Encounters in the Americas
Exchanges fueled by exploration have played an important
role from the beginning of human history. Trade is one of our distinguishing
characteristics. Exchanging what you
have with what you need or want is one of our oldest professions. Trade
transforms peoples and cultures and thus transforms our world. In this section, we will explore what happened when Europeans landed in the Americas and encountered a totally different world view and culture. We will not focus on an individual park, since Contact occurred all over the Americas and impacted everyone sooner or later.
Europeans started exploring westward when Constantinople fell
to the Ottoman Sultan Mehmed II in 1453. This severed the overland Silk Road
which brought the spices, silks, and other goods from Asia to Europe. Seagoing explorers
and merchants using nautical innovations from the Portuguese and Spanish governments initiated an unprecedented onslaught of contact and exchanges unknown in
the world before or since. This contact revolutionized our lives. New peoples,
new lands, new plants and animals, new beliefs, and new sources of wealth and
bounty poured out of the Americas into Europe.
This American windfall took Europe by surprise. During the 14th
and 15th centuries, pestilence, war, famine, and death ruled Europe with
the Black Plague, the Hundred Years War, and the Islamic occupation of Spain
and parts of Eastern Europe.
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| Contact by Native Americans with Europeans |
In the midst of this turmoil, Portugal saw an opportunity to
take the lucrative Asian trade away from Venice. In 1418, Prince Henry the
Navigator of Portugal sponsored systematic explorations of Africa’s Atlantic
coast. As Portuguese ships sailed down the west coast of Africa, pilots plotted their course with maps and compasses, navigated by the stars, and used Arab tools like the astrolabe
and quadrant to aid in safe sailing. A new ship, the caravel, assisted with the
dangerous voyages. Its triangular lateen sails allowed for windward sailing.
Using such innovations, Bartolomeu Dias reached the Indian Ocean by sailing around
the southern tip of Africa in 1488.
While Portuguese sailors went south, Spanish ones searched west
for the illusive route to Asia. In 1492, King Ferdinand and Queen Isabella ratified
the Treaty of Granada with Boabdil, the sultan of Granada, ending the 700
years of Muslim occupation of Spain. On August 3rd that same year, Christopher
Columbus cast off from southwestern Spain to cross the gray Atlantic Ocean with
three ships: one carrack, the Santa
María, and two smaller caravels, the Pinta
(the Painted), and the Santa Clara, (nicknamed the Niña). On October 12,
1492, Columbus and his crew landed on the Bahamian Islands, believing they had
reached India. They encountered the Arawak, who the Europeans mistakenly named
“Indians.” At the time of Contact, between two and three million people lived in North
America and perhaps ten million inhabited all the Americas—about equal to
Europe’s population at the same time.
Columbus and his ships returned to Spain on March 15th,
1493. Word about the "discovery" of new lands swept through Europe
like a wildfire through a bone-dry forest. Between 1493 and 1503, Columbus took
three more voyages and touched the continent at Venezuela, Nicaragua, Honduras,
Costa Rica, and Panama. His voyages set off a stampede of exploration, conquest,
and colonization throughout the Americas.
Native Americans in the north started encountering Europeans
several decades later. In 1524, Giovanni da Verrazano sailed a French
expedition from South Carolina to Newfoundland. That same year, Estevão Gomes,
a Portuguese cartographer, explored from Nova Scotia south, stopping at the New
York Harbor, and finally reaching Florida.
In the early sixteenth century, fishermen from England,
France, Spain, and Portugal discovered the abundant fishing grounds off of Cape
Cod, named for the very fish they sought. Some of these ships landed and traded
with the coastal Indians. This trade, called the Columbian Exchange,
revolutionized the world. The Columbian Exchange invented the world that we
know today.
The Columbian Exchange
As we have seen in previous chapters, complicated civilizations
inhabited the Western Hemisphere. Europeans crashed in, trading and sometimes
brutally plundering, and disrupted Native American lives. Gold, silver, new foods, and
other valuables sailed east to Europe while metal tools, horses, diseases, and
a crusading religion came west.
The Columbian Exchange rapidly transformed cultures. For
example, Europeans knew how to manufacture and used hard metal, especially
iron. Iron allowed for more durable tools—from metal pots and pans to nails to
weapons. Preparing fields with metal hoes and plows improved farming and
hunting with guns enhanced meat harvesting. With metal pots and pans, cooking
grew easier. Defending or attacking foes with metal tipped spears, with iron
swords, and with guns proved more effective than stone weapons. Contact brought
benefits along with disruption.
Europeans brought new animals to America since they had long
experience with large animal husbandry. Horses, cattle, sheep, hogs, fowl, and
other animals provided for work and food. Plowing a field with oxen, hauling
goods and people on horse drawn wagons, feeding multitudes through the
cultivation of livestock, such differences in protein and in mobility also
transferred to Native Americans. European animals transformed Native Americans lives.
For their part, Native Americans had corn and knew how to
grow multiple crops across the continent. From the hot deserts in the Southwest to the
cold woodlands of the north, native peoples throughout the Americas produced
abundant harvests of nutritious food.
They accomplished astounding innovations in horticulture. Corn from Central
America and potatoes from Peru, combined with sugar cane, chocolate, chiles,
tomatoes, tobacco, squashes, and manioc revolutionized nutrition first in Europe and then in Africa and Asia. These new foods help explain the worldwide
population explosion since Contact.
Europeans also brought new crops to the Americas. Wheat and
rice adapted well to the prairies and lowlands of the continent. Fruit trees
like apples and peaches flourished along the Eastern Seaboard. In addition to
the plants, animals, and metal tools which the Europeans brought here, they
also carried germs.
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| The Columbian Exchange |
Contact with European Diseases
Smallpox, tuberculosis, cholera, and other diseases swept
through Indian communities since they lacked immunity to these diseases.
A disease, coming from an explorer or a trader, spread quickly to other tribes
even before they had seen a European. Death preceded the Europeans who then marveled at the dying and abandoned villages and fields.
Here’s an eyewitness account from the Roanoke colony. The
nearby tribe “began to die quickly. The disease was so strange that they
neither knew what it was, nor how to cure it.”[1]
The same devastation struck farther north when Pilgrims arrived in Massachusetts in 1620.
They observed that thousands had “died in a great plague not long since; and
pity it was and is to see so many goodly fields, and so well seated, without
man to dress and manure the same.”[2]
The colonists took over these abandoned fields for their own farms. Since Contact, diseases have killed more Native Americans than warfare or displacement as
90% of the indigenous peoples in the Western Hemisphere succumbed to the deadly European
germs.
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| Native Americans had little immunity to diseases like Smallpox |
The Columbian Exchange also impacted religious beliefs. Native Americans believe that spirits animate their
natural world. As a result, land ownership did not exist for many of the
tribes, since Mother Earth was a deity. How could mere humans own a god?
Europeans held an opposing view about land. Humans could own
it and do what they wanted with the land and its bounty. When the Dutch bought
Manhattan Island from the Lenape Indians for sixty guilders in 1626, the
Indians had no concept of land ownership. For them, it was like selling the Brooklyn Bridge today to a gullible dupe.
Europeans believed in monotheism. In Spain with their recent wars against Muslims, these colonizers wanted to conquer not just
land and communities but peoples’ beliefs. Having a god which required
evangelism brought a radicalization to the Columbian Exchange.
Cultural Code-Switching
When different peoples meet, a cultural exchange occurs. In linguistics,
when someone switches from their dominant language to another one, experts call
this “code-switching.” A cultural code switching happens when people adopt and
adapt another culture’s fashion, food, lifestyles, music, and beliefs for their
own. Humans have borrowed from other cultures since time immemorial, so this is
not unique to the Columbian Exchange. With contact between Native
Americans and Europeans, both peoples exchanged key elements of their cultures
to create a new way of living and a new society of humans. More about this in future chapters.
Columbus began the encounter with Americans which profoundly
changed world history. The interactions between Europeans and Native Americans
brought together different world views, different religious beliefs, different
lifeways, and different technologies. This altered the way people lived,
worked, ate, worshipped, and played. The mix of peoples and cultures throughout
the Western Hemisphere created a vibrant weaving of innovations and experiences
that continues to impact our lives today.
In the previous chapters, we examined some of the peoples of
North America before Contact. We now examine the European explorers and colonizers and return to Jamestown, canoe the park at Grand Portage, and travel on the historic Royal Road to the Interior Lands-- El
Camino Real de Tierra Adentro. We will go to the places where history happened
between the Europeans and Americans.
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