READ: Columbian Exchange

The Columbian Exchange

In the wake of Columbus’ voyages, more Spanish crossed the Atlantic. With them came animal and plant life that altered ecosystems and transformed the landscape. Westward-bound Spanish ships brought wheat, rye, barley, oats, and other European grains; fruits such as cherries, peaches, pears, lemons, oranges, melons, and grapes; and vegetables such as radish, salad greens, and onions. All of these, unknown in the Americas, perpetuated European cuisine and were gradually incorporated into Indian diets. 

But much more important were the herd animals of the Europeans: cattle, goats, horses, burros, pigs, and sheep. A burro pulling a wheeled cart could move ten times as much corn or cordwood as a human. A horse could carry a messenger twice the speed of the fleetest runner and spread quickly across the continent’s interior. 

Still more transformative were livestock. Cattle, sheep, goats, and pigs flourished, grazing in the vast grasslands of the Americas, safe from the large carnivores that attacked them in the Old World but did not exist in the Americas. Cattle reproduced so rapidly that feral livestock swarmed across the countryside, often increasing tenfold in three or four years. They flourished so well that in time they ate themselves out of their favorable environment, stripping away plant life, which soon led to topsoil erosion and eventually to desertification. 

Pigs were even harder on the environment. Reproducing at staggering rates, they tore into the manioc tubers and sweet potatoes in the Greater Antilles where Columbus first introduced eight of them in 1493. They devoured guavas and pineapples, ravaged lizards and baby birds, and in short, stripped the land clean. Similar swine explosions occurred on the mainland of Mexico and Central America, where along with cattle, they devastated the grasslands. 

American crops also transformed much of Europe, Asia, and Africa. From its first introduction in northern Spain in the late 1500s, the potato slowly spread northward and eastward through Europe. From the North Sea to the Ural Mountains, farmers on the northern European plain learned slowly that by substituting potatoes for rye—the only grain that would thrive in the short and often rainy summers—they could quadruple their yield in calories per acre. Columbus had been dead for more than a century before potato and corn production took hold in Europe. But when this happened, as it did in Ireland in the mid-1660s, the transition to New World potato allowed for population growth and strengthened the sinew of Europe’s diet—though reliance on the potato would eventually cause great harm in Ireland.

Text retrieved from http://www.learner.org/courses/amerhistory/pdf/text/AmHst02_Mapping.pdf

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