3
If pathogens could pass freely from the Old World to the New, so, fortunately, could other life forms. So could the life forms that provide man with food, fiber, hides, and labor, that is, cultivated plants and domesticated animals. To a notable extent, the whole migration of Spaniards, Portuguese, and the others who followed them across the Atlantic, and the successful exploitation of the New World by these people depended on their ability to “Europeanize” the flora and fauna of the New World. That transformation was well under way by 1500, and it was irrevocable in both 10 North and South America by 1550.
In this matter, as in that of diseases, the impact of the Old World on the New was so great that we of the twentieth century can only imagine what pre-Columbian America must have been like. Bernabé Cobo, the seventeenth-century naturalist and historian, took an optimistic view of the effect of the eastern hemisphere on the western:
All the regions of the globe have contributed their fruits and abundance to adorn and enrich this quarter part of the world, which we Spaniards found so poor and destitute of the plants and animals most necessary to nourish and give service to mankind, howsoever prosperous and abundant the mineral resources of gold and silver.1
But before we examine the truth of his statement in detail, we must acknowledge that the Americas were not conquered by armies and bands of settlers marching on stomachs filled exclusively with wheat and pork and other items of European cuisine. Old World plants and animals obviously did not always precede the explorers and conquistadors (although sometimes this was the case), and there are wide stretches of the Americas where European flora and fauna did not and do not prosper. The colonists, particularly the early ones and those in the hot, wet areas, had to accept many items of the Indian diet. To Europeans wheat bread was probably the most indispensable item of diet, but the grains of Europe would not grow in climates where even the wafers used in the mass “did bend like to wet paper, by reason of the extreme humidity and heat.” Nicolas Durand de Villegagnon wrote of Río de Janeiro that it was necessary to eat “foods entirely different from those of our Europe.”2
In the West Indies and the hot, wet lowlands the Spaniard either had to import his wheat or eat bread made from manioc flour—“a thinne and broade cake, almost like unto a Moores target or buckler.”3 The littoral of Brazil is also inhospitable to wheat; and manioc or cassava, as it is often called, quickly became the staple of the diet there. The Brazilian historian, Caio Prado, calls it “the necessary accompaniment to man” in Brazil.4
Maize, also, had importance in the wet lowlands, but not nearly so much as in the higher, drier, cooler parts of the mainland. The Spanish always preferred wheat to maize bread, but could not always obtain or afford it and the lower classes among the Spanish colonists often ate the latter.5
The Iberians ate all kinds of other American foods—pumpkins, beans, potatoes, and so on—but none were as important in their diets as manioc and maize. The Europeans in America, like those at home, were very slow to accept potatoes as a staple food. Even in the Andean highlands, the homeland of the white potato, the Europeans at best considered it a semifood, although some were willing to make fortunes by raising potatoes to feed the Indian miners at Potosí.6
Europeans vastly enhanced their own ability to live in ever increasing numbers in the Americas by distributing Indian plants and seeds to areas where they had been unknown in pre-Columbian times. The white potato, to cite an example, was unknown in North America before the seventeenth century. It was first brought to New England by the Scotch-Irish, via Europe, in 1718.7 It is also obvious that the European made large profits and shaped the land and histories of whole areas of the New World by raising American plants on extensive plantations—tobacco, cocoa, paprika, American cotton—and that he cut and gathered guaiacum, sassafras, and other native products for export across the Atlantic. But the fact that the European utilized native American plants is not so important as his importation of plant and animal sources of food from the eastern hemisphere. The European immediately set about to transform as much of the New World as possible into the Old World. So successful was he that he accomplished what was probably the greatest biological revolution in the Americas since the end of the Pleistocene era.
The European pathfinders are remembered for their courage and endurance, and hardly at all for their green thumbs. But agriculturalists they were (albeit, in the case of the Spanish, with limited enthusiasm), strewing seed from snowy north to snowy south. Who brought which plant to where is a question that rarely can be answered accurately. In the latter part of the sixteenth century José de Acosta asked who had planted the “whole woods and forests of orange trees” through which he walked and rode, and was told “that oranges being fallen to the ground, and rotten, their seeds did spring, and of those which the water carried away into diverse parts, these woods grew so thicke …”8
The first arrival dates of which we can be sure are those having to do with Española, that vestibule to the Americas where everything seems to have happened first. Let us start there with the initial attempts to raise European plants, trace the spread of those plants to the mainland, then return to Española to do the same for European livestock.
Columbus left seeds with the citizens of the abortive colony of Navidad in 1493, but, if they were ever planted, it is doubtful that they were ever harvested, because those citizens were massacred by the Arawaks. The history of European horticulture in the Americas really begins with the second voyage of Columbus, when he returned to Española with seventeen ships, 1,200 men, and seeds and cuttings for the planting of wheat, chickpeas, melons, onions, radishes, salad greens, grape vines, sugar cane, and fruit stones for the founding of orchards. The early results were marvelously encouraging, or so the enthusiastic colonists insisted. “All the seeds they had sown sprouted in three days and were ready to eat by the twenty-fifth day. Fruit stones planted in the ground sprouted in seven days; vine shoots sent out leaves at the end of the same period, and by the twenty-fifth day green grapes were ready to be picked.” The Spanish wish was affecting the Spanish eyesight. The tradition of a “starving time” in the early history of a given American colony was initiated on Española in 1494; an unlikely event if European seeds were really bouncing out of the soil as fully mature plants in record times.9
The Antilles were less than a perfect base camp in the Americas for the European horticulturalists. Wheat and the other European grains failed, and so did grape vines and olive trees: no bread, wine, or oil. A Castilian could starve here! But many of the garden crops—cauliflowers, cabbages, radishes, lettuce, and European melons—prospered, and if the colonist could tolerate American Indian staples, he could always dessert on such familiar fruits as oranges, lemons, pomegranates, citrons, and figs that did well in the West Indies.10
Another important addition to the flora of the Antilles in the early years was the banana, brought in from the Canaries in 1516. Oviedo described this immigrant fruit as having an easily removed skin, and “inside it is all flesh which is very much like the marrow of the legbone of a cow.” These banana trees, he wrote in the 1520s, “have multiplied so greatly that it is marvelous to see the great abundance of them on the islands and in Tierra Firme [southern coast of the Caribbean], where the Christians have settled.”11
The economic underpinnings of most of the important European settlements in the tropical and semitropical zones of America historically have been the raising of a certain few crops on large plantations for export to Europe. These plantation areas, with their fields of sugar, cotton, rice, indigo, have, at one time and another, stretched all the way from Virginia's tobacco fields to Brazil's coffee fields. Mining produced the most spectacular profits in the colonial New World, but the plantations employed more people and, in the end, produced greater wealth.
It all began in Española with sugar, which was already a profitable plantation crop in the Canaries and Portugal's Atlantic islands in the fifteenth century. Columbus himself had shipped sugar from Madeira to Genoa in 1478, and the mother of his first wife owned a sugar estate on that island. He brought sugar cane with him to Española in 1493, and the cane grew well in American soil. But the growth of the sugar industry was painfully slow until Charles V intervened, ordering that sugar masters and mill technicians be recruited from the Canaries, and authorizing loans to build sugar mills on Española. There were thirty-four mills on the island by the late 1530s and sugar was one of the two staples of the island's economy (the other being cattle ranching) until the latter part of the sixteenth century.12
One of the causes for this late sixteenth-century decline of the sugar industry in the Spanish Antilles was competition from the mainland. Wherever the sun was hot and the rainfall sufficient, the Spanish planted cane. It became a common crop early after the conquests of Mexico and Peru in the lowlands and deeper valleys of those regions. Sugar cane poked up its profitable shoots all over the Spanish empire, from the Gulf of Mexico to the Río de la Plata. Asunción, for instance, boasted two hundred sugar mills in the early seventeenth century. The empire had a superabundance of sugar. Said Bernabé Cobo, “there must not be a region in all the universe where so much is consumed, and with all this many ships carry it to Spain.”13
But the greatest producer of sugar in the Atlantic world in the sixteenth century, while American, was not Spanish-American. Portugal, by virtue of her possession of Madeira and São Tomé off the coast of Africa, was already the top producer of sugar when the sixteenth century opened, and sugar cane was sent to Portuguese Brazil soon after. By 1526 duty was being paid on Brazilian sugar at the Lisbon Customs House. The next century was the age of sugar in Brazil, and Brazil was the largest sugar supplier of the Atlantic world. In 1585 the settlement of Olinda alone had sixty-six sugar mills. Depending on which expert you read, by 1610 Brazil had either four hundred mills producing 57,000 tons of sugar annually, or only two hundred and thirty mills producing 14,000 tons annually.14 The wealth created by selling such quantities of sugar in Europe persuaded the English and French of the Lesser Antilles to plant cane in the seventeenth century, which—in time—meant economic decline for the sugar plantations of Brazil.
Sugar, although of immeasurable commercial importance, is not the staff of life. Like other future plantation crops—tobacco, cotton, coffee—it brought wealth to management, but insufficient nourishment in itself to labor. Unless the standard European food plants could be grown in quantity in America, the growth of European settlement in the New World would be very slow.
The crux of the problem was temperature. Spain lies in the temperate zone. The great bulk of the Spanish empire lay between the tropics of Cancer and Capricorn. No farmer would ever be able to grow the staples of an Iberian diet at sea level in the tropical latitudes. He would have to follow Cortés and Pizarro into the mountains and find a substitute for a higher latitude in a higher altitude.
For the sake of brevity, let us consider only the plant foods most basic to Spanish cuisine—wheat, wine, and olive oil. Most of the early Spanish farms in the highlands of New Spain (Mexico) raised wheat, in accordance with the policy of the viceroys. The government had to be constantly vigilant to assure that New Spain would produce sufficient supplies of wheat and other foods to feed itself, for close attention to farming was simply not a Castilian virtue; but by 1535 Mexico was exporting wheat to the Antilles and Tierra Firme, by midcentury bread in Mexico City was “as good cheape as in Spain,” and by the last quarter of the century Atlixco Valley alone was producing 100,000 fanegas (156,200 bushels) of wheat a year.15
The topography and climate of Peru are at least as varied as Mexico's, and they enable her to produce a great variety of crops. Rice, sugar, and bananas were growing in her wet lowlands within a generation of her conquest, and her temperate valleys near Lima and her highlands were producing wheat in quantity by the 1540s. The area around Arequipa, said the conquistador Cieza de León produces “excellent wheat … from which they make excellent bread.” In time, Peru became one of the chief sources of wheat for the hotter, wetter parts of the empire, especially for Panama and Tierra Firme.16
It is accurate to say that the Spaniards raised wheat nearly everywhere in the settled areas of their American possessions that climate permitted. We find wheat being harvested in Río de la Plata, New Granada, Chile, and even in the highlands of Central America within a few years of their colonization. Thomas Gage observed three kinds of wheat being grown in rotation in the mountain valleys of Guatemala in the seventeenth century.17 An examination of any of the standard geographical accounts of Spain's empire in its first century—the Relaciones Geograficas de las Indicts, the works of Juan López de Velasco or Vazquez de Espinosa or the first volume of Antonio de Herrera's monumental history—indicates that by 1600 the Spanish colonist could almost always obtain wheat bread, unless he were very poor or an inhabitant of the hot lowlands—and even the latter could have his wheat if he had the price to import it.
In contrast to wheat, wine is by no means one of the staffs of life, but few hidalgos have ever accepted the truth of that statement. If the Spaniard is to eat, he must have wheat; if he is to drink, he must have wine. But Spam's New World empire was lacking in grapes from which good wine could be made. (There is a story that one Spanish priest of more logic than orthodoxy drew the conclusion that if God had not Himself made it possible for the Indians to make sacramental wine, then He obviously had no intention that they ever be made Christians.)18 The early records of the Spanish empire are filled with notations that grape vines would not grow here, showed promise there, and produced plentifully somewhere else. The vines would not grow in the Antilles or the hot, wet lowlands; and Mexico, though more temperate, produced little wine, and that of poor quality, “because generally the grapes doe not ripen with perfection.”19 Not until the conquistadors reached Peru did Spain acquire an area where vines would prosper. The year of the first Peruvian vintage was 1551. A hundred years later she was producing wine enough to satisfy not only her own enormous thirst, but also for export.20
Grapes also did well in many areas to the south of what is now Peru. Chile, for example, with its “temperature like unto Castile, in whose opposite altitude it falleth almost all …,” Tucumán and, generally, the Río de la Plata area grew grapes for wine, as well as all the other plants of Spain. In 1614 the diocese of Santiago, Chile, produced 200,000 jugs of wine. “Jug” is a wildly vague measure, but we can at least be sure that 200,000 jugs is a lot of wine.21
The Spanish, like the other people of the Mediterranean littoral, had to have bread, wine—and oil, olive oil. If possessed of these three, the Spaniards of the Siglo de Oro—the Golden Century—like the ancient Hebrews, had the basic plant food ingredients of what they felt was a civilized diet. The olive tree needs water, but not in the quantities that fall in most parts of the Greater Antilles and Caribbean coast. Few olive trees grew in Mexico, and the total yield of olives and oil there was insignificant in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.
The areas of the Americas settled by the Spanish in the sixteenth century which most closely resemble the dry Mediterranean lands where the olive trees grow best are the coastal valleys of Peru and Chile. The thought that olive trees might prosper there must have occurred to many of the earliest settlers, but the first olive trees were not planted until 1560. The long delay undoubtedly stemmed from the fact that the plants had to be brought all the way from Europe: there were none or too few in the usual halfway houses of Española or Tierra Firme to spare for Peru. And so it was in 1560, long after the Peruvian debut of wheat and vines, that Antonio de Rivera, one of the first settlers of Lima, returned from Spain with a number of olive seedlings. Only two or three, however, had survived the journey. Their value was so immense that he posted a number of slaves and dogs to guard them. It was no use: one was stolen and spirited off some five hundred leagues south to Chile. These seedlings, whether legitimately or illegitimately acquired, were the beginning of what quickly became a considerable olive oil industry in the irrigated valleys of South America's arid Pacific coast.22
The other Spanish food plants—vegetables and fruit trees—were sown wherever there was settlement and the slightest probability of their growing to fruition. A knowledge of Latin American geography and of what type of climate is good for a given food plant will generally allow an accurate guess as to where the Spanish raised the crop.
Not all or probably even most of the plants brought to America in the sixteenth century were for human consumption or were brought intentionally. A few of the forage grasses and clovers may have been consciously imported in the sixteenth century—they certainly were later—but most of the plants that came to America between 1492 and 1600 that do not produce food for humans or, at least, flowers for the pleasure of human senses, crossed the Atlantic as informally as did the smallpox virus. Their seeds arrived in folds of textiles, in clods of mud, in dung, and in a thousand other ways. The spread of these proletarians of the plants was doubtlessly quite rapid, as the Europeans followed and extended the Indian practice of burning over grasslands, and European livestock overgrazed large areas, opening the way for the heartier immigrant grasses and weeds. The fact that Kentucky bluegrass, daisies, and dandelions, to name only three out of hundreds, are Old World in origin gives one a hint of the magnitude of the change that began in 1492 and continues in the twentieth century. Today an American botanist can easily find whole meadows in which he is hard put to find a single species of plant that grew in America in pre-Columbian times.23
The Indians found most European food plants little more desirable than European weeds. Again and again in the accounts of the various colonies, English as well as Latin, we read that the Indians were not taking the opportunity to cultivate Old World crops. In Spanish America, where the white population often did not raise enough food for its own needs, the Indians were forced to raise wheat and other European crops, either under direct European direction or in order to make tribute payments in kind, but they rarely added these to their own diets. The Europeans destroyed the Indian's civilizations, and even drove his gods into Christian vestments, but in many of the most elemental ways, the Indian remained Indian.24
A great exception to this rule was his enthusiastic acceptance of Old World livestock, as we shall see presently.
The contrast between Old and New World fauna amazed Renaissance Europe, as we noted in Chapters 1. The difference between the two sets of domesticated animals on either side of the Atlantic was even more stunning than the general contrast. The Indian as farmer was as impressive as any in the world, but he was very unimpressive as a domesticator of animals. In 1492 he had only a few animal servants: the dog, two kinds of South American camel (the llama and alpaca), the guinea pig, and several kinds of fowl (the turkey, the Muscovy duck, and, possibly, a type of chicken). He had no animal that he rode. Most of his meat and leather came from wild game. He had no beast of burden to be compared to the horse, ass, or ox. Except in the areas where the llama lived, and except for the minor assistance of the travois-pulling dog, the Indian wanting to move a load moved it himself, no matter how heavy the load or how far it had to be moved. The classic case in point is that of the pre-Columbian peoples of Meso-America, who built great temples and carried on trade over hundreds of miles of broken terrain in spite of the fact that the fastest and strongest animal available for service there was man himself.25
A sensational preview of the impact that Old World livestock would have on the American mainland took place in Española and, shortly after, in the other Antilles. One who watched the Caribbean islands from outer space during the years from 1492 to 1550 or so might have surmised that the object of the game going on there was to replace the people with pigs, dogs and cattle. Disease and ruthless exploitation had, for all practical purposes, destroyed the aborigines of Española by the 1520s. Their Arawak brothers in Cuba, Puerto Rico, and Jamaica followed them into oblivion shortly after. The Bahamas and Lesser Antilles were not occupied by the Spanish, but as the Indians of the larger islands disappeared, slavers sailed out to the smaller islands, spread disease and seized multitudes of Arawaks and Caribs to feed into the death camps that Española, Cuba, Puerto Rico, and Jamaica had become. Thus, within a few score years of Columbus's first American landfall, the Antillean aborigines had been almost completely eliminated.26
As the number of humans plummeted, the population of imported domesticated animals shot upward. The first contingent of horses, dogs, pigs, cattle, chickens, sheep, and goats arrived with Columbus on the second voyage in 1493. The animals, preyed upon by few or no American predators, troubled by few or no American diseases, and left to feed freely upon the rich grasses and roots and wild fruits, reproduced rapidly. Their numbers burgeoned so rapidly, in fact, that doubtlessly they had much to do with the extinction of certain plants, animals, and even the Indians themselves, whose gardens they encroached upon.27
Of the imported animals, the pigs adapted the quickest to the Caribbean environment. At the end of 1498, Roldán, the Españolan rebel, alone owned 120 large and 230 small swine. Soon pigs were running wild in incredible numbers. In April of 1514 Diego Velásquez de Cuéllar wrote the King that the pigs he had brought to Cuba had increased to 30,000 (which figure is perhaps best translated from the sixteenth-century Spanish as “more pigs than I ever saw before in my life”).28
The multiplication of cattle was similarly spectacular. When Roldán revolted in 1498, he and his followers “found herds of cattle grazing and killed all the steers they needed for their food and took what beasts of burden they needed for the road.” Alonzo de Zuazo, reporting to his king in 1518, told of great numbers of cattle on Española, cattle which were breeding two and three times a year in the salubrious environment of the New World: if thirty or forty cattle stray away, he said, they will grow to three or four hundred in three or four years.29 So great was the proliferation of the cattle that by the end of the century numbers of marooned sailors and other such stray humans in the un-colonized northern half of Española were living off the wild stock there. The story goes that these people smoked the meat of the animals on a wooden grate called a boucan and thus, when they went pirating in the seventeenth century, were called buccaneers.30
Horses were slower to adapt to the tropics, and their reproductive rate was less spectacular than that of swine or cattle, but increase in number they did; and in time they, too, were running wild and free over the savannas of Española.31 The reaction of the other types of European livestock to the Caribbean environment was similar in nearly every case: goats, dogs, cats, chickens, asses grew faster, brawnier, reproduced at unheard of rates, and often went back to nature.
This amazingly successful invasion by Old World livestock took place not only in Española but in Cuba, Puerto Rico, Jamaica, and, a bit later, in certain coastal islands, especially Margarita, the Venezuelan island which was the original source of the great herds of the llanos.32 By the time of Cortés's assault on the mainland, the Spaniards had created in the Caribbean a perfect base camp for that assault. When the conquistadors moved into the interior of Mexico, Honduras, Peru, Florida, and elsewhere, they carried smallpox and many other maladies, freshened by recent passage through the bodies of the Arawaks. The Spaniards rode on horses bred in the Antilles, and wardogs from the same islands trotted beside them. Their saddlebags were packed with cakes of Caribbean cassava. Behind the conquistadors, herded along by Indian servants, came herds of swine, cattle and goats—a commissariat on the hoof—all of which had been born in the islands. In the span of the first post-Columbian generation, the Spanish had created in the Caribbean the wherewithal to conquer half a world.
The three animals which played the leading roles in that conquest were the hidalgo (the Spanish nobleman), the pig, and the horse. The hidalgo led the way—that is clear—but it is difficult to say which of the other two was the more important. The Spanish historian Carlos Pereyra judged that, “if the horse was of real significance in the Conquest, the hog was of greater importance and contributed to a degree that defies exaggeration.”33
It is necessary to define this hog. He was not the peccary, the tusked, piglike animal native to America which Acosta described as a small hog with a navel on its back. Nor was the pig that followed the conquistadors the fat, slow-footed creature we are familiar with today. Once ashore in America he became a fast, tough, lean, self-sufficient greyhound of a hog much closer to appearance and personality to a wild boar than to one of our twentieth-century hogs. This Spanish swine thrived in wet, tropical lowlands and dry mountains alike, and reproduced with a rapidity that delighted the pork-hungry Iberians.34
Swine took up so little space on board ship and were so self-sufficient and prolific once ashore that many of the earlier explorers took them along as deck cargo and deposited them on islands to multiply and provide food for future visitors. Thus Cabeza de Vaca in Río de la Plata country in 1542 found a message from his predecessor, Irala, which read:
In one of the islands of San Gabriel a sow and a boar have been left to breed. Do not kill them. If there should be many, take those you need, but always leave some to breed, and also, on your way, leave a sow and a boar on the island of Martin Garcia and on the other islands wherever you think it good, so that they may breed.35
Sometime in the 1550s the Portuguese stocked Sable Island in the northwest Atlantic with swine and cattle, which, by the time Sir Humphrey Gilbert came along thirty years later, had “exceedingly multiplied.” In 1609 Englishmen shipwrecked in the uninhabited Bermudas were able to live off the great herds of pigs there. In the same decade the Olive Blossom touched at Barbados and found no people there, not even Indians, but did find quantities of wild pigs. Tradition credits their presence there to the Portuguese of Brazil. The pigs of Barbados and the other Lesser Antilles became a vitally important source of food for the early seventeenth-century settlers.36
Great numbers of swine accompanied the conquistadors on the continental expeditions. They were at least as adaptable to new environments as the Spaniards, and made a fine ambulatory meat supply. To give a few examples, De Soto brought thirteen pigs with him to Florida in 1539, used them for food only in dire emergency, and thus had seven hundred at the time of his death three years later. In 1540 Gonzalo Pizarro collected, along with horses, llamas and dogs, more than two thousand pigs for an expedition in search of the Land of Cinnamon on the east side of the Andes.37
It follows from the above that pork was often the only familiar meat available to the first colonists of a given area. The swine needed little care, the native tribute of maize made ideal feed for them, and—if that failed—they could forage for themselves. By the end of the first decade after the conquest of Mexico, pigs were so plentiful and cheap that stockmen were no longer interested in them. Pigs came to Peru with Pizarro in 1531, and pork was the first European meat to be sold in any quantity in the Lima meat market; there was little competition from other European meats for some years.38
Swine herds were to be found wherever the Spanish settled or even touched, and the same was true in the Portuguese areas. The environment of coastal Brazil was not one most European livestock found healthy, but the pig thrived in poorer pastures than cattle, for instance, could tolerate. “The Swine doe like very well heere,” wrote a visitor to Brazil in 1601, “and they beginne to have great multitudes, and heere it is the best flesh of all.”39 In the captaincies of the central south, Río de Janeiro and São Paulo, pork became a major item in the colonial diet. In fact, so salubrious did pigs find their new homes in the Americas that in many areas they dispensed with their swineherds and took up an independent existence, running as wild as ever their ancestors had.40
It is possible to imagine the conquistador without his pig, but who can imagine him without his horse? The conquistador came from the most equestrian society in Europe. Medieval Iberia was the one section of western Europe where horses were so plentiful and cheap that they were not the exclusive possession of the nobility. This not to say that every Sancho Panza owned a horse, but it does mean that the Iberians of all classes were more accustomed to viewing the world from horseback and more skilled as riders than any other European people with easy access to the Atlantic.41 The languages of western Europe confirm this: caballero means knight, nobleman, rider, horseman, gentleman, sir or mister; chevalier, from the other side of the Pyrenees, also means knight or nobleman, but cannot be so easily stretched to also mean rider or mister.
The horse the caballero rode was as much an aristocrat in the equestrian flesh as his master was in equestrian skill. This horse was the product of crossbreeding the strong, fast horse of Iberia and the fine Arabians brought in by the Moors.42 The offspring was the finest horse in Europe.43
The first horses to exist in America since the Pleistocene arrived with Columbus in 1493. The transatlantic voyage was not an easy one for horses. The body of water between Spain and the Canaries, where almost all the early expeditions stopped on the way to America, was named the Gulfo de Yeguas, the Gulf of Mares, and the belts of windlessness in the Atlantic tropics were named the Horse Latitudes because so many horses died and had to be thrown overboard in these areas. But the price for getting horses to America was worth paying, and numbers of them were loaded on vessels bound for Española. By 1501 that island had twenty or thirty, and by 1503 there were, at the very least, no fewer than sixty or seventy.44
The enormous value of the horse came not merely from the fact that he provided the conquistador with the services of an excellent beast of burden. In the early years he was chiefly valuable as an instrument of war. The sight of a man on horseback was so frightening to the Indians that one guesses that the combination was for them as terrifying as the obscene creatures of Hieronymus Bosch would have been to the Spaniards, if they had suddenly leaped into life from the painted canvas. The Indians of South America had never seen an animal as big as the horse. No Indian anywhere had ever seen an animal which, at one time, was as strong, fast and obedient to the orders of man. The Arawaks suspected that horses fed on human flesh, and a single man on horseback could and did terrify whole crowds of these Indians. If fear failed to dissolve Indian resistance, then, according to the macabre hyperbole of Las Casas, one horseman could skewer two thousand Indians in an hour.45
Again and again, the Spanish cavalry turned massacre of Europeans into massacre of Indians. Bernal Díaz, writing of the conquest of Mexico decades after the event, mentioned horse after horse, reciting their names, colors and characters with as much care and detail as he lavishes upon his human comrades. In his appraisal of the losses of la noche triste he established a hierarchy of importance that surprises no one familiar with the conquistador mentality: “It was the greatest grief to think upon the horses, and the valiant soldiers we had lost.” Hernando Pizarro, who rode out to hurry along deliveries of Atahualpa's ransom, knew what was most important and what was not: when his horses lost their shoes and there were no iron replacements, he had them shod in silver.46
After the conquest, the horse played a role of a less spectacular but no less significant nature. The conquistador would never have been able to keep the vast sullen Indian populations under control if the horse had not enabled him to transfer information, orders and soldiers from one point to another swiftly. The horse was a very important carrier and hauler of freight, although often replaced in this role by asses, mules and even native llamas. The horse made possible the great cattle industry of colonial America, which, in the final analysis, affected much larger areas of the New World than did any other European endeavor in that period. A swineherd can operate effectively on foot: a vaquero, or cowboy, needs a horse.
The society of colonial Spanish-America was one of the most equestrian in all history, and, to a very great extent, its existence depended on the adaptability of the Old World horse to New World conditions. The horse was slower than the pig to increase his numbers in the tropical zone, but even there his numbers did increase and a few joined the swine as free agents.47 But it was not until the Spanish frontier reached the great grasslands that the vast herds of horses celebrated in American legend burst into the history of the New World.
The three greatest grasslands of the Spanish empire were the llanos of Venezuela and Colombia, the prairies that stretch from deep in Mexico north into Canada, and the pampas of Argentina and Uruguay. In the llanos the increase of the herds of horses was slow. The brutally hot climate and the annual alteration of flood and drought held down the number of horses and other livestock, although the day would come when Venezuela would be famous for its herds of wild horses and cattle.48
The area first settled and exploited by the Spanish in New Spain was the coast and highlands in the general latitude of Mexico City. Large sections of this area offer good grazing for livestock, but the area is by no means perfect for horses. As of 1531, New Spain was raising fewer than two hundred horses a year. Then, as the horses were completing their adaptation to the climate and available fodder, the Spanish frontier moved north, toward and into the plains where the enemies of the horse were few and the grass plentiful and green. By 1550 mounts were available for little more than the effort to rope them. Within a few years of that date, ten thousand horses were grazing in the pasture lands between Querétaro and San Juan del Río alone. As the opening of new mines drew Europeans and their animals further and further north, the increase in the number of horses reached the magnitude of a stampede. By the end of the century wild horses beyond counting were running free in Durango. With mounts so plentiful, all Mexicans—Spanish, mestizo and even Indian—swung into the saddle, and even Cervantes's Sancho Panza knew of the excellence of Mexican horsemanship.49
The horses continued north, urged on by the men on their backs or with no more stimulus than the smell of water and grass ahead. Nothing but the driest deserts, the snows of Canada, and the eastern woodlands stopped their advance. In 1777 Fray Morfi wrote that the area between the Río Grande and the Nueces River was so full of horses “that their trails make the country, utterly uninhabited by people, look as if it were the most populated in the world.” The wild horses never attained such numbers beyond the Nueces in what is now the United States and Canada, but they ranged widely, preceded the Anglo-Saxon pioneer onto the Great Plains and provided him with his mount. It was the Spaniard who supplied the North American cowboy with his horse and, as we shall see, his longhorns, the tools of his trade, and even the vocabulary to go along with that trade: mustang, bronco, lasso, rodeo, chaps, lariat, buckaroo.50
The beginning of the saga of the horse in South America was also one of slow beginnings, but of an even more spectacular climax. In the llanos, as has already been said, the tropical climate kept the number of horses low, as it did in Brazil, although the latter did have enough to supply her own needs and to export a few to Angola in the sixteenth century.51
The horse first arrived in Peru with Pizarro in 1532; Atalhualpa's first emissaries to the Spanish returned to tell him of huge animals which ran like the wind and killed men with their feet and mouths. These animals were slow to breed in the higher, colder regions of Peru, but did prosper in the rich pasture lands, such as those around Cuzco and Quito.52
Within a few years the conquistadors and their mounts were moving south into Chile, which by the beginning of the seventeenth century had become famous for its fine horses. In the same period the first settlers were arriving in Paraguay, on the east side of the Andes; and we soon hear of herds of wild horses there.53
The horse found a home in Peru, Chile, and Paraguay; in the pampas of Río de la Plata he found a paradise. What happened when the horse reached what is today Argentina and Uruguay is best described as a biological explosion: horses running free on the grassy vastness propagated in a manner similar to smallpox virus in the salubrious environment of Indian bodies.
The most commonly accepted story of the origin of the horses and other European livestock of the pampas at the end of the sixteenth century is that they were all descended from the handful of animals brought by Pedro de Mendoza to Buenos Aires at the time of its founding in 1535. But this first settlement of Buenos Aires proved to be abortive, and there had only been a tiny number of livestock there. It seems unlikely that the huge herds that existed on the pampas only forty or fifty years later could have all traced their ancestry back to Buenos Aires. There were horses in Paraguay who could have drifted south, and horses in Chile who might conceivably have found their way through the Andean passes. Wherever they came from, they found the grass to their taste.
The first permanent settlers of Buenos Aires arrived in 1580 and found that they had been preceded onto the pampas by enormous herds of wild horses. The horses had “multiplied infinitely” in the grasslands of Río de la Plata, possibly producing more colts faster than ever before in the history of the earth.54 Vazquez de Espinosa tells us, at the beginning of the seventeenth century, of wild horses in Tucumán “in such numbers that they cover the face of the earth and when they cross the road it is necessary for travellers to wait and let them pass, for a whole day or more, so as not to let them carry off tame stock with them. …” He speaks with awe of the plains of Buenos Aires “covered with escaped mares and horses in such numbers that when they go anywhere they look like woods from a distance.”55
The pig provided the conquistadors with sustenance, but the importance of his role in the development of colonial America dropped off sharply after the first few years of colonization in any given area. The achievements of none of the great colonizing people who came to the New World would have been possible without the horse. But the horse is a means to an end. Few people have ever made their livings by raising horses for their meat and hides. Millions have done so, however, by using them in the business of herding other grazing animals, in order to sell their meat and hides.
The figure in the history of colonial America who is most characteristically Iberian is the rancher on horseback observing his herds of livestock, most often herds of cattle. When faced with the immense grasslands of America, the Englishman paused, called them deserts and tried to find a way around them. The Spaniard embraced the plains, the llanos, the pampas, drove his cattle onto them, and let the multiplying beeves make a good life for him. As a result, there were probably more cattle in the New World in the seventeenth century than any other type of vertebrate immigrant.56
The cattle supplied the Spaniard with all the meat he could consume: an Englishman reported in the 1550s that one could obtain in Mexico City a “whole quarter of an oxe, as much as a slave can carry away from the Butchers, for five Tomynes, that is five royals of Plate, which is just two shillings and sixe pence. …”57 The great numbers of Spaniards and Indians who devoted themselves exclusively to mining could never have done so if great quantities of highly nourishing food had not been available nearby in the form of huge herds of cattle and other livestock. This is especially true of those working in mines in barren country, such as those at Zacatecas and Potosí.
But meat eaters formed only one of the markets for American beef, and not the most important market. More cattle were killed for hides and tallow than for meat. It was an age in which leather served many of the functions for which we use fiber, plastics and metals today: armor, cups, trunks, rope. The demand for hides in America and Europe was immense, and so was the number of hides exported from America to Europe. The fleet that crossed to Spain in 1587 landed nearly 100,000 hides at Seville. (“Hides” are not necessarily all cowhides, but it seems that the great majority were.) With such large numbers of cattle being slaughtered, tallow became so plentiful in America that candles—apparently something of a luxury in Europe—were used by rich and poor, and even Indians, in America. Without cheap and plentiful candles, mining could never have been carried on as extensively as it was. The work underground was accomplished in artificial light, and, even though tallow was extremely cheap, in the early seventeenth century 300,000 pesos a year was spent on candles for the Potosí mines.58
Many of the Iberian colonists were already cattlemen when they arrived in America. Southern Iberia was the only part of western Europe in Renaissance times in which open range ranching was common. The techniques that would characterize ranching in America—the constant use of the horse, periodic round-ups, branding, overland drives—were all “invented” by medieval Iberians. And these people, as their descendants in America, lived and tended their herds on a frontier troubled by the constant raiding of mounted enemies. In Europe the hostile natives were Moors, in America they were Indians. All in all, we may guess that there was no group of Europeans better equipped—technologically, socially, and psychologically—to deal with the American environment than the ranchers of southern Iberia.
Not only did Iberia develop men fit for life on the American steppes, but also animals for these new grasslands. The Spanish horses we have already discussed. Spanish cattle were even more adaptable. Fast, lean, and armed with long horns, the Spanish cow makes a poor showing at the stockyards today, but in her heyday she made an excellent showing in a variety of climates and against a variety of carnivores from the cougars of the upper Missouri River to the anacondas of the Paraguay River.59
The Spanish found the Greater Antilles quite suitable for the most prestigious of peacetime vocations, which were, first of all, gold mining and, when the gold ran out, ranching. In Spain the biggest herds of cattle had rarely exceeded eight hundred or a thousand. In the 1520s Oviedo spoke of many herds of five hundred or so on Española, and some of as many as eight thousand. The export of hides became, along with sugar, the chief support of Española, and even more exclusively the chief source of wealth of the other big islands. In 1587 alone Española sent 35,444 hides to Spain. So many were killed for their hides that “in some places the aire hath been corrupted with the aboundance of these stinking carcases.” In the 1560s Española's income from her exports probably amounted to about 640,000 pesos annually from sugar and 720,000 from hides.60
Cattle were first brought to Mexico for breeding purposes in 1521. So few were they at first that their slaughter was forbidden, but within a decade there were scores of cattle ranches. The price of beef in Mexico City dropped 75 percent between 1532 and 1538. It seems that in the first years cattle lagged behind pigs and sheep in the matter of rapid propagation, but after a few decades left them both far behind. Cattle were soon grazing everywhere in Mexico, even on the hot Gulf coast. A traveller of 1568 records that over two thousand were driven through the town of Vera Cruz every morning “to take away the ill vapors of the earth.”61
As the European population of Mexico built up and began to spread north, ranching went along with it. The penetration of Spanish cattle into the rich grass country of northern Mexico in the sixteenth century set off one of the most biologically extravagant events of that biologically amazing century. In 1579 it was statèd that some ranches in the north had 150,000 head of cattle and that 20,000 was considered a small herd. Two ranches on what is now the border of Zacatecas and Durango branded 33,000 and 42,000 calves respectively in 1586. According to one witness who wrote in 1594, the cattle herds were nearly doubling every fifteen months. At the end of that century Samuel de Champlain, on a tour of. Mexico for the French king, wrote with awe of the “great, level plains, stretching endlessly and everywhere covered with an infinite number of cattle.”62
Cattle were one of New Spain's greatest economic assets, and their hides figured significantly in her exports. In 1587, 64,350 hides were sent to Spain; that number, of course, does not include the very large number of hides kept in Mexico for local use.63
Wild cattle roamed freely in inestimable quantities far beyond the colonists' horizons. When the Spanish began a serious attempt to settle in southern Texas in the early eighteenth century, they discovered the wild cattle were there before them. These were the Hispanic ancestors of the famous Texas longhorns. Many of the English-speaking colonists who moved into Texas in the early nineteenth century considered these cattle as native to the land (and, incidentally, as harder and more dangerous to catch than mustangs).64
Cattle did well in the savannas and mountains of Central America and Tierra Firme.65 But, as we move south from Mexico, we find no cattle region to compare with its northern plains until we come to the llanos of Venezuela, six hundred miles east to west and two hundred north to south. The temperature is a good deal hotter on the average than that of the plains of Iberia, and the climate is a yearly cycle of drought and flood; so there could be no “biological explosions” of European livestock in the llanos. But the grass and the space attracted the Spaniard and his longhorns, anyway. In 1548 a Spanish stockman passed through with a small herd of cattle, bound for Bogotá. These were probably the first steers and cows in the llanos. In the latter half of the century the resistance of the Indians of these flatlands was broken, partly by force of arms and partly by smallpox and other diseases, and the adaptation of technology and animal to the difficult environment was made. By 1600 as many as forty-five ranches had been founded in the plains of Venezuela. A half century later something like 140,000 head of cattle grazed in the llanos. As in Mexico, the cattle tended to move into the interior ahead of the Europeans, being quicker to adapt than their owners. Sometimes these “strays” were driven along by African herdsmen, who had been brought to Venezuela to replace the dying Indians as servants of the Spanish, and who, like the cattle, moved beyond the frontier to excape their owners.66
The history of the llanos follows the same course as that of the plains of Mexico, only at a much slower pace. The sixteenth century was a period of bare beginnings, but the time would come two centuries later when cattle and horses, tame and wild, would number in the millions, and individual ranches would brand ten thousand head and more annually. Export of hides to Spain was beginning by the last decades of the 1600s, and took a prominent place in the economy of colonial Venezuela after the turn of the century. During the period 1620 to 1665 hides accounted for 75 percent or more of the total value of exports to Spain.67
In the rest of the continent south of Venezuela the story of cattle falls roughly into two categories; one, that of the Portuguese settlements in Brazil, where the climate was tough on cattle, as well as on men, and the increase of the herds was slow; and two, that of the Spanish settlements, where life was easier and propagation faster.
The story of the cattle of the Brazilian sertão, the back-country, is similar to that of their relatives in the llanos. The sertão produced no herds in the sixteenth century to compare with those of Mexico or, as we shall see, of the pampas; the chief limiting factor being, again, a difficult, truly tropical climate. This century was one of adjustment and adaptation for both man and animal. According to the record (which is very spotty for the earliest decades of Brazilian history), the first cattle came to Portuguese America with Martim Alfonso de Sousa between 1531 and 1533. Their number grew so slowly that they were too valuable to eat and were usually preserved to haul sugar cane to the mills and to turn the millstones to crush the cane. The sugar plantations expanded so rapidly that the natural increase of the cattle was not enough to answer the demand for animal power. Thus there was a concentrated effort to promote cattle raising in the coastal meadows of the northeast, not despite but because of the devotion of that area to sugar.
By 1590 pioneers moving north from Bahia had broken the back of Indian resistance in Sergipe, and soon herds of cattle browsed in its grasslands. At the mouth of the São Francisco River, whose valley was to become the great corridor into the interior, the Bahian cattlemen met the cattlemen moving south from Pernambuco, each group a vanguard of the sugar plantations spreading laterally along the coast.
Cattle also played a role in that part of sixteenth-century Brazil which did not dedicate itself to sugar. Far to the southwest of the main plantation areas cattle herds were slowly increasing in the area of São Paulo, and were becoming a fairly important element in the economy of the Paulistas. Thus by 1600 in two widely separated and different parts of Brazil, cattlemen were prepared for the first real penetration inland. Herds of five hundred and even a thousand were to be found here and there along the littoral. A breed of cattle and a breed of men tough enough to face the challenge of the Indians and the sertão were ready.68
Cattle were brought to Tierra Firme and Central America early in the sixteenth century, and their progeny arrived in Lima no later than 1539. The herds scattered here and there, wherever the grass was plentiful in the mountainous land. They adapted to the high altitudes more rapidly than horses. All in all, the course of events was not too different from that in New Spain, although on a much smaller scale: a rapid increase in numbers and the straying away of many head who soon became wild.69
Cattle, as was the case with horses, spread out from Peru with the Spaniards and south into Chile, and from there into and through the mountains. The cattle propagated rapidly in the green valleys of Chile, and in 1614 the residents of Santiago possessed 39,250 head, of which the annual increase was 13,500.70
In Paraguay and Tucumán the story of cattle is the same as that of horses: extremely rapid increase which, as the animals strayed south and west into even wider and greener pastures, accelerated. In 1593 there were already great numbers of wild cattle in the province of Corrientes. A few years later the plains of the Santa Cruz region were “full of cattle which today have run wild and cover the fields for a distance of every eighty leagues.” In 1619 Governor Gondra of Buenos Aires reported that the number of cattle within the area under his jurisdiction was so great that if 80,000 a year were killed for their hides, natural increase would be sufficient to make up the loss.71
The herds of cattle continued to expand and to spread south toward Patagonia. The eyewitness reports of the size of the herds of the pampas reminds the student of United States history not so much of accounts of the Texas long-horns as of the buffalo. These myriads of cattle, domesticated and wild, provided Río de la Plata with an economic base. The chief export of the pampas in the colonial era was hides. This trade was already of some importance by the beginning of the seventeenth century and was to comprise the export of a million hides annually by the end of the eighteenth.72
Sheep ranching was even more important in Renaissance Spain than cattle ranching, and so it is not surprising that Columbus brought sheep with him in 1493, along with the other livestock. The number of sheep in the Americas eventually became immense, but they were slower to adapt than most of the other kinds of European livestock. They did not do well in the Caribbean islands or in hot, wet lowlands. As Bernabé Cobo noticed, lands not good for men were also unsuited for sheep. Nor did the sheep oblige the Europeans by running off into the wilderness to breed themselves into great herds and await the opportunity to make wealthy men of the first Spaniards to claim them. Sheep were much less capable of defending themselves against predators than swine, horses, or longhorns.73
Their inability to play the game of survival in the wilderness successfully did not change the fact that they were one of the basic elements of Iberian civilization. Mutton was a very common meat in the Spanish diet and remained so in the New World. Sheepskins were an important article of clothing in Europe and served the same purpose in the Americas. In the mining areas, dressed sheepskins were of special importance because mercury, so essential in the processing of silver ore, was stored in them. And, of course, sheep were the source of wool.74
Wool was the raw material used by the first real factory industry in America, the large textile mills in which Indians were driven, often to the detriment of their health, to produce woolen and other kinds of cloth. By 1571 New Spain had eighty mills and the viceroyalty of Peru lagged not far behind. By the seventeenth century the mills were producing woolens sufficient to fill the needs of the regions where the mills existed, plus a surplus for intercolonial commerce and even some for export to Spain.75
Some few sheep managed to eke out an existence in the hot Antilles in the early sixteenth century and so were available for shipment to the mainland shortly after the founding of the settlements there. Sheep came ashore in Panama as early as 1521 and, we may assume, at similarly early dates elsewhere in the Caribbean littoral. Cortés had such a high opinion of the potentialities of New Spain as a ranching area that he sent back to the Antilles for sheep and other livestock as soon as Aztec resistance was broken. But it was Antonio de Mendoza, the first viceroy (1535–1549), who looms as most important in the early annals of Mexican sheep herding. It was Mendoza who imported the superb sheep of Castile, the Merinos, and fostered their increase in New Spain—and who, incidentally, became one of the leading ranchers within his own jurisdiction.76
Despite the fact that sheep were not tough enough to manage on their own, they, like horses and pigs and cattle, propagated very rapidly in the relatively temperate interior plateaus and valleys of New Spain. It was estimated as of 1582 that 200,000 sheep were grazing on a range nine leagues square just to the north of San Juan de los Ríos. Antonio de Herrera tells a tale of “men that with two shag-haired sheep came to have above 40,000.” The vastness of the sheep population soon gave rise to seasonal migrations; and no later than 1579, and probably a good deal earlier, 200,000 sheep and more flowed in a river of wool from Querétaro to Lake Chapala and western Michoacán every September, and back again in May, following the green grass. However, in spite of the size of the herds and their mobility, the sheep ranches were mostly concentrated in central Mexico and the northern plains were for the most part left to the tougher longhorns. An important exception was New Mexico, where sheep far outnumbered cattle until the coming of the Anglo-Saxons.77
Peru, no less than Mexico, was a land where sheep could thrive. One of the conquistadors, Captain Salamanca, imported sheep within four or six years of the conquest, and soon they were grazing in large numbers in the high meadows, alongside the cattle and the native stock. They delighted their owners, for they now were lambing twice in fourteen months.78
The effect of the sheep and other European livestock on the native herds was not so delightful. The European animals doubtlessly transmitted to the native stock a devastating selection of animal diseases. The llama and alpaca populations diminished as spectacularly as the Indian population after the conquest; and the reasons were largely the same: disease and brutal exploitation.79
The territory of the former Incan empire is a land broken and divided into so many compartments by the Andes that one cannot point to a single area as the main center of colonial ranching. Seemingly sheep grazed in every area where the presence of green grass, temperate climate and access to market combined. The reader will not be surprised to hear that the number of sheep rose immensely. Near the end of the sixteenth century José de Acosta wrote of Peru that “in former times there were men that did possesse three score and ten, yea, a hundred thousand sheep, and at this day they have not many lesse.”80
Elsewhere in South America the history of sheep ranching contains few surprises. Some sheep herding went on in New Granada in the Andean foothills and highlands. The areas of Brazil settled by the Portuguese in the sixteenth century were much too tropical for sheep, except in the captaincies of the central-south—Río de Janeiro and São Paulo—where herds of sheep did exist by the end of the century. Sheep did exceedingly well in Chile, where the climate is temperate and the grass plentiful. In 1614 the district of Santiago alone contained 623,825 sheep, which produced in a year 223,944 lambs. The pampas were too hot and the Spaniards too few to provide sufficient shepherds for any large number of sheep. However in what is now northern Argentina, specifically in Tucumán, we hear of the presence of many sheep by 1600; and, eventually, Patagonia would become one of the chief sheep-herding centers of the western hemisphere.81
Much could be said of the other types of domesticated animals brought to the New World in the first century after Columbus, but the reader's patience is limited, so we will only mention a few briefly. Dogs existed in pre-Columbian America, but those which came with the conquistadors were much bigger and fiercer, so fierce, indeed, that they were used with great effectiveness against the Indians. They seem to have returned to nature as readily as the swine, and numbers of wild dogs appeared in Española, Peru, and, no doubt, many other areas. They ate what they could find: shellfish in Atacama on the Peruvian coast, crabs in Puerto Rico, and, in the areas where there were herds of cattle, the dogs lived as predators and were treated as wolves by the settlers.82
And there were cats, many of which followed the dogs back to nature. When Charles Darwin toured the La Plata region in the 1830s, he found the common cat in the rocky hills “altered into a large fierce animal.” Goats came with the Europeans and by 1600 were to be found in large numbers just about everywhere the other grazing livestock were plentiful. Where conditions were right, they went wild, too. In Puerto Rico the “Goates live … securely, because they love cliffes of Rocks, or the tops of Hils, and therefore they are out of the ordinarie haunt of these murderous dogs.” They went back to nature in the isolation of the Chilean islands.83
There is some confusion about domesticated fowls. The turkey and Muscovy duck were certainly present in pre-Columbian America, and some think that a type of chicken was also. The acceptance of a pre-Columbian American chicken probably also means acceptance of pre-Columbian trans-Pacific contacts with the areas where the chicken was first domesticated. Whatever the truth may be, there is no doubt that most of the chickens in America by 1600 were of European descent, plus a considerable number of guinea hens, of African origin.84
Who can imagine rural Latin America without the burro? Donkeys and mules are also importations from the eastern hemisphere. Although widely used as beasts of burden, they never became as plentiful as horses in the colonial era. Perhaps the presence of so many horses and oxen made the breeding of mules seem superfluous. Nevertheless, many large mule ranches existed, usually in the same areas where the other grazing animals prospered. Córdoba in Tucumán was especially noted for its mule ranches. These animals, too, went wild.85
If the reader's impression thus far is that the Iberian record of importing livestock was one of unblemished success, then that impression must be quickly corrected. By 1600 the Spanish and Portuguese were experimenting with animals brought in from Africa and Asia, as well as Europe, and some, such as the guinea hen, proved valuable additions to the fauna of the New World. Others, such as the camel, brought in to serve as a beast of burden in the Peruvian coastal deserts, did not. As in a similar experiment in the arid southwest of the United States two centuries later, the camels proved only theoretically valuable, for the equestrian Europeans were very unenthusiastic about them. A don could, with self-respect, admire a horse, or even a mule … but a camel? The camels were neglected and allowed to stray off. Escaped slaves—los negros cimarrones—who, no doubt, often knew more about camels than did the whites, killed the animals for food. The history of the camel of colonial Peru is only sixty years long. The last one of these unassimilable immigrants died in 1615.86
Not all the importations of fauna were intentional. The Iberian undoubtedly imported dozens, even hundreds, of kinds of insects and animals that he would have preferred leaving behind in the Old World. The Old World rat, as loyal a follower of man as the dog, hitched a ride across the Atlantic and became an important pest and carrier of disease in the ports of colonial America. This was probably the black rat, which is today more common in the tropics and on board vessels than the larger brown rat. Historically, the black rat has been the most important carrier of the bubonic plague, and as good a vehicle for typhus as any.87
There was some controversy as to whether the rats that tormented the sixteenth and seventeenth-century Spanish-Americans were Old or New World in origin. Bernabé Cobo, knowing something of the science of genetics of his day, said that rats had always been everywhere because “it is a natural thing everywhere for these animals to be engendered from the rotting of the earth.”88
Be that as it may, rats were not in the Bermudas before the coming of the Europeans, and when they arrived, set off one of the most spectacular ecological disasters of the age. The early seventeenth-century English colonists unintentionally brought a few with them and “the Lord sent upon the Countrey, a very grievous scourge and punishment, threatening the utter ruin and desolation of it.” The rats spread to all the islands, honeycombed the earth with their burrows, nested in almost every tree, and nearly ate the colonists out of house and home: “for being destitute of food, many dyed, and we all became very feeble and weake, whereof … some would not; other could not stir abroad to seeke reliefe, but dyed in their houses.”89 Again and again it seemed the Lord would make the Europeans pay for the ecological sin of breaking out of Europe and taking their plants and animals with them.
It is impossible to doubt that the transfer of Old World foods and livestock to the Americas had an immense impact on the Indian. As already has been mentioned, the Indian was often slow to accept the new food plants, but the new domesticated animals were another matter. He could see little advantage in wheat over maize, but the Old World pig, horse, cow, chicken, dog, and goat were superior in nearly every way to anything the Americas had to offer.
The smaller Old World animals were more rapidly adopted by the Indians within or near the European areas of settlement than the larger. The Spaniards valued such animals less than the larger and considered Indian possession of them as no threat. These smaller animals were cheaper to obtain and less difficult for novice husbandmen to control. There was a geographically widespread precedent in America for the domestication of small animals, and, because of their smallness, they did not require their new owners to drastically alter their way of life. The Indians adopted Old World dogs, cats, pigs, and chickens into their economy and daily round of life in large areas of Spanish and Portuguese America within a generation or two of the conquest of their areas. Antonio de Herrera tells of a wise Indian who, when asked to name the most important things he and his fellows had received from the Castilians, put chicken eggs at the top of his list, because they were plentiful, “fresh every day, and good cooked or not cooked for young and Old.” (The other items on his list were horses, candles, and lamps.)90
Examples of Indian horse, cattle, sheep, and goat herding in the areas under European control exist, but were not common. The keeping of such animals called for a radical change in the lives of the sedentary farmers, except in the highlands of Peru, where there was precedent for the herding of large animals. In New Spain only a few Indians acquired even small herds of sheep, and Indian ownership of herds of the fierce Spanish cattle was even rarer. In Peru, also, the Indian was rarely owner of large numbers of such animals.91
By and large, the bigger domesticated animals of the Europeans destroyed rather than enriched the Indians of the areas controlled by the Europeans. The spectacular rise in the population of domesticated animals in these areas was accompanied by an equally spectacular decline in the Indian population; and disease and exploitation do not entirely explain that decline. The Indians were losing out in the biological competition with the newly imported livestock. The peoples of the high Indian civilizations chiefly lived on a vegetable diet, and so anything radically affecting their croplands radically affected them. The Spanish, anxious to establish their pastoral Iberian way of life in their colonies, set aside large sections of land for grazing, a good deal of it land that Indians had formerly cultivated. And the livestock, in this new continent where fences and shepherds were so few, often strayed onto Indian fields, eating the plants and trampling them. As New Spain's first viceroy, Mendoza, wrote to his King about the state of affairs around Oaxaca: “May your Lordship realize that if cattle are allowed, the Indians will be destroyed.” Many Indians went malnourished, weakening their resistance to disease; many fled to the hills and deserts to face hunger in solitude; some simply lay down and died within the sound of the lowing of their rivals. The history of this phenomenon is clear in Mexico, and we have good reason to believe that parallels are to be found elsewhere in the Americas.92
On the other hand, the impact of livestock on the Indians beyond the boundaries of European settlement often had a very positive affect. These Indians were by no means as numerous as those of Mesoamerica and Peru, and there existed among them plenty of room for the quadruped immigrants. Many of these Indians were already followers of a nomadic way of life, and the new arrivals multiplied the rewards of such a life. These Indians received the horses, cattle, sheep, and goats not as rivals but as immensely valuable additions to their sources of food, clothing, and energy.
The animals chiefly involved in this phenomenon were, in ascending order of importance, sheep, cattle, and horses. Sheep rarely went wild, and so they were available to the independent Indians only as loot to be seized by raiding or only if the Indian would become a shepherd. The latter seldom happened, but the exceptions are worth mentioning. By the end of the seventeenth century most of the tribes of the Chaco (in what is today Paraguay, Bolivia, and northern Argentina) were beginning to herd sheep. Another example is that of the Navaho people of New Mexico, who became owners of large herds of sheep a few decades later.93
Beyond every line of Spanish settlements in grass country were tribes who came to depend increasingly on the meat and hides of cattle. In New Spain the cattle immensely enriched the Yaquis, Tarahumaras, Pueblos, and other tribes, and—beyond the most northern frontier—the Athabascan people, of which the Navaho and Apache are best known. In the vast grasslands south and southeast of Peru the Spanish steer seemed to the Indians to be a gift from the gods. Just after the opening of the seventeenth century, Vázquez de Espinosa wrote that the plains of the Santa Cruz de la Sierra region were “full of cattle which today have run wild and cover the fields for a distance of over eighty leagues. … These Indians profit by the cattle, keeping them close to them and the poor Spaniards who lost them, far away.” The Charrua of the Banda Oriental (Uruguay), and the Puelches, Aucás, Tehuelches, Ranqueles, and Araucanians of the Argentine pampas lived off the cattle and made tools, clothing, and shelters of their hide, bones, and sinew.94
For the most part, the people of these tribes and a score of others like them did not become true herdsmen, but obtained their cattle from the Spanish or the wild herds whenever there was need. The most prominent exception to this rule is the Goajiro people of the great peninsula that stands between the western shore of Lake Maricaibo and the Caribbean. The Goajiro, because of their position on the edge of the Caribbean, were among the earliest mainland people to have contact with the Spanish and their cattle. Cattle began grazing on the edges of their semiárid peninsula no later than the 1570s and perhaps as early as 1550 or so. We know next to nothing of the early post-Columbian history of the Goajiro, but we may guess that they became herders very soon after they first obtained cattle and other livestock—probably from the adjacent Riohacha region. This transformation must have taken place a very long time ago. In spite of the refusal of this fierce people to become either victims or wards of the white man, little trace of their pre-Columbian culture remains today. As of the middle of the twentieth century, the Goajiro, who themselves numbered no more than 18,000, possessed 100,000 head of cattle, 200,000 sheep and goats, 20,000 mules and horses, 30,000 donkeys, and numbers of pigs and chickens. As among the Masai of Kenya, cattle are the most important measure of wealth; their diet is almost completely composed of meat and milk products; the price of a bride is measured in cattle. The Goajiro are what all the Indians of the American grasslands might have become if only the livestock, but not the Europeans, had come to the New World.95
The Goajiro would never have been able to handle such large herds if they had not received horses along with the cattle. The fact that it is a compliment of the first rank to describe a woman's hair as being the color of a horse's mane reflects their love of horses.96 The Goajiro are the last surviving example of those tribes of Indian centaurs whose culture was transformed and enriched by the horse.
The Indians began by being terrified of the horse, and if the Spanish had had their way, the Indians' wish to keep as far away from horses as possible would have been granted.97 The Europeans were fully conscious of the advantage the horse gave them over their American subjects, and so tried to prohibit Indian ownership or use of horses. But the prohibition always failed: Indians were needed as vaqueros; Indian allies were ineffective in war unless mounted; and—above all—the horses reproduced so fast and strayed beyond European control in such numbers that it soon became as easy for many Indians to acquire mounts as Spaniards. Both the horses and diseases moved through the virgin lands of America faster than did the people who had brought them to the New World.
The story is similar for all the tribes of the great grasslands, from Alberta to Patagonia. Before the horse came, the steppe lands had few human inhabitants. The tough sod discouraged farming, and the plains animals were too fleet of foot to provide a dependable supply of food for large numbers of pedestrians. Then the horse gave the Indian the speed and stamina needed to take advantage of the opportunity to harvest the immense quantities of food represented by the buffalo herds of North America and the herds of wild cattle that propagated so rapidly in the grasslands of both Americas. The Indians stopped farming; the work was hard, boring, and unrewarding, compared to the nomadic life. The nomads found life more comfortable and richer than they had ever known before. By 1700 or 1750 the Pehuenches, Puelches, Aucás, Tehuelches, and Ranqueles of Río de la Plata were all in the saddle and ranging the pampas, encouraged and pushed from behind by those Araucanians who had cast aside much of their Andean culture to come down onto the flatlands to exploit the herds.98
In the area of similar topography and climate in North America the impact of the horse came later but was similar. By the late eighteenth century the Great Plains were full of redmen on horseback—the Blackfoot, Arapaho, Cheyenne, Crow, Sioux, Comanche. The Indians of the Great Plains and the pampas, tempted into similar extreme specialization by the horse, even grew to look alike. The pampa Indian lived on horseback from infancy, and his legs grew bowed and awkward. George Catlin's description of the North American plains Indian would do as well for his pampean brother:
A Comanche on his feet is out of his element, and comparatively almost as awkward as a monkey on the ground, without a limb or a branch to cling to; but the moment he lays his hand upon his horse, his face even becomes handsome, and he gracefully flies away like a different being.99
The Indians took up an equestrian life because it was a rich life. The herds of horses were great wealth in themselves, and the meat, hides, bones and sinew of the plains animals to which the horse gave the Indian access improved his diet and added to the materials from which the aboriginal craftsman made articles of utility and beauty. The horse enabled the Indian to kill more animals than he needed for himself and his family, and the surplus could be traded for needles and blankets and firearms and whiskey. When the only beast of burden was the dog, no nomad could be rich. Now all this had changed. The horse enabled the nomad to move much heavier and larger items than ever before. The Blackfoot estimated that a horse could carry four times the burden of a dog twice as far in a day's march. The horse vastly increased the speed with which hunters could move and the distance which they could cover, and thus the area from which they could draw sustenance. The size of the nomadic band could and did grow.100
Increased wealth and larger nomadic units gave rise to greater social stratification: the rich became much richer and the poor only a little richer; and the egalitarianism of poverty began to disappear. The number of slaves increased, for they could be obtained more easily by equestrian warfare. For instance, the Guaná of the Chaco became agricultural slaves to the fierce Mbayá herders and horsemen.101
The increased number of prisoners-of-war came as result of the increased tempo of warfare. The horse immeasurably enhanced the Indian's ability to raid his fellow Indians and the European's frontier. Among some Indians, at least, the presence of the horse tended to make war more sanguinary, as static pedestrian tactics became obsolete and the cavalry charge common. The old stand-off weapons were disgarded in favor of those used in hand-to-hand combat of mounted warriors.102
In the long view of history, the greatest effect of the horse on the Indian was to enhance his ability to resist the advance of Europeans into the interiors of North and South America. Not only did the mounted Indian defend himself effectively, but he was sometimes tempted and often forced by the needs of his rapidly changing culture to raid the rich herds of the whites. The Chichimecs of Mexico were swinging up into the saddle before the end of the sixteenth century; as a result, their power in New Spain was not broken decisively for generations. The Navahos and Apaches were learning to ride and raid Spanish settlements by the last half of the seventeenth century, and were still resisting the white advance at the end of the nineteenth century.103
By 1700 all the plains tribes south of the Platte River and north of the Spanish settlements in Mexico were, to some degree, familiar with the horse. Horses were numerous among the Blackfoot tribes, well north of the Platte, in 1751. Horses with Spanish brands, obtained most likely by raids of the Mexican frontier and then traded from one tribe to another, were seen on the banks of the Saskatchewan River in 1784.104 The Indians of the Great Plains—Sioux, Black-foot, Comanche, Arapaho, Dakota, Crow—were off on horseback on one of the most spectacular adventures that any people has ever known. It lasted three or four generations, ending finally with the destruction of the buffalo herds, the catastrophic wars with the United States Army, and the final occupation of the prairies by the Old World peoples in the last half of the nineteenth century.
The story of the horse and the Indian in the Venezuelan llanos and the grasslands of Brazil was rather different from that in the plains of North America. The climate of these South American regions did not encourage the rapid growth of large herds of horses that could enable the Indian to become an expert mounted fighter before the arrival of the pioneer. The Portuguese slave hunters ran afoul of mounted Indians no later than the mid-seventeenth century, but only deep in the interior in or near Paraguay, and not close to the Portuguese settlements.105
It was only in the southern part of South America that the story of the horse and Indian paralleled that of those two in the North American prairies. As the Spanish and their herds penetrated into what is now Paraguay, the tribes of the Chaco saw their first large domesticated animals. By the middle of the seventeenth century Abipón, Mocoví, Mbayá, and Guaicurú and all were themselves acquiring herds of these animals, of which the horse was the most important. A century and a half later the Chaco was still under the control of bands of Indian cavalry, and was still a place in which no outsider could feel secure. The scarcity of non-Indian population was not entirely due to the unattractive climate; the military capabilities of the mounted aborigines were enough in themselves to discourage colonizers.106
South of the Chaco the first Indians to become horsemen were those of that complex of Chilean tribes called the Araucanians. They were making use of the horse in warfare before 1600, and soon after were plunging through the Andean passes down onto the Río de la Plata grasslands. Before this Araucanian avalanche lost momentum it moved nearly to the gates of Buenos Aires, and its influence was so great that the Araucanian tongue became in time the lingua franca of the Argentine plains.107 The Pehuenches and other pampean tribes soon learned horsemanship from the Araucanians, and by the eighteenth century even the Telhuelche of Patagonia were on horseback.
In 1796 the area of Río de la Plata that was really under European control was no larger than it had been in 1590. Several factors had hampered the Spanish advance: there was no gold or silver to attract colonists, and Spanish mercantilism tended to strangle rather than encourage economic expansion in Argentina. The chief factor was that the Spaniards were hemmed in by troops of mounted warriors, who ravaged the frontier ranches and garrison villages, and then returned to the trackless plains before the Spanish could react.
As the Europeans moved into the interior in the nineteenth century, these mounted tribes were exterminated.108 As in North America, the horse enriched the tribes of the grasslands and enabled them to resist the advance of the whites for a time. Then came the obliteration of those tribes and the advance of the white man.
By 1600 all the most important food plants of the Old World were being cultivated in the Americas. The akee, mango, and breadfruit, foods grown in the Caribbean today, were not brought there until the eighteenth century.109 But aside from these and a few others, the important food plants were probably all growing on the mainland of the New World, or at least in the Antilles, by the time of Cortés's death.
This fact is not merely of antiquarian interest. The Indian slaves could continue to eat Indian foods, and the African slaves could be forced to, or both could be left to eat nothing at all. But the Europeans would come to the New World in great numbers only if a dependable supply familiar, European food was available. In the Americas the Europeans' demand for their own kinds of food was strengthened by social and racial prejudice. To this day the upper classes in wide areas of Mexico consider maize products as the food of Indians, and wheat bread the food of the upper class. Without the successful transportation of European agriculture to the western hemisphere, there would have been an appreciably smaller number of Europeans willing to make the same trip.
But we must give the Indian agriculturalist credit, even if the Spanish colonists did not. Wheat is neither superior nor inferior to maize; each has its advantages and its disadvantages. Among the root crops, the creations of New World horticulture are superior to those of the Old World; a lot more manioc and white and sweet potatoes are grown in Europe, Africa, and Asia than turnips and the types of yams that were indigenous to the eastern hemisphere.
There are many examples of how particular Indian plants are equal or superior to their Old World counterparts, but this would not alter the fact that the immigrant flora did vastly enrich the food-producing potentialities of America. For example, Maize and manioc are amazingly adaptable plants, but neither grows well in swampy soils. In the swamps of the hot lowlands rice produces greater yields than any pre-Columbian grain, and its protein content makes it a more valuable plant than manioc, which has practically none. In addition to rice, the dwellers of the hot, wet lowlands also received bananas, African yams, mangos, and several other food plants from the Old World. At the other American extreme, the mountaineers received wheat, barley, and European broadbeans, which grow at higher altitudes than maize, supplementing the potato and quinoa in the Andes.110
The arrival of Old World plants in the Americas doubled and even tripled the number of cultivatable food plants in the New World. That is important in itself. There is great advantage in having a large variety of food plants, for exactly the same reason that the sensible investor has a number of different investments. If one or a dozen fail, then the loss will be made up by returns from one or a dozen other sources. When blight withers the manioc, rice survives—not because it is a superior plant, but simply because it is a different plant and susceptible to a different set of diseases. When a whirlwind flattens maize before the ears develop, a crop of turnips is safe in its underground niche.
But more important than the plants brought to America by Columbus and his followers are the animals they brought. The Spanish were so active in bringing animals to the New World that all the most important domesticated species had arrived by 1500. What happened to them, especially to the horses and cattle, is a truly spectacular biological success story.
The impact of domesticated animals on the Indian has already been discussed. The impact on the European colonist was, in part, the same as that of the transfer of plants. The fields of America could now provide the colonist with meat as well as vegetables. Livestock as food sources became particularly important in the enormous steppe regions and savannas too dry, too hot, or too wet for crop cultivation. The dominant plant life in those regions was grass. The Indian had no device for turning grass into food for humans. The European had several such devices: cattle, sheep, and goats and the meat and milk they produced are among the most nourishing of all foods. The coming of the Europeans and their animals created a colossal increase in the quantity of animal protein available to man in America. By 1600 one of the cheapest foods in the American colonies was meat; the Spanish-American settlers were probably consuming more meat per man than any other large group of non-nomadic people in the world. In fact, the Europeans in America have only rarely experienced famine and, taking plant and animal foods together, have possibly been the best-fed people in the world, a fact that has motivated more people to migrate to the New World than all the religious and ideological forces combined.
The materials from which to make various tools and utensils—the fibers and hides of the animals—were a tremendous boon to man in the western hemisphere. The alpaca and llama were already providing the Indians with wool in 1492, but only in the Andean highlands. These animals were never as valuable to man in the Americas as sheep became within two or three generations of Columbus's death. The hide, bone, and sinew of cattle probably had no more uses than the hide, bone, and sinew of the large native domesticated animals, but by 1600 there were many more cattle than any native domesticated animal in large sections of America.
Animals also provided the New World with a new source of power. In the whole of the pre-Columbian Americas the only important sources of extrahuman energy were the dog and llama. Windmills and waterwheels were unknown, the dog was small and weak, and the llama was incapable of carrying any burden heavier than about a hundred pounds. The importation of the horse, ass, and ox brought about a revolution in the quantity of power available to man in the New World similar to that which Watt's steam engine brought to late eighteenth-century Europe.
Livestock provided not only much of the muscle with which exploitation of America was undertaken, but was in itself an important end-product of that exploitation, and a factor spurring Europeans to expand the areas being exploited. The importance of mining in the frontier history of the New World is well known, but mining led directly to the development of only a few areas. The agriculturalists did even less than the miners to advance the frontier. The farming frontier is one that almost always moves slowly. The champion European frontiersman of the New World was the cattleman. Again and again, the frontier of European civilization advancing into the interior of the Americas has been that of the cattle industry. This was particularly true in the great grasslands, which had no gold or silver for the miner, and often the wrong amount of rain for the farmer. The European's ability to settle and exploit the grasslands was proportional to his ability to pasture his livestock on them.
The story of Brazil is a case where cattle were crucial to the colonial expansion. Without cattle, there would not have been meat for those who labored to produce the sugar, gold, and diamonds, nor would there have been the power to turn the early sugar mills nor to carry the miners into the interior and their wealth back to the coast. As Caio Prado has put it, “quite apart from its role in the colony's subsistance, the contribution of cattle raising to the opening up and conquest of the Brazilian interior would be enough to place it among the most important chapters of its history.”111
Cattle raising may have been chiefly responsible for the fact that there is one and not two Brazils. There were two separate and distinct Brazils in the sixteenth and early decades of the seventeenth century—one of the sugar millionaires in the northeast and the other of the bandeirantes hundreds of miles to the southwest at São Paulo. The northeast had little interest in the interior, and São Paulo, although famous for its matchless pioneers, raided rather than developed the interior. Then in the seventeenth century the demand for meat, tallow, hides, and beasts of burden persuaded cattlemen of both areas to move into the valley of the São Francisco River, and Portugal's first real penetration of the interior began. By 1700 or so the cattle ranches were so numerous that one could ride 1500 miles through the valley of this huge river and never have to spend a night out-of-doors. The two Brazils had been bound together with thongs of cowhide.112
Of those animals brought to the western hemisphere, the one which most affected sixteenth-century methods of cultivating the soil of the Americas was the ox. This docile, powerful animal could pull a plow through soil which had always been too heavy or too matted with roots for the Indian's digging stick. Regions which, of necessity, had been left fallow now could be put to work producing food. The ox and plow combination enabled a few men to cultivate very large areas of land—extensive cultivation—which became more and more important as the Indian population declined and with it the quantities of foodstuffs produced by the techniques of intensive cultivation.113
Cultivation of the soil with a plow is much more apt to lead to erosion and destruction of the soil than cultivation with a hoe or digging stick. It is quite likely that soil erosion in the New World accelerated after the arrival of the Europeans. As the number of sedentary Indian farmers increased over the centuries in the areas of the high pre-Columbian civilizations, erosion also increased, but not with such rapidity. The Indians did not have the plow and, more important, their animals were rarely so numerous as to destroy the ground cover. The European's animals were an even worse threat to the land than the plow, because the plow usually stayed in comparatively level land, where the danger of erosion was not immediate, but horses, cattle, sheep, and goats climbed the slopes and destroyed the fragile network of plants and their roots just where the danger of erosion was the greatest. Arroyos and barrancas began to scar the slopes, and trees encroached on the denuded savannas, and the weeds and coarser grasses spread in the steppes. The Europeans and their animals changed the rules of the battle for the survival of the fittest.114
Over a period of generations the civilizations of the Americas had accumulated immense treasures of gold and silver, which the conquistadors squandered in a few years. Over the millennia the grasslands of America had been accumulating immense riches in loam, plant and animal life, visible and invisible organisms. The squandering of those riches was already evident in the lifetime of Las Casas. He remarked that there had been a palatable grass, a fine thatch, which he had known as a young man in Española, but which had disappeared—destroyed, he guessed, by the rapidly increasing livestock herds. In the 1570s López de Velasco remarked that the pastures of that island were diminishing in size as the guava trees encroached along their edges. The disappearance of the Arawak farmers, who had worked constantly to keep the jungle out of their gardens, was probably also a factor in this case. By the 1580s overgrazing in Mexico was becoming apparent, and Father Alonso Ponce saw cattle starving in certain areas. Today the presence of large numbers of palmettos or scrub palms in the regions of Mexico where the sheep once grazed in open grasslands is probably due to the fact that the sheep destroyed the other, more palatable plants. Cattle do not crop their grass quite so closely as sheep, but when kept in large herds they have a deleterious affect oft the land. The coastal savanna of Sinaloa was giving way to scrub growth within a century of the fall of Tenochtitlán.115
The history of this phenomenon is best known for Mexico, but there is sufficient evidence to suggest that a similar sequence of events—expansion of livestock herds and then decline in the size and quality of the grasslands—occurred elsewhere, or at least began to occur elsewhere in the Americas in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. The accounts of the earliest colonists indicate that the savannas of Central America today are much smaller than they were during Balboa's lifetime. (Here the decline in Indian population was probably more important than the spread of livestock.) No number of animals could bring the forest to the steppes of Río de la Plata, but in the 1830s Darwin found scores, perhaps hundreds, of square miles of Uruguay impenetrable because they were overgrown with the prickly Old World cardoon (Cynara carduncuus). “I doubt,” he said, “whether any case is on record of an invasion on so grand a scale of one plant over the aborigines.” Usually such invasions are so successful only if the original ecology of the area has been shattered—as, for instance, by widespread overgrazing. As for the llanos, no one claims that they are today what they once were, when the seasonal floods were less violent because the ground cover was still thick enough to keep the water from spilling precipitously into the rivers, and the colts could run for hundreds of miles shoulder-deep in the fresh grass at the end of the wet season.116
The awesome initial increase of the herds lasted only a few score years in any given area. There were many factors which slowed the fantastic increase: indiscriminate slaughter of the livestock by Spaniard and Indian alike; wild dogs, other predators, insects, and pathogenic organisms coming in from elsewhere or adapting themselves to European animals as sources of food and as hosts. But the most important reason is probably this: when the hoarded riches of the grasslands were gone, the increase of the herds halted or proceeded at a pace now more arithmetical than geometrical. Martin Eriques reported from Mexico in 1574 that the “Cattle are no longer increasing rapidly; previously, a cow would drop her first calf within two years, for the land was virgin and there were many fertile pastures. Now a cow does not calve before three or four years.”117
This wild oscillation of the balance of nature happens again whenever an area previously isolated is opened to the rest of the world. But possibly it will never be repeated in as spectacular a fashion as in the Americas in the first post-Columbian century, not unless there is, one day, an exchange of life forms between planets.
1. Bernabé Cobo, Obras, 1: 420.
2. Jean de Léry, Journal de Bord de Jean de Léry, ed. M. R. Mayeux, 52–53; Joseph de Acosta, The Natural and Moral History of the Indies, 1: 233.
3. Acosta, The Natural and Moral History, 169, 232; Juan López de Velasco, Geografía y Descriptión Universidad de las Indias, 39, 40, 47, 98; Gonzalo Fernández Oviedo y Valdés, Natural History of the West Indies, trans. Sterling A. Stoudemire, 15, 17.
4. Caio Prado, Jr., The Colonial Background of Modern Brazil, trans. Suzette Macedo, 191; Samuel Purchas, ed. Hakluytus Posthumus or Purchas His Pilgrimes, 14: 550; López de Velasco, Geografía, 566; Pero de Magalhães, The Histories of Brazil, trans. John B. Stetson, 2: 158–159; André Thevet, The New Founde Worlde, or Antarctike, trans. Thomas Hacket, 92r.
5. Richard Hakluyt, ed., The Principal Navigations, Voyages, Traffiques and Discoveries of the English Nation, 9: 391; Jorge Juan and Antonio de Ulloa, A Voyage to South America, trans. John Adams, 33. The Spanish never learned to like maize as well as did the English of the thirteen colonies: see Peter Kalm, “Peter Kalm's Description of Maize, How It is Planted and Cultivated in North America, Together with the Many Uses of This Crop Plant,” trans. Esther L. Larsen, 3.
6. Marcos Jiménez de la Espada, ed., Relaciones Geograficas de Indias-Perú, 1: 382; Pedro de Cieza de León, The Incas of Pedro de Cieza de León, 271.
7. Percy W. Bidwell and John I. Falconer, History of Agriculture in the Northern United States, 1620–1860, 97–98.
8. Acosta, Natural and Moral History, 1: 265.
9. Christopher Columbus, Journals and Other Documents on the Life of Christopher Columbus, trans. Samuel Eliot Morrison, 143; Ferdinand Columbus, The Life of the Admiral Christopher Columbus by His Son Ferdinand, trans. Benjamin Keen, 127.
10. Purchas, Hakluytus Posthumus, 14: 440; Girolamo Benzoni, History of the New World, trans. W. H. Smyth, 90–91.
11. Oviedo, Natural History, 100, 102; Cobo, Obras, 1: 421.
12. Noel Deerr, The History of Sugar, 1: 115–133; Mervyn Ratekin, “The Early Sugar Industry in Españoła,” 1–14.
13. Cobo, Obras, 1: 405–406; François Chevalier, Land and Society in Colonial Mexico, trans. Alvin Eustis, 74; Antonio Vazquez de Espinosa, Compendium and Description of the West Indies, trans. Charles Upson Clark, 41, 42, 173, 221, 320–321, 323, 338, 390, 455, 471, 497, 553, 597, 601, 613, 621, 643, 683, 688, 731.
14. Deerr, History of Sugar, 1: 102–104.
15. Arthur P. Whitaker, “The Spanish Contribution to American Agriculture,” 4; Hakluyt, Navigations, 9: 357; Chevalier, Land and Society, 50, 51, 59, 60, 61; Charles Gibson, The Aztecs Under Spanish Rule, 322, 324.
16. Cobo, Obras, 1: 407; Emilio Romero, Historia Económica del Perú, 98; Cieza de León, Incas, 18, 42, 97, 317, 350; Purchas, Hakluytus Posthumus, 14: 531.
17. Thomas Gage, A New Survey of the West Indies, 1648, 219–220.
18. Henry Steele Commager and Elmo Giordanetti, eds., Was America a Mistake? An Eighteenth Century Controversy, 30.
19. Purchas, Hakluytus Posthumus, 14: 439.
20. Romero, Historia Económica, 123–125; Acosta, Natural and Moral History, 1: 168, 267; Cieza de León, Incas, 43, Jiménez de la Espada, Relaciones Geograficas, 1: 176, 251, 348, 394, 2: 48, 49, 57, 287, 294–295; Julian H. Steward, ed., Handbook of South American Indians, 2: 356–357.
21. Vazquez de Espinosa, Compendium and Description, 678, 733; Purchas, Hakluytus Posthumus, 14: 539, 546–547; Emilio A. Coni, “La Agriculture, Ganadería e Industrias Hasta el Virreinato,” 4: 364–365.
22. Cobo, Obras, 1: 393–395; Purchas, Hakluytus Posthumus, 14: 464, 522; Vazquez de Espinosa, Compendium and Description, 171, 390, 394, 426–427, 454–455, 471, 495, 503, 512, 518, 520, 727; López de Velasco, Geografía, 516.
23. Edgar Anderson, Plants, Man and Life, 8, 12; Bidwell and Falconer, History of Agriculture, 19–20, 159–160; Henry N. Ridley, The Dispersal of Plants Throughout the World, 638; William L. Thomas, Jr., ed., Man's Role in Changing the Face of the Earth, 730–731.
24. Kalm, “Description of Maize,” 102; Alonso de Zorita, Life and Labor in Ancient Mexico, trans. Benjamin Keen, 251; Charles Gibson, Spain in America, 119; Steward, Handbook, 2: 354, 357, 358; Jiménez de la Espada, Relaciones Georgraficas, 2: 277; Homer Aschmann, “The Head of the Colorado Delta,” 251.
25. Frederick E. Zeuner, A History of Domesticated Animals, 436–439; Carl O. Sauer, The Early Spanish Main, 59, 71, 115.
26. Sauer, The Early Spanish Main, 193–194.
27. Sauer, The Early Spanish Main., 59; F. Columbus, Life of the Admiral, 109; C. Colum bus, Journals, 217.
28. C. Columbus, Journals, 217; F. Columbus, Life of the Ad miral, 209–210; Sauer, Early Spanish Main, 189.
29. F. Columbus, Life of the Admiral, 194; Jiménez de la Espada, ed., Relaciones Geograficas, 1: 11.
30. Alan Burns, History of the British West Indies, 292; Clarence H. Haring, The Buccaneers in the West Indies in the XVIII Century, 57.
31. Cobo, Obras, 1: 382; Jiménez de la Espada, Relaciones Geograficas, 1: 11; Oviedo, Natural History, 10–11.
32. Hakluyt, Navigations, 11: 238; Purchas, Hakluytus Posthumus, 14: 454; Vazquez de Espinosa, Compendium and Description, 119; John J. Johnson, “The Introduction of the Horse Into the Western Hemisphere,” 600.
33. Quoted in Richard J. Morrisey, “Colonial Agriculture in New Spain,” 26.
34. Sauer, Early Spanish Main, 189; Bidwell and Falconer, History of Agriculture, 31. A similar story can be told of the English swine in seventeenth-century New England.
35. Quoted in Madaline W. Nichols, “The Spanish Horse of the Pampas,” 125.
36. Hakluyt, Navigations, 8: 63; Purchas, Hakluytus Posthumus, 19: 23; Bryan Edwards, The History, Civil and Commercial, of the British West Indies, 317; Burns, History of the British West Indies, 115.
37. Sauer, Early Spanish Main, 189; Frederick W. Hodge and Theodore H. Lewis, eds., Spanish Explorers in the Southern United States, 1528–1543, 171, 235; John J. Johnson, “The Spanish Horse in Peru Before 1550,” 32.
38. Chevalier, Land and Society, 84–85; Cobo, Obras, 1: 385; Benzoni, History of the New World, 252; Romero, Historia Económica, 98–99.
39. Purchas, Hakluytus Posthumus, 14: 500.
40. Prado, Modern Brazil, 231–232; Cobo, Obras, 1: 386; Vazquez de Espinosa, Compendium and Description, 20, 118, 746; Oviedo, Natural History, 50; Ramon Paez, Wild Scenes of South America or, Life in the Llanos of Venezuela, 143; Acosta, Natural and Moral History, 1: 16.
41. Charles J. Bishko, “The Peninsular Background of Latin-American Cattle Ranching,” 507.
42. The Moors taught the Spanish more than a little about horses: Garcilaso de la Vega recorded that Peru was won a la gineta, which is to say, by men riding with short stirrups in the style of the Muslims. Quoted in R. B. Cunningham Graham, The Horses of the Conquest, 18.
43. Johnson, “Introduction of the Horse,” 589.
44. Johnson, “Introduction of the Horse,” 589, 592, 593, 594, 597–598.
45. C. Columbus, Journals, 241; F. Columbus, Life of the Ad miral, 129; Johnson, “Introduction of the Horse,” 599; Cobo, Obras, 1: 379.
46. Graham, Horses, 55ff, 68; Johnson, Greater America, 27.
47. Cobo, Obras, 1: 382.
48. Graham, Conquest, 136; López de Velasco, Geografía, 138–148; Antonio de Herrera Tordesillas, Historia General de los Hechos de los Castellanos en las Islas y Tierra Firme del mar Océano, l: 42ff. The evidence of the last two sources is strictly negative.
49. Chevalier, Land and Society, 85, 94; J. Frank Dobie, The Mustangs, 96; Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra, Don Quixote, trans. Samuel Putman, 571.
50. Dobie, The Mustangs, 96, 100, 108; Gibson, Spain in America, 192–193.
51. Purchas, Hakluytus Posthumus, 14: 500; Magalhães, Brazil, 2: 150.
52. Johnson, “Spanish Horse in Peru,” 25, 33; Cobo, Obras, 1: 382.
53. López de Velasco, Geografía, 516, 531–532; Cobo, Obras, 1: 382; Vazquez de Espinosa, Compendium and Description, 675; Coni, “La Agricultura,” 4: 360; Julio V. González, Historia Argentina, vol. 1, La Era Colonial, 127; Harris Warren, Paraguay, An Informal History, 77, 127–128.
54. Herrera, Historia General, 1: 183; Nichols, “Spanish Horse,” 119–129.
55. Vazquez de Espinosa, Compendium and Description, 675, 694; Hakluyt, Navigations, 11: 253.
56. Cobo, Obras, 1: 382.
57. Hakluyt, Navigations, 9: 357.
58. Chevalier, Land and Society, 107; Cobo, Obras, 1: 383; Vazquez de Espinosa, Compendium and Description, 625.
59. Bishko, “Peninsular Background,” 494, 497–498.
60. Bishko, “Peninsular Background,” 500; Oviedo, Natural History, 11; Acosta, Natural and Moral History, 1: 62–63, 271; Ratekin, “Early Sugar Industry,” 13. See also Benzoni, History of the New World, 92; López de Velasco, Geografía, 98, 111, 120, 127, 137; Purchas, Hakluytus Posthumus, 14: 440, 16: 91; Vazquez de Espinosa, Compendium and Description, 41, 47; Hakluyt, Navigations, 11: 239; Morrisey, “Colonial Agriculture,” 25; Dolores Mendez Nadal and Hugo W. Alberts, “The Early History of Livestock and Pastures in Puerto Rico,” 61–64.
61. Donald D. Brand, “The Early History of the Range Cattle Business in Northern Mexico,” 132–133; Chevalier, Land and Society, 85, 92; Hakluyt, Navigations, 9: 361–362.
62. Chevalier, Land and Society, 63, 92, 93, 94; Brand, “Range Cattle Industry,” 134.
63. Acosta, Natural and Moral History, 1: 271.
64. J. Frank Dobie, “The First Cattle in Texas and the Southwest Progenitors of the Longhorns,” 181–182.
65. J. H. Parry and P. M. Sherlock, A Short History of the West Indies, 86; Vazquez de Espinosa, Compendium and Description, 244, 314; López de Velasco, Geografía, 358; Purchas, Haklutus Posthumus, 14: 487, 490, 494.
66. Taylor M. Harrell, “The Development of the Venezuelan Llanos in the Sixteenth Century,” 1–5, 59, 65, 70, 72, 162, 168, 172–172, 197; C. Langdon White, “Cattle Raising: A Way of Life in the Venezuelan Llanos,” 123.
67. Paez, Wild Scenes, 74ff, 280; Alexander Walker, Columbia: Being a Geographical, Statistical, Agricultural, Commercial and Po litical Account of that Country, 2: 154–156; Purchas, Hakluytus Posthumus, 14: 455; Vazquez de Espinosa, Compendium and Description, 91; Eduardo Arcila Farias, Económica Colonial de Venezuela, 77–78.
68. Rollie E. Poppino, “Cattle Industry in Colonial Brazil,” 219– 226; Magalhães, Histories, 2: 150; Purchas, Hakluytus Posthumus, 16: 500.
69. Oviedo, Natural History, 79; Carl L. Johannessen, Savannas of Interior Honduras, 36–37; López de Velasco, Geografía, 350, 359, 383; Purchas, Hakluytus Posthumus, 14: 498; Vazquez de Es pinosa, Compendium and Description, 205, 220–221, 227, 351, 376, 633, 644; Romero, Historia Económica, 99, 118; Jiménez de la Espada, ed., Relaciones Geograficas, 2: 213.
70. López de Velasco, Geografía, 516–533; Vazquez de Espinosa, Compendium and Description, 733.
71. Vazquez de Espinosa, Compendium and Description, 647, 675, 690; González, Historia Argentina, 1: 131–133.
72. Vazquez de Espinosa, Compendium and Description, 691; Ricardo Levene, A History of Argentina, trans. William S. Robertson, 117.
73. Cobo, Obras, 1: 386; López de Velasco, Geografía, 20. Also see Bidwell and Falconer, History of Agriculture, 28, for a similar analysis of the early history of sheep in New England.
74. Chevalier, Land and Society, 107; Juan and de Ulloa, Voyage, 223; Vazquez de Espinosa, Compendium and Description, 541.
75. Vazquez de Espinosa, Compendium and Description, 133, 135, 136, 173, 363, 368, 393, 400, 475, 491, 493, 616, 732, 746; William H. Dusenberry, “Woolen Manufacture in Sixteenth-Century New Spain,” 223–234.
76. Edward N. Wentworth, America's Sheep Trails, 23; Dusenberry, “Woolen Manufacture,” 223; Whitaker, “Spanish Contribu tion,” 4–5.
77. Morrisey, “Colonial Agriculture,” 27; Purchas, Hakluytus Posthumus, 14: 469; Chevalier, Land and Society, 95; Dobie, “Cattle in Texas,” 173.
78. Cobo, Obras, 1: 386; Jiménez de la Espada, Relaciones Geograficas, 2: 213.
79. Romero, Historia Económica, 117; Cobo, Obras, 1: 367.
80. Romero, Historia Económica, 118; Cobo, Obras, 1: 387; Pur chas, Hakluytus Posthumus, 14: 533; López de Velasco, Geografía, 20; Acosta, Natural and Moral History, 1: 270.
81. Vazquez de Espinosa, Compendium and Description, 733; Magalhães, Histories, 2: 150; Purchas, Hakluytus Posthumus, 16: 500; Prado, Colonial History, 232; Carlos Pereyra, La Obra de España en America, 171.
82. Oviedo, Natural History, 11; López de Velasco, Geografía, 20–21; Acosta, Natural and Moral History, 1: 272; Vazquez de Es pinosa, Compendium and Description, 667; Cobo, Obras, 1: 388–389; Purchas, Hakluytus Posthumus, 16: 92.
83. Vazquez de Espinosa, Compendium and Description, 49, 117–118, 396, 530, 727, 733, 748; Oviedo, Natural History, 11; Cobo, Obras, 1: 387–388, 390; Charles Darwin, The Voyage of the Beagle, 120.
84. Cobo, Obras, 1: 390–391, 420; Purchas, Hakluytus Posthumus, 16: 500–501; F. Columbus, Life of the Admiral, 234; Benzoni, History of the New World, 252; Steward, Handbook, 6: 394; Sauer, Early Spanish Main, 212.
85. Cobo, Obras, 384; Hakluyt, Navigations, 9: 390–391; Acosta, Natural and Moral History, 1: 272; Vazquez de Espinosa, Com pendium and Description, 678; George Laycock, The Alien Animals, 149–154. It may be of interest to the reader to know that many still are wild. As of 1957 about 13,000 wild burros existed in the United States.
86. Acosta, Natural and Moral History, 1: 272; Cobo, Obras, 1: 420–421; Frank Lammons, “Operation Camel, An Experiment in Animal Transportation, 1857–1860,” 20–50.
87. Vazquez de Espinosa, Compendium and Description, 339; “Rats,” Encyclopaedia Britannica, 18: 989–990; Hans Zinsser, Rats, Lice and History, 141–158.
88. Cobo, Obras, 1: 350–351.
89. Purchas, Hakluytus Posthumus, 19: 180–182.
90. Herrera, Historia General, 2: 34–35.
91. Cobo, Obras, 1: 383; Gibson, Aztecs Under Spanish Rule, 345–346; Gibson, Spain in America, 193–194.
92. Lesley Byrd Simpson, Exploitation of Land in Central Mexico in the Sixteenth Century, frontispiece; Chevalier, Land and Society, 94; Zorita, Life and Labor, 9, 109, 268–271; Steward, Handbook, 2: 23.
93. Steward, Handbook, 1: 265; Gibson, Spain in America, 194.
94. Gibson, Spain in America, 193; Steward, Handbook, 1: 192; González, Historia Argentina, 1: 69–70; Vazquez de Espinosa, Com pendium and Description, 647.
95. López de Velasco, Geografía, 148; Steward, Handbook, 4: 20, 369, 371; Gustaf Bolinder, Indians on Horseback, 42, 94.
96. Bolinder, Indians, 26; Walker, Columbia, 1: 545–551.
97. Steward, Handbook, 2: 427; Robert M. Denhardt, “The Role of the Horse in the Social History of Early California,” 17; Dobie, Mustangs, 25.
98. González, Historia Argentina, 1: 68–70; Steward, Handbook, 1: 250, 2: 756, 763–764; Alfred J. Tapson, “Indian Warfare on the Pampa During the Colonial Period,” 5.
99. Ruth M. Underhill, Red Man's America, 153; Tapson, “Indian Warfare,” 5; Walter P. Webb, The Great Plains, 65.
100. John C. Ewers, The Horse in Blackfoot Indian Culture with Comparative Material from Other Western Tribes, 308.
101. Steward, Handbook, 1: 203.
102. Ewers, Horse in Blackfoot Indian Culture, 109–110; Clark Wissler, “The Influence of the Horse in the Development of Plains Culture,” 17.
103. Chevalier, Land and Society, 103; Harold E. Driver, ed., The Americas on the Eve of Discovery, 19; Jack D. Forbes, Apache, Navaho and Spaniard, 167, 191; Edward H. Spicer, Cycles of Con quest, 547; Ewers, Horse in Blackfoot Indian Culture, 3.
104. Ewers, Horse in Blackfoot Indian Culture, 4, Wissler, “Influ ence of the Horse,” 5–6.
105. Richard M. Morse, ed., The Bandeirantes, 110.
106. Steward, Handbook, 1: 201–203, 312; Tadeo Haenke, Viaje For el Virreinato del Río de la Plata, 57; R. B. Cunningham Graham, Conquest of the River Plate, 127.
107. Steward, Handbook, 2: 764.
108. Tapson, “Indian Warfare” 1, 5, 11; Steward, Handbook, 1: 14–15, 139; 2: 763–764; Nichols, “Spanish Horse,” 129.
109. Parry and Sherlock, West Indies, 148–149. It was the need for a fast growing plant that would produce food in quantity for slaves of the British West Indian plantations that sent Captain Bligh and H.M.S. Bounty off to Tahiti to collect breadfruit plants in 1787.
110. Food Composition Tables for Internation Use: Food and Agricultural Organization Nutritional Studies No. 3, 9, 10; Steward, Handbook, 2: 54, 356.
111. Prado, Colonial Background, 214.
112. Poppino, “Cattle Industry,” 246.
113. Morrisey, “Colonial Agriculture,” 24.
114. Johannessen, Savannas, 109–111; Harrell, “Venezuelan Llanos,” 24; Sauer, Early Spanish Main, 287–288.
115. Sauer, Early Spanish Main, 156; López de Velasco, Geografía, 98; Simpson, Exploitation of Land, 22–23; Brand, “Range Cattle Industry,” 138. Also see Sherburne F. Cook, The Historical Demog raphy and Ecology of Teotlalpán and Soil Erosion and Population in Central Mexico.
116. Sauer, Early Spanish Main, 285–288; Johannessen, Savannas, 109–111; White, “Cattle Raising,” 127–128; Darwin, Voyage of the Beagle, 119–120.
117. Chevalier, Land and Society, 102, 104–105. See also Mendez Nadal and Alberts, “Livestock and Pastures,” 62.