The Columbian Exchange II. Animals

Abraham Ortelius, a Dutch cosmographer, was the first to observe the matching coastlines of the Old and New Worlds in his Thesaurus Geographicus in 1596. Centuries later, the continental drift theory was formulated, stating that America and Europe originated from a single supercontinent many millions of years ago. Since then, flora and fauna of the two new landmasses evolved separately, until 1492. We recently mentioned the consequences of the Columbian Exchange of plants, but the effects were no less dramatic when we look at the animal component. Many domesticated species existed in Europe at the time of the oceanic voyages, making the transfer of animals almost unidirectional. Horses, pigs, cattle, goats, sheep, and several other species found optimal conditions in the vast American prairies and plains.

Pictures of American Indians, National Archives

The new introduced animals provided Native Americans with new sources of hides, wool, and animal protein. Horses, donkeys and mules, a new source of pulling power, could be used to improve transportation, both through riding and wheeled vehicles, with important economic developments. Hunting buffalos on horseback became easier too.

Charles Russell, Buffalo Hunting, 1892

If horses helped in peace, they also helped in war: “One of the early advantages of the Spanish over the Mexican Aztecs, for instance, was that the Spanish had the horse. It took the American Indians a little while to adopt the horse and become equals on the field of battle” (Alfred W. Crosby on the Columbian Exchange). That changed not only the political equilibrium among the Native Indian tribes but influenced the next conflicts for the defense of the Indian territories. [Silvana Munzi]

“There is no land unhabitable nor sea innavigable”

With this widely quoted phrase, in the 1520s, the merchant Robert Thorne the younger encouraged the English Crown to become actively involved in oceanic explorations. Thorne’s idea was to invest resources on a northern route to the East. The letter was addressed to Edward Lee, Henry VIII’s ambassador to Spain. We know that Thorne belonged to a Bristol circle of wealthy merchants, and that his family, especially, was deeply engaged in trade with the Iberian market. The close contacts established with Portugal and Spain over the years brought him extensive knowledge of new discoveries. It is indeed likely that his adventurous father, Robert Thorne the elder, had even boarded a ship to cross the Atlantic.

All these factors encouraged the younger Thorne to spend an important period of his life in Seville, a privileged port for oceanic navigation, where he became acquainted with the piloto mayor Sebastiano Caboto. Thorne could not remain indifferent to the cornucopia of treasures carried from the New World by the Iberian expeditions. Everyday life in Seville allowed him to touch with his hands images of undreamed-of lands full of riches. Thorne’s efforts seemed to vanish with his death in 1532, but his words were not forgotten. At the end of the 16th century, Richard Hakluyt printed Thorne’s letter three times.

Between Thorne’s death in 1532 and the first edition of his letter in 1582, England developed an increasing interest in opening trade to faraway places. In this slow process of awareness, the reception of Iberian nautical treatises and accounts of the new discoveries played a key role. The most relevant texts were circulating in their original editions as well as in translation.

Among others, the Breve compendio de la sphera (1551) of Martín Cortés de Albacar was particularly appreciated by English seamen. Translated first into English by Richard Eden in 1561, it went through many editions and was still being published in 1630. The same translator published in 1555 an English version of Pietro Martire’s book, which contained additions including a large part of Fernández de Oviedo y Valdés’ work (The Decades of the New World or West India). Some authors believe that Sir Francis Drake was navigating with Pedro de Medina’s Arte de navegar in hand. The book was very popular, but it was not translated into English until 1581. Martín Fernández de Enciso’s Suma de geographia (1519) was translated into English by John Frampton in 1578. Enciso’s way of writing has echoes of the textual genre of those sailing directions which were among the first ever printed for overseas travelling. While in a pathless ocean, as navigators, explorers, pilots and common people were trying to trace long-distance routes, improving their navigational know-how, Iberian books were the ones setting the framework for a world-scale change of mentality. [Luana Giurgevich]

Once and Future Astronauts

The word “astronaut” has acquired in our times a very specific ring, inseparable of rockets, robots, and fancy expensive suits—all very technological in the limited sense of the metallic and hydrocarbon-powered technology which moves our world. It is rather a pretentious word, when you think that our so-called astronauts have not even made it to the nearest star (astron, in Greek), our Sun, but have barely reached our tiny moon while making other big plans.

In this our contemporary make-believe sense, we mean by astronaut “someone who navigates among the stars,” but there is in fact a more humble and realistic sense of the word, and it is the one used in the compound “astronavigation”. In this case it means “someone who navigates using the stars as reference,” “someone who navigates under the guidance of the stars.”

Some elements of maritime astronautics must have been always there since the end of the mythical Golden Age, when men first started cutting the waves with their keels—after all, the starry sky was and still is an almost palpable reality of uncontaminated night. But fifteenth-century Arab pilots in the Indian Ocean were inheritors and refiners of a centuries-old tradition of astronautics, a particularly sophisticated and complex usage of the night skyscape, combining accurate and dogged observation with astute and insightful combinations to transform the heavenly vault, even in cases of poor visibility, into a very reliable and efficient reference framework. Those were the good old pre-modern astronauts!

And yet, come to think of it, if we remember that the very idea of number and calculation is rooted in the observation of the sky (Plato, Epinomis, 978b), then we are all, by being human and living in society, a sort of astronauts. All our sciences and techniques at every step have been and are determined unfathomably by our relation to those flickering lights above, and what we can decide to a certain extent is only the degree of our awareness. Let’s try and put it axiomatically in Latin: non est homo nisi astronauta, there is no human who is not an astronaut. [Juan Acevedo]

The Columbian Exchange I. Plants

The voyage of Christopher Columbus changed the world in many different ways. If we experience some of them only indirectly, we face others every day when eating or drinking. In fact, it was only with the discovery of the New World that important crops like potatoes, maize, tomatoes, chili peppers, cacao, peanuts and pineapple, among others, arrived in the Old World.

First Landing of Christopher Columbus by Frederick Kemmelmeyer (1760-1821) via Wikimedia Commons

Simply, many traditional foods now associated exclusively to specific countries in our collective consciousness, like tomato sauce to Italy, chocolate to Switzerland or chili peppers to India and Korea, didn’t exist before 1492. Nicotiana tabacum L., the tobacco plant, became so widely used that it became a substitute for currency in many parts of the world. In exchange, coffee and sugar were brought to the Americas, where they adapted quite well.

Theobroma cacao L., illustration from "Der Cacao und die Chocolate” by Alfred Mitscherlich,
Berlin 1859.

Changes on both sides were drastic. From the 16th century onward, farmers could choose the crops that worked better from a wide selection of plants. They could literally pick the best of two worlds. This practiceled to a sudden increase of farming and to improved yields. While cultivation of potatoes, sweet potatoes, maize, and cassava resulted in caloric and nutritional improvement in Europe, other crops such as tomatoes, cacao, and chili peppers increased vitamin intake and improved taste, favoring the development of local cuisine as we know it today. Since “the coming together of the continents was a prerequisite for the population explosion of the past two centuries, and certainly played an important role in the Industrial Revolution” (Crosby, 1989), we can argue that gastronomic traditions were not the only ones shaped by the biological globalization that followed Columbus’ voyage.

However, plants were not the only ones being transferred. With the expression “the Columbian Exchange”, the historian Alfred W. Crosby, in 1972, referred to the transfer of plants, animals and diseases which started between Europe and the Americas, and whose effects rapidly spread to Africa and Asia. We’ll talk later about the other two categories. [Silvana Munzi]