3.8: American "Discovery"

Introduction

In 1500, the year which marks the start of the Age of Exploration, the populations of Europe, Africa, Asia, and the Americas were quite similar. European and Asian populations had substantially recovered from the plagues of the previous two centuries and were on the rise. Continental Asia dominated. China led the world in population size with 125 million people, followed by India with about 90 million. Europe and Africa had about 80 million each, and the Americas probably had a total population of around 65 million. However, major differences in development were occurring more on the Afro-Eurasian continents than on the American continents, at least as far as the first Europeans who set foot on the American continents were concerned.  

In reality, there were a number of extensive empires on the American continent, the latest being the Mexica empire, renamed the Aztecs by the Spanish conquistadores who first encountered this empire. These large civilizations contained extensive infrastructure, including aqueducts, roadways, and massive architecture in the urban areas, showcasing the wealth of the location and overall empire.  The twin Mexica Triple Alliance capitals of Tenochtitlán and Texcoco, built in the 1320s in the Valley of Mexico, each had more than 200,000 inhabitants when they were first encountered by the Spanish, making them as large as Paris and Milan, Europe’s most populous cities at the time. Tenochtitlán was built on an island in Lake Texcoco and was connected to the lakeshore by a series of causeways. The urban Aztecs had a lot of people to feed. They surrounded their island capital of Tenochtitlán with raised planting-beds called chinampas on floating platforms in Lake Texcoco. This technique allowed Aztec farmers to carefully control soil fertility and watering. The Aztecs were so concerned about the quality of the water, they created a dike across the lake that separated the fresh-water around their city from the brackish water of the main lake to the east, and they drank water brought into the city via an aqueduct from springs in the hills overlooking the lake. The Aztecs supported six people per acre using chinampas in the fifteenth century. By comparison, Chinese intensive rice farming, the most successful agricultural technique known in Europe and Asia, supported only about one person per acre at the same time.

Indigenous Americans

The people living in the Americas had been separated from the Afro-Eurasian continents for nearly 12,000 years, since the end of the Ice Age. During this period, the indigenous populations experienced their own agricultural revolution around the same time as Africans and Eurasians, but instead of domesticating cattle, horses, sheep, goats, pigs, and chickens–which were not native to the Americas–they developed certain plants, creating three of the world’s current top five staple crops: corn, potatoes, and cassava, as well as additional plants such as hot peppers, tomatoes, beans, cocoa, and tobacco, all of which would find their way to the rest of the world through the Columbian Exchange. They also didn’t place as large an emphasis on gems and precious metals as the Europeans did, but still appreciated their beauty in an artistic sense, using them to decorate art and architecture and make jewelry and clothing items for the ruling classes of these territories.  The figures below show differences in perception between the Europeans and the Indigenous. The top image is from the "Lienzo de Tlaxcala", created by the Tlaxcalans to remind the Spanish of their loyalty to Castile and the importance of Tlaxcala during the Conquest. The text mixes European and native styles and includes anachronisms, such as the European-style chairs included in Figure 3.8.1. Figure 3.8.2, however, shows Christopher Columbus landing in the West Indies, on an island that the natives called Guanahani and he named San Salvador, on October 12, 1492. He raised the royal banner, claiming the land for his Spanish patrons, and stood bareheaded, with his hat at his feet, in honor of the sacredness of the event. The captains of the Niña and Pinta follow, carrying the banner of Ferdinand and Isabella. The crew displays a range of emotions, some searching for gold in the sand. Natives watch from behind a tree.

Figure 3.8.1: "Cortez Meeting Montezuma," 1519, unknown Tlaxcalan artists, in the Public Domain.

Figure 3.8.2 Landing of Columbus in the West Indies, on an island that the natives called Guanahani on October 12, 1492, John Vanderlyn, Public Domain.

The natives of North America also settled in complex societies in various regions, based mainly on the cultivation of corn, wild rice, squash, and pumpkins and on managing the environment to promote the success of game animals. The traditional U.S. and Canadian Thanksgiving dinner celebrates the native foods of North America, including the turkey. Along the Mississippi River and its tributaries, indigenous people lived mostly in villages but occasionally gathered into cities and built mounds like those found at Cahokia. The Algonquian and Iroquois were semi-sedentary, living throughout what is now upstate New York and southern Quebec and Ontario. By the time of contact with Europeans, the Iroquois had formed a confederacy of five major tribes. The Ojibwe and Dakota were also semi-sedentary, living in settlements in the western Great Lakes region and on the edge of the northern Great Plains. By the time of contact with the Europeans, the Dakota dominated the Plains, where they took advantage of the large herds of buffalo as a source of protein, clothing, and housing, while gathering wild rice and cultivating corn and squash for carbohydrates. Many North American forest-dwellers also developed the sap of the maple tree as a key source of sugar.

European Exploration

Of course, all this agriculture and city-building and civilization was happening in the Americas without anyone in Europe, Asia, or Africa knowing about it. Although it is NOT true that everybody believed the world was flat until Columbus came along, some Europeans were unclear on the actual size of the Earth, the existence of American continents and the Pacific Ocean. But not all Europeans were unaware there was something valuable across the Atlantic. The initial desire was to find new trade routes that would take Western European goods to new markets in the East Asian countries, hoping to gain a new relationship with China, which didn’t place as high a value on European goods as Europeans placed on Chinese goods.  It wouldn’t be until the sailing of Amerigo Vespucci, the explorer who was honored by a German map maker by using his name for the continents, that many realized there were significant landmasses between Europe and Eastern Asia. 

It’s also important to realize that European exploration did not BEGIN with Columbus. Around 1000 CE, five hundred years before the Italian explorer set out to discover a new trade route to Asia for Spain, Norse explorers from Europe and Iceland had established a presence on Greenland. The Greenland colony lasted four hundred years and was a base for exploration and settlement even further west. Leif Erikson, son of the Greenland colony’s leader Erik the Red, began a colony in what is now northern Newfoundland. For a long time, historians thought Scandinavian claims about a North American colony called Vinland were just patriotic folktales. But in 1978, archaeologists discovered a site called L’Anse aux Meadows that dates to about 1000 CE. The settlement was more than just a fishing camp: the eight buildings include a blacksmith shop and a spinning room including artifacts that suggest women lived there and wove cloth for their families.

The Little Ice Age was a period of global cooling that hit the North Atlantic particularly hard beginning around the 1430s. Sailing became increasingly dangerous and as the agricultural season was cut short by longer and more severe winters, the Greenland colony was abandoned in the early 1400s, and without a base in Greenland the Vikings were unable to sustain a North American colony. They also faced strenuous opposition from natives they called Skraelings, who according to the Viking sagas were fierce warriors. This map made in Iceland in 1570 identifies the area at the latitude of Newfoundland as Skralinge Land. North of that is Markland (land of forests) and Helleland (land of flat stones), then Greenland. And on a more recent map of Greenland, from 1747, you can see the names of old Viking settlements as well as a channel it was believed had once cut through the island. The text on the map reads, “It is said that these streights [sic] were formerly passable, but now they are shut up with ice.” On both sides of Greenland, the map says, “The Coast is for the most part inaccessible by reason of floating and fixed mountains of ice.”

Columbus’s promise to find a sea route to Asia interested European monarchs like Ferdinand and Isabella because land-based trade routes to Asia were becoming more difficult and expensive. The collapse of the Mongol Empire at the end of the thirteenth century and the plagues of the fourteenth century increased the perceived danger of overland travel. Columbus had failed to interest both his native Italy as well as Portugal in his proposal, because Bartolomeu Dias had already discovered a route to Asia around the bottom of Africa, entering the Indian Ocean trading network. On the other hand, Spain had recently unified with the marriage of King Ferdinand of Aragon and Queen Isabella of Castille, and the monarchs had just completed the Reconquista and ended Muslim rule in Granada, their last kingdom on the Iberian Peninsula. So they were in an expansive mood, willing to spend money on a quest of this nature to show the importance and might of a united Spain.

It is worth considering that as they turned their interests outward, the Spanish had been at war for nearly 800 years. Their war on behalf of religion and glory would continue in the New World. It’s also worth noting that the inventions that sparked this new era of exploration and empire-building, like the sternpost rudder, the compass, and gunpowder were all Chinese inventions that found their way to Europe over an already-existing international trade network dominated by Arab merchants, which was about to become truly global with the European encounter of the Americas.

The European Views of the American Indigenous

Columbus arrived in the Caribbean on October 12, 1492 and explored until late December. His flagship, the Santa Maria, ran aground on Hispaniola on December 25 and had to be abandoned. With permission of the local chief, Columbus left 39 sailors behind in a settlement he named La Navidad. He returned to Europe with two ships, a few captive Taino natives, some gold, and specimens of New World species including turkeys, pineapple, and tobacco. This would start the sharing of new animals, plants, technology, and diseases known as the Columbian Exchange. Arriving in Barcelona in mid-March, Columbus was celebrated as a hero.

It is often mentioned that Columbus believed he had reached Asia, and he did make that claim in his extravagant “Letter on the First Voyage.” But this document was the explorer’s report to his royal sponsors, and Columbus wanted very badly to be sent back again. Columbus wrote “Hispaniola is a miracle…both fertile and beautiful…the harbors are unbelievably good and there are many wide rivers the majority of which contain gold.” Whether or not Columbus understood he was reporting on lands previously unknown to Europeans, he definitely got his readers excited about the places he had visited.

When other European explorers reached America they were equally amazed. People throughout Europe read exciting traveler’s accounts like Amerigo Vespucci’s 1504 best-seller, Mundus Novus, which actually coined the term New World and made it clear for anyone who might still be confused, that these lands were not Asia but a previously unknown continent. Like Columbus, the explorers carried back to Europe not only eyewitness accounts of wealthy civilizations, but samples of native plants, animals, and captive people.

Columbus returned to the Caribbean in 1493 with 17 ships, 1,200 men, and according to his diaries, “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.” Other old-world crops that thrived in the Americas included coffee and bananas, originally cultivated in Africa and Asia, which were brought from the Canary Islands in 1516. The Spanish had introduced sugar cultivation to the Canary Islands in the early fifteenth century, and transplanted canes to the tropical paradise their explorers had discovered across the Atlantic.

Cattle were delivered to Spanish conquistadors in Mexico in 1521. Most of the significant Eurasian species brought to the Americas by European explorers and colonists were introduced by the Spanish by the early 1500s, long before North American settlement began. Even species like the wild horses of the American West that would transform Plains Indian culture in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries were the descendants of escapees from the herds of the conquistadors. The Americas had very few large mammal species, and most could not be domesticated. Nearly all the species humans have successfully domesticated, the familiar residents of the modern farmyard, originated in Europe and Asia. These include goats, sheep, cows, horses, pigs and chickens. 

Traditional European or Eurocentric American histories of exploration often present the victory of the Spanish over the Aztec as an example of the superiority of Europeans over the savage Indians. The reality is far more complex. When Cortés explored central Mexico, he encountered a region simmering with native conflict. Far from being unified and content under Aztec rule, many peoples in Mexico resented the overlords of Tenochtitlán and were ready to rebel. Cortés was also aided by an enslaved Nahua woman, Malintzin (also known as La Malinche or Doña Marina, her Spanish name), whom the natives of Tabasco gave him as a tribute slave. In addition to speaking Nahua and Maya, Malintzin quickly learned Spanish and translated for Cortés in his dealings with Aztec emperor Moctezuma.

As a slave, Malintzin was forced into a physical relationship with Cortés. Their son, Martín, was one of the first “mestizos” (persons of mixed indigenous American and European descent) in Spanish America. Malintzin remains a controversial figure in the history of the Atlantic World. Some view her as a traitor because she helped Cortés conquer the Aztecs, while others see her as a victim of European imperialism whose choices were very limited. In either case, she demonstrates one way in which native peoples responded to the arrival of the Spanish. Without her, Cortés would not have been able to communicate, and without the language bridge, he surely would have been less successful in destabilizing the Aztec Empire. By this and other means, native people helped shape the conquest of the Americas.

The Spanish and Portuguese dominated the first century of exploration, conquest, and colonization in the Americas for many reasons. Spain and Portugal had an eight-century long tradition of warfare from fighting the Reconquista against the Moors and were prepared for further battle for glory and religion. The Portuguese also had a maritime tradition, which was how Columbus learned his trade. But the two Catholic nations also had a papal charter. The Spanish and Portuguese were granted a license by the Pope under the 1494 Treaty of Tordesillas, which awarded all the territory east of the 47th meridian to Portugal and everything west of it to Spain. The Pope (Alexander VI) who made this deal was a Spaniard named Rodrigo Borja – his reign was known for nepotism and corruption, and, despite a pledge of clerical celibacy, he was the father of the famous Italian political family known for poisoning their enemies, the Borgias. The Portuguese received the east, because they were already establishing colonies on the east and west coasts of Africa. The Spanish were assigned the unknown west, which turned out to be bigger than anyone had expected. The Pope granted nothing to any other European kingdom. This type of corruption at the Vatican helped motivate reformers like Martin Luther toward what became the Protestant Reformation. It also led to the prevalence of both the Spanish and Portuguese languages throughout modern-day Latin America, as well as many conflicts and wars between the two nations over the various territories there as settlement occurred.

Columbian Exchange

Historians call the transfer of plants and animals that began with the encounter between Europe and the Americas after 1492 the Columbian Exchange. The directions of these biological transfers and their effects on the environments and people of Europe and the Americas shaped the modern world we live in. American maize, potatoes, and cassava fed growing European, African, and Asian populations, allowing the building of new cities and industries. European animals such as pigs, sheep, chickens, and cattle thrived in the Americas, enabling both Native Americans and Europeans there to add and maintain animal protein to their diets and eventually expand their populations. But before most of the indigenous had a chance to benefit from the new food sources and other innovations introduced by Europeans, they were struck down by the largely accidental transfer of Old World viruses and bacteria to the Americas, which caused the deaths of at least 90% of the indigenous American population. 

The impact of these Eurasian diseases on Native Americans was one of human history’s most abrupt and severe population disasters. Even the Black Death did not kill as large a percentage of Europeans in comparison to the rest of the Afro-Eurasian continent as these diseases killed the American indigenous populations, and when diseases recurred in Europe, they generally killed their victims over a much longer time span due to the inherited immunity of European populations. American native populations had no such safeguards, and disease spread virulently. For example, there were over a million people living on the Caribbean island of Hispaniola in 1492 when Columbus left his 39 sailors in La Navidad. By 1548, there were only 500 natives left alive. 999,500 people had disappeared in a little over 50 years.

The populations of other Caribbean islands like Cuba were similarly wiped out. Whole societies disappeared, and this was not only a tragedy for the cultures that vanished. The reduction of native populations began a cycle of violence that became central to the history of the Americas. Once there were no natives left to work on European sugar plantations, enslaved Africans—who had a similar acquired immunity as Europeans—were considered crucial to the survival of the West Indies sugar economy.

The greater population densities of Central and South America enabled contagious diseases to spread more quickly there. Heavily traveled roads in central Mexico actually helped spread disease beyond areas that had been reached by Spanish explorers. Cities were wiped out that had never seen a white man. The population of the Aztec heartland dropped from about 25 million on the eve of the Spanish conquest in 1519 to just under 17 million a decade later. One out of every three native people died in just ten years. After another decade the Aztec population was reduced to about 6 million. Three out of four people in the Aztec world disappeared in 20 years. Imagine writing a list of your 10 closest friends and family, and then randomly crossing off seven names. By 1580, the Aztec empire had been hollowed out to less than 2 million people, from a starting point of 25 million.

The depopulation of the Americas is one of the Earth’s most significant population disasters, both in its human toll and in the changes it brought about. Over the years, as you might expect, there has been a lot of controversy about what happened. Critics of Spanish colonialism (many of them Spanish, like the priest Bartolomé de las Casas) have accused Spaniards of atrocities in what has become known as “the Black Legend”. To defend themselves, colonialists accused the Aztec and Inca Empires with atrocities of their own and have emphasized the support conquistadors received from indigenous rivals of these empires. Various sources often reflect some of these biases, one, for example, mentions that “Allegedly, between 20,000 and 80,000 men, women, and children were slaughtered in a single ceremony in 1487” as a sacrifice at a temple in the Aztec capital of Tenochtitlán. This claim may or may not be true, but even if it is, it can and should be compared to the deaths of over 20 million men, women, and children that followed the Spanish invasion of the Aztec lands of Central Mexico.

Review Questions For Figures 3.8.1 and 3.8.2

• What are the similarities in these pictures?  What are the differences? How do these represent what is being portrayed in the pictures?
• Who is the audience for these pictures?  What is the narrative or story the artist is trying to share through these pictures? How does that affect the way the pictures might be viewed by different audiences?