I don't read my books after they come out because publication is a hard freeze that makes imprecisions, lapses in taste, and mistakes permanent and painful to the touch. However, in preparation for writing this preface I pulled The Columbian Exchange down from the shelf and did go through it. Flaws? Oh, yes; I'll talk over a few of them with you. But it is a good book; I'll talk some about that, too.
First, my apologies. Thirty years ago I used “man” to mean all members of the Homo sapiens species. So did most people, but it was stupid then and it is now. I used the word “race” as if I actually knew what it meant. I referred to the Maya as the most “sensitive” of all the indigenous peoples of the Americas without realizing how patronizing that is. Was I implying that Cortés might have invited the Maya for cocktails, but certainly not the Aztecs?
And so on. I invite you to make your own selection of yesterday's plastic blossoms pressed between the pages of my book.
I made some flat-out mistakes, some of them pretty good. All smallpox epidemics in previously uninfected populations did not produce thirty percent mortality rates. Only the worst epidemics did that. The indigenous inhabitants of the Antilles were not almost all extinct by the mid-sixteenth century, only those of the Greater Antilles. The Caribs hung on in the Lesser Antilles. Ancestral wheat was not, like the ancestors of maize, markedly inferior in yield to its cultivated descendents. Wild wheat was awkward to harvest but very productive, which may be one of the reasons why the peoples of southwest Asia got the jump on the rest of humanity in farming, urbanization, etc.
My biggest mistake was a matter of general ignorance at the time and I like it a lot. On page 218 I announced, ex cathedra, that there has been no extreme and permanent physical change affecting the entire globe in half a billion years. Since the publication of The Columbian Exchange, geologists and paleontologists have amassed evidence that an asteroid or some such object hit the Earth about sixty-five million years ago, killing off the dinosaurs, clearing the way for mammals, and making a fool out of me.
The chapter which has weathered the last thirty years the least successfully, though it has not been completely superseded, is number four, “The Early History of Syphilis: A Reappraisal.” The geographical homeland of the disease was a mystery when I wrote of it and still is, whatever the newspapers proclaim, as they do at least once every five years. Did syphilis exist in the New World before 1492? There are a good many skeletons with distorted and scarred bones that seem to indicate that it did. But by “it” do we mean venereal syphilis or one of the nonvenereal “syphilises,” or are they all just manifestations of the same thing?
Did “it” exist in the Old World before 1492? There are pre-Columbian skeletons in the Old World similar to those termed syphilitic in the New World, but only a very few. Their tiny number doesn't, of course, prove that their wretched owners did not have syphilis, but if they did the disease must have been of a different character, certainly less communicable, than sixteenth-century Europe's venereal pox. Either that, or before 1492 Old World people must have been close to one hundred percent celibate or monogamous, an admirable, and therefore unlikely, state of affairs.
To my knowledge the oldest cadaver thus far proved syphilitic by actual evidence of the presence of Treponema pallidum in its tissues is that of Maria d'Aragona of Naples. This noblewoman died in 1568, long after Columbus sailed, so her tissues tell us no more than that the disease was circulating in Europe in her lifetime, which we knew for sure anyway.1 Unfortunately, treponemal traces fade with time and any in pre-Columbian bones would probably be so faint as to defy investigators using present technology.
We don't know where venereal syphilis started. It could have come from here or there or here and there and have leaped in deadlines when mild strains of treponemas met and crossed the Atlantic in 1492, or its increase in virulence circa 1500 may have had nothing whatsoever to do with Columbus and simply have been a coincidence.
Anyway, I should not have ennobled syphilis with a whole chapter as if it were Montezuma's Revenge. Its Old World debut was spectacular and, like all things venereal, fascinating, but it was not a history-maker like the plague in the fourteenth century or smallpox in the sixteenth century. I cast it in a major role because I was uneasy about so many diseases crossing west over the Atlantic and none crossing east. I was like the geographers who believed for generations, before Captain Cook proved otherwise, that there must be a continent, a Terra Australis, in the far, far south vast enough to balance all off of Eurasia, the bulk of Africa, and North America. Chapter four was my try for a sort of epidemiological-geographical symmetry. The aforesaid geographers were wrong, and so was I. There was little symmetry in the exchange of diseases between the Old and New Worlds, and there are few factors as influential in the history of the last half millennium as that.
I should have no more than nodded to the French Pox and included not pages but a whole chapter on the crops of the post-Columbian slave plantations, particularly southeast Asia's sugar and America's tobacco. European desire (addiction might be a better word) for the sweetener served as a motivation to transport millions of Africans across the Atlantic. Tobacco, which has killed many more than syphilis, is the true Montezuma's Revenge.
But enough of my self-abasement, however noble. Let's proceed to what is worthwhile about my book. It is about something so huge that we often overlook it, much as we tend to be unconscious of the air we breathe, and that is the full story of our species since the melting back of the continental glaciers. That is to say, it is the story of the divergent evolution of the ecosystems and associated societies, isolated by rising sea levels, and when they did meet, the catastrophic and bountiful effects they had on each other. Those effects are so great as to defy containment in our usual intellectual divisions: archaeology, history, botany, medicine, demography, etc.
Thirty years ago I was so naïve that I thought I could function usefully in all these disciplines. Naivité, if insisted upon, can guide you through the trees to some very interesting forests, which it did in my case.
I doubt that I would have gone hiking there but for the tumble and tumult of the 1960s (which in defiance of the decimal system lasted to the Watergate crisis of the early seventies.) I had studied for a doctorate in United States history in the starchy 1950s. I had been trained by men (always) who, most of them, were veterans of the Second World War, men who rarely entertained doubts about the basic goodness of the society for which they had fought. For these men American history was political before all else and came in four-year presidential compartments occasionally illuminated by wars, which the good guys always won. The good guys consisted of people who looked quite a lot like me. History was the story of people like me (Americans or, if not so blessed, at least European) and was, all and all, a record of progress, and would continue to be.
Then, just as I started teaching, along came the Civil Rights struggle and the Black Power movement, which taught me that people who didn't look like me had been appallingly mistreated by people who did look like me. Then came the Vietnam War, which taught me that the world was much more than North America and Europe, that people who looked like me did not necessarily win all the wars, and that there were big pieces missing from the kind of history I was teaching.
The sixties “globalized” my mind a quarter century before that word entered journalistic jargon. For instance, if the Viet Cong were successful against the American armed forces, despite all the latter's technological advantages, and if Africa had somehow repelled European imperialists for centuries before succumbing, then why were American Indians, all and all, so easily conquered? Did Cortés just huff and puff and blow Monctezuma's house down or were there other factors at work?
The sixties, which made ideologues of some, drove me to biology. I had always had an interest in biological matters, though nothing that leafing through Natural History or watching Nova on TV could not satisfy. That mild interest now came to my rescue. I recommend such professionally irrelevant inclinations to young historians—linguistics, architecture, jazz, etc. They may provide you with new questions to ask when you are weary of the old questions. Good questions are harder to come by than good answers.
I fled from ideological interpretations of history and went in search of the basics, life and death. Alive is alive and dead is dead, whatever Adam Smith or Karl Marx, Richard Nixon or Leonid Brezhnev had to say. What kept people alive long enough to reproduce, and what killed them? Perhaps food and disease?
Asking big questions like that is like replacing the standard film in your camera with infrared or ultraviolet film. You see things you have never seen before. The indigenous peoples of the Greater Antilles appear and then disappear. Chinese peasants eating corn on the cob, not rice, loom up.
Big questions can, of course, lead to over-simplified answers. I probably did that with my telling of the arrival and first spread of smallpox in America, which, I indicated, led ipso facto to European triumph. Epidemics among immunologically unprepared populations (often called virgin soil epidemics) often do produce high mortality rates, but if left alone the population will recover in numbers.
Europe, for instance, lost one-third of its population to the Black Death in the fourteenth century and recovered in time. If the Black Death had been accompanied by the arrival of Genghis Khan's hordes, miraculously plague-proof, the story would have been very different. It might have been similar to what happened when European settlers followed on the heels of smallpox and other infections previously unknown to American Indians.
If, by the way, the plague and the Mongols had arrived in tandem, I think it is unlikely that I would be writing this preface in an Indo-European language.
If Columbus had sailed directly from the western extreme to the eastern extreme of Eurasia—if there had been no Americas—Spain and Europe would have probably been the richer for his success and perhaps the Ottoman Empire a bit poorer. There would have been major shifts of power, technologies, and possibly of religions. But even so, post-Columbian developments would have been only more of what had gone before. Columbus, however, couldn't get to Asia—there were two continents full of biological and cultural improbabilities in his way—and life on our planet changes drastically and forever as the eastern and western hemispheres began to exchange life forms, both macro and micro.
1. Gino Fornaciari et al, “Syphilis in a Renaissance Italian Mummy,” Lancet 2 (1989): 614.