6
The Columbian exchange continues and will continue. The men of the Old World continue to enjoy the benefits of biological warfare as American Indians continue to die of Old World diseases. Between 1871 and 1947, the total number of natives of Tierra del Fuego dropped from between 7,000 and 9,000 to 150, many of them victims of a malady which is even now one of the chief killers of the aborigines of the Chaco: measles.1
Most of the really devastating killers among the diseases crossed the oceans to the New World in the first post-Columbian century, but the migration of sicknesses has, of course, never stopped. The arrivals of cholera epidemics, with their high mortality rates, were among the most awesome events of the nineteenth century in America. The African anopheles mosquitos, which arrived in Brazil about 1929, did not initiate the spread of malaria in America—it had existed in the New World for several centuries, at least—but they could breed in conditions under which American mosquitos could not. Hundreds of thousands of humans fell sick and about 20,000 died before these immigrant insects were eliminated.2
Most of the diseases native to the New World have proved to be inexportable. Verruga Peruana, which sickened the comrades of Pizarro and still takes its toll, is a disease whose most notable symptom is great warts or ulcers. This malady “of granulomatous erruption” is, fortunately for the rest of the world, still confined to Peru, Colombia, and Ecuador. Oroya fever strikes down the healthy in Peru, Ecuador, Bolivia, Colombia, Chile, and probably Guatemala, but has never established a beachhead in the Old World. Rocky Mountain spotted fever stays on its own side of the Atlantic. Pinta, probably the cause of the strange complexions of Moctezuma's servants whom Cortes called “tiger men,” never has crossed oceans—never has, that is, unless we consider it as just another form of treponematosis.3
The one disease—if we can call it that—which experts agree is American in origin and which has laid thousands low in the Old World is that ailment caused by the sandflea or chigger of the tropics. Oviedo's description of its depredations is as accurate for America or Africa (where the insect appeared about 1872) today as it was for Española four hundred years ago. He recorded that the chigger
penetrates the skin of the feet and forms a pocket as large as a chickpea between the skin and the flesh. It swells with nits, which are the eggs which the insect deposits. If it is not taken out in time the niguas (for that is the name of this small animal) grow and increase so that the men are so severely affected that they are crippled and remain lame forever.4
The chief danger from this insect is that the site in which its eggs are deposited will become an avenue for really dangerous infection. The nigua has often served as a pathfinder for tetanus.5
But the chigger is no maker of history like the tsetse fly or the anopheles mosquito. The most important pathological organism that America ever exported is probably the Treponema pallidum. It has spread everywhere since the fifteenth century, and the wounds it inflicts upon society suppurate beneath the cosmetic of hypocrisy. Among its victims have been men whose physical health or lack of it has shaped our history and culture. Saint-Simon's Mémoires inform us that Louis XIV's celebrated general, the Duc de Vendôme, had syphilis. Guy de Maupassant and Friederich Nietzsche, both of whom died insane, were probably syphilitics.6
Finally, in the mid-twentieth century a way to cure syphilis quickly and thus limit its spread was discovered: penicillin. It was hoped that the widespread use of penicillin would soon wipe out the disease completely, but, instead, the effectiveness of the medication has led to overconfidence. A drop in the number of syphilitics in the 1950s has been followed by a resurgence of the disease. In 1964 in England and Wales, for instance, syphilis was second only to tuberculosis as a cause of death among the infectious diseases.7
The other set of biological exchanges initiated by the Columbian voyages consisted of life forms visible to the naked eye, ranging from pumpkins to water buffalo. The results of this exchange—from the human viewpoint—have been mixed. Pumpkins, for instance, are eaten with pleasure by millions of the Old World's people, and the Vrat Kaumudi of India recommends the worship of this fruit. The water buffalo, introduced into the lower Amazon region in the hope that it would prove as valuable a beast of burden as in Asia, has rather become a dangerous wild animal.8
The exchange of plants and animals between the hemispheres goes on continually. The transfer of organisms which conduct themselves in a manner contrary to the interests of man is naturally better recorded than the stories of helpful migrants. According to tradition, that enemy of American wheat, the Hessian Fly, arrived with the Hessians during the American Revolution. The starling and English sparrow have dispossessed millions of American birds and swept across North America. The carp, first succesfully introduced into America in 1877, has spread explosively, driving native American fish and water fowl out of many ponds, lakes, and rivers. Importations, intentional and unintentional, have made it possible for the twentieth-century American to be trampled by Barbary sheep in New Mexico and gored by Russian hogs in North Carolina. If he sits at home, he can watch his flowers succumb to Japanese beetles and his trees to the Dutch elm disease and the chestnut tree fungus mentioned in Chapter 4. All of these, excepting only the Hessian fly, have arrived in the New World well within the last century.9
The results of biological transfers from the eastern to western hemispheres are, then, mixed at best. The ecology of vast areas of the Americas has been changed by the arrival and propagation of Old World life forms. Native animals, such as the bighorn sheep, which once roamed over huge areas, have been destroyed or driven back into the mountains, where they gaze down on the enormous herds of horses and cattle, which have usurped their ancient homes. In thousands and thousands of square miles of the Americas, the indigenous plants have been eliminated completely or restricted to uncultivated strips along the side of roads; and sugar, coffee, bananas, wheat, barley, and rye occupy the greater part of the land. The positive result has been an enormous increase in food production and, thereby, in human population. The negative results have been the destruction of ecological stability over enormous areas and an increase of erosion that is so great that it amounts to a crime against posterity. The Spaniards initiated the process, and it is perhaps significant that many Spanish-American words adopted into the Anglo-American vocabulary have to do with domesticated animals or erosion: bronco, lariat, chaps, bukaroo, arroyo, and barranca, to name a few.
The New World has few valuable animals to offer the Old. The turkey, guinea pig, and Muscovy duck crossed the Atlantic very early. The muskrat was purposely introduced into Europe in 1905 in hopes of profits to be gained from its pelts and spread so quickly that by 1917 Europeans were trying to bring it under control. Most Europeans agree that its importation was a mistake.10
Of valueless animals the New World has supplied the Old with plenty. For instance, North American gray squirrels have nearly driven Britain's red squirrels right off the island in the last seventy years. In the 1860s, an American vine aphid nearly destroyed the French wine industry, which was saved only by grafting European vines onto American root-stock resistant to that aphid. The Colorado potato beetle followed the white potato across the Atlantic about 1920 and by 1955 had advanced as far east as Russia.11
It is in plants that America has made its really positive contribution to the Old World. There were American plants, which the European wished he had never seen, such as the Canadian water weed that choked British waterways in the middle of the last century, but the food plants developed by the American Indian proved to be an enormously valuable acquisition for the Old World farmer. The dependence of Old World peoples on American crops in some instances may even be increasing today. For instance, the dependence on the sweet potato has undoubtedly increased in China since World War II. During the “Great Leap Forward” of the late 1950s, the intention of China's leaders was—and still may be—to have this root satisfy 20 to 30 percent of China's dietary needs.12
The most obvious element in the Columbian exchange—at least from the human viewpoint—is the last to be dealt with in this book: people. Few, very few, aborigines of the New World have crossed the Atlantic to colonize in the Old World, but aborigines of Europe and Africa have crossed by the tens of millions to found nations in the regions of America where their pioneers had done the heroic work of bringing diseases to destroy or reduce the resistance of the native Americans. Indeed, the Euro- and Afro-Americans now often consider themselves to be the natives of those nations, and the Indians to be the aliens.
The source of the earliest mass migration of Old World peoples to the New World was not Europe, despite the impression that history textbooks give. The mass of African immigrants arrived in America before the mass of Europeans. With perhaps millions of Native Americans succumbing to cold steel, the musketball, whiskey, and disease in the sixteenth, seventeenth, and eighteenth centuries, especially in the coastal regions, European exploitation of America was slowed by the shortage of servants and slaves. Europeans could not or would not offer themselves in sufficient numbers to make up this shortage, and so the white conquistadors and plantation masters and merchant princes turned to Africa. The shortage of labor was most pressing in the islands and littoral of tropical America, where the swords and maladies of the Old World had made the cleanest sweep of the aborigines and where the profits to be made from the mass production of tobacco, rice, indigo, coffee, and especially sugar were potentially the greatest. Almost 90 percent of the Africans who were torn from their homes to serve as slaves in America were brought to the tropics of the New World, 38 percent to Brazil and 42 percent to the Antilles alone. The total number brought to America probably falls between 8 million and 10.5 million, and almost all of these had arrived by 1850. In 1950 their descendants, both of pure and part African ancestry, numbered at least 47 million, as compared with the entire African population, Caucasians and Asians included, of 198 million.13
The migration of masses of aborigines from Europe to America is an event of no more than the last century and a half. The port officials of Seville recorded only 150,000 people embarking for the New World from 1509 to 1740, and, while this is a serious underestimation of the numbers of Spaniards who made that choice, it does suggest that relatively few did. In the seventeenth century only a quarter million left the British Isles for America, and, in the eighteenth century, only a million and a half. Germany sent only 200,000 before 1800, and other European countries even fewer.14 Despite interbreeding with the Indians and Afro-Americans and despite what were sometimes fantastically high birth rates, these few people would have never filled up the regions vacated by the Indians if they had not been aided by the multitudes that have followed them since.
In the nineteenth century, news that the American settlements were now more than beachheads and that American land was good and cheap spread throughout Europe. The spacious and dependable steamship replaced the cramped and undependable sailing ship. Population pressure in rural Europe made it more and more difficult to obtain even a small plot of ground, and the early industrial revolution made wages low and unemployment frequent in her cities. The greatest transoceanic migration in all human history began, at first a freshet in the 1830s and then a torrent of Englishmen, Scots, Irishmen, Germans, Swedes, Poles, Spaniards, Portuguese, Czechs, Italians, and Russians, Protestants, Catholics, and Jews crossing the Atlantic to fill in the lands left vacant by the Indians or defined as vacant by the ethnocentric immigrants. From 1851 to 1960, over 61 million Europeans migrated to continents other than that of their birth.15 The great bulk of these men and women, 45 million by 1924, migrated to the Americas. Of these 45 million, the majority, about 34 million, chose the United States of America as their new home. Those who went to Latin America went chiefly to Argentina and Brazil, the total to Argentina between 1850 and 1940 approaching 7 million and the total to Brazil from 1821 to 1945 about 4.5 million. Non-American recipients of European immigrants, like Australia and South Africa, lagged far behind.16
In 1930 about 20 million people born in Europe were living in other continents: nearly 14 million in North America—12 million in the United States and most of the remainder in Canada—and about 5 million in Latin America, chiefly Argentina and Brazil. And the migration to the New World continues. Between 1946 and 1957 Europe lost 5.4 million emigrants and the Americas gained 4.4 million immigrants.18
As of the 1950s the population of the United States was over 85 percent of European ancestry, and the corresponding percentage for Brazil was 42, for Chile 46, for Uruguay 96, and for Argentina 99.19 There are two Europes, as there are two Africas: one on either side of the Atlantic. The European and African in America are the most blatant products of the Columbian exchange.
The effects of the transatlantic crossing of Old World emigrants, along with their agricultures and industries, has been, of course, enormous, and whole legions of historians have devoted their careers to tracing those influences. We will only briefly note a few of those influences.
All the populations of all the continents have increased in the last two hundred years, but Europe's has increased fastest, from 19 or 20 percent of the world's population in 1750 to 23 percent in 1850. In 1960 the proportion was still 21 percent.20 This relative increase over the last two centuries must have played a role in enabling the expansion of the area of the world settled by Europeans from no more than 22 percent in 1750 to a peak figure of 36 percent in 1950.21
Why did Europeans gain in number relative to Asians and Americans? Because they made fuller use of American crops? Probably not. Because of more efficient government, better sanitation, and other advantages? Probably so. Certainly the removal of more than 50 millions across the Atlantic must have done a great deal to lessen population pressure on the resources of the continent of their birth and, thus, to encourage population growth there. And certainly the export of Europeans and Africans to America helped to bring a manifold return on European investments in the New World, and by thus lessening the burden of poverty, to encourage an increase in marriages and births.
TABLE 4
INTERCONTINENTAL MIGRATION, SELECTED COUNTRIES AND PERIODS17
Emigration
| Country of Emigration | Period | Number of Emigrants |
| Austria and Hungary | 1846–1932 | 5,196,000 |
| Belgium | 1846–1932 | 193,000 |
| British Isles | 1846–1932 | 18,020,000 |
| Denmark | 1846–1932 | 387,000 |
| Finland | 1871–1932 | 371,000 |
| France | 1846–1932 | 519,000 |
| Germany | 1846–1932 | 4,889,000 |
| Holland | 1846–1932 | 224,000 |
| Italy | 1846–1932 | 10,092,000 |
| Norway | 1846–1932 | 854,000 |
| Poland | 1920–1932 | 642,000 |
| Portugal | 1846–1932 | 1,805,000 |
| Russia | 1846–1924 | 2,253,000 |
| Spain | 1846–1932 | 4,653,000 |
| Sweden | 1846–1932 | 1,203,000 |
| Switzerland | 1846–1932 | 332,000 |
Immigration
| Country of Immigration | Period | Number of Immigrants |
| Argentina | 1856–1932 | 6,405,000 |
| Australia | 1861–1932 | 2,913,000 |
| Brazil | 1821–1932 | 4,431,000 |
| British West Indies | 1836–1932 | 1,587,000 |
| Canada | 1821–1932 | 5,206,000 |
| Cuba | 1901–1932 | 857,000 |
| Mexico | 1911–1931 | 226,000 |
| New Zealand | 1851–1932 | 594,000 |
| South Africa | 1881–1932 | 852,000 |
| United States | 1821–1932 | 34,244,000 |
| Uruguay | 1836–1932 | 713,000 |
An admittedly extreme example of what Europeans and Africans working in America to enrich Europe could mean in terms of wealth streaming back to Europe is the following: between 1714 and 1773, Britain imported £101,264,818 worth of goods, mostly sugar, from her West Indian colonies—20.5 percent of her total imports for that period—much of which was re-exported, at profit, to the continent. A contemporary estimated that every Englishman driving slaves in the cane fields brought twenty times greater clear profit to England than a similar person in the home country.22
The emigration of masses of Europeans to America created giant markets for European manufacturers and, thus, a return of enormous profits to Europe. Even if we select only those American nations whose citizens are most nearly completely European in ancestry, and exclude such nations as Brazil, which has millions of European ancestry, we discover that Euro-Americans make up an immense market for European exports. To illustrate, the United States, Canada, and Argentina received 17 percent of Great Britain's exports in 1860 and 21 percent in 1960. Britain, of course, provides extreme examples of the sort we are looking for, because she has been so long one of the greatest manufacturing and trading nations in the world. But even France, which has lagged behind her rival across the Channel in these categories, sent 11 percent of her exports to the United States in 1860 and 6 percent in 1960.23
There are, of course, a thousand other ways in which America has been a device for making capital for Europe, but that is a subject for another book. We have indicated the truth of the claim that the Columbian exchange has created markets for Europe without which she would have been and would be now a very different and a much poorer region of the earth, and poverty a palpably heavier burden on the connubial propensities of young adults.
This book must end on a note of pessimism for we have tried to take the long view and, at least to some extent, the view of the historian of life rather than that of human institutions. The long-range biological effects of the Columbian exchange are not encouraging.
If one values all forms of life and not just the life of one's own species, then one must be concerned with the genetic pool, the total potential of all living things to produce descendants of various shapes, sizes, colors, internal structures, defenses against both multicellular and unicellular enemies, maximum fertility, and, to speak generally, maximum ability to produce offspring with maximum adaptive possibilities. The genetic pool is usually expanded when continents join. As plants and creatures move into virgin territory, the adaptations to new environments of those who survive the increased competition produce new types and even many new species. Paleontologists and comparative zoologists call the event “explosive evolution,” meaning that it often only takes a few million years.24 This is what normally would have happened and would be happening after the joining of the Old and New Worlds in 1492—but for man.
Not for half a billion years, at least, and probably for long before that, has an extreme or permanent physical change affected the whole earth. The single exception to this generality may be European man and his technologies, agricultural and industrial. He has spread all over the globe, and non-European peoples have adopted his techniques in all but the smallest islets. His effect is comparable to an increase in the influx of cosmic rays or the raising of whole new chains of Andes and Himalayas.
The Columbian exchange has included man, and he has changed the Old and New Worlds sometimes inadvertently, sometimes intentionally, often brutally. It is possible that he and the plants and animals he brings with him have caused the extinction of more species of life forms in the last four hundred years than the usual processes of evolution might kill off in a million. Man kills faster than the pace of evolution: there has been no million years since Columbus for evolution to devise a replacement for the passenger pigeon. No one can remember what the pre-Columbian flora of the Antilles was like, and the trumpeter swan and the buffalo and a hundred other species have been reduced to such small numbers that a mere twitch of a change in ecology or man's wishes can eliminate them. The flora and fauna of the Old and especially of the New World have been reduced and specialized by man. Specialization almost always narrows the possibilities for future changes: for the sake of present convenience, we loot the future.25
The Columbian exchange has left us with not a richer but a more impoverished genetic pool. We, all of the life on this planet, are the less for Columbus, and the impoverishment will increase.
1. Jehan Vellard, “Causas Biologicas de la Desaparición de los Indios Americanos,” 83 and passim.
2. Charles S. Elton, The Ecology of Invasions by Animals and Plants, 20.
3. William H. Prescott, History of the Conquest of Mexico and the History of the Conquest of Peru, 894; Philip H. Manson-Bahr, Manson's Tropical Diseases, 181, 184; Alfonso Elizondo Langagne, “Program for the Eradication of Pinta (Spotted Sickness) in Mexico,” 172.
4. Gonzalo Fernández Oviedo y Valdés, Natural History of the West Indies, trans. Sterling A. Stoudemire, 23. See also Fray Bartolomé de Las Casas, Historia de las Indias, 5: 349; Luis L. Dominguez, ed., The Conquest of the River Plate, 1535–1555, 74; François Pyrard, The Voyage of François Pyrard of Laval to the East Indies, the Maldives, the Moluccas and Brazil, trans. Albert Gray, 319; Hans Staden, Hans Staden: The True History of His Captivity, trans. Malcolm Letts, 166.
5. Manson-Bahr, Tropical Diseases, 622–623.
6. J. D. Rolleston, “Syphilis in Saint-Simon's Mémoires,” 183; Guy de Maupassant, The Portable Maupassant, ed. Lewis Galantière, 21; H. A. Reyburn, H. E. Hinderks, and J. G. Taylor, Nietzsche, The Story of a Human Philosopher, 497–498. A good place to begin a search for other great men with syphilis is in Judson B. Gilbert and Gordon E. Mestler, Disease and Destiny, a bibliographical guide to medical references to famous figures of history.
7. R. S. Morton, Venereal Diseases, 38–44.
8. Julian H. Steward, ed., Handbook of South American Indians, 6: 424; George A. Watt, A Dictionary of Economic Products of India, 1: 286, 2: 639.
9. George Laycock, The Alien Animals, 10, 13, 28–45, 47, 51, 61–62, 75, 83, 110–117, 162–170.
10. Ibid., 95–100.
11. Ibid., 91, 93; Elton, Ecology of Invasions, 59; Carl Lindroth, The Faunal Connections Between Europe and North America, 136.
12. Iago Galdston, ed., Human Nutrition, Historic and Scientific, 74.
13. Philip D. Curtin, The African Slave Trade, A Census, 87–91, 265–266.
14. Brinley Thomas, “Migration, Economic Aspects,” 293.
15. I realize that an appreciable number of the 61 million eventually returned to Europe, but those who did had usually spent at least several years outside of Europe, and I feel that it is no more necessary to subtract them than I feel it necessary to subtract those who emigrated and then died within five or ten years.
16. B. Thomas, “Migration,” 296; William Woodruff, Impact of Western Man, A Study of Europe's Role in the World Economy, 1750–1960, 106; Population Division, Department of Social Affairs, United Nations, The Determinants and Consequences of Population Trends, 101–103.
17. B. Thomas, “Migration,” 294.
18. B. Thomas, “Migration,” 295; United Nations, Determinants and Consequences of Population Trends, 101.
19. Woodruff, Impact of Western Man, 112; United States, Bureau of the Census, Department of Commerce, Pocket Data Book, 1969, 36–49.
20. These percentages include Asian Russians, a relatively insignificant number.
21. Woodruff, Impact of Western Man, 103.
22. Eric Williams, Capitalism and Slavery, 52–53, 225.
23. Woodruff, Impact of Western Man, Tables VII/14 and VII/16.
24. George Gaylord Simpson, The Geography of Evolution, 7.
25. George Gaylord Simpson, The Meaning of Evolution, A Study of the History of Life and of its Significance for Man, 194–195, 249.