The so-called discovery of the so-called New World by Europeans goes down in history as one of the most important and earth-shattering moments in human history, ranking right up there with the advent of agriculture, the domestication of animals, etc., and the discovery of the use of fire. Although the Vikings made it to Newfoundland around the year 1000, they apparently decided that Greenland would be a much better colony and retreated, leaving the Spanish with all the glory almost five centuries later. The resulting exchange of plants, animals, people and diseases has since been called the “Columbian Exchange,” after the charismatic Christopher Columbus, who landed in the Bahamas thinking he had made it to India.
Over the next few centuries, various groups of European explorers brought crops such as corn, potatoes, cassava, tomatoes, peppers, cacao, peanuts, strawberries, and tobacco back to the Old World from the Americas—meaning that the potato is no more Irish than the tomato Italian, the pepper is Spanish or the cigarette is French. In particular, carbohydrate-rich corn and potatoes helped alleviate the food shortages that were all too common in Europe; Ireland’s population alone grew by 800 percent in 200 years – only to be hit by potato blight in the mid-1840s. So much for putting all the potatoes in one basket.
Of course, it wouldn’t be called the Columbian Exchange if the process didn’t go both ways. Imagine the Plains Indians and then subtract the horses. Imagine a Central American banana republic and then subtract the bananas. Imagine a Colombian donkey carrying a load of coffee beans, then subtract both the donkey and the coffee beans. Imagine a selection of Mexican dishes and then remove the rice, cheese, lettuce, black olives, onions, chicken, pork and beef. Or imagine a handful of far-flung, dry, completely impoverished Indian reservations and then dump the smallpox, influenza, typhoid, cholera, tuberculosis, measles, scarlet fever, yellow fever and malaria. These were just some of the things that Europeans brought with them in the first years of their interaction with the New World.
The New World was a fairly healthy place before the Columbian Exchange, which is why diseases in the Old World could so easily decimate the indigenous population. Think of Jim and Dwight talking about health insurance on “The Office.” Dwight: “I don’t need it. Never been sick. Perfect immune system.” Jim: “Okay, if you’ve never been sick, then you don’t have antibodies.” After suffering from constant outbreaks of some extremely serious diseases for centuries, the people of the Old World arrived in America Continent has built up a whole range of antibodies. In fact, many of the animals they brought to the New World—for example, the chickens, pigs, and cows mentioned above—were one of the main reasons Europeans were so sick all the time. It turns out that sleeping in the same one-room house as your livestock can cause significant harm to your health, especially at a time when you were a real dandy by bathing once a week.
Before Spanish colonization and the Colombian Exchange, the native population of the Americas was estimated at between 40 and 100 million, meaning that Native Americans were likely far more numerous than the 60 million citizens of Europe. In fact, in 1492, the Aztec capital of Tenochtitlan was larger, cleaner and more beautiful than any other city in Europe, while the Incas had the largest single empire on earth. The ensuing “Great Dying” of indigenous peoples may have killed up to one in five people worldwide. Westerners like to rave about the Black Death of the 14th century, but the plague—or even the sum of Europe’s many plagues—can’t hold a candle to what happened in the New World.
When European settlers arrived in what is now the United States, they were absolutely amazed by the beauty, pristineness, and park-like nature of the landscape, and since the “Indians” around them were dying in droves, they thought God was giving them a chance to sign their claim to it Country. Little did they know that they had stumbled upon the thousands of years of work of native peoples, many of whom had been decimated by rapidly spreading European diseases before the colonists even got there.
The vast majority of the indigenous people who suffered during the Colombian exchange no longer exist to tell the tale. Among the unexpected survivors, however, are America’s black populations; The introduction of the cassava plant to West Africa led to a population boom that helped fuel slavery that arose around the cultivation of Columbian Exchange cash crops such as cotton, sugar cane, coffee, and tobacco. Although Americans have long been taught to live by words like “Manifest Destiny” and “American Dream,” we must not forget the millions upon millions for whom America was, to quote Langston Hughes’ poem, a dream deferred.
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