1493_ Uncovering the New World Columbus Created - Charles C. Mann [10]
From the human perspective, the most dramatic impact the Columbian Exchange was on humankind itself. Spanish accounts suggest that Hispaniola had a large native population: Colón, for instance, casually described the Taino as “innumerable, for I believe there to be millions upon millions of them.” Las Casas claimed the population to be “more than three million.” Modern researchers have not nailed down the number; estimates range from 60,000 to almost 8 million. A careful study in 2003 argued that the true figure was “a few hundred thousand.” No matter what the original number, though, the European impact was horrific. In 1514, twenty-two years after Colón’s first voyage, the Spanish government counted up the Indians on Hispaniola for the purpose of allocating them among colonists as laborers. Census agents fanned across the island but found only 26,000 Taino. Thirty-four years later, according to one scholarly Spanish resident, fewer than 500 Taino were alive. The destruction of the Taino plunged Santo Domingo into poverty. The colonists had wiped out their own labor force.
Spanish cruelty played its part in the calamity, but its larger cause was the Columbian Exchange. Before Colón none of the epidemic diseases common in Europe and Asia existed in the Americas. The viruses that cause smallpox, influenza, hepatitis, measles, encephalitis, and viral pneumonia; the bacteria that cause tuberculosis, diphtheria, cholera, typhus, scarlet fever, and bacterial meningitis—by a quirk of evolutionary history, all were unknown in the Western Hemisphere. Shipped across the ocean from Europe these maladies consumed Hispaniola’s native population with stunning rapacity. The first recorded epidemic, perhaps due to swine flu, was in 1493. Smallpox entered, terribly, in 1518; it spread to Mexico, swept down Central America, and then continued into Peru, Bolivia, and Chile. Following it came the rest, a pathogenic cavalcade.
Throughout the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries novel microorganisms spread across the Americas, ricocheting from victim to victim, killing three-quarters or more of the people in the hemisphere. It was as if the suffering these diseases had caused in Eurasia over the past millennia were concentrated into a span of decades. In the annals of human history there is no comparable demographic catastrophe. The Taino were removed from the face of the earth, though recent research hints that their DNA may survive, invisibly, in Dominicans who have African or European features, genetic strands from different continents entangled, coded legacies of the Columbian Exchange.
TO THE LIGHTHOUSE
A placid, whispering river runs through Santo Domingo, capital of the Dominican Republic. On the west bank of the river stands the stony remains of the colonial town, including the palace of Diego Colón, the admiral’s firstborn son. From the east bank rises a vast mesa of stained concrete, a monolith 102 feet high and 689 feet long. It is the Faro a Colón—the Columbus Lighthouse. The structure is called a lighthouse because 146 four-kilowatt lights are mounted on its summit. They point straight up, assaulting the heavens with a fusillade of light intense enough to cause blackouts in surrounding neighborhoods.
Like a medieval church, the lighthouse is laid out as a cross, with a long nave and two short transepts projecting from the sides. At the central intersection, inside a crystal security box, is an ornate golden sarcophagus said to contain the admiral’s bones. (The claim is disputed; in Seville, Spain, another ornate sarcophagus also is said to house Colón’s remains.) Beyond the sarcophagus are a series of exhibits from many nations. When I visited not long ago, most focused on the hemisphere’s original inhabitants, depicting them as the passive or even grateful recipients of European largesse, cultural and technological.
Unsurprisingly, native people rarely endorse this view of their history, and Colón’s part in it. An