Columbus_ The Four Voyages - Laurence Bergreen [129]
In reality, Columbus’s final deed before leaving Hispaniola had been to instruct his brother Bartholomew to establish a new city at the mouth of the Ozama River. Santo Domingo was so named because Bartholomew arrived there on a Sunday. The site seemed promising: “a river of wholesome water, quite rich in excellent varieties of fish, flows into the harbor along charming banks,” Peter Martyr noted. “Native palms and fruit trees of every kind sometimes drooped over the heads of our sailors, their branches weighed with blooms and fruits.” The soil appeared to be even more fertile than that of La Isabela. Work on the fortress of Santo Domingo commenced that year, or the next, 1497, and before long twenty men resided in the future capital of the Spanish empire of the Indies. Santo Domingo is now the oldest continuously inhabited European settlement in the Western Hemisphere.
The rise of Santo Domingo meant the end of La Isabela. The ill-starred settlement became the final resting place of the bones of both Spanish settlers and Indians, finally at peace in death. In their shallow graves, the Indian corpses rested on their sides, according to their custom, and the Spanish on their backs, with their arms crossed over their rib cages and their eyes staring into eternity.
INTERLUDE
The Columbian Exchange
Millions of years ago, the Old and New Worlds belonged to one giant landmass, Pangaea, meaning “All Land.” The geologic paradigm known as continental drift, first proposed by the Flemish cartographer Abraham Ortelius in 1596, slowly drove the continents thousands of miles apart.
As recently (in geologic terms) as 125 million years ago, when dinosaurs still inhabited the earth, large portions of North America were joined to the Eurasian landmass. A giant, amorphous ocean—and its currents—freely circulated the globe. Not until 30 million years ago did the oceans begin to assume their present configuration, but even then, the Atlantic Ocean reached from the poles to the tropics. A new phenomenon, the Gulf Stream, a remnant of the ancient transglobal current, distributed and redistributed life across its length. As Pangaea slowly fragmented, the resulting continents developed divergent evolution—that is, life-forms on each continent evolved separately, sometimes on parallel tracks, and in other cases quite differently.
It seemed that matters would go on this way indefinitely, despite fleeting instances of natural transoceanic contact. But in 1492 the voyages of Columbus and his successors suddenly and permanently altered this age-old pattern, bursting the evolutionary bubbles of previously independent continents. It is challenging to consider that one fleet, led by the vision and determination of a single individual, set in motion the events that brought about this lasting global change, but that is what occurred.
Not that Columbus realized it at the time. Arriving in the Americas, he was dumbfounded by the profusion of unfamiliar flora and fauna he faced. He was at times deeply frustrated by his inability to put a name to plants and animals he saw. The few learned men aboard his ships, such as his physician, Dr. Chanca, were similarly baffled.
The world was a very different place in 1492. When Columbus was journeying across the Atlantic, tomatoes, and tomato sauce, were unknown in Italy, or anywhere in Europe. The same situation applied to chocolate, widespread in the Americas for three thousand years before Columbus, but unfamiliar to European palates. Tobacco presented a similar case: deeply woven into Indian life and ritual, but unknown to Europeans. When Columbus and his men encountered these items, they did not know what to make of them. Yet, as a result of their importing these products to Europe, and transplanting flora and fauna they had brought with them in their ships, some as large as horses, others as small as microorganisms, the Old World and the New became interconnected in ways that no one, least of all Columbus, anticipated.