Cattle and sheep ground American vegetation between their flat teeth, preventing the regrowth of native shrubs and trees. Beneath their hooves would sprout grasses from Africa, possibly introduced from slave-ship bedding; splay-leaved and dense on the ground, they choked out native vegetation. (Alien grasses could withstand grazing better than Caribbean groundcover plants because grasses grow from the base of the leaf, unlike most other species, which grow from the tip. Grazing consumes the growth zones of the latter but has little impact on those in the former.) Over the years forests of Caribbean palm, mahogany, and ceiba became forests of Australian acacia, Ethiopian shrubs, and Central American logwood. Scurrying below, mongooses from India eagerly drove Dominican snakes toward extinction. The change continues to this day. Orange groves, introduced to Hispaniola from Spain, have recently begun to fall to the depredations of lime swallowtail butterflies, citrus pests from Southeast Asia that probably came over in 2004. Today Hispaniola has only small fragments of its original forest.
Natives and newcomers interacted in unexpected ways, creating biological bedlam. When Spanish colonists imported African plantains in 1516, the Harvard entomologist Edward O. Wilson has proposed, they also imported scale insects, small creatures with tough, waxy coats that suck the juices from plant roots and stems. About a dozen banana-infesting scale insects are known in Africa. In Hispaniola, Wilson argued, these insects had no natural enemies. In consequence, their numbers must have exploded—a phenomenon known to science as “ecological release.” The spread of scale insects would have dismayed the island’s European banana farmers but delighted one of its native species: the tropical fire ant Solenopsis geminata.2 S. geminata is fond of dining on scale insects’ sugary excrement; to ensure the flow, the ants will attack anything that disturbs them. A big increase in scale insects would have led to a big increase in fire ants.
So far this is informed speculation. What happened in 1518 and 1519 is not. In those years, according to Bartolomé de Las Casas, a missionary priest who lived through the incident, Spanish orange, pomegranate, and cassia plantations were destroyed “from the root up.” Thousands of acres of orchards were “all scorched and dried out, as though flames had fallen from the sky and burned them.” The actual culprit, Wilson argued, was the sap-sucking scale insects. But what the Spaniards saw was S. geminata—“an infinite number of ants,” Las Casas reported, their stings causing “greater pains than wasps that bite and hurt men.” The hordes of ants swarmed through houses, blackening roofs “as if they had been sprayed with charcoal dust,” covering floors in such numbers that colonists could sleep only by placing the legs of their beds in bowls of water. They “could not be stopped in any way nor by any human means.”
Overwhelmed and terrified, Spaniards abandoned their homes to the in-sects. Santo Domingo was “depopulated,” one witness recalled. In a solemn ceremony, the remaining colonists chose, by lottery, a saint to intercede with God on their behalf—St. Saturninus, a third-century martyr. They held a procession and feast in his honor. The response was positive. “From that day onward,” Las Casas wrote, “one saw by plain sight that the plague began to diminish.”
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 army of activists and scholars has bombarded the public with condemnations of the man and his works. They have called him brutal (he was, by today’s standards) and racist (he wasn’t, strictly speaking—modern concepts of race had not yet been invented); incompetent as an administrator (he was) and as a seaman (he wasn’t); a religious fanatic (he surely was, from a secular point of view); and a greedy monomaniac (a charge, the admiral’s supporters would say, that could be leveled against all ambitious souls). Colón, his detractors charge, never understood what he had found.
Completed in 1992, this huge, cross-shaped memorial to Columbus in Santo Domingo was designed by the young Scottish architect Joseph Lea Gleave, who attempted to capture in stone what he regarded as Columbus’s most important role: the man who brought Christianity to the Americas. The structure, he said modestly, would be “one of the great monuments of the ages.” (Photo credit 1.2)
How different it was in 1852, when Antonio del Monte y Tejada, a celebrated Dominican litterateur, closed the first of the four volumes of his history of Santo Domingo by extolling Colón’s “great, generous, memorable and eternal” career. The admiral’s every action “breathes
greatness and elevation,” del Monte y Tejada wrote. Do not “all nations … owe him eternal gratitude”? The best way to acknowledge this debt, he proposed, would be to erect a gigantic Columbus statue, “a colossus like the one in Rhodes,” sponsored by “all the cities of Europe and America,” that would spread its arms benevolently across Santo Domingo, the hemisphere’s “most visible and noteworthy place.”
A grand monument to the admiral! To del Monte y Tejada, the merits of the idea seemed obvious; Colón was a messenger from God, his voyages to the Americas the result of a “divine decree.” Nonetheless, building the monument took almost a century and a half. The delay was partly economic; most nations in the hemisphere were too poor to throw money at a monstrous statue on a faraway island. But it also reflected the growing unease about the admiral himself. Knowing what we know today about the fate of the Indians on Hispaniola, critics asked, should there be any monument to his voyages at all? Given his actions, what kind of person was buried in the golden box at its center?
The answer is hard to arrive at, even though his life is among the best documented of his time—the newest edition of his collected writings runs to 536 pages of small print.
During his lifetime, nobody knew him as Columbus. The admiral was baptized as Cristoforo Colombo by his family in Genoa, Italy, but changed his name to Cristovao Colombo when he moved to Portugal, where he was an agent for Genoese merchant families. He called himself Cristóbal Colón after 1485, when he moved to Spain, having failed to persuade the Portuguese king to sponsor an expedition across the Atlantic. Later, like a petulant artist, he insisted that his signature be an incomprehensible glyph:
(No one is sure what he meant, but the third line could invoke Christ, Mary, and Joseph—Xristus Maria Yosephus—and the letters up top may stand for Servus Sum Altissimi Salvatoris, “Servant I am of the Highest Savior.” Χρο FERENS is probably Xristo-Ferens, “Christ-Bearer.”)
“A well-built man of greater than average stature,” according to a description attributed to his illegitimate son Hernán, the admiral had prematurely white hair, “light-colored eyes,” an aquiline nose, and fair cheeks that readily flushed. He was a mercurial man, moody and inconstant one hour to the next. Although subject to fits of rage, Hernán remembered, Colón was also “so opposed to swearing and blasphemy that I give my word I never heard him say any oath other than ‘by San Fernando.’ ” (St. Ferdinand). His life was dominated by overweening personal ambition and, arguably more important, profound religious faith. Colón’s father, a weaver, seems to have scrambled from debt to debt, which his son apparently viewed with shame; he actively concealed his origins and spent his entire adult life striving to found a dynasty that would be ennobled by the monarchy. His faith, always ardent, deepened during the long years in which he was vainly begging rulers in Portugal and Spain to back his voyage west. During part of that time he lived in a politically powerful Franciscan monastery in southern Spain, a place enraptured by the visions of the twelfth-century mystic Joachim di Fiore, who believed that humankind would enter an age of spiritual bliss after Christendom wrested Jerusalem from the Islamic forces who had conquered it centuries before. The profits from his voyage, Colón came to believe, would both advance his own fortunes and fulfill di Fiore’s vision of a new crusade. Trade with China would pour so much money into Spain, he predicted, “that in three years the Monarchs will be able to set about preparing for the conquest of the Holy Land.”
Integral to this grand scheme were Colón’s views on the size and shape of the earth. As a child, I—like countless students before me—was taught that Columbus was ahead of his time, proclaiming the planet to be large and round in an era when everyone else believed it to be small and flat. My fourth-grade teacher showed us an etching of Columbus brandishing a globe before a platoon of hooting medieval authorities. A shaft of sunlight illuminated the globe and the admiral’s flowing hair; his critics, by contrast, squatted like felons in the shadows. My teacher, alas, had it exactly backward. Scholars had known for more than fifteen hundred years that the world was large and round. Colón disputed both facts.
The admiral’s disagreement with the second fact was minor. The earth, he argued, was not perfectly round but “in the shape of a pear, which would all be very round, except for where the stem is, where it is higher, or as if someone had a very round ball, and in one part of it a woman’s nipple would be put there.” At the very tip of the nipple, so to speak, was “the Earthly Paradise, where nobody can go, except by divine will.” (During a later voyage he thought he had found the nipple, in what is now Venezuela.)
The king and queen of Spain cared not a whit about the admiral’s views of the world’s shape or heaven’s location. But they were keenly interested in his ideas about its size. Colón believed the planet’s circumference to be at least five thousand miles smaller than it actually is. If this idea were true, the gap between western Europe and eastern China—the width, we know today, of both the Atlantic and Pacific oceans and the lands between them—would be much smaller than it actually is.
The notion enticed the monarchs. Like other European elites, they were fascinated by accounts of the richness and sophistication of China. They lusted after Asian textiles, porcelain, spices, and precious stones. But Islamic merchants and governments stood in the way. If Europeans wanted the luxuries of Asia, they had to negotiate with powers that Christendom had been at war with for centuries. Worse, the mercantile city-states of Venice and Genoa had already cut a deal with Islamic forces, and now monopolized the trade. The notion of working with Islamic entities was especially unwelcome to Spain and Portugal, which had been conquered by the armies of Muhammad in the eighth century and had spent hundreds of years in an ultimately successful battle to repel them. But even if they did make arrangements with Islam, Venice and Genoa stood ready to use force to maintain their privileged position. To cut out the unwanted middlemen, Portugal had been trying to send ships all the way around Africa—a long, risky, expensive journey. The admiral told the rulers of Spain that there was a faster, safer, cheaper route: going west, across the Atlantic.
In effect, Colón was challenging the Greek polymath Eratosthenes, who in the third century B.C. had ascertained the earth’s circumference by a method, the science historian Robert Crease wrote in 2003, “so simple and instructive that it is reenacted annually, almost 2,500 years later, by schoolchildren all around the globe.” Eratosthenes concluded that the world is about twenty-five thousand miles around. The east-west width of Eurasia is approximately ten thousand miles. Arithmetic would require that the gap between China and Spain be about fifteen thousand miles. European shipbuilders and potential explorers both knew that no fifteenth-century vessel could survive a voyage of fifteen thousand miles, let alone make the return trip.
Colón believed that he had, as it were, disproved Eratosthenes. A skilled intuitive seaman, the admiral had plied the eastern Atlantic from Africa to Iceland. During these travels he used a sailor’s quadrant in an attempt to measure the length of a degree of longitude. Somehow he convinced himself that his results vindicated the claim, attributed to a ninth-century caliph in Baghdad, that a degree was 560 miles. (It is actually closer to sixty-nine miles.) Colón multiplied this value by 360, the number of degrees in a circle, to calculate the circumference of the earth: 20,400 miles. Coupling this figure with an incorrectly large estimate of the east-west length of Eurasia, Colón argued that the journey across the Atlantic could be as little as three thousand miles, six hundred miles of which could be cut off by setting sail from the newly conquered Canary Islands. This distance could easily be traversed by Spanish vessels.
Crossing their fingers that Colón was right, the monarchs submitted his proposal to a committee of experts in astronomy, navigation, and natural philosophy. The committee of experts rolled its collective eyes. From its perspective, Colón’s claim that he—a poorly educated man fumbling with a quadrant on a wave-tossed ship—had refuted Eratosthenes was like someone clai
ming to have demonstrated in a backwoods shack that gravity didn’t pull iron as much as scientists thought, and that one could therefore hoist an anvil with a loop of thread. In the end, though, the king and queen ignored the experts—they told Colón to try the thread.
After landing in the Americas in 1492, the admiral naturally claimed that his ideas had been vindicated.3 The delighted monarchs awarded him honors and wealth. He died in 1506, a rich man surrounded by a loving family; nevertheless, he died a bitter man. As evidence had emerged of his failings, personal and geographical, the Spanish court had revoked most of his privileges and shunted him aside. In the anger and humiliation of his later years, he slid into religious messianism. He came to believe that he was God’s “messenger,” destined to show the world “the new heaven and earth of which Our Lord spoke through Saint John in the Apocalypse.” In one of his last reports to the king, the admiral suggested that he, Colón, would be the ideal person to convert the emperor of China to Christianity.
Much the same mix of grandiosity and disappointment characterized the Columbus monument. Del Monte y Tejada’s proposal for a memorial to the admiral was finally approved in 1923, at a meeting of the Western Hemisphere’s governments. Progress was slow—the design competition wasn’t held for another eight years, and the monument itself wasn’t built for another six decades. During most of that time the Dominican Republic was ruled by the tyrant Rafael Trujillo. A classic case of narcissistic personality disorder, Trujillo erected scores of statues to himself and hung a giant neon sign that read “God and Trujillo” over the harbor of Santo Domingo, which he had renamed Trujillo City. As his reign grew more barbarous, international enthusiasm for the lighthouse waned—supporting the project was seen as endorsing the dictator. Many nations boycotted the inauguration, on October 12, 1992. Pope John Paul II reneged on his promise to celebrate a Mass at the opening, though he did appear nearby a day before. Meanwhile, protesters set police barricades on fire, denouncing the admiral as “the exterminator of a race.” Residents of the walled-off slums around the monument told reporters that they thought Colón deserved no commemoration at all.