the dry uplands. Farmers moved in numbers to these areas, which had previously been lightly settled. The result was a wave of deforestation, followed by waves of erosion and floods, which caused many deaths. The regime, already straining under many problems, was further destabilized—to Europe’s benefit. Spain, too, was uneasy about the galleon trade. The annual shipments of silver to Manila were the culmination of a centuries-long quest to trade with China. Nonetheless, Madrid spent almost the entire period trying to limit the exchange. Again and again, royal edicts restricted the number of ships allowed to travel to Manila, cut the amount of allowable exports, set import quotas for Chinese goods, and instructed Spanish merchants to form a cartel to raise prices. From today’s perspective the Spanish discontent is surprising. Both sides gained by the exchange of silk for silver, as economic theory would predict. But it was Europe that emerged in the stronger position. With the galleon trade, declaimed the historian Andre Gunder Frank, “Europeans bought themselves a seat, and then even a whole railway car, on the Asian train.” Legazpi’s encounter with the Chinese signaled the arrival of the Homogenocene in Asia. And following it, gliding in the slipstream, came the rise of the West. As close to a monument to globalization as the world is likely to see, this statue to Miguel L?pez de Legazpi and Andr?s de Urdaneta, initiators of the silver trade across the Pacific, occupies a little-frequented corner of a park in central Manila. (Photo credit 1.3) The statue of Legazpi and Urdaneta was not intended to commemorate any of these ideas or events. It was proposed in 1892 by Manila’s Basque community to celebrate the Basque role in the city’s history (Legazpi and Urdaneta were Basques, as were many of their men). By the time Catalan sculptor Agust? Querol i Subirats cast the bronze, the United States had seized the Philippines from Spain. The islands’ new rulers had little interest in a monument to dead Spaniards; the statue languished at a customs house until 1930, when it was finally erected. Walking around the monument, I wished that it were larger, given that it is the closest equivalent to a formal commemoration of globalization we have today. I also wished it were more complete. To truly mark the galleon trade, Legazpi and Urdaneta would have to be surrounded by Chinese merchants: equal partners in the exchange. Such a monument probably will never be built, not least because the worldwide network is still viewed with unease, even by many of its beneficiaries. Across the street from the monument is another, more popular park, named after Jos? Rizal, a writer, doctor, and martyred anti-Spanish revolutionary who is a national hero in the Philippines. At the center of Rizal Park is a reflecting pool edged with flower gardens and statuary. All the statues are bronze busts on concrete columns. All depict Filipinos who died fighting Spanish rule. On the side of the pool facing the Legazpi monument is a bust of Rajah Sulayman, identified by a plaque as “the brave Muslim ruler of the kingdom of Maynila (Manila) who refused the offer of ‘friendship’ by the Spaniards … under Miguel Lopez de Legazpi.” (Parentheses in original.) 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. Legazpi approached Sulayman soon after encountering the Chinese. The Spaniards wanted to use Manila’s harbor as a launching point for the China trade. When Sulayman said he didn’t want the Spaniards around, Legazpi leveled his principal village, killing him and three hundred of his fellows. Modern Manila was established on the ruins. Sulayman and the other people around the pool were, in effect, the first antiglobalization martyrs. They have been awarded a place considerably more prominent than the deserted corner given to Legazpi and Urdaneta. In the end, though, they lost, each and every one of them. Big speakers mounted on iron columns at the corners of the pool issue bulletins from the redoubts of Classic Rock. Walking around the area, I was nearly run over by a train fashioned into a replica of Thomas the Tank Engine, a children’s-book and -television character owned by Apax Partners, a British private-equity firm said to be among the world’s largest. Over Thomas’s smiling, tooting head I could see the towers of the hotels and banks in Manila’s tourist district. The birthplace of globalization looked a lot like many other places. In the Homogenocene, Kentucky Fried Chicken, McDonald’s, and Pizza Hut are always just minutes away. REVERSALS OF FORTUNE The Homogenocene? A new epoch in the history of life, brought into being by the abrupt creation of a world-spanning economic system? The claim seems grandiose. But imagine a thought experiment: flying around the earth in 1642, a century and a half after Col?n’s first voyage, threescore and ten after the first Chinese silk from Manila arrived in Mexico. Think of it as a round-the-world cruise at 35,000 feet of a planet in the first stages of a great disturbance. The brochure promises that the cruise will hit the highlights of the nascent Homogenocene. What will the passengers see? One answer would be: a world bound together by hoops of Spanish silver. Silver from the Americas is well on its way to doubling or tripling the world’s stock of precious metals. Potos?, in what is now southern Bolivia, is the main source—the biggest, richest strike in history. Begin the cruise here, at this central node in the network. Located more than thirteen thousand feet up the Andes, Potos? sits at the foot of an extinct volcano that is as close to a mountain of pure silver as geology allows. Around it is an almost treeless plateau, strewn with glacial boulders, scoured by gelid winds. Agriculture struggles here, and there is no wood for fire. Nonetheless, by 1642 this mining city had become the biggest, densest community in the Americas. Potos? is a brawling, bawling boomtown marked by extravagant display and hoodlum crime. It is also a murderously efficient mechanism for the extraction and refining of silver ore in appallingly harsh conditions. Indian workers haul the ore on their backs up crude ladders from hundreds of feet below the surface, then extract the silver by mixing the ore with highly toxic mercury. Smelters on the slopes transform the metal into bars of almost pure silver, typically weighing sixty-five pounds and stamped with sigils guaranteeing their quality and authenticity. Other silver is stamped into coins—the Spanish peso is on its way to becoming a de facto world currency, as the U.S. dollar is today. Battalions of llamas—more sure-footed and altitude tolerant than mules and horses—carry the coins and bars down from the mountains, every dangerous step guarded by men with weapons. They hoist the silver onto ships in Arica, on the Chilean coast, which shuttle it to the great port of Lima, seat of the Spanish colonial government. From Lima the silver is loaded onto the first of a series of military convoys that will transport it across the world. From the plane, follow the silver fleet as it travels north. To the east of the convoy rise the Andean slopes, gripped in ecological turmoil. Humankind has lived here for many thousands of years, erecting some of the world’s first urban complexes in the valleys north of Lima. A hundred and fifteen years before this overflight, smallpox swept in. After it came other European diseases, and then Europeans themselves. Millions died, fearful and suffering, in shattered mountain villages. Now, decades later, slopes terraced and irrigated for centuries remain empty. Shrubs and low trees have overwhelmed abandoned farms. A huge volcanic eruption in 1600 covered central Peru with up to three feet of ash and rubble. Four decades later, little has been cleared away. Andean ecosystems have gone feral. Sailing north, the silver fleet is passing something akin to wilderness, at least in patches. Some of the vessels anchor in Panama, while others go to Mexico. Watching from the plane, observe that the Panamanian silver crosses the isthmus, bound for Europe, whereas most of the Mexican silver is bound ultimately for Asia. How much goes where is the subject of brisk dispute, both by customs officials in 1642 and by historians today. The Spanish monarchy, perpetually hungry for cash, wants the silver in the home country. Spanish colonists want to send as much as possible to China—coins and bars can be traded there more profitably than anywhere else. The tension leads, inevitably, to smuggling. Official statistics suggest that no more than a quarter of the silver went across the Pacific. In the past historians have largely assumed that government scrutiny kept the smuggling to perhaps 10 percent of the total, meaning that the official statistics were roughly correct. A new wave of researchers, however, argues that smuggling was rampant; China sucked up as much as half of the silver. The debate is more than pedantic. One side regards European expansion as the primary motivating force in world affairs; the other views the earth as a single economic unit largely driven by Chinese demand. Follow the Europe-bound silver as it is carried by mule train over the mountains to Portobelo, then Panama’s main Caribbean port. Guarded by an armada of galleons, bristling with guns and crewed by as many as two thousand seamen and soldiers, the silver traverses the Atlantic every summer, its departure timed to avoid hurricane season. The convoy bellies up to the mouth of the Guadalquivir, Spain’s only major navigable river, and then sixty miles upstream to Seville. Unloaded onto the quays, the chests of treasure are the emblem of a paradox: silver from the Americas has made the Europe of 1642 affluent and powerful beyond its giddiest fantasy. But Europe itself is plagued from one end to the other by war, inflation, rioting, and weather calamities. Turmoil is nothing new in Europe, which is divided by language, culture, religion, and geography. But this is the first time that the turmoil is intimately linked to human actions on opposite ends of the earth. Trouble volleys from Asia, Africa, and the Americas to Europe, shuttling about the world on highways of Spanish silver. Cort?s’s conquest of Mexico—and the plunder that came from it—threw Spain’s elite into delirium. Enraptured by sudden wealth and power, the monarchy launched a series of costly foreign wars, one overlapping with another, against France, the Ottoman Empire, and the Protestants in the Holy Roman Empire. Even as Spain defeated the Ottomans in 1571, discontent in the Netherlands, then a Spanish possession, was flaring into outright revolt and secession. The struggle over Dutch independence lasted eight decades and spilled into realms as far away as Brazil, Sri Lanka, and the Philippines. Along the way, England was drawn in; raising the ante, Spain initiated a vast seaborne invasion of that nation: the Spanish Armada. The invasion was a debacle, as was the fight to stop rebellion in the Netherlands. War spawned war. In 1642, Spain is combating secession in Andalusia, Catalonia, and Portugal, which it has ruled for six decades; France is fighting Spain on its northern, eastern, and southern borders; and Swedish armies are battling the Holy Roman Empire. (Emperor Ferdinand III, the son-in-law of one Spanish king and the father-in-law of another, is so closely allied with Spain that he has often been called a Spanish puppet.) Almost the only European nation not directly or indirectly at war with Spain is England, which is convulsed by its own civil strife—the ascetic Puritan rebellion that will soon lead to civil war and the execution of the king. The costs are staggering. At the height of the Vietnam War, the United States fielded about 500,000 soldiers. If the U.S. had wanted to send out the same proportion of its men that Spain did in its war with the Dutch, according to Dennis Flynn, an economic historian at the University of the Pacific, it would have had to send 2.5 million. “Even though all this silver was coming in from Bolivia, Spain didn’t have enough money to pay its army in the Netherlands,” he told me. “So the men mutinied constantly. I did a count once—there were forty-five mutinies between 1572 and 1607. And that was just one of Spain’s wars.” To pay for its foreign adventures, the court borrowed from foreign bankers; the king felt free to incur debts because he believed they would be covered by future shipments of American treasure, and bankers felt free to lend for the same reason. Alas, everything cost more than the monarch hoped. Debt piled up hugely—ten or even fifteen times annual revenues. Nonetheless the court continued to view its economic policy in the optative mood; few wanted to believe that the good times would end. The inevitable, repeated result: bankruptcy. Spain defaulted on its debts in 1557, 1576, 1596, 1607, and 1627. After each bankruptcy, the king borrowed more money. Lenders would provide it—after all, they could charge high interest rates (Spain paid up to 40 percent, compounded annually). For obvious reasons the high interest rates made the next bankruptcy more likely. Still the process continued—everyone believed the silver would keep pouring into Seville. Now, in 1642, so much silver has been produced that its value is falling even as the mines slacken. The richest nation in the world is hurtling toward financial Armageddon. Europe is complexly interconnected; Spain’s economic collapse is dragging down its neighbors. The silver trade was not the only cause of this tumult—religious conflict, royal hubris, and struggles among classes all were important—but it was an essential part. The flood of precious metal unleashed by Cort?s so vastly increased Spain’s money supply that its small financial sector could not contain it. It was as if a billionaire suddenly deposited a fortune into a tiny country bank—the bank would immediately redeposit the cash into other, bigger institutions that could do something with it. American silver overflowed from Spain like water from a bathtub and washed into bank vaults in Italy, the Netherlands, and the Holy Roman Empire. Payments for Spanish military adventures filled coffers across the continent. Economics 101 predicts what will happen in these circumstances. New money chases after the same old goods and services. Prices rise in a classic inflationary spiral. In what historians call a “price revolution,” the cost of living more than doubled across Europe in the last half of the sixteenth century, tripling in some places, and then rose some more. Because wages did not keep pace, the poor were immiserated; they could not afford their daily bread. Uprisings of the starving exploded across the continent, seemingly in every corner and all at once. (Researchers have called it the “general crisis” of the seventeenth century.) Hope for the peasantry was provided by American crops, which by 1642 have ridden the silver route across the Atlantic. As the plane sweeps over Europe, it descends low enough for passengers to view the marks of the Columbian Exchange: plots of American maize in Italy, carpets of American beans in Spain, fields crowded with the shining, upturned visages of American sunflowers in France. Big tobacco leaves soak up sunlight on Dutch farms; tobacco is so common in Catholic Europe that Pope Urban VIII has this year denounced its use (in Protestant England, it is endorsed even by the nation’s most notorious killjoy, Oliver Cromwell). Most important will be the potato, which is beginning to fill bellies in Germany, the Netherlands and, increasingly, Ireland. In ordinary times, the quickly increasing agricultural productivity would soothe some of the discontent caused by inflation and war. But these are not ordinary times: the plane’s instruments reveal that the climate itself has been changing. For almost a century Europe has experienced frighteningly snowy winters, late springs, and cold summers. Frigid Mays and Junes delay French wine harvests until November; people walk a hundred miles across the frozen sea from Denmark to Sweden; Greenland hunters moor their kayaks on the Scottish shore. After three failed harvests, Catholic mobs in Ireland rise up, robbing and killing the hated English Protestants—attacks those Protestants use as an opportunity to seize Catholic land. Fearing that growing Alpine glaciers will overrun their homes, Swiss villagers induce their bishop to exorcise a threatening ice front—an echo of the Spaniards in Santo Domingo, seeking God’s help against the plague of ants. Annual visits from the bishop drive back the glacier by eighty paces. The order of the world seems overturned. Historians call the freeze the Little Ice Age. Enduring from about 1550 to about 1750 in the Northern Hemisphere, this global thermal anomaly is difficult to pin down; its onset and duration differed from one region to the next. Because few people then kept written records of weather conditions, paleoclimatologists (researchers of ancient climate) must study it with imperfect measures like the thickness of tree rings and the chemical composition of tiny bubbles of gas in polar ice. Based on such indirect evidence, some researchers proposed that the Little Ice Age was attributable to a decline in the number of sunspots known as the Maunder Minimum. Because sunspots are correlated with the sun’s energy output, fewer sunspots implies less-intense solar irradiation—enough, these researchers argued, to cool the earth. Other scientists theorized that the temperature drop was due to big volcanic eruptions, which blast sulfur dioxide into the upper atmosphere. High above the clouds, the sulfur dioxide mixes with water vapor to form minute droplets of sulfuric acid—shiny motes in the sky—that reflect some of the sun’s light into space. This phenomenon existed in 1642; a massive eruption in the southern Philippines the year before is now thought to have cooled the earth for as long as three years. Both hypotheses have drawn sharp criticism, though. Many scientists believe that the impact of the Maunder Minimum was too small to account for the Little Ice Age. Others argue that a series of individual volcanic eruptions could not have caused a steady temperature drop. In 2003, William F. Ruddiman, a paleoclimatologist at the University of Virginia, suggested a different cause for the Little Ice Age—an idea that initially seemed outlandish, but that is increasingly treated seriously. As human communities grow, Ruddiman pointed out, they open more land for farms and cut down more trees for fuel and shelter. In Europe and Asia, forests were cut with the ax. In the Americas before Col?n, the primary tool was fire—vast stretches of it. For weeks on end, smoke from Indian bonfires shrouded Florida, California, and the Great Plains. Today, many researchers believe that without regular burning, much of the midwestern prairie would have been engulfed by an invading tide of trees. The same was true for the grasslands of the Argentine pampas, the hills of Mexico, the Florida dunes, and the high plains of the Andes. American forests, too, were shaped by flame. Indians’ “frequent fiering of the woods,” remarked English colonist Edward Johnson in 1654, made the forests east of the Mississippi so open and “thin of Timber” that they were “like our Parkes in England.” Annual fire seasons removed scratchy undergrowth, burned out noxious insects, and cleared land for farms. Scientists have conducted fewer studies of burning in the tropics, but two California paleoecologists (scientists who study past ecosystems) surveyed the fire history of thirty-one sites in Central and South America in 2008 and found that in every one the amount of charcoal in the soil—an indicator of fire—had increased substantially for more than two thousand years. Enter now the Columbian Exchange. Eurasian bacteria, viruses, and parasites sweep through the Americas, killing huge numbers of people—and unraveling the millennia-old network of human intervention. Flames subside to embers across the Western Hemisphere as Indian torches are stilled. In the forests, fire-hating trees like oak and hickory muscle aside fire-loving species like loblolly, longleaf, and slash pine, which are so dependent on regular burning that their cones will only open and release seed when exposed to flame. Animals that Indians had hunted, keeping their numbers down, suddenly flourish in great numbers. And so on. Indigenous pyromania had long pumped carbon dioxide into the air. At the beginning of the Homogenocene the pump suddenly grows feeble. Formerly open grasslands fill with forest—a frenzy of photosynthesis. In 1634, fourteen years after the Pilgrims land in Plymouth, colonist William Wood complains that the once-open forests are now so choked with underbrush as to be “unuseful and troublesome to travel through.” Forests regenerate across swathes of North America, Mesoamerica, the Andes, and Amazonia. Ruddiman’s idea was simple: the destruction of Indian societies by European epidemics both decreased native burning and increased tree growth. Each subtracted carbon dioxide from the air. In 2010 a research team led by Robert A. Dull of the University of Texas estimated that reforesting former farmland in American tropical regions alone could have been responsible for as much as a quarter of the temperature drop—an analysis, the researchers noted, that did not include the cutback in accidental fires, the return to forest of unfarmed but cleared areas, and the entire temperate zone. In the form of lethal bacteria and viruses, in other words, the Columbian Exchange (to quote Dull’s team) “significantly influenced Earth’s carbon budget.” 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. Flying the plane back across the Atlantic, the effects of the Little Ice Age are obvious in the Americas, too. Clearly visible from the air is the filling in of Indian lands by forest—and by snow. Ice is solid enough that people ride carriages on Boston harbor; it freezes over most of Chesapeake Bay, and nearly wipes out the two score French colonists who this year have founded Montreal. Introduced cattle and horses die in snowdrifts in Maine, Connecticut, and Virginia. Other impacts are harder to see. The forests are filling in former Indian lands with cold-loving species like hemlock, spruce, and beech. Vernal pools take longer to evaporate in the canopy they provide in these cool summers. Mosquitoes that breed in those pools thus have an increased chance for survival. Using fire, indigenous people in the Americas cleared big areas for agriculture and hunting, as shown in this map of North America’s eastern seaboard. Click here to view a larger image. European diseases caused a population crash across the hemisphere—and an extraordinary ecological rebound as forests filled in abandoned fields and settlements. The end of native burning and the massive reforestation drew so much carbon dioxide from the air that an increasing number of researchers believes it was a main driver of the three-century cold snap known as the Little Ice Age. Click here to view a larger image. Among these paradoxically cold-loving mosquitoes is Anopheles quadrimaculatus, the overall name for a complex of five near-indistinguishable sibling species. Like other Anopheles mosquitoes, A. quadrimaculatus hosts the parasite that causes malaria—the insect’s common name is the North American malaria mosquito. Southeast England at this time is rampant with malaria. Precise documentation will never become available, but there is good reason to suspect that by 1642 malaria has already traveled in immigrant bodies from England to the Americas. A single bite into an infected person is enough to introduce the parasite to its mosquito host, which spreads the parasite far and wide. Virginia and points south have already proven so unhealthy for Europeans that plantation overseers are finding it difficult to persuade laborers to come from overseas to work in the tobacco fields. Some landowners already have resolved this problem by purchasing workers from Africa. Partly driven by the introduction of malaria, a slave market is beginning to quicken into existence, a profitable exchange that will entwine itself over time with the silver market. As ever, the ships from Africa will form a kind of ecological corridor, through which travel passengers not on any official manifest. Crops like yams, millet, sorghum, watermelon, black-eyed peas, and African rice will follow the slave ships to the Americas. So will yellow fever. Beyond Chesapeake Bay the airplane flies west, heading toward Mexico. Beneath its wings unfurl the Great Plains. From their southern edge come herds of Spanish horses, scores at a time, brought by silver galleons on the return trip across the Atlantic. Apache and Ute race hundreds of miles south to meet the horses, followed by Arapaho, Blackfoot, and Cheyenne. As European villagers learned from Mongol horsemen, peasant farmers, tied to their land, are sitting ducks for cavalry assault. The rush by Indian nations to acquire horses is thus a kind of arms race. All over the North American West and Southwest, native farmers are abandoning their fields and leaping onto the backs of animals from Spain. Long-sedentary societies are becoming wanderers; the “ancient tradition” of the nomadic Plains Indian is coming into existence, a rapid adaptation to the Columbian Exchange. As natives acquire horses, they come into conflict with each other and the labor force on Spain’s expanding ranches. The ranch workers are Indians, African slaves, and people of mixed ancestry. In a kind of cultural panic, the colonial government has created a baroque racial lexicon—mestizo, mulatto, coyote, morisco, chino, lobo, zambaigo, albarazado—to label particular genetic backgrounds. All of these people and more meet in Mexico City, the capital of New Spain, the richest piece of Spain’s American empire. Wealthier and more populous than any city in Spain, it is an extraordinary jumble of cultures and languages, with no one group forming the majority. Neighborhoods are divided by ethnicity—one entire barrio is occupied by Tlaxcalans from the east. As the back-and-forth continues, engineers struggle to prevent the city from physical collapse. Mexico City has flooded six times in the last four decades, once remaining inundated for five years. 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. The airplane flies west, to Acapulco, on Mexico’s Pacific coast, the eastern terminus of the galleon trade. Ringed by protective mountains, untroubled by sandbars or shoals, the harbor is a majestic setting for one of the more listless settlements in the Americas: several hundred huts scattered like lost clothes at the edge of the water. Most of Acapulco’s few permanent inhabitants are African slaves, Indian laborers, and Asian sailors who jumped ship (the galleons are mainly crewed by Filipinos, Chinese, and other Asians). When the galleons arrive, Spaniards show up, some of them coming from as far as Peru. A market and fair springs into existence; millions of pesos change hands. Then the town empties again as the ships are beached and readied for the next trip across the Pacific. Follow the silver to its destination in China. The Little Ice Age has taken hold in East Asia, too, though here the impact is typically less a matter of snow and ice than of crashing, copious rain alternating with bouts of cold drought. The five worst years of drought in five centuries occurred between 1637 and 1641. This year, rain is drowning the crops. All the impacts have been exacerbated by a series of volcano eruptions in Indonesia, Japan, New Guinea, and the Philippines. Millions have died. Cold, wet weather and mass deaths ensure that more than two-thirds of China’s farmland is no longer being tilled, adding to the famine. Cannibalism is rumored to be frequent. The Ming court—paralyzed by infighting, preoccupied with wars to the north—does little to help the afflicted. It simply doesn’t have the funds. Like the Spanish king, the Ming emperor backs his military ventures with Spanish silver, which his subjects must use to pay their taxes. When the value of silver falls, the government runs out of money. The Ming have long believed their duty is to protect China from malign foreign influence. They have failed. American crops like tobacco, maize, and sweet potato are spreading over hillsides. American silver is dominating the economy. Although the emperors don’t know it, American trees are helping to bring the rains. All of these are working against the Ming. Popular discontent is already at such levels that mobs of peasant rebels are tearing violently through half a dozen provinces. Unhappy, unpaid soldiers are mutinying. Flood and famine simply exacerbate the anger. In two years Beijing will fall to a rebellious ex-soldier. Weeks later, the soldier will be overthrown by the Manchus, who establish a new dynasty: the Qing (pronounced, roughly speaking, “ching”). When Col?n 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. Col?n’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 Col?n 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 Col?n 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 Col?n 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 Col?n 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”—caf?-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 Jamestown was founded inside the small indigenous empire of Tsenacomoco. Most Tsenacomoco villages were located along the rivers that served as the empire’s highways. Because the water at the river mouths was brackish, the villages were mostly upstream. The English put Jamestown as far upriver as they could—but not far enough to avoid the bad water. Even the groundwater was salty. Click here to view a larger image. The lack of domestic animals had momentous consequences. In a country without horses, donkeys, and cattle, the only source of transportation and labor was the human body. Compared to England, Tsenacomoco had slower communications (no galloping horses), a dearth of plowed fields (no straining oxen) and pastures (no grazing cattle), and fewer and smaller roads (no carriages to accommodate). Battles were fought without cavalry; winters endured without wool; logs skidded through the forest without oxen. Distances loomed larger when people had to walk from place to place; indeed, in terms of the time required for Powhatan’s orders to reach his minions, Tsenacomoco may have been the size of England itself (it was much less populous, of course). Chesapeake Bay is the remains of a giant meteor crater. The impact shattered rock for miles, letting seawater infiltrate. The U.S. government suggests that salt levels should not exceed 20 milligrams per liter (mg/L); Jamestown water had more than twenty times as much and other settlements had even higher levels. Click here to view a larger image. Just as most Europeans lived in small farm villages, most of Powhatan’s people—the “Powhatan Indians,” as the newcomers called them—lived in settlements of a few hundred inhabitants surrounded by large tracts of cleared land: fields of maize and former maize fields. The villages clustered along the three rivers—the Rappahannock, York, and James—that served as the empire’s main thoroughfares. Sailing up the James when they arrived, the English saw the banks lined with farms, fields greenly shimmering with newly planted maize, stands of tall trees interspersed among them. Rather than covering fenced plots with neat rows of wheat, the Powhatan planted many crops at once, as shown in this replica Wendat (Huron) garden in the Crawford Lake Conservation Area in Ontario, Canada. These farms and gardens were so different from anything the English knew that the newcomers often couldn’t recognize native fields as cultivated land. (Photo credit 2.2) Europe, too, had its own prosperous riverside farms. But there the similarities ended. To create a farm plot, Europeans cleared forestland, yanked out the stumps with horses and oxen, and plowed the result, again with horses or oxen, until it was a flat expanse of nearly bare soil. In these stripped areas farmers planted single crops: solid rustling expanses of wheat or barley or rye. Fallow plots were used as pasture. Dotting the open areas were patches of forest, clearly demarcated as such, used for hunting and wood. Lacking draft animals and metal tools, the Powhatan perforce used different methods and obtained different results. They toppled trees by circling their bases with a ring of fire, then laboriously hacked at the burned zone with stone axes until the trunk collapsed. Brush and slash were put to the torch, leaving a heave of blackened stumps. Around the stumps farmers dug shallow holes with long-handled hoes made from bone or clamshells, dropping in each hole a few kernels of maize and several beans. As the maize grew, the young colonist Henry Spellman observed, “the beans run up thereon”—twining themselves around the growing maize. Below the maize grew squash and gourds, pumpkin and melon, common beans and runner beans, ropy vines asprawl in every direction. Here and there patches of thick-leaved tobacco plants stood. The ensemble of charred stumps, hummocked land, and overlapping crops could stretch for considerable distances: “thirty to forty acres of treeless land per capita,” in one historian’s “conservative” estimate. Smith saw family plots that covered as much as two hundred acres—a third of a square mile. Except for defensive palisades, Powhatan farmers had no fences around their fields. Why screen off land if no cattle or sheep had to be kept inside? The English, by contrast, regarded well-tended fences as hallmarks of civilization, according to Virginia D. Anderson, a historian at the University of Colorado at Boulder. Fenced fields kept animals in; fenced woodlots kept poachers out. The lack of physical property demarcation signified to the English that Indians didn’t truly occupy the land—it was, so to speak, unimproved. Equally unfamiliar was the Powhatan practice of scattering their farm plots within larger cleared areas. To the Indians, fallow lands were a kind of communal larder, a place for naturally occurring useful plants, including grains (little barley, sumpweed, goosefoot), edible greens (wild lettuce, wild plantains), and medicinals (sassafras, dogbane, smartweed). Because none of these species existed in Europe, the English didn’t know the groundcover was useful. Instead they saw “unused” land, something that bewildered them. How could Indians go to the trouble of clearing the land but then not use it? Even Tsenacomoco’s streams were different than their English equivalent. English waterways ran swiftly in the spring, scouring away the soil from steep banks, then turned to dribbling trickles in July and August. Beyond the riverbanks the land was drier; one could hike for miles in summer without stepping into mud. Chesapeake Bay was, by contrast, a seemingly endless patchwork of bogs, marshes, grassy ponds, seasonally flooded meadows, and slow-moving streams. It seemed to be wet everywhere, no matter what the season. Credit for the watery environment belongs to the American beaver (Castor canadensis), which had no real English equivalent. Weighing as much as sixty pounds, these big rodents live in dome-shaped lodges made by blocking streams with mud, stones, leaves, and cut saplings—as many as twenty dams per mile of stream. The dams smear the water across the landscape, so to speak, transforming a rushing rivulet into a series of broad pools and mucky wetlands linked by shallow, multiply branched channels. Indians regarded this as a fine thing—easier to take a canoe through a set of ponds than a narrow, quick-flowing stream. English accounts, by contrast, are filled with descriptions of colonists unhappily stumbling through the sopped countryside.2 The freshwater marshes favored the growth of tuckahoe (Peltandra virginica, arrow arum), a semi-aquatic plant found in stands throughout the eastern United States and Canada. Tuckahoe has a bulb-like, underground rhizome (enlarged stem area used for storage) that every spring sends out a thin stalk with a long leaf shaped like a child’s sketch of an arrowhead. It was a standing larder for the people of Tsenacomoco, always ready in the springtime if they exhausted the maize from the previous fall. Standing shin deep in the marsh, women mucked about with their bare feet and hands, gradually working loose the roots. The work was unpleasant; when I dug up some tuckahoe one warm spring day in Virginia, I ended up perspiring in the heat even as the cold mud numbed my feet. Tuckahoe root contains calcium oxalate, a potentially fatal poison. To break down the toxin, women sliced the peeled root, baked the slices, then ground them into flour with a mortar and pestle. At home I made tuckahoe flour with an oven and a food processor, then added water and boiled up some porridge. One mouthful was enough to tell me why native people preferred maize. Surrounding the cleared areas and the fruitful marshes was the wood, splendid with chestnut and elm, but hardly untouched. Like the fields, the forest was shaped by native fire. Every fall Indians burned the underbrush, sending ash billowing into the heavens; when ships approached during fire season, the Dutch merchant David Pieterszoon de Vries observed in 1632, “the land is smelt before it is seen.” From the embers emerged tender new growth, attracting deer, elk, and moose. These were hunted by fire. Men drove the animals into ambushes with flaming torches, herded them toward waiting archers with strategically placed bonfires, encircled them terrified within mile-long walls of flame. Prowling through the woods one evening, John Smith navigated “by the aboundance of fires all over the woods.” Regular fall burning kept the Maryland forest so open, the Jesuit priest Andrew White wrote in 1634, that “a coach and four horses may travel [through it] without molestation.” The statement is hyperbole, but not entirely false—rather than paving roads, Indians used fire to make what the ecological historian Stephen J. Pyne has called “corridors of travel.” Well-used paths could be six feet wide, hundreds of miles long, and cleared completely of brush and stones. Occasionally one did find unburned patches of land, Virginia colonist William Byrd warned, and these were dangerous. In those places, “the dead Leaves and Trash of many years are heapt up together, which … furnish fewel for a conflagration that carries all before it.” Because Indian burning killed underbrush and saplings, the forest encountered by the early English colonists was a soaring space, hushed as a cathedral, formed by widely spaced walnut and oak six feet in diameter—a beautiful sight, but one just as artificial as the burned-off clearings. “Much as cooking helped rework an intractable environment into food and as the forge refashioned rock into metals,” Pyne explained, native fire “remade the land into usable forms.” Like the English countryside the colonists left behind them, Chesapeake Bay had been refashioned by its inhabitants into a working landscape. And just as the tidy English checkerboard of fields and woodlots was essential to English culture—indeed, to England’s survival—the jumbled patchwork of ecological zones in coastal Virginia was essential to Powhatan culture and survival. But to the newcomers the Virginia coast was not a humanized place. They saw it as a random snarl of marshes, beaver ponds, unkempt fields, and hostile forest. If the English wanted to live and prosper in this new place in their accustomed manner, they would have to transform the land into something more suitable for themselves. THE RISK POOL Most accounts of Jamestown focus on John Smith. No surprise: Smith makes great copy. He was a poor boy who made good with luck, nerve, and self-promotion—in just eighteen years he published no less than five autobiographical accounts of his deeds. (To be fair, one was printed without his knowledge.) The True Travels, Adventures and Observations of Captain John Smith (1630), his major autobiography, is a wild tale of an orphan who left home at thirteen, fought in the Netherlands, lived in a lean-to teaching himself Machiavelli and Marcus Aurelius, battled “a rabble of Pilgrimes of divers Nations going to Rome” aboard a ship in the Mediterranean (they threw him overboard), and became a pirate in the Adriatic—all in the opening chapter. By chapter 4 (its title: “An Excellent Stratagem by Smith”) he is using torches to send coded messages between mountaintops—a technique from Machiavelli—as he coordinates a battle in what is now Hungary. Later chapters reveal: •How Smith served in a Transylvanian army, battling “some Turks, some Tartars, but most Bandittoes, Rennagadoes, and such like.” •How he slew three Turkish aristocrats in single combat before raucous crowds. •How he was captured and sold into slavery in the Ottoman Empire, where “a great ring of iron” was “rivetted about his necke.” •How he seized the chance to “beat out [his master’s] braines” with a farm implement and fled in the man’s clothes to Russia, France, and Morocco. •How in Morocco he joined another band of pirates, preying on Spanish vessels off West Africa. •How he returned to England and promptly joined the Virginia expedition. He was just twenty-six. Skeptics have been scoffing at this buckle and swash since 1662, when one noted that the sole record of Smith’s adventures is his own writing: “it soundeth much to the dimunition of his deeds, that he alone is the herald to publish and proclaim them.” Other writers cheered him as a quintessential American: the original self-made man. During the Civil War, Smith’s link with Virginia turned him into a symbol of the Confederate South. Northerners naturally tried to belittle him; after writing an article that highlighted inconsistencies in True Travels, historian Henry Adams, a fervent Unionist, crowed that he had executed a “rear attack on the Virginia aristocracy.” The cruelest blow came in 1890, when a Hungarian-speaking researcher charged that the people and places in Smith’s adventures were fictional. Smith, for instance, said he deployed his “excellent stratagem” at a place called “Olumpagh.” No town named Olumpagh existed in the region. QED: Smith was a fraud. In the 1950s a second Hungarian-speaking researcher, Laura Polyani Striker, counterattacked. Smith’s places, she said, were real—the previous researcher had been misled by Smith’s atrocious spelling. Olumpagh, for example, was Lendava, in Slovenia, known to Hungarians in those days as “Al Limbach.” Such places being unknown in England, Striker argued, Smith indeed must have visited them. Short, stocky, and homely, John Smith had a formidable chestnut beard that startled native people when they encountered it. He was evidently aware of his unprepossessing appearance: this author’s portrait from his 1624 autobiography was accompanied by a doggerel poem, likely penned by Smith, claiming that his interior excellence more than made up for his less than handsome exterior. (Photo credit 2.3) No historians doubt that Smith was at Jamestown. Nor do they dispute that this scrappy, self-confident man befriended Pocahontas, obtained desperately needed food from Powhatan, saved the colony from extinction, and constantly annoyed the colony’s leaders, all of whom were his social betters. At the time, English class distinctions were rigid to a degree that is hard now to comprehend; Smith, never one to display deference, so quickly angered Jamestown’s gentry that during the voyage from England they threw him in the brig on vague charges. Historians also accept that after landing in Virginia Smith led the search through Chesapeake Bay for a passage to China. But scholarly eyebrows rise in disbelief about what Smith claims happened in December 1607 during one of those expeditions. Intending to explore the headwaters of the Chickahominy River, Smith went off in a canoe with two Indian guides and two English companions. They ran into a hunting party led by Opechancanough (oh-pee-CHAN-can-oh), Powhatan’s younger brother, who was vocally anti-immigrant. He wanted no illegal aliens in Tsenacomoco. During the inevitable skirmish the Indians killed Smith’s companions; Smith fell into a swamp and was captured. Opechancanough brought the adventurer to his brother’s capital, Werowocomoco. In the most famous version of the story—the one published in True Travels—Smith approached Powhatan through a gauntlet: “two rowes of men, and behind them as many women, with all of their heads and shoulders painted red; many of their heads bedecked with the white downe of Birds.” The king gave him a public feast. Then, Smith wrote, Powhatan decided to kill him on the spot, in the banquet hall. Executioners “being ready with their clubs to beat out his brains, Pocahontas, the king’s dearest daughter,” then perhaps eleven years old, suddenly rushed out and cradled Smith’s head in her arms “to save him from death.” Fondly indulging his daughter’s crush, Powhatan commuted Smith’s sentence and returned him to Jamestown, where the girl “brought him so much provision, that saved many of their lives, that els[e] for all this had starved with hunger.” Countless romantic novels have been spawned by Smith’s tale, but most researchers believe it to be untrue. In his debunking, Henry Adams pointed out that the earliest account of the rescue dates from 1624, in the boastful autobiography Smith published just before the boastful True Travels. But Smith also wrote about his abduction in 1608, a few months after it happened, in a report not intended for public view, and said not a word about being saved by a love-smitten Indian maiden. Smith clearly relished the image of infatuated women coming to his rescue—in True Travels, it happens no less than four times. More damning still, no anthropologist or historian has found any suggestion that the Powhatan ever held feasts for prisoners of war before executing them. Nor were children like Pocahontas admitted to official dinners—they were in the kitchen, washing dishes. “None of the story fits the culture,” the anthropologist Helen Rountree told me. “Big meals are for honored guests, not criminals to be executed.” In her view, the feast suggests the Indians regarded Smith as a potential treasure trove of data about the foreign invaders. “It’s hard to see them killing an intelligence asset,” she said. John Smith’s tale of rescue from execution by the “Indian princess” Pocahontas has proven irresistible to generations of artists, despite historians’ disbelief in its veracity. In this 1870 engraving, Pocahontas resembles an opera star, the Powhatan have been given tipi homes like those in the West, and the venue has been transplanted to a hilly and almost treeless expanse unlike anything in coastal Virginia. (Photo credit 2.4) Historians dislike the Pocahontas-rescue story for another, deeper reason. By pumping up the romance and fanfaronade, it draws attention from what the English were actually trying to accomplish in Virginia—and what happened to Tsenacomoco when they arrived. Brave adventurers like Smith were integral to Jamestown, but the colony was primarily an economic venture. And for all the danger and conflict, its fate was decided less, in the end, by the clash of arms than by impersonal ecological forces—the Columbian Exchange—that nobody in Virginia was then equipped to understand. Like La Isabela, Jamestown was intended as a trading post, a midway point from which England could seize its share of the China trade. But whereas La Isabela was largely sponsored and controlled by the Spanish monarchy, Jamestown was the creation of private enterprise: a consortium of politically connected venture capitalists known as the Virginia Company. The difference was anything but absolute: Spanish merchants hoped to enrich themselves at La Isabela, and the political ramifications of Jamestown preoccupied the English government. But Jamestown was closer to the capitalist ventures meant in today’s discussions of globalization. The Virginia Company came into existence because English sovereigns—Queen Elizabeth I and her successor, James I—wanted the benefits of trade and conquest but couldn’t pay for them. The state had been pushed so deeply into debt by war (in Elizabeth’s case) and profligacy (in James’s case) that it could not afford to send ships to the Americas. Nor could it borrow the necessary cash. From moneylenders’ point of view, the monarchy was a bad credit risk—it could, and all too often did, assert its prerogative to repudiate its debts. In consequence, they charged it ruinously high interest rates. True, kings and queens had the power to force loans from their subjects, a practice that for obvious reasons was deeply unpopular. But was the certainty of incurring discontent worth the gamble of an American colony? Elizabeth and James came to the same conclusion: no. As La Isabela showed, colonization was inherently risky. The English faced the additional danger that most of the Americas already had been claimed by Spain. Hostility between the two nations was intense; indeed, Pope Pius V had practically ordered Catholic monarchs like Spain’s Philip II to take up “Weapons of Justice” against Protestant England. (“There is no place at all left for Excuse, Defence, or Evasion,” the pope fulminated. Queen Elizabeth, “Slave of Wickedness,” had to be overthrown.) Spain sent a fleet to invade England in 1588, England a fleet to invade Spain in the following year. Both attacks failed, in part because of violent weather—a manifestation, perhaps, of the Little Ice Age. Ultimately Elizabeth relied upon a more successful tactic: sponsoring what is remembered in England as “privateering” and in Spain as “terrorism.” She authorized English ships to loot any Spanish ships or colonies they came across. After Elizabeth died in 1603, James I ratcheted down tensions. But he knew that installing English colonies in North America would rekindle the conflict. Spain had already planted more than a dozen small colonies and missions on the Atlantic Coast, one of them just miles away from Jamestown’s future location (it had failed). The empire would not look favorably on an intrusion into its domain. If that weren’t enough, France, too, had claimed North America, setting down five colonies and missions of its own. Still, the monarchy was unwilling to cede the Americas to the competition. In a kind of white paper to Elizabeth, the influential cleric and writer Richard Hakluyt argued that Christian rulers had a sacred duty to save the souls of “those wretched people”—that is, Indians. “The people of America crye out unto us,” he said, to “bringe unto them the gladd tidings of the gospell.” Spain, he noted, had already converted “many millions of infidells.” And what had been Spain’s reward for this deed? God had “open[ed] the bottomles treasures of his riches,” letting England’s hated adversary acquire vast stores of silver, which in turn had let it open trade with China. Hakluyt pointed out that Spain, formerly a “poore and barren nation,” was now so rich that, incredibly, its seamen had almost stopped being thieves. England, by sad contrast, was “moste infamous” for its “outeragious, common, and daily piracies.” And there was opportunity in North America, or so it was thought. Between 1577 and 1580 Sir Francis Drake, England’s best-known privateer/ terrorist, went on a round-the-world tour, sacking Spain’s silver fleet along the way. During this trip he stopped on the west coast of the United States. Exactly what he did there is not known because almost all of the expedition’s records have disappeared. But something Drake saw convinced many powerful Londoners that a watery channel cut across North America—it was possible to sail through the United States. If so, the Americas could only be a few hundred miles wide. After that short trip one would be on the Pacific shore, ready to sail to China. Elizabeth and James were wary but persuaded. Unwilling to pay the high interest rates moneylenders charged poor credit risks, though, the sovereigns delegated colonization to an entity that could independently support it: a joint-stock company. An ancestor to the modern corporation, joint-stock companies consisted of groups of wealthy people who pooled their resources to fund a commercial enterprise, being repaid by shares of the proceeds. By working with other investors, members of the company can limit their participation in an uncertain enterprise to a small part of the total sum. If a colony failed, the total loss would be huge but the loss to each individual investor would be tolerable—painful, to be sure, but not disastrous. As the economic historian Douglass C. North has argued, the joint-stock company was more than a novel means of making money; it was one of many institutional arrangements European societies were developing to mobilize resources efficiently. (North shared the 1993 Nobel Memorial Prize in Economics, largely for working out these ideas.) These institutional arrangements secured property rights (necessary because people will not risk investing if they believe that their gains can be taken away); opened markets (necessary to prevent entrenched interests from stifling innovation); and strengthened democratic governance (necessary to check rulers’ excesses). All permitted trade and commerce to be independent, which led to research and investment becoming routine—a constant activity that people could profit from with little state interference. “What counts is work, thrift, honesty, patience, tenacity,” wrote the Harvard economist David S. Landes. In his classic Wealth and Poverty of Nations (1999), Landes argued that Europe had developed ways of organizing people and resources—private joint-stock companies, for instance—that fostered and rewarded individual initiative, which in turn promoted these virtues. Other places did not develop them. The result of these innovations, North argued, was economic growth so robust that it led to “a new and unique phenomenon”: the ascension of European societies to world power. English joint-stock companies were not immediately successful. The first was created in 1553. Fifty-three years later, when the Virginia Company received its charter, England had just ten. Three of these ventures were created to plant colonies in the Americas. (A fourth American project used a similar risk-sharing arrangement, but was not formalized as a joint-stock company.) Every one of these American enterprises had failed. Soberingly, the attempt, in the 1580s, to take over Roanoke Island, off the North Carolina coast, resulted in great expense—three costly voyages across the Atlantic—and the total obliteration of the colony.3 Despite this dismal record, the Virginia Company believed it worth trying again. At its inception, the company consisted of two investor groups, one in Plymouth and one in London. The Plymouth group focused on what is now New England, and quickly launched a colony on the coast of Maine. It disintegrated within months, and the Plymouth investors threw in the towel. The London group set its sights on Chesapeake Bay and in practice took over the entire venture. Its ships set sail from London on December 20, 1606. Although Roanoke had been wiped out by its Indian neighbors, the Virginia Company directors reserved their fears for distant Spain. They ordered the colonists—their employees, in today’s terms—to reduce the chance of detection by Spanish ships by locating the colony at least “a hundred miles” from the ocean. The instructions didn’t mention that this location might already be inhabited. True, the directors viewed conflict with the Indians as unavoidable. But they viewed the conflict as a problem mainly because they feared Indians would “guide and assist any nation that shall come to invade you.” That is, they worried about Tsenacomoco not because they feared its citizens would attack the English but because they feared it would help Spain attack the English. For this reason, the directors told the colonists to take “Great Care not to Offend the naturals”—naturals being a then-common term for native people. Jamestown was the result. All the good upriver land was already occupied by Indian villages. As a result, the newcomers—tassantassas (strangers), the Indians called them—ended up selecting the most upstream uninhabited ground they could find. Their new home was fifty miles from the mouth of the James. It was a peninsula near a bend in the river, at a place where the current cut so close to the shore that ships could be moored to the trees. Unfortunately for the tassantassas, no Indians lived on the peninsula because it was not a good place to live. The English were like the last people moving into a subdivision—they ended up with the least desirable property. The site was boggy and mosquito ridden. Colonists could get water from the James, but it was not always potable. During the late summer, the river falls as much as fifteen feet. No longer pushed back by the flow of freshwater, the salty water of the estuary spreads upstream, stopping right around Jamestown. Because the colonists had arrived in the midst of a multiyear drought, the summer flow was especially feeble and the concentration of saltwater especially high. The saltwater boundary traps sediments and organic wastes from upstream, which meant that the English were drinking the foulest water in the James—“full of slime and filth,” complained Percy, the future colony president. The obvious solution—digging a well—was not tried for more than two years. It was of little help. Chesapeake Bay is the remains of a huge, 35-million-year-old meteor crater. The impact-fractured rock at the mouth of the bay lets in the sea, contaminating the groundwater with salt. Few Indian groups lived in the saltwater wedge, presumably for just that reason. Jamestown was bordered and undergirded by bad water. That bad water, the geographer Carville V. Earle argued, led to “typhoid, dysentery, and perhaps salt poisoning.” By January 1608, eight months after landfall, only thirty-eight English were left alive. Paradoxically, the colony’s desperation was its salvation; Powhatan apparently couldn’t bring himself to regard the starving tassantassas as a threat. Certain that he could oust the English at any time, he allowed them to occupy their not-so-valuable real estate as long as they provided valuable trade goods: guns, axes, knives, mirrors, glass beads, and copper sheets, the last of which the Indians prized much as Europeans prized gold ingots. After abducting John Smith, this “subtle old fox,” as Percy called him, learned enough from his captive to conclude that the profit from trade with the tassantassas tomorrow was worth giving them grain today. He sent the foreigner back to Jamestown in January 1608 with enough maize to keep his few remaining companions alive for a while. From Powhatan’s point of view, it was a good bet, suggests Rountree, the anthropologist of Tsenacomoco. If the English tried to overstay their welcome, he could simply withhold their food, and the invasion would implode on its own. (“Confidence borne of ignorance,” the University of Missouri historian J. Frederick Fausz has noted, characterized the initial attitudes of both English and Indians toward each other.) After his return from captivity, John Smith took charge of Jamestown. Because he controlled food negotiations with Powhatan, the colony’s men of consequence swallowed their displeasure. In any case they could hardly point to a record of success. That spring Smith ordered the survivors to plant crops (they would rather have looked for gold) and rebuild the colony fort (they had accidentally burned it down). He himself continued to explore Chesapeake Bay, persuading himself there was a “good hope” that it stretched to the Pacific. All the while, Smith negotiated with Powhatan for food. He wanted to dribble out enough knives, hatchets, and iron pots to Tsenacomoco to get the necessary grain shipments but not enough to saturate the Indian demand for English goods. Complicating his task, English demand kept rising; two more convoys in the spring and fall of 1608 increased the number of mouths to about two hundred. Like any good businessman, Powhatan responded to the rising demand by raising maize prices; he asked for guns and swords, rather than hand tools. Smith refused, fearing the consequences of arming the Indians. Powhatan responded by cutting side deals for weapons with Jamestown residents who chafed at Smith’s autocratic rule. And he kept the pressure on Smith by allowing his men to pick off stragglers outside Jamestown. Smith left for medical treatment in England in October 1609. Canny but clumsy, he had suffered terrible burns when he accidentally ignited a bag of gunpowder he’d fastened around his waist. For the tassantassas, his departure came at a specially bad time. Two months before, yet another convoy had arrived, carrying more than three hundred new colonists, among them another squad of Smith-hating gentlemen. They had persuaded the Virginia Company directors to depose him. Happily for Smith, the ship with the company’s written instructions—and his replacement as governor—had been delayed. Still, the scornful newcomers posed an immediate threat to Smith’s authority and, to Smith’s way of thinking, Jamestown itself. To get them out of his hair, he split up the new arrivals and dispatched them to seek food from several Tsenacomoco groups. This proved to be a mistake. One party went to the Nansemond, who lived on an island off the opposite, southern bank of the James. When the group’s envoys to the Nansemond did not return on time, Percy wrote, the rest of the English “burned [the Indians’] houses, ransacked their temples, took down the corpses of their dead kings from off their tombs, and carried away their [funerary] pearls, copper and bracelets.” Smith was appalled. He had berated and bullied and blustered at the Indians, but he also believed that Jamestown should not massacre its food supply. But by then he was too badly injured to force the colonists to apologize. The incident evidently convinced Powhatan that the tassantassas’ new leaders had abrogated the pact he had struck with Smith. That winter he struck back, directly and indirectly. On the first, direct track, native fighters cut down seventeen colonists who sought to ransack the village of Kecoughtan for food; killed another party of emaciated tassantassas in the forest (as a sign of “contempt and scorn,” the Indians left the bodies “with their mouths stopped full of bread [maize]”); wiped out a boatload of soldiers in an upstream outpost established by Smith; and slaughtered a contingent of thirty-three colonists who had been lured to Werowocomoco by promises of grain. The leader of this party, Percy reported, was killed in a fashion that was ghastly, inventive, and slow: “By women his flesh was scraped from his bones with mussel shells and, before his face, thrown into the fire.” In the next five years, natives slew as many as one out of every four colonists, Fausz estimated in a history of this “first Indian war.” Powhatan’s indirect attack was more deadly still: he stopped sending food. His timing was excellent. Smith left before his official replacement as governor had arrived. His opponents in the colony chose as a temporary leader George Percy, the younger brother of the earl of Northumberland. While under attack, Smith had been unable to force the colonists to maintain Jamestown’s gardens or mend the fishing nets. The otiose Percy was even less successful at organizing the colonists—a lack of respect related, one assumes, to his practice of swanning around the muddy encampment in silk garters, gold-banded hats, and embroidered girdles. In consequence, the English had no stockpiled food when Powhatan cut off supplies. As Percy later admitted, they were reduced to eating “dogs, cats, rats and mice,” as well as the starch for their Elizabethan ruffs, which could be cooked into a kind of porridge. With famine “ghastly and pale in every face,” some colonists stirred themselves to “dig up dead corpse[s] out of graves and to eat them.” One man murdered his pregnant wife and “salted her for his food.” By spring, only about sixty people had survived what was called the “starving time.” On some level the colony’s plight is baffling. Chesapeake Bay was and is one of the hemisphere’s great fisheries. Replete with pike, carp, mullet, crab, bass, flounder, turtle, and eel, this long, shallow estuary was so biologically productive that John Smith joked about being able to catch dinner in the frying pan used to cook it. The Atlantic sturgeon that swam in the James grew big enough, one colonist reported, that native boys could loop vines around their tails and be pulled underwater. (I didn’t believe this until an archaeologist at Jamestown told me he had uncovered bones from a sturgeon that may have been fourteen feet long.) Oysters grew in such numbers that one mound of discarded shells from native feasts covered nearly thirty acres. The luckless George Percy, younger son of the earl of Northumberland, in a nineteenth-century copy of a portrait, now lost, made during his lifetime. (Photo credit 2.5) How could the colonists starve in the midst of plenty? One reason was that the English feared leaving Jamestown to fish, because Powhatan’s fighters were waiting outside the colony walls. A second reason was that a startlingly large proportion of the colonists were gentlemen, a status defined by not having to perform manual labor. The first three convoys brought a total of 295 people to Jamestown. According to the historian Edmund S. Morgan, fully 92 of them were gentlemen—and many of the rest were “the personal attendants that gentlemen thought necessary to make life bearable even in England.” The attendants, too, defined their position by not performing manual labor. But even if they had been able to cast aside their life-long, ingrained customs, they might not have been able to survive, because the English were unfamiliar with the Virginia environment. They could have tried fishing for bass and catfish, which are common in the lower river at winter. But they didn’t know where and when these fish like to feed. As anglers know, fishing in the wrong place at the wrong time is futile. The colonists died of ignorance as much as inanition. John Rolfe was lucky enough to arrive in Virginia the following spring, after the starving time. Almost a year before, he had left England on the flagship of the expedition that brought the Smith-hating gentry. Rolfe’s ship carried Smith’s official replacement. Halfway across, a hurricane slammed into the group. The other ships slipped through the storm and made landfall in Virginia, with the results that I described above (attacking the Nansemond, enraging Powhatan, dying in droves). Meanwhile Rolfe’s vessel was blown south and nearly sank. For three straight days, one passenger remembered, every person aboard, many “stripped naked as men in galleys,” worked bucket chains in chest-deep water. The ship staggered awash to Bermuda, where it wrecked on the northernmost of the country’s four main islands. For nine months the survivors remained on the beach, surviving on fish, sea turtles, and the pigs they had brought for Jamestown. They slowly fashioned two smaller vessels from island cedar and the wreckage of their ship. Rolfe’s party arrived in Chesapeake Bay on May 23, 1610. Appalled by the famine and ruin they found, the Bermuda group decided within two weeks to abandon Jamestown. Rolfe and the other newcomers loaded Jamestown’s skeletal inhabitants onto their two makeshift vessels and two others at the colony, intending to set off for Newfoundland, where they would beg a ride home from fishing boats that plied the Grand Banks. As they waited for the tide to turn for their departure, a small boat hove into view. It was the longboat preceding yet another convoy, this one containing yet another new governor, 250 new colonists, and, most important, a year’s worth of food. The previous colonists, despondent, returned to Jamestown and the task of figuring out how to survive. It wasn’t easy. Although they no longer had to depend on Powhatan for food, the Virginia Company later reported, “not less than one hundred and fifty of [the 250 newcomers] died” within months, among them Rolfe’s young wife. Their fate was anything but atypical. Year after year, the company spent outsize sums to send colonists to Virginia—more than a hundred shiploads all told. Year after year, most of the would-be settlers perished within weeks or months—men and women, rich and poor, child and convict. England shipped more than seven thousand people to Virginia between 1607 and 1624. Eight out of ten died. Most of the thousands of hopeful English who came to Virginia quickly died. This chart represents the author’s best attempt to calculate the total number of migrants, increasing year by year, and Jamestown’s actual population every year. The figures could well be off by several hundred, because the extant records are fragmentary and sometimes contradictory. But the overall picture is clear—and dismaying. So unremitting was the parade of death that even today it is painful to pore through the letters, reports, and chronicles Jamestown left behind. From every page dolorous phrases toll. Few in the Shipp that I came in are left alive.… Many newcomers either have all perished or have suffered horrible extreamities.… In 3 yeares their dyed about 3000 p[er]sons. Reports tally names and fates with the unadorned deadpan of old-fashioned obituary columns. Colony treasurer George Sandys notes that a servant newly shipped from London is dead before delivered. Colonist Hugh Pryse is found in the woods rente in pieces with wolves or other wild Beasts, and his bowels torne out of his body. In a drunken clash William Epps strikes Edward Stallenge so violently that he Cleft him to the scull and next day he died. Surgeon William Rowsley brought 10 men ov[er] w[i]th him to Virginia but within weeks all of his servants are dead. Edward Hill tells his brother in England he remains in Virginia only to gett what I have lost and then god willing I will leave the Contrey. (Hill never did leave; unable to recoup his losses, he died in Virginia a year later.) I am quite out of hart to live in this land, wails Phoebus Canner, god send me well out of it. On December 4, 1619, John Woodlief landed with thirty-five men at a new plantation, upstream from Jamestown, called Berkeley Hundred. Woodlief had been instructed by his backers to celebrate the day of arrival “as a day of thanksgiving to Almighty god”—the first Thanksgiving in English America. Berkeley Hundred’s founders had ordered the date to be observed every year. By the next December 4, thirty-one of the thirty-five tassantassas who had landed that day were sleeping in the soil. Why did the Virginia Company keep trying? “Whatever else may have entered into the activities of the company,” Wesley Frank Craven observed in his history of the company, “it was primarily a business organization with large sums of capital invested by adventurers whose chief interest lay in the returns expected from the investment.” Yet the Virginia Company did not act like an ordinary business organization. When the initial hope of discovering precious metals and a route to Asia didn’t pan out, the company tried wine making, shipbuilding, iron monging, silk weaving, salt panning, and even glassblowing. All failed, at dreadful cost in money and lives. Nonetheless, the firm kept dumping money and people into Virginia. Why didn’t the company’s backers pull the plug? Why did they keep sending ship after doomed ship? Equally puzzling, why did Powhatan allow the colony to survive? Jamestown escaped his first assault but remained at the edge of a precipice for years. Why didn’t Powhatan push it over, once and for all? Part of the answer to both questions is the Columbian Exchange. “ENGLISH FLIES” Pocahontas probably did not save John Smith when he was captured in 1608, but she did help save Jamestown—by marrying the widower John Rolfe six years later. Evidence suggests she was a curious, mischievous child, one who like all children in Tsenacomoco went without clothing until puberty. After Smith’s return from captivity, Pocahontas visited Jamestown, colonist Strachey wrote afterward. The colony’s young men turned cartwheels with her, “falling on their hands turning their heels upwards, whom she would follow, and wheel so her self naked as she was all the fort over.” Her real name was Mataoka; Pocahontas was a teasing nickname that meant something like “little hellion.” The tassantassas liked the girl—but not enough to prevent them from using her as a hostage. After Smith’s departure, when Powhatan had again brought the English to the brink of annihilation, the colony’s new leaders decided to counterattack. They put Jamestown under strict martial law—one colonist who stole several pints of oatmeal was chained to a tree until he starved to death—divided the men into military companies, and sent out expeditions to bring Tsenacomoco to heel. Attacking without warning, the colonists razed native villages up and down the James. The Indians repeatedly struck back, picking off colonists one by one, forcing them to retreat behind Jamestown’s palisade, where they were claimed by hunger and disease. It was a classic guerrilla-war stalemate. The tassantassas could win every battle, but never obtain a decisive victory; Powhatan’s troops could always retreat into the hinterland, then reappear to deadly effect, arrows rushing from the trees in a sudden cloud. Yet Powhatan could not finish off the tassantassas, either. He could make the colonists so afraid to venture outside that they couldn’t harvest their own crops. But as long as London was willing to keep shipping replacement supplies—and replacement people—the Indians, too, could not win. Both sides were exhausted by March 1613, when Jamestown’s military commander, Thomas Dale, ordered a subordinate to trick the teenage Pocahontas into coming aboard an English ship. Then they sailed away with her. Regarding the young woman as having noble blood, Dale put her under comfortable house arrest at the home of the colony’s minister. Meanwhile, he sent a ransom note to Powhatan: to get back his daughter, he would have to return all the swords, guns, and metal tools “he trecherously had stolne,” along with all the English prisoners of war. For three months Powhatan refused to negotiate with people he regarded as criminals. Finally he sent back a handful of English captives with an offer: five hundred bushels of maize for the girl. The guns and swords could not be returned, he said, because they had been lost or stolen. Dale scoffed at this claim. Communications ceased for another eight months, during which time some of the freed English captives ran back to the Indians—they preferred Tsenacomoco with its foreign culture and language to Jamestown with its martial law and famine. Early images of northeastern Indians are rare. This 1616 engraving of Pocahontas (left), executed during her visit to England, is the only known full portrait of a Powhatan. No portraits exist of Opechancanough, though one can imagine him looking something like this shaven-headed man (right), possibly a Virginia Indian visiting London, whose likeness was captured by the Bohemian artist Wenceslaus Hollar in 1645. (Photo credit 2.6) Determined to end the standoff, Dale led Rolfe and 150 musket-wielding tassantassas in March 1614 to meet Powhatan. In an angry standoff, several hundred native troops faced Dale’s men on the banks of the York River. With both sides fearing a battle that would inflict many casualties, England and Tsenacomoco finally began active parley. Rolfe was on the English negotiating team. Tsenacomoco was represented by Powhatan’s brother, Opechancanough, the man who had seized John Smith in the swamp. Over two days they put together an informal pact. Perhaps surprising, a key tenet was that Pocahontas would not return home. After her abduction Pocahontas had been, one colonist reported, “exceeding pensive and discontented.” In addition, one assumes, she was bewildered by the tassantassas, with their unwieldy clothes, their practice of confining women to the home and garden, their strangely rigid eating habits (at home, people simply dipped into the stewpot when hungry). But over time her attitude changed. Perhaps she was angered by her father’s initial refusal to ransom her. Perhaps she liked being treated royally by the English—in her father’s house, she was but one of many children from many wives. Perhaps she thought that by staying with the English she could end the war, with its intermittent eruptions of atrocity. Perhaps she simply fell in love with John Rolfe, whom she met while she was in captivity. In any case, she agreed to stay in Jamestown as his bride. Nobody cared that Pocahontas was already married. Because she was still childless, Rountree says, native custom allowed her to sunder the marital bond at any time. And the English were willing to overlook “savage” marriages—they were un-Christian, and therefore nonexistent. In consequence, both natives and newcomers could treat Pocahontas’s wedding to Rolfe as a de facto cease-fire—a “timely and face-saving method of ending the war without capitulation, a written treaty, or a formal winner,” as Fausz put it in his history of the strife. Opechancanough used the suspension of hostilities to take the levers of power from his brother (Powhatan retired in about 1615 and died three years later). Unyielding and methodical, opposed to the tassantassas from the day of their arrival, Opechancanough manipulated Jamestown into attacking his native rivals, augmenting his empire even as the English domain expanded. Determined to understand his enemy, the new ruler infiltrated his people into Jamestown. Working in English homes, trading with English ships, and serving in English militias, the Indians studied the ways of the foreigners. Opechancanough’s men acquired a stockpile of guns, and trained themselves to use them. The colonists were blithely unaware of Opechancanough’s schemes. Nonetheless, they initiated, all unintentionally, a devastating countermeasure: the Columbian Exchange. The constant flow of ships to Virginia brought with them an entire suite of new species, opening what would become a multilevel ecological assault. One of the most potent weapons was tobacco. Even at the height of the war John Rolfe had been experimenting with N. tabacum. King James I had initially excoriated smoking as “lo[a]thsome to the eye, hatefull to the Nose, [and] harmefulle to the braine.” He thought about banning it but changed his mind—the perpetually cash-short monarch had discovered that tobacco could be taxed. English smokers were relieved, but not happy; the Spaniards kept raising prices. Much as crack cocaine is an inferior, cheaper version of powdered cocaine, Virginia tobacco was of lesser quality than Caribbean tobacco but also not nearly as expensive. Like crack, it was a wild commercial success; within a year of its arrival, Jamestown colonists were paying off debts in London with little bags of the drug. The cease-fire with Powhatan let colonists expand production explosively. By 1620 Jamestown was shipping as much as fifty thousand pounds a year; three years later the figure had almost tripled. Within forty years Chesapeake Bay—the Tobacco Coast, as it later became known—was exporting 25 million pounds a year. Individual farmers were making profits of as much as 1,000 percent on their initial investment. One thousand percent! And all that was needed was sun, water, and soil! The sums skyrocketed if farmers could afford servants—laborers’ annual pay was about ?2, but they could grow ?100 or even ?200 of tobacco in that time. In an object demonstration of the power of economic order to focus the human mind, the tassantassas whom John Smith had to order into their fields at gunpoint now became intent on wringing tobacco from the soil. Newcomers poured in, grabbed some land, and planted N. tabacum. English-style farms spread like rumors up and down the James and York rivers. So many colonists poured in that the company realized they could not be controlled entirely from across the ocean and created an elected council to resolve disputes—the first representative body in colonial North America. Its opening session lasted from July 30 to August 4, 1619. Barely three weeks later a Dutch pirate ship landed at Jamestown. In its hold was “20. and odd Negroes”—slaves taken by the pirates from a Portuguese slave ship destined for Mexico. (About thirty more showed up in another ship a few days later.) In their hurry to extract tobacco profits, the tassantassas had been clamoring for more workers. The Africans had arrived at harvest time. Without a second thought colonists bought the Africans in exchange for the food the pirates needed for the return trip to Europe. Legally speaking, the “20. and odd” Africans may not have been slaves—their status is unclear. Nevertheless, they were not volunteers; their purchase was a landmark in the road to slavery. Within weeks of each other, Jamestown had inaugurated two of the future United States’ most long-lasting institutions: representative democracy and chattel slavery. Not that the colonists paid attention to these landmarks—they were too busy exporting Virginia leaf. Obsessed by tobacco, some of the leadership complained, the colonists let Jamestown fall once again into ruin: “the Church down, the Palizado’s [walls] broken, the Bridge in pieces, the Well of fresh water spoiled; the store-house they used for the Church; the market-place, and streets and all other spare places planted with Tobacco.” Massive celebratory drunkenness was common; incoming ships brought liquor and profitably transformed themselves into floating temporary taverns. Dale was forced to issue an order to Virginia’s planters: grow food crops, too, or forfeit your tobacco to the colonial government. Few paid attention. Alas, the boom came too late for the Virginia Company. Shipping colonists across the Atlantic only to have them die had exhausted its start-up capital. Company officers persuaded London’s powerful clergy that helping Jamestown find more investors was the duty of all English Christians. Sunday after Sunday, ministers urged their parishioners to buy shares in the Virginia Company. “Goe forward,” Rev. William Crashaw urged potential “noble and worthy Adventurers,” some of whom sat in the pews of his Temple Church, one of the nation’s most influential houses of worship. If England did not seize its opportunity in Virginia, Crashaw predicted, future generations would ask, “Why was there such a pri[z]e put into the hands of fooles who had not hearts to take it?” (Emphasis in original.) The tactic worked. Ministers enticed more than seven hundred individuals and companies to put at least ?25,000 into the Virginia Company.4 (By contrast, historians believe that fewer than a dozen men were the original backers of the company and that they put in no more than several hundred pounds.) The new sum was enough to send over hundreds of colonists, Rolfe and Dale among them, who eagerly grew tobacco. But even the rush of tobacco profits could not offset the debts from the company’s years of losses. The Virginia Company was again running out of money on March 22, 1622, when Opechancanough attacked. Early that morning Indians slipped into European settlements, knocking on doors and asking to be let in. Most were familiar visitors. They came unarmed. Many accepted a meal or a drink. Then they seized whatever implement came to hand—kitchen knife, heavy stewpot, the colonists’ own guns—and killed everyone in the house. The assault was brutal, widespread, and well planned. So swift were the blows that many colonists died without knowing they were under attack. Entire families fell. Houses burned across what had been Tsenacomoco. At the last minute several Indians told English friends about the attack, providing enough warning to let Jamestown gather its defenses. Nonetheless the attackers killed at least 325 people. The aftermath claimed as many as seven hundred more. Because the attack disrupted spring planting, the tassantassas grew even less maize than usual. Meanwhile, the company tried to rebuild Jamestown by sending over more than a thousand new colonists. Incredibly, they were sent with no food supplies. Actually, not so incredibly—ship captains were paid by the person transported, so they overloaded their vessels with passengers, carrying as little unprofitable food as possible. The luckless, scurvy-ridden souls aboard were dumped ashore, where they were forced to eat “barks of trees, or moulds [soil] of the Ground. Again colonists scrabbled in rags over handfuls of maize. It was a second “starving time.” By spring the survivors were so debilitated, colony treasurer George Sandys wrote, “the lyveing [were] hardlie able to bury the dead.” (Emphasis in original.) Altogether about two out of every three Europeans in Virginia died that year.5 Although this image is confused in many ways—note the neatly walled fortress in the distance, so utterly unlike Jamestown or any Powhatan settlement—something of the shock caused by the Powhatan attack on Virginia in 1622 was captured in this engraving by the German artist Matth?us Merian. (Photo credit 2.8) By any measure, Opechancanough was in a commanding position. His forces now more numerous and better supplied than the enemy, they raided English settlements at will. Jamestown’s governing council confessed that the colonists couldn’t successfully mount a reprisal, “by reasone of theire swyftnes of foote, and advantages of the woodes, to which uppon all our assaultes they retyre.” Opechancanough predicted in the summer of 1623 that “before the end of two Moones there should not be an Englishman in all their Countries.” Just as he foresaw, the Virginia Company did not survive. Horrified by the attack, James I created an investigatory commission, which issued a damning report. The company’s parliamentary support vanished. Management fought desperately to retain the king’s favor. Its investors had sunk into Virginia as much as ?200,000, a vast sum at the time. As long as the firm existed the money potentially could be recouped. If James revoked the company charter, it would be beyond recovery. Nevertheless he revoked the charter on May 24, 1624. “Any responsible monarch would have been obliged to stop the reckless shipment of his subjects to their deaths,” wrote Morgan, the historian. The wonder was that the king had not done so earlier. Opechancanough had defeated the Virginia Company. But victory over the company did not mean victory for the Indians. Opechancanough did not launch a final, killing assault, pushing the foreigners into the sea. Indeed, a second coordinated attack didn’t take place for twenty-two years, when it was far too late. The reason for his hesitation will never be known with certainty, because English accounts provide the great majority of historical records, and the hostilities ensured that the tassantassas lost what little view they had into native life. But one possible answer is that Opechancanough had lost Tsenacomoco before his troops fanned out into English homes. By growing tobacco, the English had transformed the landscape into something unrecognizable. Indians had traditionally raised tobacco, but only in small amounts. The colonists, by contrast, covered big areas with stands of N. tabacum. Neither natives nor newcomers understood the environmental impact of planting it on a massive scale. 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. “Tobacco has an almost unique ability to suck the life out of soil,” said Leanne DuBois, the agricultural extension agent in James City County, Jamestown’s county. “In this area, where the soils can be pretty fragile, it can ruin the land in a couple of years.” Constantly wearing out fields, the colonists had to keep moving to new land. In Tsenacomoco, one recalls, families traditionally farmed their plots for a few years and then let them go fallow when yields declined. The unplanted land became common hunting or foraging grounds until needed again for farms. Because the fallow lands had already been cleared, the foreigners could readily move in and plant tobacco on them. Unlike the Powhatan, the English didn’t let their tobacco fields regenerate after they were depleted. Instead, they turned them into maize fields, and then pasture for cattle and horses. Rather than cycling the land between farm and forest, in other words, the foreigners used it continuously—permanently keeping prime farmland and forage land away from the people of Tsenacomoco, pushing the Indians farther and farther away from the shore as they did. In a decade or two the English had grabbed most of the land cleared by Indians. They moved into the forest, as the environmental historian John R. Wennersten wrote, “using slash-and-burn techniques that had not been seen in Europe for centuries.” They felled great numbers of trees, and lavishly used the fallen timber. Farmers marked their property with “worm” fences—zigzag constructions of six to ten interlocking rails—that Wennersten estimates consumed 6,500 long, thick timbers for every mile of fence. Other wood was converted into pitch, tar, turpentine, and wooden planks. The plentiful leftovers were exported, in the form of barrels, casks, kegs, and hogsheads, to timber-starved England. “They have an unconquerable aversion to trees,” one eighteenth-century visitor dryly observed. “Not one is spared.” Subject to annual burning, native woodlands had been both open, in that people could freely move around, and closed, in that the canopy of big trees sheltered the land from the impact of rainfall. Taking down the forest exposed the soil. Colonists’ ploughs increased its vulnerability. Nutrients dissolved in spring rains and washed into the sea. The exposed soil dried out more quickly and hardened faster, losing its ability to absorb spring rains; the volume and speed of runoff increased, raising river volume. By the late seventeenth century disastrous floods were common. So much soil had washed into the rivers that they became difficult to navigate. Tobacco from South America was far from the only biological import. The English brought along all the other species they were accustomed to finding on farms: pigs, goats, cattle, and horses. At first the imported animals didn’t fare well, not least because they were eaten by starving colonists. But during the peace after Pocahontas’s marriage, they multiplied. Colonists quickly lost control of them. Indians woke up to find free-range cows and horses romping through their fields, trampling the harvest. If they killed the beasts, gun-waving colonists demanded payment. Animal numbers boomed for decades. The worst may have been the pigs. By 1619, one colonist reported, there were “an infinite number of Swine, broken out into the woods.” Smart, strong, and constantly hungry, they ate nuts, fruits, and maize, turning up the marshy soil with their shovel-like noses in search of edible roots. One of these was tuckahoe, the tuber Indians relied upon when their maize harvests failed. Pigs turned out to like tuckahoe—a lot. Traveling through the area in the eighteenth century, the Swedish botanist Peter Kalm found that pigs were “very greedy” for the tubers, “and grow very fat by feeding on them.” In places “frequented by hogs,” he argued, tuckahoe “must have been extirpated.” The people of Tsenacomoco found themselves competing for their food supply with packs of feral pigs. After the final defeat of the Virginia Indians in the 1660s, they were required to wear identifying badges—this one belonged to a native leader—if they wanted to enter English settlements. (Photo credit 2.9) In the long run, though, the biggest ecological impact may have been wreaked by a much smaller domestic animal: the European honeybee. In early 1622 a ship arrived in Jamestown that was loaded with exotic entities: grapevines, silkworms, and bees. The grapes and silkworms never amounted to much, but the bees thrived. Most bees pollinate only a few plant species and tend to be fussy about where they live. But European honeybees, promiscuous little beasts, pollinate almost anything in sight and reside almost anywhere. Quickly they set up shop throughout the Americas. Indians called them “English flies.” The English imported bees for honey, not to help their crops—pollination wasn’t discovered until the mid-eighteenth century—but feral honeybees pollinated farms and orchards anyway. Without them, many of the plants Europeans brought with them wouldn’t have proliferated. Georgia probably would not have become the Peach State; Johnny Appleseed’s trees might never have borne fruit; Huckleberry Finn might not have had any watermelons to steal. So critical to European success was the honeybee that Indians came to view it as a harbinger of invasion; the first sight of a bee in a new territory, the French-American writer Jean de Cr?vecoeur noted in 1782, “spreads sadness and consternation in all minds.” Removing forest cover, blocking regrowth on fallow land, exhausting the soil, shutting down annual burning, unleashing big grazing and rooting animals, introducing earthworms, honeybees, and other alien invertebrates—the colonists so profoundly changed Tsenacomoco that it became harder and harder for its inhabitants to prosper there. Meanwhile, it was easier and easier for Europeans to thrive in an environment that their own actions were making increasingly familiar. Despite starvation, disease, and financial meltdown, immigrants poured into Chesapeake Bay. Axes flashing, oxen straining before the plow, hundreds of new colonists planted spreads of tobacco across every accessible river bluff. When they wore out the soil, they gave the fields over to cattle and then moved on. Ecologically speaking, Tsenacomoco was becoming ever more like Europe—the hallmark of the nascent Homogenocene. By 1650 the Indian empire was mainly inhabited by Europeans. “SOE INFINITE A RICHES” By all accounts, John Ferrar was a modest, pious, hardworking man who spent his life tending the family business. His father, Nicholas, was a cosmopolitan London leather merchant with a mansion on St. Sythe’s Lane, not far from the Bank of England and the Royal Exchange. One of the original stockholders in the Virginia Company, he sank ?50 into Jamestown. The investment did not bear fruit, and Nicholas became convinced that the problem lay with the company’s well-connected but feckless managers. Rather than pulling out, though, the family invested another ?50 in 1618, acquiring a plantation of several thousand acres, administered by another relative whom Nicholas dispatched to Virginia. A few months later, he participated in a sort of shareholders’ revolt. New corporate officers were appointed, among them two of Nicholas’s other sons: Nicholas Jr., who became the company counsel and secretary, and John, who was given the unsalaried office of deputy treasurer. Despite his lowly position, John Ferrar found himself effectively in charge of the company’s finances—the actual treasurer, an important aristocrat, was too busy harassing the king in Parliament. The firm now was making money from tobacco sales but had piled up so much debt that Ferrar had to scramble to pay creditors. Worse, he claimed, the previous management had embezzled ?3,000. Attempts to restore the funds were countered by the thieves’ attempts to smear him in court. The intrigue grew so all-consuming that Ferrar held daily crisis meetings at the family manse on St. Sythe’s Lane. Maps like this one, from 1667, were surprisingly common in seventeenth-century Europe. Depicting North America as a narrow isthmus, it suggested to the Virginia Company’s English backers that their colonists at Jamestown (star on map) could easily walk to the Pacific. From there, they could sail to China. (Photo credit 2.7) Click here to view a larger image. In the end, his hard work didn’t pay off. Opechancanough’s attack in 1622 gave the company’s enemies the opening they sought; Nicholas and John, portrayed as reckless swindlers, were briefly thrown in prison. They managed to talk their way free, but cannot have been taken by surprise when the king put an end to the enterprise. John Ferrar never reconciled himself to the loss. Twenty-five years after the company’s demise, he read William Bullock’s Virginia Impartially Examined, a sixty-six-page tract that blamed him and other managers for Jamestown’s troubles. Ferrar filled the margins of his copy with irate rejoinders. Bullock had written that the colony could prosper only by diversifying; rather than focusing exclusively on tobacco, the colonists should have grown wheat and barley. To Ferrar, this was like telling people who were riding off a cliff that they should wear jackets of another color. As far as he was concerned, Virginia’s mistake had been to ignore what Sir Francis Drake had learned during the 1570s, when he stopped in California during his round-the-world voyage. Drake had proven—proven!—that the Americas were at most a few hundred miles across. Jamestown’s failure to cut through the continent and pioneer a new route to Asia, Ferrar wrote, “is to this day the greatest Error and damadge that hath happened to the Collony all this while.” He was certain that only “8 or 10 days March[,] naye it maybe not a 4 days Journy” separated Jamestown and the Pacific. A single expedition west would have discovered “Soe Infinite a Riches to them all as a passadge to a West Sea would prove to them.” Instead, they had stupidly filled their days with “Smokey Tobaco.” From today’s vantage the story seems more complex. The goal of the Virginia Company had been to integrate Virginia, and thus poor England itself, into the rich new global marketplace. Although Ferrar never recognized it, the company had done exactly that—with “Smokey Tobaco,” the first American species to disperse into Europe, Asia, and Africa. 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. By 1607, when Jamestown was founded, tobacco was enthralling the upper classes in Delhi, where the first smoker, to the dismay of his advisers, was none other than the Mughal emperor; thriving in Nagasaki, despite a ban promulgated by the alarmed daimyo; and addicting sailors in Istanbul to such an extent that they were extorting it from passing European vessels. In that same year a traveler in Sierra Leone observed that tobacco, likely brought by slave traders, could be found “about every man’s house, which seemeth half their food.” Nicotine addiction became so rampant so quickly in Manchuria, according to the Oxford historian Timothy Brook, that in 1635 the khan Hongtaiji discovered that his soldiers “were selling their weapons to buy tobacco.” The khan angrily prohibited smoking. On the opposite side of the world, Europeans were equally hooked; by the 1640s the Vatican was receiving complaints that priests were celebrating Mass with lighted cigars. Pope Urban VIII, as enraged as Hongtaiji, promptly banned smoking in church. From Bristol to Boston to Beijing, people became part of an international culture of tobacco. Virginia played a small but important part in creating this worldwide phenomenon. From today’s perspective, though, N. tabacum in the end was less important in itself than as a magnet that pulled many other nonhuman creatures, directly and indirectly, across the Atlantic, of which the most important surely were two minute, multifaceted immigrants, Plasmo-dium vivax and Plasmodium falciparum—names little known outside specialist circles, but ones that played a devastating role in American life. 1 In recent years, advanced techniques have let researchers domesticate a few previously undomesticable species in laboratory settings—the silver fox is the most well-known example. In all previous history, though, only about forty large animals were domesticated. (That figure does not include domesticated insects, like the European honeybee and the Mexican cochineal, cultivated as a source of red dye.) 2 Europeans later hunted the beaver to near extinction—its fur makes especially good felt, then in demand for hats. In this way, they unknowingly replaced one dominant natural engineer with another, the earthworm. 3 Roanoke apparently did have one signal impact: introducing England to tobacco. Sir Francis Drake probably brought the plant to the nation in the previous decade—he had acquired it on his round-the-world expedition. But it wasn’t widely known until Roanoke colonists returned with strange, fiery clay tubes at their lips. “In a short time,” one courtly eyewitness moaned, “many men every-where … with insatiable desire and greediness sucked in the stinking smoak.” 4 Equivalents in contemporary money are hard to establish, but this sum surely translates into tens of millions of dollars. Even that vague claim may be misleading, because the pool of investment capital was then much smaller; the capital raised by the Virginia Company was a much bigger percentage of the total available than, say, $50 million would be today. 5 Not everything went badly for the tassantassas. In May 1623, a little more than a year after the assault, they staged a counterattack at a peace conference with Tsenacomoco’s leadership. At a celebratory toast, one witness recorded, the English passed out poisoned sack (a sherry-like wine), killing “some tooe hundred” Indians. Pursued by a stricken, enraged crowd, the colonists fled to their boats. As they left, they fired into the mob, killing “som 50 more,” including, they erroneously believed, Opechancanough. Afterward the English “brought hom parte of ther heades”—that is, they scalped some of their victims. 3 Evil Air “EXTRACTIVE STATES” In 1985 a bookseller in northeast Spain announced that he had possession of nine letters and reports by Crist?bal Col?n, seven of them never seen before, including chronicles of all four of his American voyages. Later that year, Consuelo Varela and Juan Gil, editors of a definitive edition of the admiral’s writings, skeptically inspected the papers. Surprising their colleagues, Varela and Gil concluded that the manuscripts were handwritten copies of actual letters and reports by Col?n—copies of the type routinely kept by wealthy people in the days before photocopiers. The Spanish government acquired the papers for an undisclosed sum; a facsimile edition was published in 1989. Nine years after that, an English translation appeared. Because I am interested in Col?n, I bought a copy of the translation when I spotted it in a used-book store. Part of a series the Italian state published to honor the five hundredth anniversary of his first voyage to the Americas, the book is a big, lush, cream-colored object that doesn’t fit on a standard bookshelf. Disappointing to readers like me, Gil and Varela announced in the introduction that “these previously unknown texts do not present any spectacular revelations” about Col?n’s life and character. But halfway through the newly revealed chronicle of the admiral’s second voyage I came across a curious detail—one that wasn’t in the fine biographies by Samuel Eliot Morison and Felipe Fern?ndez-Armesto. In the translation, Col?n explains that after the expedition arrived at La Isabela “all my people went ashore to settle, and everyone realized it rained a lot. They became gravely ill from tertian fever.” Tertian fever, an old-fashioned term, refers to bouts of fever and chills that occur in a regular forty-eight-hour pattern—a day of sickness followed by a day of quiet, then a day of sickness as the pattern repeats (tertian, taken from the Latin for “three days,” derives from the Roman custom of counting time from the beginning of one period to the beginning of the next). Tertian fever is the fingerprint of the most important types of malaria, one of humankind’s most intractable scourges. Taken literally, Col?n seemed to be saying that at La Isabela his men contracted malaria. No wonder the colonists didn’t want to work, I thought, and marked the passage with a pencil. In 2002 Noble David Cook, a historian at Florida International University, in Miami, published an article entitled, alarmingly, “Sickness, Starvation, and Death in Early Hispaniola,” which detailed the island’s catastrophic history after Col?n’s landing. Researchers generally agree that human malaria did not exist in the Americas before 1492 (some believe a kind of monkey malaria was present). If Col?n’s men contracted malaria, Cook explained, they must have brought the disease with them from Spain, which like much of Europe then was rife with the disease. It was a textbook case of the Columbian Exchange, recorded by its progenitor himself. Remembering the cream-colored book, I hauled it from my bookshelf and turned to the relevant passage. The original Spanish, printed on the facing page, didn’t use the Spanish words for malaria or tertian fever. Instead Col?n wrote that his men had contracted something called ?i?iones, a term I had never encountered. Why did Cook and the translator of Col?n’s letter think this meant malaria? ?i?iones is hard to find in modern Spanish dictionaries—I consulted the dozen or so in my local library without success. Google, too, was no help. Nor was Col?n himself. He provided no description of the symptoms of ?i?iones, perhaps because he believed they were familiar to his readers. All he said about the disease, in fact, was to guess that it was spread by the native women around La Isabela, “who are abundant there; and since they [that is, the women] were immodest and disheveled, it is no wonder that they [that is, the men] had trouble.” To me, this sounded like the admiral thought ?i?iones was some kind of venereal disease. But that doesn’t jibe with other sources, as I learned when I contacted an expert in sixteenth-century Spanish, Scott Sessions of Amherst College. The first dictionary of the Spanish language appeared in 1611, Sessions told me. In it is an entry for ?i?iones: “the fever that comes with chills, which is attributed to the cierzo [mistral wind], because it is the most acute, cold and penetrating.” The next authoritative Spanish dictionary, issued in multiple volumes by the Royal Spanish Academy between 1726 and 1739, similarly defines ?i?iones as “the fever that starts with chills, which from being acute and penetrating like the mistral wind, as [the first dictionary] says, one derives the word: but it more likely refers to tertian fever”—malaria. Cook and the translator, in other words, were correct: Col?n may well have been describing malaria. The scenario isn’t implausible. Malaria can lie dormant in the body for months, only to reemerge at full strength. The disease is transmitted by mosquitoes, which take in microscopic malaria parasites when they drink blood from infected people and pass them on to the next people they bite. Col?n left on his second voyage in September 1493. If one of his crew had a malaria relapse after landing in La Isabela, only one bite from the right type of mosquito would be necessary to spread the disease—and those mosquitoes are abundant on Hispaniola. All of this is highly speculative, to say the least. Today we know that many different diseases cause chills and fevers, including influenza and pneumonia. But for centuries people couldn’t distinguish one from another; they didn’t understand that malaria was a specific disease. Sessions, the Amherst historian, told me that paludismo, the Spanish word for malaria, didn’t appear in Royal Spanish Academy dictionaries until 1914. Even then, few realized that it was caused by a mosquito-borne parasite—the 1914 dictionary defined paludismo as a “group of deadly phenomena produced by marshy emanations.” (The English word “malaria” comes from the Italian mal aria, evil or bad air.) Col?n was using a word that probably indicates malaria, in other words, but he could well have been describing ordinary chills and fever. A single word is not enough to make a diagnosis. Yet the impossibility of finding definitive answers does not mean historians should stop seeking them—the question is too important. Despite a global eradication program that began in the 1950s, malaria is still responsible for unimaginable suffering: more than three-quarters of a million deaths per annum, the great majority of them children under the age of five. Every year about 225 million people contract the disease, which even with modern medical care can incapacitate for months. In Africa it afflicts so many people so often that economists believe it is a major drag on development; since 1965, according to one widely cited calculation, countries with high rates of malaria have had annual per capita growth rates 1.3 percent less than countries without malaria, enough to ensure that many of the former lost ground to the latter. As it does today, malaria played a huge role in the past—a role unlike that of other diseases, and arguably larger. When Europeans brought smallpox and influenza to the Americas, they set off epidemics: sudden outbursts that shot through Indian towns and villages, then faded. Malaria, by contrast, became endemic, an ever-present, debilitating presence in the landscape. Socially speaking, malaria—along with another mosquito-borne disease, yellow fever—turned the Americas upside down. Before these maladies arrived, the most thickly inhabited terrain north of Mexico was what is now the southeastern United States, and the wet forests of Mesoamerica and Amazonia held millions of people. After malaria and yellow fever, these previously salubrious areas became inhospitable. Their former inhabitants fled to safer lands; Europeans who moved into the emptied real estate often did not survive a year. The high European mortality rates had long-lasting impacts, the Harvard and Massachusetts Institute of Technology economists Daron Acemoglu, Simon Johnson, and James A. Robinson have argued. Even today, the places where European colonists couldn’t survive are much poorer than places that Europeans found more healthful. The reason, the researchers said, is that the conquering newcomers established different institutions in disease zones than they did in healthier areas. Unable to create stable, populous colonies in malarial areas, Europeans founded what Acemoglu, Johnson, and Robinson called “extractive states,” the emblematic example being the ghastly Belgian Congo in Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness, where a tiny cohort of high-collared Europeans forces a mass of chained, naked slaves, “shadows of disease and starvation,” to build a railroad to ship ivory from the interior. Tobacco brought malaria to Virginia, indirectly but ineluctably, and from there it went north, south, and west, until much of North America was in its grip. Sugarcane, another overseas import, similarly brought the disease into the Caribbean and Latin America, along with its companion, yellow fever. Because both diseases killed European workers in American tobacco and sugar plantations, colonists imported labor in the form of captive Africans—the human wing of the Columbian Exchange. In sum: ecological introductions shaped an economic exchange, which in turn had political consequences that have endured to the present. It would be an exaggeration to say that malaria and yellow fever were responsible for the slave trade, just as it would be an exaggeration to say that they explain why much of Latin America is still poor, or why the antebellum cotton plantations in Gone with the Wind sat atop great, sweeping lawns, or why Scotland joined England to form the United Kingdom, or why the weak, divided thirteen colonies won independence from mighty Great Britain in the Revolutionary War. But it would not be completely wrong, either. SEASONING Malaria is caused by the two hundred or so species in the genus Plasmodium, ancient microscopic parasites that plague countless types of reptile, bird, and mammal. Four of those two hundred species target humankind. They are dishearteningly good at their jobs. Although the parasite consists of but a single cell, its life story is wildly complex; it changes outward appearance with the alacrity of characters in a Shakespearean comedy. From the human point of view, though, the critical fact is that it is injected into our flesh by mosquitoes. Once in the body, the parasite pries open red blood cells and climbs inside. (I am here skipping several intermediate steps.) Floating about the circulatory system like passengers in so many submarines, the parasites reproduce in huge numbers inside the cell. Eventually the burgeoning offspring burst out of the cell and pour into the bloodstream. Most of the new parasites subvert other red blood cells, but a few drift in the blood, waiting to be sucked up by a biting mosquito. When a mosquito takes in Plasmodium, it reproduces yet again inside the insect, taking on a different form. The new parasites squirm into the mosquito’s salivary glands. From there the insect injects them into its next victim, beginning the cycle anew. In the body, Plasmodium apparently uses biochemical signaling to synchronize its actions: most of the infected red blood cells release their parasites at about the same time. Victims experience these eruptions as huge, coordinated assaults—a single infection can generate ten billion new parasites. Overwhelmed by the deluge, the immune system sets off paroxysms of intense chills and fever. Eventually it beats back the attack, but within days a new assault occurs; some of the previous wave of parasites, which have hidden themselves inside red blood cells, have produced a new generation of Plasmodium, billions strong. The cycle repeats until the immune system at last fights off the parasite. Or seems to—Plasmodium cells can secret themselves in other corners of the body, from which they emerge a few weeks later. Half a dozen episodes of chills and fever, a bit of respite, then another wave of attacks: the badge of full-blown malaria. Single-celled Plasmodium parasites burst out of dying red blood cells, beginning the assault on the body that leads to full-blown malaria. (Photo credit 3.1) If the suffering caused by malaria today is difficult to grasp, it is almost impossible to imagine what it was like when its cause was unknown and no effective treatments existed. One can get a hint by reading the accounts of victims like Samuel Jeake, a seventeenth-century merchant in southeast England, who doggedly recorded every skirmish in his decades-long war with what we now recognize as malaria. To pick an example almost at random, here is Jeake on February 6, 1692, near the end of one six-month bout, stoically recording that he had been “taken ill the Seventh time: with a Tertian Ague [fever]; about 3h p.m. it began,