Columbian Exchange

1
Historical Interpretations of the

Columbian Voyages @
The five hundredth anniversary of the Columbian discovery of

America is upon us, and with it the obligation to assess existing
interpretations of the significance of that voyage and the establishment
of permanent links between the Old and New Worlds. The most influ-
ential of the several schools of interpretation are, on the one hand, the
newest and analytic, and on the other, the classic and bardic. The
former is for many recondite and discomforting. The latter, the one
most often taught, dramatized, and believed in North America, is for
most as comfortable as an old pair of slippers: We learned it in primary
school.
THE BARDIC INTERPRETATION
The bardic version of the Columbian voyages and their consequences

was the product of narrative historians, most of them nineteenth-
century writers, who did their work when the peoples of the republics
of the New World looked upon the Americas as fresh and “without sin,”
at least as compared to “decadent” Europe. These historians narrated
the American past in ways consonant both with the documentary
record then available and with the ethnocentrism of their fellow white
citizens of the New World, particularly of the United States. Their
readers wanted history books to provide a story of “the steps by which
a favoring Providence, calling our institutions into being, has conducted
the country to its present happiness and glory,” to quote the
innocently arrogant George Bancroft, whose ten-volume History of the
United States (1834-76) we no longer read but have never forgotten.
The classic narrative that Bancroft and his successors provided can
be summarized as follows: At the end of the fifteenth century
Christopher Columbus discovered America, adding to the world two
Crosby, Alfred W. The Columbian Voyages, the Columbian Exchange, and Their Historians.
E-book, Washington, DC: American Historical Association, 1987, https://hdl.handle.net/2027/heb03124.0001.001.
Downloaded on behalf of California State University, Los Angeles
2
continents populated sparsely with “savages” and, in Mexico and Peru,

with “barbarians” experimenting with protocivilization. Then the
conquistadores, few in number but courageous, conquered the Amer-
indian civilizations, which, for all their temples and gold, were
evidently no more than paper tigers. Lesser conquistadores performed
similarly, if less profitably, in other places, most of them also in tropical
America, as did their Portuguese counterparts in coastal Brazil. British,
French, Dutch, and other European soldiers, merchants, and settlers
did much the same thing in those parts of the New World not yet
claimed by the Iberians. The history of the New World subsequently
became the struggle of European imperialist powers for domination,
and Amerindians ceased to be important, except as enemies or allies of
whites. Afro-Americans, the other of the two non-European peoples
who made major contributions to the development of the modern
Americas, were obviously present in large numbers during the colonial
period but were almost invisible in American history until the Haitian
revolt at the end of the eighteenth century, usually viewed as a
nightmarish aberration from the “normal” pattern of colonization in
the Americas. The Columbian era, the period of European exploration
and colonization, ended in the decades around 1800 with successful
revolutions led by whites, usually of good family and education, against
the parent-countries. Then came the maturation of independent soci-
eties and cultures in the New World, a development paradoxically
confirmed and made irreversible by the migration of very large num-
bers of Europeans to the Americas after the mid-nineteenth century.
This narrative is the version of history that most Americans learned
as children. It is also a cautionary tale (or interpretation) for scholars
and teachers. The bardic version is as deceptive as it is popular because
it is the product of an age that is past, with a characteristically selective
view of history. It is as dangerous as it is deceptive because it reinforces
Euro-American ethnocentrism and confirms historians and teachers in
premises and approaches clearly obsolete on the eve of the Columbian
quincentennial. On the other hand, this classic interpretation is rational
and true to the original sources. That it can be rational as well as
deceptive is perhaps a useful lesson for seekers after absolute truth in
history.
Rather than make a display of our “superiority” over scholars now
dead and buried (thus anticipating the smugness of our own suc-
cessors), let us praise our forebears. They were skilled practitioners of
the historian’s craft who did their work well, enabling the present
generation of historians to make progress, rather than mere correc-
tions. Men like Spain’s Martin Fernandez de Navarette and Canada’s
3
Henri-Raymond Casgrain drew together the documentary evidence

that forms the core of what even revisionists must begin with, and
assembled the bare data of who was who and where and when. These
scholars performed the laborious work that is preliminary to creative
scholarship in any field of history. Among them were creative scholars
of the first rank who built a model of the past that reconciled the
record as they knew it with the values of their own day and made sense
to the literate classes of their time. This is what society pays historians
to do.
Two of the best of these bardic historians were New England’s
William Prescott, historian of the Spanish conquest of Mexico and Peru,
and Francis Parkman, the Homer of the struggle of Britain and France
for empire in North America. Another was Samuel Eliot Morison,
whose 1942 biography of Columbus and two-volume The European
Discovery of America (New York, 1971, 1974) are as close to being
definitive works as one can expect in this mutable world. These men all
liked to approach history through biography; they chose sides and
were transparently loyal to their heroes. For all three men, the stuff of
history was almost always documents, preferably letters, diaries, and
memoirs, and not statistics. Seldom did they turn for help to economics,
archaeology, biology, or any of the sciences, which resulted in some
startling omissions. Prescott managed to write magnificent books on
the conquests of Mexico and Peru and omit all but the bare mention of
the conqueror’s best ally, smallpox. The information on smallpox was in
the original sources but not within the range of what Prescott was
equipped to perceive as important.
The books of the bardic historians were usually neatly organized
around great white men, a strategy whose validity seemed to be con-
firmed by contemporary events. Prescott did not worry his sources like
a dog with an old shoe to find the real reason for the success of Cortés
and Pizarro, because he lived in an era when white people seemingly
always won their wars with nonwhites. In the Second Opium War,
Queen Victoria's plenipotentiary opined that “twenty-four determined
[white] men with revolvers and a sufficient number of cartridges might
walk through China from one end to the other.”? Bardic historians
thought in terms of biography, and why not? They were children of the
nineteenth century, the golden age of rugged individualism and indus-
trial capitalism. It was also an age of rampant nationalism, and when
historians thought in terms of large groups of humans, they thought of
the nation-state and not of tribes or cultures or language families. It
was an age of unembarrassed elitism and racism, and historians tended
to ignore plebians in particular and non-Europeans in general. (Prescott
4
and Parkman were in part exceptions, paying a full measure of

attention to Amerindians, at least in so far as they influenced Euro-
American destinies.) These historians were not much better equipped
intellectually to notice those whom Eric R. Wolf called the “people
without history” * than they were to judge the stability of ecosystems.
The social sciences and biology were new; ecology was not born until
after Prescott and Parkman died, and was still immature when Morison
was middle-aged.
THE ANALYTIC INTERPRETATION
America’s classic historians did not even try to answer many of the
questions that concern us at the end of the twentieth century because
neither they nor their audiences were asking such questions. There
were a few fresh minds, however, who provided new ways of looking
at the world, which led to new ways of sorting data and new kinds of
inquiries. Among the greatest of these innovators were Charles Dar-
win, Karl Marx, and Louis Pasteur, celebrants of paradox who empha-
sized the importance of instability and the immense power of the
humble, even the invisible. Travelers and archaeologists, at a different
level intellectually but no less influential, kept exploring and digging,
turning up evidence of dense pre-Columbian populations in the
Americas, of peoples of undeniably high culture. Who could continue
to think of the Maya as savages after John L. Stephen’s volumes and
Frederick Catherwood’s prints? After the works of W. E. B. Du Bois and
Melville Herskovits, what excuse remained for a historian to claim that
there was nothing to learn about Africans or Afro-Americans?
Above all, after the hell-for-leather advance of the Japanese military
in the early 1940s and the swift collapse of Europe’s overseas empires
in the following two decades (as astonishing, in its way, as the collapse
of the Amerindian empires four centuries earlier), there could be no
more doubt that a great many of the “people without history” must
have at least some history. The effect on the historical profession of the
experiences of the last half-century has been like that on astronomers
of the discovery that the faint smudges seen between the stars of the
Milky Way were really distant galaxies.
The obsolescence of old conceptions persuaded historians to take a
fresh look at the origins of European imperialism: perhaps elements
less dramatic than gold and God and heroes had been involved. Charles
Verlinden led the way by tracing the roots of European imperialism to
the Mediterranean in the age of the Crusades, where organizational
structures and exploitative techniques that would be imposed on
+)
America in the sixteenth century were first tried, and where

Europeans first learned to like sugar and to raise it for profitable export
to their homelands. Verlinden followed the precursors of conquerors
like Cortes and the plantation owners of Brazil from the Levant to the
islands of the eastern Atlantic. There, in the triangle of the great
western ocean that has Iberia, the Azores, and the Canaries as its
boundary stones—an expanse that Pierre Chaunu has shrewdly called
the “Mediterranean Atlantic’4—the sailors of southern and western
Europe studied the patterns of oceanic winds and learned to be blue-
water sailors and how to sail to America and Asia. In Madeira white
settlers, often led by down-at-the heels Iberian nobility seeking land and
wealth to match their titles, discovered how to make a lot of money
raising sugar; in the Canaries they learned how swiftly a fierce
aboriginal people, the Guanches, could disappear and how easily they
could be replaced with imported labor to raise tropical crops for the
European market.
While historians of the Middle Ages and Renaissance were disinter-
ring the roots of European imperialism, the students of the Americas
and Amerindians were revolutionizing their disciplines. Archaeology
thrust the beginnings of American history back at least fifteen
thousand years and populated these millenia and both American
continents with myriads of clever and mysterious people. Social scien-
tists devised means, often quantitative, to tap into the history of
undocumented peoples. The contribution of demographic historians
has been of particular value, providing a structure within which other
historians can find niches for their own discoveries. Historians opened
themselves to (or, fearing obsolescence, rushed to ransack) geology,
climatology, biology, epidemiology, and other fields. As a result, the
kind of grain that is poured into the historian’s mill today would wear
out Leopold von Ranke's grindstones. Historians are scientific not only
in the care they take with research and attempts to limit bias, but also
in their exploitation of whatever the sciences provide that is pertinent
to the study of the human past.
European historians of the Annales school, centered in France, have
been the most noted practitioners of this new kind of history, but
similar advances in technique have been developed in the New World
and applied to the study of the Amerindian past and the impact of the
Columbian voyages on American history. The Berkeley school, as it is
loosely and sometimes inaccurately called, led by geographer Carl
Ortwin Sauer, physiologist Sherburne F. Cook, and _ historians
Woodrow Borah and Lesley Byrd Simpson, began as far back as the
1930s to reassess pre-Columbian and Amerindian history. They used
6
many kinds of nondocumentary data— geological and botanical, among

others—and re-examined, and many times examined for the first time,
the yellowed sheets of tribute, tax, and population records of the
Spanish empire. The Berkeley school has revolutionized American his-
toriography. Not everyone accepts their conclusions, but their ques-
tions—rarely asked before except by proponents of indigenismo and
indianismo—plot the course of historical research in the immediate pre-
and post-Columbian centuries in America.
There has been a renewal of interest in the whole picture, the world,
and therefore in global history. The forces that propelled Columbus
and the forces that the European discovery and exploitation of America
triggered were supranational and supracontinental. Columbian and
post-Columbian exchanges of raw materials, manufactured products,
and organisms cannot be described or analyzed to the full extent of
their significance within any unit smaller than the world. Scholars of
worldly sophistication have accepted the challenge: Fernand Braudel,
William McNeill, Immanuel Wallerstein, Eric R. Wolf, and others. Their
work leads us to lands, cultures, and questions that the bardic his-
torians of Columbus rarely considered. To cite one example, nearly a
hundred years before Columbus and other European mariners crossed
the great oceans, the Chinese admiral Cheng Ho launched a succession
of huge fleets, manned by thousands, around the Malay Peninsula and
across the Indian Ocean as far as East Africa. After this the Chinese
ceased their transoceanic voyaging completely. Cheng Ho inspires
today’s world historians to ask two questions that would never have
occurred to Prescott, Parkman, or even Morison: Why did the Chinese
stop their voyaging, and, the obvious corollary but not a question asked
by Western historians until the present, why did European voyagers
start and never stop?
There are vast expanses of time and territory in the new history of
the Americas as yet not even roughly surveyed, and the work of
detailed description must be left to the next century. There is no body
of received wisdom about the New World, but there is a new model of
New World history for our consideration and use.
America’s classic historians were successful in part because their
scope was narrow. They wrote almost exclusively about white heroes
in the last five hundred years, while today’s analytic historians are
concerned with the masses of people of numerous ethnic groups in a
much larger time frame. To understand how these peoples fared after
they met in 1492, we need to know at least something about the species
of plants, animals, and microlife associated with them. To know that,
we have to go back further than most of our Victorian ancestors
thought there was anything to go back to.
7
The Old and New Worlds had been separate for millions of years
before Columbus, except for periodic reconnections in the far north
during Ice Ages. In this immense period the biotas of the Old and New
Worlds evolved and diverged. As of 1492, there were many similar
species, especially in Eurasia and North America, such as deer and elm,
but the differences were impressive. Europe had nothing quite like
hummingbirds, rattlesnakes, and hickory and pecan trees. Further
south the contrasts between Old and New World biotas were even
more amazing. The biggest mammal in Africa was the elephant; in
contact. |
South America, the cow-sized tapir. The native biotas of the Old and
New Worlds were decidedly different, and for most of the previous few
million years these biotas had not been in competition or even in
The last bout of competition before the arrival of Columbus included

the intial migration into America of the Old World’s Homo sapiens and
the spread of that species from the Arctic Sea to Tierra del Fuego,
affecting changes as yet only partly understood. After the last Ice Age
ended some ten thousand years ago and the continental glaciers melted
back, releasing so much water that the land connection between
Siberia and Alaska was innundated, the ancestors of the Amerindians
were left in complete or nearly complete isolation. They developed
autochthonous cultures, domesticated American plants and animals,
and adapted to American microlife. In 1492 they were living in
equilibrium with each other and with the other tenants of the New
World, macro and micro. This homeostasis no doubt wobbled con-
siderably, even violently, in areas with thick settlements of Amerindian
farmers, but in all probability it was more stable then than it has been
since.
During the same ten-thousand-year period, peoples of the Old World,
in adjustment to the biotas of their continents, engendered their
cultures and domesticated and bred their crops, beasts, and, uninten-
tionally of course, their own set of pesky and sometimes fatal germs.
These humans were also elements in a system that varied constantly
but which was, within broad limits, stable. They even had a modus
vivendi with the plague, which had reared up in the fourteenth century
and killed approximately one-third of the population of western Eurasia
and North Africa. By 1500, however, the European population had
recovered its pre-Black Death totals and was growing, despite
recurrent waves of plague and other deadly diseases.
In 1492 these two systems of homeostasis, one of the Old World and
the other of the New World, like tightrope walkers with poles dipping
and lifting to maintain balance, collided.
The Old World peoples had some distinct advantages in the biological
8
competition that followed. Although their crop plants were not

superior to those of the Amerindians per se—wheat, rice, and yams
were “better” than maize, potatoes, and cassava in some ways and
inferior in others—the Old World advantage in domesticated animals
was great. It was a matter of the Old World's horses, cattle, pigs, goats,
sheep, and other domesticated species versus the New World’s llamas,
guinea pigs, domesticated fowl, and dogs. This advantage was not
permanent, because Amerindians adopted many of the new livestock,
most spectacularly horses in the Great Plains and pampa, where these
animals helped the Amerindians to maintain their independence until
the last half of the nineteenth century. The greatest influence of Old
World plants and animals was probably in making it possible for Old
World pastoralists and farmers to live in the American colonies as they
had at home or, in most cases, better. Old World livestock, which had
evolved in what seemingly had been a rougher league than the New
World’s, often outfought, outran, or at least out-reproduced American
predators. Free of the diseases and pests that had preyed on them at
home, the European animals thrived and even went wild, often in
amazing numbers, providing mounts, meat, milk, and leather much
more cheaply in the New World than in the Old. The most spectacular
instances of this were in southern South America. The first Spanish
attempt to colonize the pampa failed in the 1530s, and the survivors
departed, leaving some livestock behind. When settlers returned in
1580 they found “infinite” herds of horses. In 1587 Hernando Arias left
one hundred cattle behind him at Santa Fé de Parana in Brazil, and
when he returned in 1607 he found, according to his testimony, one
hundred thousand. These Iberians were speaking colorfully, rather
than statistically, but the natural increase in the feral herds of South
America was indeed enormous, probably unprecedented in all history.
Smaller but comparable explosions in animal populations took place
elsewhere in the New World.
The decisive advantage of the human invaders of America was not
their plants or animals—and certainly not their muskets and rifles,
which Amerindians eventually obtained in quantity —but their diseases.
The aboriginal Americans had their own diseases (several of them, like
Chargas’s disease and Carrion’s disease, were as indigenous to the
Americas as hummingbirds and tapirs), but the number of these was
insignificant compared to the sum of those that came to the New World
from the Old after 1492. There is debate about whether certain dis-
eases did or did not exist in America before 1492. Yellow fever, for
example, is probably African, but could have been endemic among
American monkeys when Europeans first arrived and perhaps
9
attracted no attention until the first epidemic among humans. There is

little disagreement on the following list: smallpox, measles, whooping
cough, chicken pox, bubonic plague, malaria, diphtheria, amoebic
dysentery, and influenza. These were the most lethal of the invaders of
the New World in the sixteenth century. Even today the worst
immediate threats to the native peoples of remote Amazonia are not the
soldiers or road builders per se, but the measles and influenza that they
bring with them.
The advantage in bacteriological warfare was (and is) character-
istically enjoyed by people from dense and often older areas of
settlement moving into sparser and usually newer areas of settlement:
the Russians into Siberia, the Chinese into Mongolia, the British into
Australia, for example. The diseases that savaged the Amerindians
were infections associated with dense populations of humans, which
appeared in the Old World long before the New. In addition, it is
probable that a number of these diseases were produced by the
exchange of microlife between humans and domesticated animals.
Such maladies as influenza seem to be renewed in their virulency by
exchanges between species and possibly first evolved into human
pathogens as the result of such exchanges. Old World peoples
domesticated more species of animals than Amerindians and lived in
close contact with animals—often literally cheek and jowl, hip and
thigh—for much longer. From their animals Old World peoples ob-
tained much more protein, fat, leather, fiber, bone, manure, and
muscle power than were available to the Amerindians, and more
epidemic and endemic disease as well. Old World peoples adjusted to
these infections, socially and immunologically, and were relatively
resistant to the diseases. As a result, they practiced bacteriological
warfare whenever they went to places remote from the dense popula-
tions of the Old World. The Valley of Mexico had fifty devastating
epidemics between 1519 and 1810, including smallpox, typhus,
measles, mumps, and pneumonia. Even the fragmentary record of
Yucatan shows fourteen epidemics. The story of Peru, and of every
area for which there are any records, is similar.
“Wherever the European has trod,” wrote Darwin after his circum-
navigation of the globe on the Beagle, “death seems to pursue the
aboriginal. We may look to the wide extent of the Americas, Polynesia,
the Cape of Good Hope, and Australia, and we find the same result,” >
which he blamed largely on infectious disease. The Yanomamo of
today’s Venezuelan-Brazilian borderlands offer a simple explanation for
the phenomenon: “White men cause illness; if the whites had never
existed, disease would never have existed either.” ®
10
The most spectacular killer of Amerindians was smallpox, a disease

that existed in medieval and Renaissance Europe but did not rise to the
first rank of maladies until the sixteenth century. From that time until
the spread of vaccination in the nineteenth century, smallpox was one
of the Continent’s most widespread and deadly diseases, so common
that it was considered inevitable among children in areas of dense
population. In this period Europe’s most important colonies were
established in the New World.
Smallpox appeared in the West Indies at the end of 1518 or beginning
of 1519 and spread to Mexico on the heels of Cortes, swept through
Central America, and preceded Pizarro into the realms of the Incas.
Witnesses estimated the losses at one-fourth, one-third, or even one-
half of the infected populations. Such estimations may seem extrav-
agantly high, but very high death rates among the unimmunized were
not uncommon in more recent, well-documented outbreaks. To cite a
few examples of the devastating effects of such epidemics, when small-
pox broke out in 1898 among the Moqui Amerindians in Arizona, 632
fell ill. Of the 220 Moqui who refused European-style treatment and,
presumably, put their faith in folk therapy (as Aztecs and Incas would
have in the early sixteenth century), 163 died; their death rate was over
70 percent. Even twentieth-century therapy could do no more than
ameliorate the effects of the disease and prevent secondary infections.
In 1972 a pilgrim returning from Mecca brought smallpox to Yugo-
slavia, where it had not been known for over a generation. Before
public health measures stopped the spread of the disease, 174 people
contracted smallpox and 35 died, a mortality rate of 20 percent.
Readers who are still skeptical about the killing potential of new infec-
tions should turn to accounts of the Black Death in the Old World or to
a consideration of the potentialities of AIDS in the 1980s. Imagine the
consequences if AIDS were not a venereal but instead a breath-borne
disease like smallpox.
Although Euro-Americans dubbed America the “virgin land,” it had
not been virgin for many millenia, if the title is used to mean free from
human occupation. By the time Old World settlers, following after the
explorers, soldiers, and traders, arrived in numbers in most regions—
Venezuela, Alberta, Amazonia—Old World pathogens had so reduced
the indigenous population that some special name for the ensuing
vacancy was required. Francis Jennings, with chilling appropriateness,
replaced the phrase the “virgin land” with the “widowed land.” ’
The widowed land was more open to exploitation than any large area
to which western Europeans had access, certainly more open to occu-
pation than the nearest alternative, the lands of eastern Europe,
11
bloodied for centuries by the Drang nach Osten. The success of the
invaders of widowed America, particularly of the British in North
America, inspired Adam Smith to issue an unintentional prophesy, ap-
propriately dated 1776: “The colony of a civilized nation which takes
possession, either of a waste country, or of one so thinly inhabited, that
the natives easily give place to new settlers, advances more rapidly to
wealth and greatness than any other human society.” ®
In comparison with Eurasia and Africa, both ineradicably populated
with their own peoples, the New World was a tabula rasa. Great
fortunes could be made in the Americas by exploiting mineral
resources and native biota, such as the beaver with its thick, tough fur.
The greatest money-maker in America in the first centuries after
Columbus, however, was the plantation, which produced tropical and
semitropical crops, most of Old World origin, of an at least quasi-
addictive nature for the European market. The foremost crop was
sugar, followed by cocoa and tobacco, and then such useful items as
cotton. Lands with soils and climates suitable for these crops existed in
large parts of the New World, but the establishment and operation of
plantations required the incessant labor of a great many people. Entre-
preneurs tried using Amerindians as slaves and serfs in the hot, wet
lowlands where such crops often grew best, but found not only that
the Amerindians were intransigent but, worse, that they wilted and
died too fast to be useful as laborers.
The plantation masters turned to their own homelands, using per-
suasion, propaganda, and even kidnapping to get Europeans across the
Atlantic. Even shipments of convicts were acceptable. (An English verb
for the transportation of these unfortunates, often Celtic backers of the
wrong royal family, was “barbadoing,” after the island where tobacco
and later sugar promised profit.) But few Europeans could be per-
suaded or forced to become field workers in the American tropics,
especially after the spread of malaria and yellow fever. Most Euro-
peans, even serfs, had some civil rights. They could be dragged off to
the hot lands of the New World by the thousands, but not by the
millions. Until the end of the eighteenth century most of the people
who crossed the Atlantic from the Old to the New World, and the ma-
jority of those who took up the ax and machete and hoe to labor on the
plantations, were black, about 10 million. The Atlantic slave trade, the
greatest such trade in all history and the source of revolutionary
changes in all of the four continents facing the Atlantic, was part of the
legacy of Columbus.
ps
| The Heirs of Columbus
The bardic historians were relatively unconcerned with the geo-

graphic, biological, and demographic effects of the Columbian voyages,
but these are the themes of current scholarship. The bulk of the
research and analysis on these matters remains to be done, especially
on the Columbian influence in Africa and Asia, but I can offer an
interim report.
THE EFFECTS INTELLECTUAL
“Among the extraordinary though quite natural circumstances of my

life,” wrote Columbus’s countryman, the mathematician and physician
Girolamo Cardano in the 1570s, “the first and most unusual is that I was
born in this century in which the whole world became known;
whereas the ancients were familiar with but a little more than a third
part of it.” ° In 1491 the European conception of the universe was much
the same as it had been a thousand years and more before. The earth
was believed to be at the center of crystalline spheres carrying the sun,
moon, and stars, with the surface of the world above water divided into
three parts—Europe, Africa, and Asia. Humans lived in all three land
areas, but not in the Torrid Zone, which was dreadfully hot and there-
fore uninhabitable. The evidence that did not fit this model was still
small enough in significance and quantity to be ignored or subdued to
conformity by sophistry. But when Columbus returned in 1493 he
rendered the old model obsolete in a stroke. Few realized this immedi-
ately, but the system was obviously overloaded with new data and
bursting by the time Cardano wrote.
Columbus added a fourth part to the world, the Americas, and his
successors added the Pacific, an unimagined ocean of unimaginable
breadth beyond America. Columbus and his followers also provided
eyewitness testimony that torrid America was full of people. (Euro-
peans had somehow been able to ignore earlier reports of Portuguese
13

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1

Historical Interpretations of the

The five hundredth anniversary of the Columbian discovery of

THE BARDIC INTERPRETATION

The bardic version of the Columbian voyages and their consequences

continents populated sparsely with “savages” and, in Mexico and Peru,

Henri-Raymond Casgrain drew together the documentary evidence

and Parkman were in part exceptions, paying a full measure of

THE ANALYTIC INTERPRETATION

America in the sixteenth century were first tried, and where

many kinds of nondocumentary data— geological and botanical, among

The last bout of competition before the arrival of Columbus included

competition that followed. Although their crop plants were not

attracted no attention until the first epidemic among humans. There is

The most spectacular killer of Amerindians was smallpox, a disease

| The Heirs of Columbus

The bardic historians were relatively unconcerned with the geo-

THE EFFECTS INTELLECTUAL

“Among the extraordinary though quite natural circumstances of my

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