Colonial Hispaniola
NOBODY ELSE WAS IN SIGHT. THE ONLY SOUND was the crashing of waves as I stood on the north shore of the great Caribbean island of Hispaniola, in what is now the Dominican Republic, looking at a scatter of rectangles laid out by lines of stones on red soil. They were the outlines of now-vanished buildings, revealed by archaeologists. One of the buildings had slightly more impressive walls than the others. Standing like a sentry at its entrance was a sign: “Casa Almirante,” or “Admiral’s House.” It marked the first American residence of Christopher Columbus, Admiral of the Ocean Sea, the man whom generations of schoolchildren learned to call the discoverer of the New World.
La Isabela is the name Columbus gave to that community, Spain’s first attempt to plant a permanent base in the Americas. (Five hundred years earlier, the Vikings had established a village in what is now Canada, but it did not last.) Today La Isabela is almost forgotten. Columbus’s fame is shadowed, too. These days he seems less admirable and less important than he did when I went to school. Critics say that he was a cruel, deluded man who stumbled upon the Americas by luck. Indeed, he was an agent of empire-building forces, and his arrival was a calamity for the original inhabitants of the Americas. Yet we should continue to remember the admiral. Of all the people who have ever walked the earth, Columbus is the only one who began a new era in the history of life.
Babies born on the day the admiral founded La Isabela, January 2, 1494, came into a world of barriers and separations. Direct trade and communication between Europe and East Asia were largely blocked by the Islamic nations in between. Africa south of the Sahara Desert had little contact with Europe and next to none with South or East Asia. The Eastern and Western Hemispheres were almost entirely ignorant of each other’s 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 silk and fine pottery from Asia to Mexico, Dutch sailors traded shells from the Indian Ocean for human beings on the Atlantic coast of Africa, and tobacco from the Caribbean had cast its spell over the wealthy and powerful in cities from Europe to the Philippines. Long-distance trade had taken place for thousands of years, but nothing like this worldwide exchange had existed before. No earlier trade networks had linked the world’s two hemispheres, or operated on a scale large enough to shake up societies on both sides of the planet. Columbus began the era of globalization—the single, sometimes stormy exchange of goods and services that now includes the entire habitable world.
The king and queen of Spain had backed Columbus’s first voyage reluctantly. Travel across the oceans in those days was heart-stoppingly expensive and risky, like spaceflight today. Everything changed when Columbus returned from that first voyage in March of 1493, bearing golden ornaments, brilliantly colored parrots, and as many as ten captive Indians, all from the Caribbean—although Columbus believed he had found his way to Asia. Just six months later the enthusiastic king and queen sent Columbus on a second, much bigger expedition. Its goal was to create a permanent base for Spain, a headquarters for further exploration and trade.
Columbus landed on Hispaniola, thinking it was part of Asia, and founded La Isabela. Almost immediately the colonists ran short of food and, worse, water. Columbus had failed to inspect the water barrels he had ordered, and they leaked. Ignoring all complaints of hunger and thirst, the admiral ordered his men to clear and plant vegetable patches, build a fortress, and enclose the settlement within stone walls. Most of the new arrivals regarded these labors as a waste of time. They saw La Isabela as just a temporary base camp for the quest for riches, especially gold. Columbus himself was torn between governing his colony and continuing his search for China, which he was sure had to be nearby. In the end he sailed off to look for China, leaving his men to tend gardens and search for Indian gold mines.
Five months later, dreadfully sick, Columbus returned to La Isabela. He had not found China, and at La Isabela he found only failure: starvation, sickness, exhaustion, and endless skirmishes with the local Taino people, whose storehouses the Spanish colonists had raided. With the cemetery of La Isabela filling fast, the humiliated Columbus set off for Spain. When he returned to the Caribbean two years later, so little was left of La Isabela that he did not bother landing there. Instead he landed on the opposite side of the island, in a settlement called Santo Domingo, which his brother had founded. Columbus never again set foot in his first colony, and it was almost forgotten.
Yet La Isabela marked the beginning of an enormous change: the creation of the modern Caribbean landscape. Columbus and his men did not travel alone. They were accompanied by insects, plants, animals, and microorganisms such as bacteria. They brought to the Americas cattle, sheep, and horses, along with crops such as sugarcane (originally from New Guinea, in East Asia), wheat (from the Middle East), and bananas and coffee (from Africa). Earthworms, cockroaches, mosquitoes, honeybees, rats, African grasses—all these poured from Columbus’s ships and those that followed, rushing like eager tourists into lands that had never seen anything like them before.
Natives and newcomers interacted in unexpected ways, creating biological bedlam. To take just one example, the Spanish colonists introduced the African plantain, a type of nonsweet banana that can be cooked and eaten, in 1516. At the same time, and without realizing it, they probably also imported African scale insects, small creatures that suck the juices from plant roots and stems. In Hispaniola the scale insects had no natural enemies. Their numbers must have exploded—scientists call this phenomenon ecological release. The spread of scale insects would have dismayed the island’s European banana farmers but delighted one native species: a tropical fire ant. These ants discovered that they were fond of eating the sugary wastes of scale insects. A big increase in scale insects would have led to a big increase in fire ants.
All this is only an educated guess. Yet what happened in 1518 and 1519 is fact. In those years, according to a missionary priest who lived through them, Spanish plantations and orchards in Hispaniola were destroyed by fire ants “from the root up.” It was “as though flames had fallen from the sky and burned them.” The “infinite number of ants” swarmed through houses in Santo Domingo, stinging people and blackening roofs, covering floors in such numbers that people could sleep only by placing the legs of their beds in bowls of water. Overwhelmed and terrified, the Spaniards abandoned their homes to the insects, and Santo Domingo was “depopulated” for a time.
From the human perspective, the most dramatic effect of the Columbian Exchange was on the human species itself. No one knows how many people lived in Hispaniola when the Europeans arrived, although one careful study in 2003 pointed to a population of a few hundred thousand. No matter what the original number, the European impact was horrific. By 1514 only twenty-six thousand Taino remained. Thirty-four years later, according to one scholarly Spanish resident, fewer than five hundred Taino were alive. The destruction of the Taino plunged Santo Domingo into poverty because the colonists had wiped out their own labor force.
Spanish cruelty played its part in the disaster, but a larger cause was the Columbian Exchange. Before Columbus, the Americas had none of the epidemic diseases that were common in Europe and Asia. The viruses that cause smallpox, influenza, hepatitis, measles, and viral pneumonia were unknown. So were the bacteria that cause tuberculosis, diphtheria, cholera, and typhus. Shipped across the ocean from Europe, these diseases and others consumed the population of Hispaniola with stunning fierceness. Throughout the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries new 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 that these diseases had caused in Eurasia over thousands of years were concentrated into decades in the Americas. In all of human history there is no population catastrophe like it.
BECAUSE THE EXPEDITION AT LA ISABELA WAS desperately short of water, the men drank from rivers. Some researchers believe that this caused Columbus and his men to catch shigellosis, a disease caused by a bacterium that is native to the American tropics.
The shigellosis bacterium is carried in feces, the solid waste of animals and humans. It can enter new hosts through contaminated water. People infected by the bacterium can develop Reiter’s syndrome, a disease of the autoimmune system. Sufferers from Reiter’s syndrome feel as if large chunks of their bodies, including their eyes and bowels, are swollen and inflamed. Columbus endured severe attacks of these symptoms a few months after arriving at La Isabela. His writings reveal that the suffering continued on and off for years, with painful episodes that left him unable to see or walk, sometimes bleeding from the eyes. “Most people don’t realize that Columbus died a crippled man,” says Dr. Frank Arnett, an expert on Reiter’s syndrome, which is also called reactive arthritis. “He was bedridden. He was in so much pain he couldn’t write or stand. He was very sick.”
Reiter’s syndrome is always painful and sometimes fatal. If it led to the admiral’s death years later at the age of fifty-four, as some scientists believe, and if the cause of the syndrome was shigellosis infection, Columbus himself was one of the first victims of the Columbian Exchange.
A peaceful, whispering river runs through Santo Domingo, capital of the Dominican Republic. On the west bank stands the stony remains of the colonial town, including the palace of Christopher Columbus’s first-born son, Diego. From the east bank rises a vast hill of stained concrete laid out in the shape of a giant cross and topped with lights pointing to the heavens. It is the Columbus Lighthouse, completed in 1992 as a memorial to the admiral.
The idea of a grand memorial to Columbus was raised in 1852, but it took almost a century and a half for the memorial to be built. In that time and up until today, ideas about Columbus changed. From being seen as a heroic explorer, a leader, and a messenger bringing God’s word to the Americas, he has come to be viewed by many as brutal, greedy, fanatical, and incompetent. Should there be any monument to his voyages at all? The answer is hard to arrive at, even though his life is one of the best documented of his time.
During his life, nobody knew him as Columbus. He was baptized Cristoforo Colombo by his Italian family, but after moving to Spain in 1483 he called himself Cristóbal Colón. His thoughts were dominated by towering personal ambition and profound religious faith. Perhaps ashamed of his humble origins, he spent his entire adult life trying to establish a dynasty that would be given noble status by a monarch. He believed that if Spain could establish trade with China, the resulting wealth would allow the Spanish rulers to conquer the biblical Holy Land of the Middle East, which had come under Islamic control. Columbus wanted to be the one to begin that trade by finding a sea route to China.
Central to Columbus’s scheme were his views on the size and shape of the world. Generations of schoolchildren were taught that, before Columbus, the people of Europe thought the world was flat. Nothing could be further from the truth. Scholars had known for fifteen hundred years that the world was large and round. Columbus disputed both facts. He argued that the world was not round but pear shaped. This mattered less than its size—and there Columbus was badly off the mark. He believed the distance around the planet was about five thousand miles less than it actually is.
Columbus’s vision enticed the Spanish monarchs. Like other wealthy and powerful Europeans, they were fascinated by accounts of the richness and sophistication of China. They lusted after Asian silks, gems, spices, and the fine pottery known as porcelain. Yet merchants and governments associated with Islam—people with whom Christian Europe had been at war for centuries—stood in the way of overland trade between Europe and China. Worse, the trading cities of Venice and Genoa, in Italy, had already cut a deal with Islamic forces and now controlled the Asia trade. To cut out these unwanted middlemen, Portugal had been trying to send ships all the way around Africa—a long, risky, and expensive journey. Columbus told the rulers of Spain that there was an easier way: west, across the Atlantic. He expected to reach the east coast of China by sailing west across the Atlantic Ocean from Europe. Unfortunately for his plan, not only did he greatly underestimate the distance, but he did not know that the American continents and the Pacific Ocean lay in his way.
After landing in the Americas in 1492, the admiral naturally claimed that his ideas had been proven true, and that he had reached Asia. The delighted monarchs awarded him honors and wealth. Columbus died in 1506, a rich man surrounded by a loving family—but nevertheless bitter, and not just because of his illnesses. His personal and geographical failings had caused the Spanish court to take away most of his privileges and push him to the sidelines.
Much the same mixture of high hopes and disappointment is true of the Columbus Lighthouse. Although the nations of the Western Hemisphere had agreed in 1923 to build a memorial to the admiral, it was six decades before it was constructed. During that time, international support for the monument faded, partly because the Dominican Republic was ruled for years by a tyrant named Rafael Trujillo. His reign was barbarous, and supporting the lighthouse project was seen as supporting the dictator. Many nations boycotted the opening of the monument. Protesters set fire to police barricades, calling Columbus “the exterminator of a race.” People living in the walled-off slums around the monument told reporters that Columbus deserved no recognition at all.
Their belief is understandable but mistaken. Because of the far-reaching effects of the Columbian Exchange that began with his voyages, Columbus’s journeys marked the beginning of a new biological era in which places that were once ecologically distinct have become more alike. In this sense the once-separate parts of the world have been tied together, exactly as the old admiral hoped. The lighthouse in Santo Domingo should be seen less as a celebration of the man than as a recognition of the world he almost accidentally created—the world we live in today.
The island nation of the Philippines lies in the western Pacific, south of Japan. In a park in its capital city of Manila stands a marble pillar topped by life-size statues of two men. One man carries a cross, the other a sword. Compared to the Columbus Lighthouse in Santo Domingo, this monument is small and rarely visited by tourists. Yet it is the closest thing the world has to an official recognition of the origins of globalization.
The man with the sword is Miguel López de Legazpi, the founder of modern Manila. The man with the cross is Andrés Ochoa de Urdaneta y Cerain, the navigator who guided Legazpi’s five Spanish ships across the Pacific to Miguel Lopez de Legazpi and Andres de Urdaneta began the silver trade across the Pacific Ocean. This statue in a park in Manila is as close to a monument to global-ization as the world is likely to see. the Philippines from Spain’s colony in Mexico in 1564. Together these friends and cousins achieved what Columbus failed to do. They established trade with China by sailing west. They launched the economic unification of the world, just as Columbus launched its ecological unification.
Urdaneta’s second achievement was figuring out how to sail back to Mexico. He could not simply retrace the route the expedition had followed to the Philippines, because the trade winds that had blown the ships westward would block their return. In a stroke of navigational genius, Urdaneta avoided the currents by sailing far north before turning east. In this way he established a route that ships would follow for years to come.
Meanwhile, plagued by mutiny and disease, and harassed by ships from Spain’s rival Portugal, Legazpi slowly spread Spanish influence in the Philippine islands. Eventually some of his men made contact with two trading junks, ships that had come from China to exchange porcelain, silk, perfumes, and other goods for Philippine gold and beeswax. The Chinese returned to their homeland with word that Europeans had arrived in the Philippines. Amazingly, they had come from east of China, although Europe lay to the west. Furthermore, the European “barbarians” had something that was extremely desirable in China: silver. Two years later, three junks from China appeared in the Philippines loaded with silks, porcelain, and other goods to trade at Legazpi’s outpost in Manila. In return, the Chinese took every ounce of Spanish silver.
More junks came the next year, and the year after that. Driven by China’s hunger for silver and Europe’s hunger for silk and porcelain, the trade grew enormous. The “galleon trade,” as it was called after the large ships known as galleons, linked Asia, Europe, and Africa, the source of the slaves who dug the silver out of Mexico’s mines. Never before had so much of the planet been linked in a single network of exchange. With Spain’s arrival in the Philippines, a new, distinctly modern era had dawned.
The new era was regarded with suspicion from the start. China was then the world’s wealthiest, most powerful nation. It had long viewed Europe as too poor and backward to be of commercial interest. When Spain discovered huge amounts of silver in South America, Europe finally had something China wanted—badly wanted, in fact. Spanish silver became China’s money supply. Yet the Chinese court feared that the galleon trade would bring large, uncontrolled changes to Chinese life.
Those fears were correct. Emperor after emperor tried to keep foreigners out of China, but they could not keep out other species. The unexpected arrival of American crops, especially sweet potatoes and corn, led to huge changes in agriculture, migrations within China, deforestation, and floods, as you will see in chapter 6. These changes weakened the Chinese empire—to Europe’s benefit.
Across the street from the monument to Legazpi and Urdaneta is another park, where a plaque commemorates Rajah Sulayman, “the brave Muslim ruler” of Manila who refused Legazpi’s offer of friendship. When Legazpi approached Sulayman and asked to use Manila’s harbor as a launching point for the China trade, Sulayman didn’t want the Spaniards around and said no. Legazpi leveled Sulayman’s main village, killing him and three hundred others. Modern Manila was established on the ruins. In a sense, Sulayman and his people were the first protesters against globalization. In the end they lost, each and every one, and the process of globalization continues to this day.
