10. New Turf

IT’S PROBABLY FAIR TO SAY Christopher Columbus was as skilled at sales as he was at sailing—at any rate, he was as fanatically determined in both areas. Columbus spent nine years traveling from the court of one European monarch to another, trying to convince one of them to finance his “Enterprise of the Indies.” The king of Portugal turned him down twice. The monarchs of France, England, and Spain also sent him packing.

But Columbus wouldn’t take no for an answer.

Fortunately for him, political changes in Spain suddenly transformed what sounded like a far-fetched plan into an appealing proposal and now Spain’s Catholic monarchs were inclined to support him. Before 1492, the Spanish couldn’t even have considered exploring the Atlantic. They couldn’t afford it, being trapped in a costly war against the last Muslim emirate in Granada. When the war ended that year, Spain’s sights turned to the sea and it boosted its budget for naval affairs.

Columbus had supporters helping make his case on the inside. Luis de Santángel, the crown’s treasurer and a famous converso, told the monarchs that Columbus’s expedition would cost them less than a weeklong party at court. Diego de Deza, a Dominican friar and tutor of the Infante, promised that the expedition would enable them to convert hordes of Asian pagans.

Isabel and Fernando bought both arguments. They named Columbus admiral of the ocean sea, viceroy of yet-to-be-reached India, and governor of the yet-to-be-discovered lands, gave him the honorary title of don, and sent him on his way with a promise that he could keep a 10 percent cut of whatever riches he found. It was a generous offer on paper. In reality, the monarchs really weren’t expecting Columbus to find anything, or even make it back alive.

Columbus set sail from the port of Palos on August 3, 1492, in command of a small fleet of three ships, the Niña, the Pinta, and the Santa María, with a total of ninety men on board. After a short stopover in the Canary Islands, he sailed full west with the trade winds. Luck was on his side. For thirty-five days straight, he sailed into the sunset under blue skies with the wind at his back.

Not everyone on the trip was willing to trust his luck. Columbus’s men were nervous about their chances of returning and became mutinous. On October 10, Columbus promised that if they didn’t find land within three days, he’d turn back. Two days later, at 2 A.M., his watchman spotted land. October 12, just before lunch, Columbus set a wet foot on the island of Guanahaní, Bahamas, which he renamed San Salvador.

On this first visit to “India,” Columbus discovered the islands of Cuba and La Española (Hispaniola). The voyage was a huge linguistic challenge. The islanders, whom he called Indios, spoke dialects of either Cariban or Arawak. But Columbus had expected to hear the languages Marco Polo and other explorers had described in their accounts of their voyages to India. With that in mind, he had brought along interpreters for Latin, Greek, Arabic, and Aramaic. (It wasn’t as silly as it sounds. Five years later, when the Portuguese Vasco da Gama actually found the eastern route to India, the first Indian “natives” he met in the port of Calicut were Arab merchants from Tunis, who spoke Arabic and Italian.)

The more Columbus explored, the more new languages he encountered. At least, 600 languages were spoken in the New World, from 125 different language families, and all were unknown to Europeans. That was because the New World had had no contact with Eurasia for at least twelve thousand years. Unlike other voyagers before him, Columbus had no way of communicating with the new populations he met.

According to the great scholar Humberto López Morales, it took two full weeks before Columbus recorded the first Native American word in his log journal: canoa (canoe). Columbus had been hearing the word for two weeks by that time. He had originally called it an almadía, an Arabism meaning, “raft.” Yet the canoa was actually a dugout. So, being a sailor, Columbus noted the difference and introduced the native term. He alternated between using almadía and canoa for six more weeks, before almadía disappeared from his log.

López Morales also noticed that Columbus, while searching for names for the new things he saw, constantly vacillated between native and Castilian terms. Where Castilian words seemed sufficient, he used them. Otherwise, he and his men adopted a native term. Rope beds were so different from regular beds that Columbus quickly recorded the new word hamaca (hammock) for them and never used cama (bed). On the other hand, he persisted in calling the locals Indios two months after he had recorded the name Caribe (Caribbean). Although Columbus dropped the term Indios before returning to Spain, for some reason the label stuck.

Aside from canoa and hamaca, Columbus recorded relatively few local terms in his diary: ajes (a tuber), cacique (chief), cazabe (manioc bread), nitaine (a member of the nobility), aji (pepper), tiburón (shark), bohío (hut), Cuba, Caribe. When he returned to Spain, he still hadn’t found words to describe the strange “dry leaves” he’d see natives smoking, the “fires” they burned, or the “lizards” he encountered—tobacco, barbacoa (barbecue), and iguana were introduced later.

Columbus’s obsession with riches is obvious from the number of words for gold he recorded—tuob, caona, noçay, and guanín. This fixation on gold, India, and China set Columbus and his less-than-fluent interpreters on more than a few wild-goose chases. When Columbus heard there might be gold in Cubanacan (mid-Cuba), he thought his interpreter was saying El Gran Can (the Great Khan). He sent a scholar, Luis de Torres, accompanied by a sailor, Rodrigo de Jerez, to verify. The sailor was uniquely unqualified: his only credential was that he had once met an African king in Guinea. Equipped with Latin passports and letters of support, the two ambassadors roamed from village to village for days without finding a khan, either great or small. But they met lots of locals smoking “rolls of leaves.” Jerez returned from America as Europe’s first tobacco addict, and the Spanish Inquisition, not known for its open-mindedness, jailed him for sorcery for seven years.

In an attempt to solve his communication problems for his next voyage, Columbus kidnapped a dozen locals with the plan of turning them into interpreters. Columbus wildly underestimated the task he was assigning them. The “interpreters” not only had to learn Spanish. To be useful, they also had to learn all sorts of other American dialects and languages. By Columbus’s second voyage, in October 1493, the surviving captives managed to teach some European interpreters basic Taíno, a dialect of Arawak, but finding good interpreters would remain one of the main stumbling blocks of early explorations for twenty years.

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We know very little about the people Columbus encountered on his expeditions for the simple reason that most of them died from the biological shock the Europeans set off in the New World. The natives of America had no immunity to smallpox, influenza, typhus, or diphtheria, all endemic to Europe. Of those who survived, many died victims of the atrocious encomienda system of forced labor Europeans introduced.

The scale of this infectious shock was unprecedented and has never been equaled. Estimates put the original population of the Americas in the range of 50 to 100 million. Experts believe that disease wiped out as much as 95 percent of this population within decades. By 1650, there were only 10.5 million people left in the Americas, including the settlers. By 1514, disease and slavery reduced the Taíno population on the island of La Española from one million to twenty-two thousand adults and three thousand children. A century later, they were gone. It would be the same story everywhere else. These horrendous statistics dwarf the death toll of the Black Death, which killed off a third of Europeans in the fourteenth century. Many of their languages—the main competitors to Spanish—died with them.

Spanish technological superiority, of course, only amplified the biological shock. The Aztecs called the first horses they saw “big dogs.” Because seafaring techniques, steel, and the horse were all unknown in the Americas, the conquistadores (conquerors) were able in the 1520s to conquer societies including the Aztecs and the Incas, who were richer and more populous than Spain itself. European colonial powers held on to this technical superiority for the next 250 years, until the Comanche Indians mastered the use of horses in the southwest United States. For that matter, in the three places where the Spaniards had the hardest time imposing their rule (the interior of Argentina, Guatemala, and north of the Rio Grande), the locals had either developed some immunity to Eurasians’ diseases or had mastered horse warfare.

During the first century of Spanish colonization, 250,000 Spaniards went to the Americas, and another 500,000 followed in the seventeenth century. The number, relatively small compared to the native population, raises the question of how Spanish ever became the main language of the continent. It wasn’t because the Spanish were adamant about teaching Spanish. Spanish spread because most of the native population was wiped out within decades of Columbus’s arrival, and half the six hundred known native languages of the Americas disappeared with them. Simply put, Spanish had little competition.

The situation was different in Asia, where the arrival of Europeans did not provoke a biological shock. (Nor did it in Africa, for that matter.) Europeans’ technical advantage was never as strong in Asia as it was in the Americas. According to scholar Nicholas Ostler, this is the main reason that the Spanish failed to impose their language in the Philippines. Similarly, the impact of Portuguese culture and language remained shallow in their Asian and African trade empires, though it was profound in Brazil.

The massive epidemics were a double-edged sword. On one hand, the annihilation of Native Americans made it easy for the Spanish to impose their rule. When Pizarro reached Peru in 1532, a smallpox epidemic had already devastated the Inca Empire in 1528 and led to a civil war. But the epidemics also left Spaniards with no native labor to exploit. And that was the whole point of settling the New World in the first place. Lamenting this conundrum, the Spanish even developed a saying: “Sin Indios, no hay Indias” (Without Indians, there can’t be any Indies).

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Columbus’s first voyage was slightly disappointing. He proved he could reach “India” from the West in five weeks, but he came back nearly empty-handed. He found neither the Great Khan nor much in the way of gold or spices. Still, Isabel and Fernando sent him on a second expedition.

And that’s how Spain and Portugal ended up drawing the linguistic map of the Americas.

Spain had given Portugal a monopoly on Atlantic sea exploration in 1479 with the Treaty of Alcáçovas. At the time of Columbus’s voyages, this treaty was still in force. Now the Spanish monarchs knew they needed to renegotiate. Their solution? They approached the pope and convinced him to write a bull (a formal papal pronouncement) giving Spain the right to explore in the Atlantic. As luck would have it, the new pope (Alexander VI), elected eight days after Columbus’s departure, was their old friend, Alejandro Borja, previously bishop of Valencia, who had supported their consanguine marriage and rallied the Castilian nobility behind Isabel’s bid for the Castilian crown.

The pope’s bull granted Castile a monopoly over all explorations west of the Azores. In return, all the Spanish Crown had to do was promise to evangelize the natives.

Portugal, of course, was furious and refused to recognize the bull. So while Columbus set off on his second voyage, Castile kept negotiating with Portugal. In the town of Tordesillas, Portugal managed to get the line separating its territory pushed back 370 leagues (1,000 miles) west of the Cape Verde islands. This included the eastern tip of what is now Brazil.

Spain and Portugal signed the Treaty of Tordesillas in 1494. The linguistic map of the Americas today pretty much corresponds to the lines of the treaty: Portugal got Brazil and Spain got everything south of the Rio Grande. By the time France, England, and Holland began to establish overseas colonies, the Spanish language was firmly established in its core areas.

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Like the second, third, and fourth moon landings, interest in Columbus’s second, third, and fourth voyages to the West Indies declined. Columbus undertook his second voyage in October 1493 with seventeen ships and twelve hundred men (still no women), including seven hundred colonists but returned with nothing to show for it. That only fueled the growing criticism of him in Spain. Rumors spread that he and his two brothers had turned into despotic rulers in La Española. Columbus’s persistent claims that the ever-elusive India was on the other side also began to raise questions about his ability.

In 1499, Isabel and Fernando started wondering whether Columbus wasn’t too much of a one-man show. They doubted that he alone could find the passage to India, especially since the Portuguese were multiplying exploration voyages. So while Columbus was away on his third voyage, the monarchs sponsored a new group of explorers to find the tierra firme (the continent). The ships were commanded by Alonso de Ojeda, Pedro Alonso Niño, Diego de Lepe, Vicente Yañez Pinzón, Rodrigo de Bastidas and, finally, Amerigo Vespucci.

It’s curious to see Columbus’s (supposed) burial site today in the cathedral of Seville—a raised coffin carried on the shoulders of four kings. Columbus died rich, but he certainly wasn’t considered a national hero, let alone by kings. By 1500, his reputation had suffered so much that he was put on trial in Spain for his “despotic and tyrannical” governance of La Española: he was jailed for six weeks and lost his titles. Although he was allowed to make a fourth voyage two years later, his glory days were over.

What happened with the next generation of explorers explains why this new continent is called America and not Columbia (in honor of Columbus). Off the coast of Brazil, the Italian explorer Amerigo Vespucci understood that he had reached a new continent, and not India. A cartographer, merchant, and navigator, Vespucci had sailed three times to the Americas, alternately under the authority of Portugal and Castile. He also correctly deduced that if this continent was not India, there had to be an unknown ocean on the other side of it that led to India.

Vespucci became famous in Europe when he published two accounts of the “new” continent in 1502 and 1504. Cartographers soon began proposing names for it. The Castilians favored Indias or Gran Tierra del Sur (Great Southern Land). The Portuguese preferred Vera Cruz (True Cross) or Terra Santa Cruz (Land of the Holy Cross). Other cartographers pushed for Tierra del Brasil (Land of Brazil), Tierra de Loros (Land of Parrots), Nueva India (New India), and Nuevo Mundo (New World). The last label, the title of Vespucci’s first account, was the one that stuck.

But in a curious twist of fate, a continent discovered by mistake acquired its name thanks to another mistake. Vespucci’s writings had traveled to a small town in France’s Vosges Mountains called Saint-Dié, where a cartographer named Martin Waldseemüller was so thrilled about them that he published Cosmographiae Introductio (Introduction to Cosmography) in 1507. The book included a map of the New World that drew the lines of the new continent’s eastern shore with surprising accuracy. Waldseemüller called the new continent America in honor of his source: Amerigo Vespucci. In 1513, when Waldseemüller learned that Christopher Columbus was the true discoverer of the New World, the cartographer tried to reverse his decision. In subsequent editions of his book, he called it Terra Incognita.

But the first edition of his map had already sold one thousand copies. The name America was out there, and it would stick.