Columbus_ The Four Voyages - Laurence Bergreen [131]
These crops were associated with population growth and economic growth. That was fine as far as it went, and relatively benign. But the Europeans also brought with them alcohol and alcoholism, another scourge that decimated heretofore innocent local populations. The devastating effects of European agriculture and pathogens on American Indians and their land did not mean the New World’s ecosystem and its peoples were inferior; it resulted from the novelty of the assault. In time, plants, animals, and people adapted to the invaders, long after the devastation wrought by the initial contact.
Once started, the Columbian Exchange never ceased, and it continues at an ever-accelerating pace. Crosby called the phenomenon a “wild oscillation of nature” that occurs when an isolated region emerges into the larger environment. “Possibly it will never be repeated in as spectacular fashion as in the Americas in the first post-Columbian century, not unless there is, one day, an exchange of life forms between planets.”
For better or worse, or rather, for better and worse, this is Columbus’s enduring, relentless, inescapable, all-encompassing legacy.
PART THREE
Decadence
CHAPTER 8
“A Great Roaring”
Columbus labored uncertainly on muleback along stony trails and dusty plains toward Valladolid, in north central Spain. Ferdinand and Isabella had wed here twenty-eight years earlier, in 1469, and they occasionally returned to preside over their expanding empire. Columbus’s companions included two close relatives of Caonabó, the duplicitous Indian cacique with whom he had formed an alliance. The Admiral of the Ocean Sea had planned to present Caonabó himself to the Sovereigns as a trophy, but he had died of disease at sea. Only his relatives remained.
The Admiral had returned to Spain at the conclusion of his second voyage only weeks before, and he managed this overland journey as if it were an extension of that seagoing enterprise. As the party stumbled on their way, their caged parrots, souvenirs of Hispaniola, screeched in alarm. Caonabó’s brother, who had converted to Christianity and taken the name Don Diego, remained nearly as conspicuous, wearing a prominent collar fashioned from gold and his crown, said to be “big and tall, with wings on its sides like a shield and golden eyes as large as silver cups.”
Ravaged by illness, Columbus looked a decade older than his forty-six years, drained of the vigor and stamina that had propelled him as a young navigator. His fine mane of hair had gone white, and his vision constantly troubled him, his retinas scorched from long hours of gazing at the sunlit sea. His bones ached with every lurch of the mule on which he rode. Suffering from arthritis and other disorders, he knew his time was limited, and rather than resting on his laurels, and allowing others to win glory and riches by building on the discoveries that he had made in the previous five years, he was determined to cram as much exploration as possible into the time left to him.
At times he brooded on the lack of recognition for his astonishing exploration of the Indies. “I discovered for you,” he reminded Ferdinand and Isabella between voyages, “333 leagues of mainland at the very end of the Orient and named 700 islands in addition to what was discovered on the first voyage, and I pacified for you the island of Hispaniola, which is larger than Spain and inhabited by innumerable people.” Columbus should have thought