Columbian Exchange The Christopher Columbus

Published Date: 02 Nov 2017

Christopher Columbus was a voyager, guide, and colonist, was born in Republic of Genoa. As he started his journey he completed his four voyages including first journey to the Canary Islands in the Atlantic Ocean off the coast of Africa, Bahamas, Cuba, Hispaniola and Spain, then second voyage was the exploration of Caribbean sea and Hispaniola and Haiti then the third voyage was to verify the existence of a continent that King John II of Portugal claimed was located to the southwest of the Cape Verde Islands and Portuguese Porto Santo Island, South America, including the Orinoco River(Tobago and Concepcion (Grenada), Columbus made a fourth voyage, nominally in search of a westward passage to the Indian Ocean and sailed to Central America. Those voyages, and his efforts to establish permanent settlements on the island of Hispaniola, initiated the Spanish colonization of the New World.

The Columbian Exchange, also called the Grand Exchange refers to the exchange of diseases, ideas, food, crops, and populations between the New World and the Old World following the voyage to the Americas by Christopher Columbus in 1492. The term was coined in 1972 by Alfred W. Crosby, a historian at the University of Texas at Austin, in his eponymous work of environmental history [1].

The Old World—by which we mean not just Europe, but the entire Eastern Hemisphere—gained from the Columbian Exchange in a number of ways. Discoveries of new supplies of metals are perhaps the best known. But the Old World also gained new staple crops, such as potatoes, sweet potatoes, maize, and cassava. Less calorie-intensive foods, such as tomatoes, chili peppers, cacao, peanuts, and pineapples were also introduced, and are now culinary centerpieces in many Old World countries, namely Italy, Greece, and other Mediterranean countries (tomatoes), India and Korea (chili peppers), Hungary (paprika, made from chili peppers), and Malaysia and Thailand (chili peppers, peanuts, and pineapples). Tobacco, another New World crop, was so universally adopted that it came to be used as a substitute for currency in many parts of the world. The exchange also drastically increased the availability of many Old World crops, such as sugar and coffee, which were particularly well-suited for the soils of the New World.

Columbus, sailing West in search of Eastern spices and gold, brought about cultural revolutions that reached virtually every nation in the world. Europe was certainly ready for a change. The lower and merchant classes had put up with a dull menu for years. Peasants (poor farm holder) commonly ate dark bread made with rye and wheat; cabbage soup and cheeses (or cheese curds) filled out a typical meal. Wealthier families ate much of the same things, but they enjoyed more variety in flavors, thanks to the obsession with Asian spices that first set Columbus on his way. The Americas may not have produced traditional spices and condiments such as clove, ginger, cardamom and almonds, but they produced potatoes, corn and other colorful crops that excited the 16th-century palate. Peanuts and vanilla, as well as green beans, pineapple and turkey all broadened the horizons of European chefs.

"The first tomatoes to reach Europe were probably yellow, since the Italian word for it is pomodro--"golden apple." While the tomato took root in every European culture, it truly conquered Italy, where the warm climate proved ideal for the source of rich red sauces. Still, Europeans were slow to accept it. Like many exotic foods--including the far less assertive potato it was first thought to be either a poison or an aphrodisiac."[2]

The Americas were being invaded by new foods as well. Before Columbus, many native cultures were relatively meatless. In the 16th century, writes food historian Reay Tannahill, Mexicans began their day "with a bowl of maize porridge, sweetened with honey or spiced with red pepper. The main meal of the day was at the hottest time, in the early afternoon.

With Columbus came an explosion of new foods. Before Columbus, Peru's meat specialty had been the guinea pig; after the explorer's visits, Mexico and Peru suddenly had beef and pork, as well as milk and cheeses. Chickens, sheep and goats also provided new meats that quickly became staples. Columbus brought vegetable seeds, wheat, chickpeas and sugar cane to the Caribbean in his later voyages. As the foods spread around the world and ingredients became shared, and so food came to be one of the pillars of national identity. Africa was also a major player in the food exchange. Thanks to Columbus, it got such crops as maize, sweet potatoes, manioc and green beans, which opened up new agricultural possibilities to a continent that had previously been confined to a relatively narrow spectrum of foodstuffs. Sokolov "is the epitome of how this country works: immigrants come to America looking for a better life, but bringing the best of their old culture with them--happily, that always includes the food."[2]

Right from the start, Columbus thought to establish a sugar industry on Hispaniola much like the ones back home on the Canary and Madeira islands. So on his second voyage to the New World, he brought along several stalks of sugar cane. When the Indians started dropping from disease, the Spaniards turned to Africa. By the mid of the 16th century a nascent sugar industry completely dependent on black slave labor had taken hold in the Spanish Caribbean.

The dramatic change on Hispaniola prompted a Spanish historian to write: "There are so many Negroes in this island, as a result of the sugar factories, that the land seems an effigy or an image of Ethiopia itself."[3]. Thus began a relationship between sugar production and African slavery that was to dominate Caribbean life for nearly four centuries.

Slavery grew more important as European crusaders seized the sugar plantations of the eastern Mediterranean from their Arab predecessors. By the 15th century, African slaves supplied the labor for the Spanish and Portuguese plantations on the Atlantic islands off the coast of Africa. To the Spanish way of thinking, then, African slaves were the logical solution to the labor shortages in the New World.

While Spaniards in the Caribbean were the first to produce and export sugar, their pioneering efforts were soon outstripped by developments on the American mainland. Sugar cane prospered in the Spanish territories of Mexico, Paraguay and Peru. By 1526, the Portuguese had begun shipping sugar from Brazil to Lisbon in commercial quantities.

By the end of the 17th century, the British had also established stakes in the Caribbean, and slavery became an integral part of their newly settled colonies almost from the start. Dutch traders, who had a foothold in Brazil, first introduced sugar making to English colonists on the island of Barbados in the 1630’s.

As Columbus made his voyages to the north, south and Central America he took some epidemic diseases with him including mumps, measles, whooping cough, smallpox, cholera, gonorrhea and yellow fever.

"The year was 1520. Cortes had already entered the capital of the Aztec empire and imprisoned Moctezuma when he received notice of the arrival of Narvaez at the port of Veracruz, with express orders to apprehend him. Cortes left for Veracruz accompanied by a few men and soundly defeated Narvaez in just a few hours. When he returned victorious to Tenochtitlan, he discovered that the Aztecs were readied for combat. Pedro de Alvarado, who had stayed behind in Mexico as commander-in-chief during Cortes's absence, had uncovered a secret insurrection under the guise of a fiesta and proceeded to massacre women, old people, and warriors dressed in festive costume, as well as a large number of children in the streets of the great city"[4]. As he came back he founded more effective disaster than his cannons, horses, and crossbows. Smallpox and measles epidemics joined the conquering army and laid waste to the great Aztec empire.

Some historians think these diseases were not endemic to the Aztec world and therefore Aztec doctors did not know of any type of treatment, so the epidemics spread rapidly throughout the Americas. The first data offered by the chroniclers situate these illnesses--at least in respect to the continent--in the capital of the great empire, Tenochtitlan.

The chronicles of Columbus already speak of various contagious communities afflicted by smallpox in 1507, in the recently discovered islands and later in Haiti in 1517, which makes credible the hypothesis of the black man as transmitter of the disease. Some chronicle note that in 1525, when the Extremenian conquistador was making a trip through those lands, he found the village of Tumluz half destroyed, "because of a great pestilence that happened to them"[4]. The hypotheses point with greater insistence toward the possibility that the illness came from Mexico, since it is known that over the course of those five years the epidemics destroyed the Mayas and Guatemaltecos, implying a shifting towards the south that could well have reached the Incas by means of traders. It can be added that in 1532 Pedro de Alvarado sent a letter to Carlos V, dated September 1st, in which he says: "In all of New Spain there came a pestilence over the natives that they call measles." Thus the discussion comes down to which illness the Aztecs were suffering from when they were defeated by Cortes and his allies. That it might have been either smallpox or measles is pecata minuta, compared with the results it produced in favor of the fistful of men that dared to confront the great Aztec empire.