1493_ Uncovering the New World Columbus Created - Charles C. Mann [46]
2 Europeans later hunted the beaver to near extinction—its fur makes especially good felt, then in demand for hats. In this way, they unknowingly replaced one dominant natural engineer with another, the earthworm.
3 Roanoke apparently did have one signal impact: introducing England to tobacco. Sir Francis Drake probably brought the plant to the nation in the previous decade—he had acquired it on his round-the-world expedition. But it wasn’t widely known until Roanoke colonists returned with strange, fiery clay tubes at their lips. “In a short time,” one courtly eyewitness moaned, “many men every-where … with insatiable desire and greediness sucked in the stinking smoak.”
4 Equivalents in contemporary money are hard to establish, but this sum surely translates into tens of millions of dollars. Even that vague claim may be misleading, because the pool of investment capital was then much smaller; the capital raised by the Virginia Company was a much bigger percentage of the total available than, say, $50 million would be today.
5 Not everything went badly for the tassantassas. In May 1623, a little more than a year after the assault, they staged a counterattack at a peace conference with Tsenacomoco’s leadership. At a celebratory toast, one witness recorded, the English passed out poisoned sack (a sherry-like wine), killing “some tooe hundred” Indians. Pursued by a stricken, enraged crowd, the colonists fled to their boats. As they left, they fired into the mob, killing “som 50 more,” including, they erroneously believed, Opechancanough. Afterward the English “brought hom parte of ther heades”—that is, they scalped some of their victims.
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Evil Air
“EXTRACTIVE STATES”
In 1985 a bookseller in northeast Spain announced that he had possession of nine letters and reports by Cristóbal Colón, seven of them never seen before, including chronicles of all four of his American voyages. Later that year, Consuelo Varela and Juan Gil, editors of a definitive edition of the admiral’s writings, skeptically inspected the papers. Surprising their colleagues, Varela and Gil concluded that the manuscripts were handwritten copies of actual letters and reports by Colón—copies of the type routinely kept by wealthy people in the days before photocopiers. The Spanish government acquired the papers for an undisclosed sum; a facsimile edition was published in 1989. Nine years after that, an English translation appeared.
Because I am interested in Colón, I bought a copy of the translation when I spotted it in a used-book store. Part of a series the Italian state published to honor the five hundredth anniversary of his first voyage to the Americas, the book is a big, lush, cream-colored object that doesn’t fit on a standard bookshelf. Disappointing to readers like me, Gil and Varela announced in the introduction that “these previously unknown texts do not present any spectacular revelations” about Colón’s life and character. But halfway through the newly revealed chronicle of the admiral’s second voyage I came across a curious detail—one that wasn’t in the fine biographies by Samuel Eliot Morison and Felipe Fernández-Armesto.
In the translation, Colón explains that after the expedition arrived at La Isabela “all my people went ashore to settle, and everyone realized it rained a lot. They became gravely ill from tertian fever.” Tertian fever, an old-fashioned term, refers to bouts of fever and chills that occur in a regular forty-eight-hour pattern—a day of sickness followed by a day of quiet, then a day of sickness as the pattern repeats (tertian, taken from the Latin for “three days,” derives from the Roman custom of counting time from the beginning of one period to the beginning of the next). Tertian fever is the fingerprint of the most important types of malaria, one of humankind’s most intractable scourges. Taken literally, Colón seemed to be saying that at La Isabela his men