The Biological Consequences of 1492
Crosby, Alfred W. Jr.
ON THE EVENING OF OCTOBER 11, 1492, Christopher Columbus, on board the Santa Maria in the Atlantic Ocean, thought he saw a tiny light far in the distance. A few hours later, Rodrigo de Triana,...
...2 2 -23...
...We, all of the life on this planet, are the less for Columbus, and the impoverishment is bound to increase...
...Thomas Gage observed three kinds of wheat being grown in rotation in the mountains of Guatemala in the seventeenth century...
...The first horse to exist in America since the Pleistocene arrived with Columbus in 1493...
...A few of the forage grasses and clovers may have been consciously imported in the sixteenth century-they certainly were later-but most of these crossed the Atlantic as informally as did the smallpox virus...
...Bidwell and Falconer, History of Agriculture, p. 31...
...In thousands and thousands of square miles, indig- enous plants have been eliminated completely, or re- stricted to uncultivated strips along the sides of roads, and sugar, coffee, bananas, wheat, barley, and rye occupy the greater part of the land...
...T HIS ESSAY MUST END ON A PESSIMISTIC note, for we have tried to take the long view and, at least to some extent, the view of the historian of life rather than of human institutions...
...VOLUME XXV, NUMBER 2 (SEPTEMBER 1991) 9R"eprt on e4 Amics Environment In the tropical zone, horses were slower to multiply than pigs, but even there the numbers increased and a few joined the swine as free agents...
...Madeline W. Nichols, "The Spanish Horse of the Pampas," American Anthropologist, No...
...This article was adapted from The Columbian Exchange, by Alfred W. Crosby, Jr...
...Cobo, Obras, Vol...
...Thus, within a few score years of Columbus' first American landfall, the Antillean aborigines had been almost completely eliminated...
...The connection between the Old and New Worlds, which for more than ten millennia had been no more than a tenuous thing of Viking voyages, drifting fisherman, and shadowy contacts via Polynesia, became a bond as significant as the Bering land bridge had once been.' The two worlds, which God had cast asunder, were reunited, and the two worlds, which were so very different, began on that day to become alike...
...3 6 -37...
...insects, and pathogenic organisms which adapted themselves to European animals as sources of food and as hosts...
...The first arrival dates of which we can be sure are those having to do with the island of Hispaniola, that vestibule to the Americas where everything seems to have happened first...
...364-365...
...Nor was he the fat, slow-footed creature we are familiar with today...
...Juan L6pez de Velasco, Geografla y Descripcirn Universidad de las Indias (Madrid: Establecimiento Tipogrificode Fortanet, 1894), pp...
...Johannessen, Savannas, pp...
...The classic case in point is that of the pre-Columbian peoples of Mesoamerica, 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 animals available for service there were human beings themselves...
...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...
...The grasses, deciduous trees and shrubs, and all the plants that flower, were already pushing in beside the ferns and conifers, and were already beginning to differentiate into the quarter million species that now exist...
...Nothing but the driest deserts, the snows of Canada, and the eastern woodlands stopped their advance...
...14, p. 531...
...Percy W. Bidwell and John I. Falconer, History ofAgriculture in the Northern United States, 1620-1860 (Washington D.C.: Camegie Institute of Washington, 1925), pp...
...teaches at the University of Texas at Austin...
...Edward Grimston, (New York: Burt Franklin [n.d.]), Vol...
...He remarked that there had been a palatable grass, a fine thatch, which he had known as a young man in Hispaniola, but which had disappeared-destroyed, he guessed, by the rapidly increasing livestock herds...
...A swineherd can operate effectively on foot...
...Not everything was different...
...The horses trotted along with them into Asia and thence to Africa and Europe...
...The horse first arrived in Peru with Pizarro in 1532...
...Vizquez de Espinosa, Compendium, pp...
...Suzette Macedo (Berkeley: University ofCalifornia Press, 1967), pp...
...Johnson, Greater America, pp...
...678, 733...
...As of 1531, New Spain was raising fewer than 200 horses a year...
...Emilio A. Coni, "La Agricultura, Ganaderfa e Industrias Hasta el Virreinato," Historia de la Nacion Argentina (Buenos Aires: Imprenta de la Universidad, 1938), Vol...
...One who watched the Caribbean islands from outer space during the years 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...
...Sauer, Early Spanish Main, pp...
...It was approximately 60 million years ago that the world began to resemble the one we now know...
...Alvin Eustis (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1963), pp...
...The Arawaks suspected that horses fed on human flesh, and a single man on horseback could and did terrify crowds of Indians.' 4 After the Conquest, conquistadors would never have been able to keep the vast sullen native populations under control without horses to transfer information, orders, and soldiers from one point to another swiftly...
...Regions which, of necessity, had been left fallow now could be put to work producing food...
...59, 71, 115...
...18,42, 97, 317, 350...
...Chevalier, Land and Society, pp...
...I doubt," he said, "whether any case is on record of an invasion on so grand a scale of one plant over the aborigines...
...In Paraguay and Tucumin 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...
...14, p. 440...
...A traveller of 1568 records that over 2,000 were driven through the town of VeraCruz every morning "to take away the ill vapors of the earth...
...19-20, 159-160...
...With such large numbers of cattle being slaughtered, tallow became so plentiful that candles-apparently something of a luxury in Europe-were used by rich and poor, even Indians, in America...
...4 The topography and climate of Peru are at least as varied as Mexico's...
...2 6 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...
...Within a few years the conquistadors and their mounts were moving south into Chile and were arriving in Paraguay, on the east side of the Andes.' Horses found a home in Peru, Chile, and Paraguay...
...The differences between the life forms of the two worlds have amazed people ever since, differences which become more and more pronounced as one moves south into Mexico and beyond...
...8 Vazquez de Espinosa 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...
...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...
...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...
...3. Samuel Purchas, ed., Hakluytus Posthumus or Purchas His Pilgrimes (Glasgow: James MacLehose and Sons, 1906), Vol...
...119-120...
...192-193...
...of North Carolina Press, 1959), p. 50...
...Smyth, (New York: Burt Franklin [n.d.]), pp...
...2 2 Cattle did well in the savannas and mountains of Central America and Tierra Firme in the early sixteenth century...
...By the end of the century, wild horses beyond counting were running free in Durango.' 5 A drawing by Incan artist Felipe Guaman Poma: The introduction of European livestock into the New World profoundly altered the lives of Native Americans Horses continued north, urged on by the men on their backs or with no more stimulus than the smell of water and grass ahead...
...Two ranches on what is now the border of Zacatecas and Durango branded 33,000 and 42,000 calves respectively in 1586...
...6. Thomas Gage, A New Survey of the West Indies, 1648 (New York: Robert M. McBride and Co., 1929), pp...
...William S. Robertson, (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1937), p. 117...
...Horses were important as carriers and haulers of freight, although often replaced in this role by asses, mules and even native llamas...
...American palms were quite like those of Africa, and the jaguar was very much like the leopard...
...1 This hog was not the peccary, the tusked, piglike animal native to America which Acosta described as a small hog with a navel on its back...
...They did not do well in the Caribbean islands or in hot, wet lowlands...
...The carp, first successfully introduced into America in 1877, has spread explosively, driving native fish and water fowl out of many ponds, lakes, and rivers...
...Charles Upson Clark, (Washington D.C.: Smithsonian Institute, 1948), pp...
...In 1777 Fray Morfi wrote that the area between the Rio 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...
...Disease and ruthless exploitation had, for all practical purposes, destroyed the aborigines of Hispaniola by the 1520s...
...As in Mexico, cattle tended to move into the interior ahead of the Europeans, being quicker to adapt than their owners.21 Cattle arrived in Lima no later than 1539...
...Far to the northwest of the Central American isthmus is the most notoriously retractable land bridge of them all and one which had the greatest influence on evolution during the Cenozoic...
...This Spanish swine thrived in wet, tropical lowlands and dry mountains alike, and reproduced with a rapidity that delighted the pork-hungry Iberians...
...Of those animals brought to the Western Hemisphere, the one which most affected sixteenth-century methods of cultivation was the ox...
...The camels migrated west to become the dromedaries and Bactrian camels of Asia and Africa, and south to become the llamas of Peru...
...2 0 In Spain the biggest herds of cattle had rarely exceeded 800 or 1,000...
...In the early years they were chiefly valuable as an instrument of war...
...Sauer, Early Spanish Main, p. 189...
...The modem camel and horse, for instance, are North American in origin...
...A similar story can be told of the English swine in seventeenth-century New England...
...The history of European horticulture in the Americas begins with the second voyage of Columbus, when he returned to Hispaniola with 17 ships, 1,200 men, and seeds and cuttings for wheat, chickpeas, melons, onions, radishes, salad greens, grape vines, sugar cane, and fruit stones for orchards...
...9, p. 357...
...Leather served many of the functions for which we use fiber, plastics, and metals today: armor, cups, trunks, rope...
...The starling and the English sparrow have dispossessed millions of American birds and swept across North America...
...Hemando 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 was no iron replacements, he had them shod in silver...
...John J. Johnson, GreaterAmerica: Essays in Honor ofHerbert Eugene Bolton (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1945), p. 27...
...Charles Darwin, The Voyage ofthe Beagle (Garden City: Doubleday and Co., 1962), pp...
...It now lies beneath the Bering Sea, but it was once 1,500 kilometers of dry land from north to south, and thousands of species of plants and animals, super- and sub-microscopic, moved across it from world to world...
...2 4 Cattle spread south into Chile, and from there into and through the mountains...
...The Biological Consequences of 1492 1. The theoretical basis of this article is neatly summed up in George Gaylord Simpson, The Geography ofEvolution (New York: Capricomrn Books, 1965), pp...
...Arroyos and barrancas began to scar the slopes, trees encroached on the denuded savannas, and the weeds and coarser grasses spread in the 12steppes...
...A hundred years later she was producing wine enough to satisfy not only her own enormous thirst, but also for export...
...Cunningham Graham, The Horses ofthe Conquest (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1949), p. 5 5 , 68...
...90-91...
...The Rio de la Plata trade in hides was already of some importance by the beginning of the seventeenth century REPORT ON THE AMERICAS and was to comprise the export of a million hides annually by the end of the eighteenth...
...They had no beast of burden like the horse, ass, or ox...
...85,94...
...It is possible that humans and the plants and animals they brought have caused the extinction of more species of life forms in the last 500 years than the usual processes of evolution might kill off in a million...
...Morrisey, "Colonial Agriculture," p. 24...
...The fact that Kentucky bluegrass, daisies, and dandelions are Old World in origin gives one a hint of the magnitude of the range that began in 1492 and continues today...
...What happened when they 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...
...Vizquezde Espinosa, Compendium, pp...
...T HE ECOLOGY OF VAST AREAS OF THE Americas has been changed by the arrival and propagation of Old World life forms...
...a cowboy needs a horse...
...To grow the staples of an Iberian diet, farmers had to follow Cort6s and Pizarro into the moun- tains and find a substitute for higher latitude in higher altitude...
...41 N.S...
...But more important than the plants brought to America by Columbus and his followers were the animals they brought...
...Quoted in Richard J. Morrisey, "Colonial Agriculture in New Spain," Agricultural History, No...
...The existing intercontinental land bridge which was probably under water for the longest time in the Cenozoic is the isthmus of Central America...
...The sight of a man on horseback was as frightening to native peoples as the obscene creatures of Hieronymus Bosch would have been to the Spaniards, if they had suddenly leaped into life from the painted canvas...
...They 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...
...14, p. 498...
...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 roots just where the danger of erosion was the greatest...
...January-March 1939), pp...
...To a notable extent, the whole migration of Spaniards, Portuguese, and others who followed them across the Atlantic depended on their ability to "Europeanize" the flora and fauna of the New World...
...See R.B...
...Today the presence of large numbers of palmettos or scrub palms in the region of Mexico where sheep once grazed in open grasslands is probably due to the fact that sheep destroyed the other, more palatable plants...
...96, 100, 108...
...De Soto brought 13 pigs with him to Florida in 1539, used them for food only in dire emergency, and thus had 700 at the time of his death three years later...
...Lopz de Velasco, Geografla, pp...
...3 The crux of the problem was temperature...
...Girolamo Benzoni, History of the New World, trans...
...The year of the first Peruvian vintage was 1551...
...By 1600, as many as 45 ranches had been founded...
...2 8 The awesome initial increase of the herds lasted only a few score years...
...8. Edgar Anderson, Plants, Man, and Life (Berkeley: University of Californica Press, 1967), pp...
...Carl O. Sauer, The Early Spanish Main (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1966), pp...
...5 The Spaniards raised wheat nearly everywhere in the settled areas of their American possessions that climate permitted: Rio de la Plata, New Grenada, Chile, and even in the highlands of Central America within a few years of their colonization...
...In the whole of the pre-Columbian Americas the only important sources of extra human energy were the dog and llama...
...Here the decline in Indian population was probably more important than the spread of livestock...
...119-129...
...Ricardo Levene, A History ofArgentina, trans...
...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...
...Emilio Romero, Historia Econdmica del Peri (Buenos Aires: Editorial Sudamerica, 1949), p. 98...
...Native animals, such as the bighorn sheep, which once roamed over huge areas, have been destroyed or driven back into the moun- tains, where they gaze down on the enormous herds of horses and cattle which have usurped their ancient homes...
...In 1540 Gonzalo Pizarro collected, along with horses, llamas and dogs, more than 2,000 pigs for an expedition in search of the Land of Cinnamon on the east side of the Andes...
...In the rivers there were eels that defended themselves with electricity, and rays and piranhas...
...In 1579 it was stated that some ranches in the north had 150,000 head of cattle and that 20,000 was considered a small herd...
...Even those who had voyaged to Africa for slaves and to the Far East for spices found little in America that was familiar, and many things that were utterly strange...
...20,118, 746...
...2 3 1-232...
...The effect is comparable to an increase in the influx of cosmic rays or the raising of whole new chains of Andes and Himalayas...
...Henry N. Ridley, The Dispersal of Plants Throughout the World (Ashford, Kent, U.K.: L. Reeve and Co., 1930), p. 638...
...Then, the Spanish frontier moved north, toward and into the plains where the enemies of the horses were few and the grass plentiful and green...
...in the pampas of Rio de la Plata they found a paradise...
...In 1492 Native Americans had only a few animal servants: the dog, two kinds of South American camel (llama and alpaca), the guinea pig, and several kinds of fowl (the turkey, the Muscovy duck, and, possibly, a type of chicken...
...9. Frederick E. Zeuner, A History of Domesticated Animals (London: Hutchinson and Co., 1963), pp...
...516,531532...
...8, 12...
...63, 92-94...
...539, 546-547...
...By the 1580s overgrazing in Mexico was becoming apparent, and Father Alonso Ponce saw cattle starving in certain areas...
...Joseph de Acosta, The Natural and Moral History of the Indies, trans...
...The sugar plantations expanded so rapidly that there was a concentrated effort to promote cattle raising, not despite, but because of sugar...
...Carl L. Johannessen, Savannas of InteriorHonduras, pp...
...Vdzquez de Espinosa, Compendium, p. 691...
...According to one witness who wrote in 1594, the cattle herds were nearly doubling every fifteen months...
...C. Langdon White, "Cattle Raising: A Way of Life in the Venezuelan Llanos," The Scientific Monthly, No...
...25, 33...
...Marcos Jim6nez de la Espada, ed., Relaciones Geogrdficas de IndiasPenri (Madrid: Atlas Ediciones, 1965), Vol...
...They have spread all over the globe, and non-European peoples have adopted their techniques in all but the smallest islets...
...Humans kill faster than the pace of evolution: There have been no million years since Columbus for evolution to devise a replacement for the passenger pigeon...
...Even though tallow was extremely cheap, in the early seventeenth century 300,000 pesos a year was spent on candles for the Potosf mines...
...No number of animals could bring the forest to the steppes of Rio de la Plata, but in the 1830s Darwin found scores, perhaps hundreds, of square miles of Uruguay impenetrable, over- grown with the prickly Old World cardoon...
...They had no animals to ride...
...But many of the garden crops--cauliflowers, cabbages, radishes, lettuce, and European melons-prospered...
...VOLUME XXV, NUMBER 2 (SEPTEMBER 1991) 14...
...Pedro de Cieza de Le6n, The Incas ofPedro de Cieza de Le6n, trans...
...Without cheap and plentiful candles, mining could never have been carried on as extensively as it was...
...At the end of the century Samuel de Champlain, on a tour of Mexico for the French king, wrote with awe of the "great, level plain...stretching endlessly and everywhere covered with an infinite number of cattle...
...4. Arthur P. Whitaker, "The Spanish Contribution to American Agriculture," Agricultural History, No...
...Grapes also did well in Chile, Tucumin and, generally, the Rio de la Plata area...
...69-132...
...all the most important domesticated species had arrived by 1500...
...Cattle do not crop their grass quite so closely as sheep, but when kept in large herds they have a deleterious affect on the land...
...83 (September 1956), pp...
...Romero, Historia Econdmica, pp...
...The long-range biological effects of the Columbian exchange are not encouraging...
...Once ashore in America he became a fast, tough, lean, selfsufficient greyhound of a hog much closer in appearance and personality to a wild boar than to one of our twentiethcentury hogs...
...132-133...
...In the 1570s L6pez de Valasco remarked that the pastures of that island were diminishing in size as the guava trees encroached along their edges...
...By 1550 mounts were available for little more than the effort to rope them...
...As the number of humans plummeted, the population of imported domesticated animals shot upward...
...Vizquez de Espinosa, Compendium, pp...
...The coming of European animals created a colossal increase in the quantity of animal protein available to humans in America...
...Hakluyt, Navigations, Vol...
...Vdzquez de Espinosa, Compendium, p. 625...
...Chevalier, Land and Society, p. 107...
...See Dobie, TheMustangs, pp...
...I T IS POSSIBLE TO IMAGINE THE CONQUISTAdor without his pig, but who can imagine him without his horse...
...Copyright (c) 1972 by Alfred W. Crosby, Jr...
...Antonio de Herrera y Tordesillas, Historia General de los Hechos de los Castellanos en las Islas y Tierra Firme del Mar Ociano (Madrid: Real AcademiadeHistoria, 1934-1957), Vol...
...Specialization almost always narrows the possibilities for future change: For the sake of present convenience, we loot the future...
...Homo sapiens and moose and elm trees and all the life forms of the two worlds were left in isolation, and the differences between the geographically separated life forms began to become greater...
...The first contingent of horses, dogs, pigs, cattle, chickens, sheep, and goats arrived with Columbus on the second voyage in 1493...
...127-128...
...Who had ever seen a bird as strange as the toucan, who seemed more beak than body, and who had ever seen a land bird as large as the Andean condor actually fly...
...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 native population declined and with it the quantities of foodstuffs produced by the techniques of intensive cultivation...
...Brand, "Range Cattle Industry," p. 134...
...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...
...A Castilian could starve here...
...The hidalgo led the way-that is clear-but it is difficult to say which of the other two was the more important...
...Jug" is a wildly vague measure, but we can at least be sure that 200,000 jugs is a lot of wine...
...This docile, powerful animal could pull a plow through soil which had always been too heavy or too matted with roots for the Indians' digging stick...
...wild dogs and other predators...
...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 fleet that crossed to Spain in 1587 landed nearly 100,000 hides in Seville...
...Charles Gibson, The Aztecs Under Spanish Rule (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1964), pp...
...The early explorers wondered about the small- ness of American mammals, but it was the reptiles, snakes, birds, and insects that really impressed them...
...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...
...It has also meant 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...
...Gonzalo Fernmindez Oviedo y Vald6s, Natural History of the West Indies, trans...
...Harried de Onis, ed., Victor W. von Hagen (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1959), pp...
...Lesley Byrd Simpson, Exploitation of Land in Central Mexico in the Sixteenth Century (Berkeley: University of Califomia Press, 1952), pp...
...ON THE EVENING OF OCTOBER 11, 1492, Christopher Columbus, on board the Santa Maria in the Atlantic Ocean, thought he saw a tiny light far in the distance...
...Three animals played the leading roles in that conquest: the hidalgo (the Spanish nobleman), the pig, and the horse...
...Sterling A. Stoudemire, (Chapel Hill: Univ...
...That transformation was well under way by 1500, and it was irrevocable in both North and South America by 1550...
...31 (July 1957), p. 26...
...The thought that olive trees might prosper there must have occurred to many of the earliest settlers, but the first were not planted until 1560, long after the Peruvian debut of wheat and vines...
...2 5 B Y 1600 ALL THE MOST IMPORTANT FOOD plants of the Old World were being cultivated in the Americas, doubling and even tripling the number of cultivatable food plants in the New World...
...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 that we lost...
...675, 694...
...Brand, "Range Cattle Industry," p. 138...
...35 (July 1961), pp...
...And who, outside of a nightmare, had ever seen bats that drank blood or a snake quite as long as the REPORT ON THE AMERICAS 6 REPORT ON THE AMERICASanaconda...
...Purchas, Hakluytus, Vol...
...Cobo, Obras, Vol...
...His most recent book is Ecological Imperialism (Cambridge Univ...
...Purchas, Hakluytus, Vol...
...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...
...That is, until that fateful day in 1492...
...50, 51, 59, 60, 61...
...And great numbers of swine accompa- nied the conquistadors on the continental expeditions...
...Caio Prado, Jr., The Colonial Background of Modern Brazil, trans...
...But why even slight differences, and why the great ones...
...The flora and fauna of the Old and especially of the New World have been reduced and specialized by human effort...
...The single exception to this generality may be European peoples and their technologies, agricultural and industrial...
...There were monkeys-no oddity in itself, but these swung by their tails...
...1, p. 16...
...Ram6n Pdiez, Wild Scenes in South America, or Life in the Llanos of Venezuela (New York: Macmillan and Co., 1963), p. 143...
...436-439...
...285-288...
...Cattle supplied the Spaniards with all the meat they could consume, but more cattle were killed for hides and tallow...
...A few hours later, Rodrigo de Triana, lookout on the Pinta's forecastle, sighted the Bahamas...
...Rice, sugar, and bananas were grow- ing in the wet lowlands within a generation of Peru's conquest, and the temperate valleys near Lima and the highlands were producing wheat in quantity by the 1540s...
...Most of their meat and leather came from wild game...
...These myriads of cattle, domesticated and wild, con- tinued to expand and to spread south toward Patagonia...
...322, 324...
...Nor did the sheep oblige the Europeans by running off into the wilderness to breed themselves into great herds...
...Windmills and waterwheels were unknown, the dog was small and weak, and the llama could not carry any burden heavier than about a hundred pounds...
...Over the millennia the grasslands of America had been accumulating immense riches in loam, plant and animal life, visible and invisible organisms...
...7 3 0 - 731...
...See Antonio Vzquez de Espinosa, Compendium and Description ofthe West Indies, trans...
...Greenwood Press, Westport, CT, 1972...
...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 against both multicellular and unicellular enemies, maximum fertility, and to speak generally, maximum ability to produce offspring with maximum adaptive possibilities...
...Except in the areas where the llama lived, and except for the minor assistance of the travoispulling dog, Indians wanting to move a load moved it themselves, no matter how heavy or how far...
...Their numbers burgeoned so rapidly, in fact, that doubtlessly they had much to do with the extinction of certain plants, animals, and even the native people themselves, whose gardens they encroached upon...
...The course of events was not too different than in New Spain, although on a much smaller scale: a rapid increase in numbers and the straying of steers which soon became wild...
...In time, Peru became one of the chief vOLUME xxv, NUMnER 2 (SEPTEMBER 1991)7 VOLUME XXV, NUMBER 2 (SEPTEMBER 1991) 7q The Spaniards' dominance of the horse made possible the great colonial cattle industry...
...The Europeans thought they were just off the coast of Asia-back to Eurasia again-but they were struck by the strangeness of the flora and the fauna...
...Cattle were first brought to Mexico for breeding purposes in 1521 and were soon grazing everywhere, even on the hot Gulf coast...
...Live- stock provided not only much of the muscle with which the exploitation of America was undertaken, but was in itself an important end-product, spurring Europeans to expand the areas being exploited...
...The Indians of South America had never seen an animal as big as the horse, nor any which was as strong, fast, and obedient to the orders of man...
...5. Bemab6 Cobo, Obras (Madrid: Atlas Ediciones, 1964), Vol...
...It is probable that these crossmigrations usually affected the New World more profoundly than the Old, because the latter, being larger, usually had produced a greater variety of life forms during the period of separation and isolation...
...Sheep were much less capable of defending themselves against predators than swine, horses, or longhorns...
...Both animals disappeared in their homelands, the last of them dying during the latter millennia of the last epoch of the Cenozoic, the Pleistocene...
...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...
...Donald D. Brand, "The Early History of the Range Cattle Industry in Northern Mexico," Agricultural History, No...
...The spread of these proletarians of the plants was doubtlessly quite rapid...
...The course of that evolution was profoundly influ- enced by the emerging and submerging of the various great land bridges of the world, joining or separating the continents where various experiments in new types of life were going on...
...Then the land connection with the north reappeared, and many of the species native to South America disappeared beneath a wave of more efficient mammals rolling down from the north...
...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 their ancestors...
...205,220-221,227,351,376,633,644...
...Sauer, Early Spanish Main, p. 156...
...For tens of millions of years, beginning early in the Cenozoic, South America was another Australia, where mammals that could not have survived the competition of their cousins in the Old World and North America proliferated...
...aspects of life on this planet since the retreat of the continental glaciers...
...Oviedo, Natural History, p. 79...
...1 2 Swine herds were to be found wherever the Spanish settled or even touched, and the same was true in the Portuguese areas...
...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 of ecology or human desire can eliminate them...
...Wheat and the other European grains failed, and so did the grape vines and olive trees: no bread, wine, or oil...
...The genetic pool is usually expanded when continents join...
...Gibson, Spain inAmerica, pp...
...There were many factors which slowed it: indiscriminate slaughter of livestock by Spaniards and Indians alike...
...Sauer, Early Spanish Main, p. 189...
...2 9 This is what normally would have hap- pened and would be happening after the joining of the Old World and New Worlds in 1492-but for humans...
...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...
...The few that survived were those that missed by the widest margins the sixteenth-century European preconceptions of what mammals should be: the armadillo, tree sloth, and American anteater...
...The Columbian exchange has included humans, and they have changed the Old and New Worlds sometimes inadvertently, sometimes intentionally, often brutally...
...The first permanent settlers of Buenos Aires, arriving in 1580, found that they had been preceded onto the pampas by enormous herds of 10wild horses...
...2 Then, 10,000 years or so ago, the Bering land bridge submerged again...
...Abridgement bypermission ofthe authorand Greenwood Publishing Group, Inc...
...Bernal Diaz, writing ofthe conquest ofMexicodecades after the event, mentioned horse after horse, reciting their names, colors, and characters with as much care and detail as he lavished upon his human comrades...
...3 (January 1929), p. 4; Richard Haklyut, ed., The Principal Navigations, Voyages, TraffiquesandDiscoveriesofthe English Nation (New York: AMS Press, 1965), Vol...
...The champion European frontiersman of the New World was the cattle rancher...
...Thereafter very few types of terrestrial life found their way from the one world to the other...
...Purchas, Hakluytus, Vol...
...But the most important reason is probably the fact that the hoarded riches of the grasslands were gone...
...But it was not until the Spanish frontier reached the great grasslands-the llanos of Venezuela and Colombia, the prairies that stretch from deep in Mexico north into Canada, and the pampas of Argentina and Uruguay-that the vast herds of horses celebrated in American legend burst into the history of the New World...
...1, p. 183...
...But America, too, developed unique and long-lived life forms...
...widespread overgrazing shattered much of the continent's original ecology sources of wheat for the hotter, wetter parts of the empire, especially for Panama and Tierra Firme...
...11, p. 2 5 3 . 20...
...4, pp...
...William L. Thomas, Jr., ed., Man's Role in Changing the Face ofthe Earth (Chicago: U. of Chicago Press, 1956), pp...
...In fact, Europeans in America 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...
...a half century later something like 140,000 head of cattle grazed there...
...The Europeans and their animals changed the rules of the battle for the survival of the fittest...
...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...
...219-220...
...T HERE WERE PROBABLY MORE CATTLE IN the New World in the seventeenth century than any other type of vertebrate immigrant...
...The Columbian exchange has left us with not a richer but a more impoverished genetic pool...
...That trend towards biological homogeneity is one of the most important Bio-historian Alfred W. Crosby, Jr...
...Press, 1986...
...Swine took up so little space on board ship and were so self-sufficient and prolific once ashore that many of the earliest explorers took them along as deck cargo and deposited them on islands to multiply and provide food for future visitors...
...2, p. 213...
...8 REPORT ON THE AMERICAS 8T HE DIFFERENCE BETWEEN THE TWO SETS of domesticated animals on either side of the Atlantic was even more stunning than the general contrast between Old and New World fauna...
...Not all or probably even most of the plants brought to America in the sixteenth century were for human consumption or were brought intentionally...
...Europe had no reptile as big as the iguana...
...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...
...As the European population of Mexico began to spread north, ranching went with it...
...Why were there no fourlegged beasts bigger than a fox in the West Indies...
...Gaylord Simpson, The Geography of Evolution, p. 7...
...Usually such invasions are so successful only if the original ecology of the area has been shattered-as, for instance, by widespread overgrazing...
...The Europeans' animals were an even worse threat to the land than the plow...
...1, p. 407...
...Columbus brought sheep with him in 1493, along with the other livestock...
...Their Arawak brothers and sisters in Cuba, Puerto Rico, and Jamaica followed them into oblivion shortly after...
...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...
...2. David M. Hopkins, "The Cenozoic History of Beringia-A Synthesis," and Hansjurgen Miller-Beck, "On Migrations Across the Bering Land Bridge in the Upper Pleistocene," in The Bering Land Bridge, David M. Hopkins, ed.,, (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1967...
...14, pp...
...Why were there no horses or cattle anywhere in the Americas...
...The horses had "multiplied infinitely" in the grasslands of Rio de la Plata, possibly producing more colts faster than ever before in the history of the earth...
...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...
...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 water from spilling precipitously into the rivers, and the colt could run for hundreds of miles shoulder-deep in the fresh grass at the end of the wet season...
...Most of the early Spanish farms in the highlands of New Spain (Mexico) raised wheat, in accordance with the policy of the viceroys...
...it reminded Amerigo Vespucci of the flying serpent of legend, except for the lack of wings...
...Lopdz de Velasco, Geograffa, p. 98...
...Animals also provided the New World with a new source of power...
...What happened to them, especially to the horses and cattle, is a truly spectacular biological success story...
...Paleontologists and comparative zoologists call the event "explosive evolution," meaning that it often only takes a few million years...
...Within a few years, 10,000 horses were graz- ing between Quer6taro and San Juan del Rio alone...
...The squandering of those riches was already evident in the lifetime of Las Casas...
...The area around Arequipa, said the conquistador Cieza de Le6n, produces "excellent wheat...from which they make excellent bread...
...The coastal savanna of Sinaloa was giving way to scrub growth within a century of the fall of Tenochtitl]n.27 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...
...If the water level today fell forty meters, the Bering Strait would again be dry land...
...350,359,383...
...J. Frank Dobie, TheMustangs (New York: Bramhall House, 1952), p. 96...
...In the 1520s Oviedo spoke of many herds of 500 or so on Hispaniola, and some of as many as 8,000...
...The Brazilian sertao (back country) produced no such enormous herds, the chief limiting factor being its truly tropical climate...
...7. In 1614 the diocese of Santiago, Chile, produced 200,000 jugs of wine...
...6 Not until the conquistadors reached Peru did Spain acquire an area where grape vines would prosper...
...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 to feed into the death camps that Hispaniola, Cuba, Puerto Rico, and Jamaica had become...
...7 The areas of the Americas settled by the Spanish in the sixteenth century which most closely resemble the dry Mediterranean lands where olive trees grow best are the coastal valleys of Peru and Chile...
...The accounts of the earliest colonists indicate that the savannas of Central America today are much smaller than they were during Balboa's lifetime...
...99, 118...
...This has resulted in an enormous increase in food production and, thereby, in human popu- lation...
...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...
...1, p. 383...
...1, p. 386...
...During this Cenozoic Era, the dinosaurs died off and mammals became prevalent, differentiating into bats and whales, sloths and antelopes, and, after most of the 60 million years had passed, humans...
...9 A sensational preview of the impact that Old World livestock would have on the American mainland took place in Hispaniola and in the other Antilles...
...Franmois Chevalier, Land and Society in Colonial Mexico, trans...
...Their seeds arrived in folds of textile, in clods of mud, in dung, and in a thousand other ways...
...Chevalier, Land and Society, pp...
...109-111...
Vol. 25 • August 1991 • No. 2
