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This political cartoon illustrates the common misconception of how many people believe Columbus discovered the Americas, when in fact Natives had been here previously. This would be a good supplement to many of the videos online pertaining to the Columbian Exchange, for those videos often forget to mention the native side of the story, or portray them in an incorrect, negative way. Students could also use this cartoon as a reference on how political cartoons work, and could make one of their own, based upon their knowledge from this one.

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This rap, created by students, is a fun, educational way for students to get an overview of what the Columbian Exchange brought to the Americas. Because this video is created by students, other students watching it will be able to easily understand the basics of the Columbian Exchange, for the video includes an array of factoids. A supplement assignment could be students creating their own rap about the Columbian Exchange, using this for reference.

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Lyrics: I'm gonna trade some goods Between America and Afro-Eurasia Post 1492 heres the flu give me some fruit This trades freakin awesome Pull up to the new world like waddup I'm Chris Columbus I'm so pumped that I discovered the Americas Fresh from Spain he's gonna go all out

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This news piece, from the Scientific American, offers readers a background of how global disease spread throughout the world. This is a great perspective and resource for how the Columbian Exchange is still affecting our world today. Students could use this resource as a reference to do more research on diseases that are still around today that may have originated due to the Columbian Exchange.

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In 1492, Columbus sailed the ocean blue, but when he returned from 'cross the seas, did he bring with him a new disease?

New skeletal evidence suggests Columbus and his crew not only introduced the Old World to the New World, but brought back syphilis as well, researchers say.

Syphilis is caused by Treponema pallidum bacteria, and is usually curable nowadays with antibiotics. Untreated, it can damage the heart, brain, eyes and bones; it can also be fatal.

The first known epidemic of syphilis occurred during the Renaissance in 1495. Initially its plague broke out among the army of Charles the VIII after the French king invaded Naples. It then proceeded to devastate Europe, said researcher George Armelagos, a skeletal biologist at Emory University in Atlanta.

"Syphilis has been around for 500 years," said researcher Molly Zuckerman at Mississippi State University. "People started debating where it came from shortly afterward, and they haven't stopped since. It was one of the first global diseases, and understanding where it came from and how it spread may help us combat diseases today."

Stigmatized disease

The fact that syphilis is a stigmatized sexually transmitted disease has added to the controversy over its origins. People often seem to want to blame some other country for it, said researcher Kristin Harper, an evolutionary biologist at Emory. [ Top 10 Stigmatized Health Disorders]

Armelagos originally doubted the so-called Columbian theory for syphilis when he first heard about it decades ago. "I laughed at the idea that a small group of sailors brought back this disease that caused this major European epidemic," he recalled. Critics of the Columbian theory have proposed that syphilis had always bedeviled the Old World but simply had not been set apart from other rotting diseases such as leprosy until 1500 or so.

However, upon further investigation, Armelagos and his colleagues got a shock - all of the available evidence they found supported the Columbian theory, findings they published in 1988. "It was a paradigm shift," Armelagos says. Then in 2008, genetic analysis by Armelagos and his collaborators of syphilis's family of bacteria lent further support to the theory.

Still, there have been reports of 50 skeletons from Europe dating back from before Columbus set sail that apparently showed the lesions of chronic syphilis. These seemed to be evidence that syphilis originated in the Old World and that Columbus was not to blame.

Armelagos and his colleagues took a closer look at all the data from these prior reports. They found most of the skeletal material didn't actually meet at least one of the standard diagnostic criteria for chronic syphilis, such as pitting on the skull, known as caries sicca, and pitting and swelling of the long bones.

"There's no really good evidence of a syphilis case before 1492 in Europe," Armelagos told LiveScience.

In the seafood?

The 16 reports that did meet the criteria for syphilis came from coastal regions where seafood was a large part of the diet. This seafood contains "old carbon" from deep, upwelling ocean waters. As such, they might fall prey to the so-called "marine reservoir effect" that can throw off radiocarbon dating of a skeleton by hundreds or even thousands of years. To adjust for this effect, the researchers figured out the amount of seafood these individuals ate when alive. Since our bodies constantly break down and rebuild our bones, measurements of bone-collagen protein can provide a record of diet.

"Once we adjusted for the marine signature, all of the skeletons that showed definite signs of treponemal disease appeared to be dated to after Columbus returned to Europe," Harper said, findings detailed in the current Yearbook of Physical Anthropology.

"What it really shows to me is that globalization of disease is not a modern condition," Armelagos said. "In 1492, you had the transmission of a number of diseases from Europe that decimated Native Americans, and you also had disease from Native Americans to Europe."

"The lesson we can learn for today from history is that these epidemics are the result of unrest," Armelagos added. "With syphilis, wars were going on in Europe at the time, and all the turmoil set the stage for the disease. Nowadays, a lot of diseases jump the species barrier due to environmental unrest."

"The origin of syphilis is a fascinating, compelling question," Zuckerman said. "The current evidence is pretty definitive, but we shouldn't close the book and say we're done with the subject. The great thing about science is constantly being able to understand things in a new light."

Follow LiveScience for the latest in science news and discoveries on Twitter @livescience and on .

Copyright 2011 LiveScience, a TechMediaNetwork company. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.

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Case Closed? Columbus Introduced Syphilis to Europe

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In 1492, Columbus sailed the ocean blue, but when he returned from 'cross the seas, did he bring with him a new disease? New skeletal evidence suggests Columbus and his crew not only introduced the Old World to the New World, but brought back syphilis as well, researchers say.

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Map shows the most lucrative food crop in each state. This resource offers students a perspective of how imperative the Columbian Exchange was, in relation to our nation today. One could supplement this resource with a background on the importance of the crop to a particular state. Students could use this resource also to prove how the Columbian Exchange is still relevant today.

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Website explains the disastrous smallpox epidemic that struck the Cherokee tribe in 1738. This resource could be used in a lesson to show the negative affects of the Columbian Exchange. It also offers students a perspective from a native group that often is overlooked. I believe this resource could be used to show students how the Columbian Exchange affected peoples for years to come after the initial event.

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From the "Declaration of Designed Purpose" by Chadwick "Corntassel" Smith - Cherokee Nation Principal Chief and Hastings Shade - Cherokee Nation Deputy Chief

Alliances, Disease, and Genocide
Although De Soto's march through the southeast probably brought the first news of European explorers to the Cherokees, intensive contact with Europeans did not come until almost 150 years later. By the late 1600s, the Cherokees were entering more extensively into trading relationships, primarily with the English in Virginia and South Carolina.

An old Cherokee story prophesied the impact of the deer trade on the Cherokees. From the beginning, there had been an agreement between the Cherokees and the animals that the animals would sacrifice some of their own to sustain the Cherokee people, provided the people took no more than they needed to live, and provided they showed the proper honor and respect to the animal at the time of the kill. For many generations, the Cherokees had abided by this agreement as they hunted the animals, and the animals had given their lives without remonstrance.

But a time came when the Cherokees began to be greedy, and started to take more of the lives of the animals than they needed. At last the situation became intolerable, and the animals called a council to discuss their situation. They decided that since the Cherokees were killing them so indiscriminately, they would do the same to the Cherokees to teach them a lesson. At that council, each animal invented a new disease, and when they left the council, they unleashed these new diseases on the outside world, the world of the Cherokees.

Just as prophesied, the Cherokees began to hunt more of the deer that had always been a staple of their existence as the trade goods of Europeans became more enticing to the Cherokees. Now they traded these deerskins to the English for cloth, blankets, brass kettles and pots, and, most especially, guns. And as their contact with Europeans increased, so did their exposure to new diseases to which they had no immunity. Finally, in 1738, disaster struck as the most terrible smallpox epidemic they had ever known spread throughout the Cherokee towns. For eighteen months the Cherokees battled the scourge and as many as half of the 20,000 people of the tribe perished.

The decentralized government of the Cherokees was not as effective in dealing with the colonial situation as it had been throughout earlier generations. Because each town was autonomous in its leadership, and there was no national structure of leadership, the British were often able to manipulate the towns against each other. This created a situation of competition between various Cherokee towns for the positions of privilege and favor from the British.

Finally, by the 1750s, the Cherokee chiefs and headmen designated Chota, an overhill town in what is now north-central Tennessee, as the primary town of the Cherokees. The headman of Chota, a man named Old Hop, was selected as the principal chief, or spokesperson, of the Cherokees. At the same time, the Cherokees began meeting regularly in councils to communicate more closely with each other and to better resist the divide-and-conquer tactics of the British.

This more centralized structure of chief and councils also gave itself some measure of coercive authority over Cherokees who were skirmishing with colonists on the borders of the Cherokee territory. For the first time, this began to establish a level of law beyond that of the clans and blood law.

The 1700s were also characterized by repeated periods of warfare. The presence of encroaching settlers, especially near the regions of the Lower Towns of present day western South Carolina, led to many border skirmishes between the English and Cherokees. The Cherokees as a whole were severely penalized for these skirmishes. Although the Cherokees entered into a treaty alliance with the British in 1755 at the outbreak of the French and Indian Wars, the sympathies of most Cherokees began to sway toward the French.

Their British allies actually began to attack Cherokee towns by 1759, and within two years, most of the Lower and Middle Towns of the Cherokees, in present day western South and North Carolina, were raided and the structures, dwellings, cornfields, and orchards were burned. Livestock was run off or confiscated; men, women, and children were killed, and perhaps 5000 Cherokees had been run into the mountains as refugees. By 1761, the Cherokees were forced to enter into a peace agreement with the British, which effectively removed them from the duration of the War.

In the following decade, with the outbreak of the American Revolution, the Cherokees were again sought as an ally. Once again the Cherokees allied with the British, despite the tense relationship between them. In response, the Americans launched a concerted genocidal campaign against the Cherokees in an attempt to eradicate the Cherokees from the face of the earth. In a strategic effort, the Americans in Virginia attacked the Upper Towns of the Cherokees, the militias in the Carolinas attacked the Middle and Valley Towns, and South Carolina attacked the Lower Towns. In rapid succession, over two-thirds of the Cherokee towns were wiped out in the early 1780s. Yet again, dwellings, fields, and orchards were burned, stores of food were plundered and burned, stock was driven off or killed, and thousands of Cherokees fled into the mountains where starvation and exposure were commonplace. Others were held as prisoners of war, and still others were sold into slavery by the Americans.

Lacking any support from their British allies, the Cherokees were brought to their knees by 1782 and were forced to sue for peace. In 1783, disaster struck again as smallpox returned to sweep through the Cherokees. One-third of the remaining people died in the epidemic, bringing the Cherokees to their lowest population ever, about 9000 people.

The 1700s mark the first century of intensive contact between Europeans/Americans and Cherokees. On the whole, it was absolutely disastrous for the Cherokees. As they faced wave after wave of adversity, disease, warfare and the decimation of their populations and their towns, the Cherokees struggled valiantly to survive and even began making some governmental adaptations to that end. But the prosperity that had once belonged to the Cherokees was crushed. The balance of their world was gone.

For information regarding culture and language, please contact: communications@cherokee.org.

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From the "Declaration of Designed Purpose" by Chadwick "Corntassel" Smith - Cherokee Nation Principal Chief and Hastings Shade - Cherokee Nation Deputy Chief Alliances, Disease, and Genocide Although De Soto's march through the southeast probably brought the first news of European explorers to the Cherokees, intensive contact with Europeans did not come until almost 150 years later.

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Offers a specific biological example of unintended consequences and examples of unintended human costs at the hand of the Columbian Exchange. This resource offers a more objective perspective because it focuses more upon the biological consequences that originated from the Columbian Exchange. One could even use this resource as an interdisciplinary opportunity by pairing with the science teacher and having them do research in science class, while pairing their knowledge with what they are learning in social studies.

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Copyright National Humanities Center, 2015

In what ways did the arrival of Europeans to America bring about unforeseen and unintended consequences for the people and environments of both the New World and the Old?

Understanding

The Columbian Exchange - the interchange of plants, animals, disease, and technology sparked by Columbus's voyages to the New World - marked a critical point in history. It allowed ecologies and cultures that had previously been separated by oceans to mix in new and unpredictable ways. It was an interconnected web of events with immediate and extended consequences that could neither be predicted nor controlled.

Text

Charles C. Mann, 1493: Uncovering the New World Columbus Created

Text Type

Nonfiction

Text Complexity

Grade 9-10 complexity band.

For more information on text complexity see these resources from achievethecore.org.

In the Text Analysis section, Tier 2 vocabulary words are defined in pop-ups, and Tier 3 words are explained in brackets.

Click here for standards and skills for this lesson.

Teacher's Note

In this lesson students will explore a description of the Columbian Exchange written by Charles C. Mann as part of the introduction to his book, 1493: Uncovering the New World Columbus Created. In three excerpts students will examine elements of the Exchange - an overview, a specific biological example of unintended consequences, and finally an example of unintended human costs of the Columbian Exchange. Each excerpt is accompanied by close reading questions for students to complete. The text analysis is accompanied by three interactive exercises to aid in student understanding. The first interactive allows students to explore vocabulary in context; the second encourages students to review the textual analysis; and the third explores the use of diction, simile, and appeal to authority.

This lesson focuses upon the Columbian Exchange as an interwoven process with unforeseen consequences. Charles Mann expands upon the earlier theories of Alfred W. Crosby, who explored the idea of the Columbian Exchange in 1972 (for a general essay on the Columbian Exchange written by Crosby, including suggestions for class discussions, click here). Although Mann details the effects of tobacco, the potato, corn, malaria, yellow fever, the rubber industry, and other elements of the Exchange in both the Eastern and Western hemispheres fully in 1493, this lesson focuses specifically upon some effects of the Exchange in Hispaniola. The follow-up assignment allows students to extend the effects of the Exchange into the African slave trade. The author uses Colon, the Spanish spelling for Columbus, throughout, and that spelling has been retained in the excerpts for this lesson.

This lesson is divided into two parts, both accessible below. The teacher's guide includes a background note, the text analysis with responses to the close reading questions, access to the interactive exercises, and a follow-up assignment. The student's version, an interactive worksheet that can be e-mailed, contains all of the above except the responses to the close reading questions, and the follow-up assignment.

Teacher's Guide (continues below)

Background note

Text analysis and close reading questions with answer key

Interactive exercises

Follow-up assignment

Student Version (click to open)

Interactive PDF

Background note

Text analysis and close reading questions

Interactive exercises

Background

Background Questions

1. What kind of text are we dealing with?

2. When was it written?

3. Who wrote it?

4. For what audience was it intended?

5. For what purpose was it written?

When Columbus landed on the island of Hispaniola (the island including the modern countries of Haiti and the Dominican Republic) during his first voyage in 1492, he and his men did not realize the lasting effects their voyage would have on both the New World and the Old at that time and in the years to come. The Columbian Exchange is the term given to the transfer of plants, animals, disease, and technology between the Old World from which Columbus came and the New World which he found. Some exchanges were purposeful - the explorers intentionally brought animals and food - but others were accidental. In this lesson you will read about this Exchange from a description written by Charles C. Mann, a writer specializing in scientific topics. This lesson uses excerpts from a book entitled 1493: Uncovering the New World Columbus Created in which Mann describes the effects, both intended and unintended, of the Columbian Exchange. Mann wrote 1493 to explore the Columbian Exchange as a process which is still going on today.

This lesson draws from the introduction in Mann's book. There are three excerpts, each with close reading questions. The first excerpt is a general overview of the Exchange - while it does not include all parts of the Exchange, you will see examples of how animals and plants from one part of the world replaced those in another part of the world. In excerpt two you will explore a specific example of unintended consequences of the Columbian Exchange, when settlers thought they were simply bringing in an enjoyable food, but they wound up with an invasive pest. Finally, in excerpt three you can see the devastating effects of the Columbian Exchange upon the Taino Indians, the residents of Hispaniola before Columbus arrived. In some of the excerpts you will see Columbus spelled as Colon - this is the Spanish spelling and is used by the author.

Text Analysis

Excerpt 1

Close Reading Questions

1. Why do you believe Columbus brought cattle, sheep or horses with him?
They were part of the European culture. They would help in farming (cattle and sheep) and communication, transportation, and war (horses). The Spanish intended to start a colony and would need the animals.

2. What would the Taino culture have been like without cattle or horses?
There would have been communication only by human messenger and fields planted by hand. There would have been no quick communication (by horse) or plowed fields or pastures (no cattle, so they were not possible or necessary) and only a few, small paths, no real roads (the only transportation was by foot).

3. What is the thesis statement of paragraph 1? How does Mann develop that thesis? Cite evidence from the text.
The thesis is "Colon and his crew did not voyage alone." Mann develops that thesis by giving examples to prove his point, including earthworms, cockroaches, African Grasses, rats, and other animals and plants.

4. How did the introduction of cattle and sheep affect plant life on Hispaniola?
New grasses for grazing choked out native species.

5. Why is it important that alien grasses, trees, and other plants choked out native vegetation in Hispaniola?
Choking out native grasses reduced the biodiversity (the number of distinct life forms) of Hispaniola. Ecosystems that are more biodiverse (they have more distinct life forms) are more productive and are more resistant to diseases.

6. What can be the effect of introducing a new predator into an environment, such as the Indian mongoose in Hispaniola? Give an example.
It can render another species extinct, which may itself have unintended consequences. For instance, the food source for the Dominican snake may have increased in population which may have led to other effects.

7. How does Mann show that the Columbian Exchange is still ongoing?
He relates how, in 2004, the orange groves have become prey of the lime swallowtail butterflies.

8. In the second paragraph of this excerpt, Mann implies his thesis but does not actually state it. What is the implied thesis of paragraph 2? How does he imply the thesis?
Mann implies that the Columbian Exchange can have negative results. He gives examples, citing grasses that were choked out, trees that were replaced with other types of trees, and animals driven toward extinction.

In this excerpt, Mann offers an overview of the Columbian Exchange with examples.

...Colon [Columbus] and his crew did not voyage alone. They were accompanied by a menagerie of insects, plants, mammals, and microorganisms. Beginning with La Isabela [Colon's first settlement], European expeditions brought cattle, sheep, and horses, along with crops like sugar cane (originally from New Guinea), wheat (from the Middle East), bananas (from Africa), and coffee (also from Africa). Equally important, creatures the colonists knew nothing about hitchhiked along for the ride. Earthworms, mosquitoes, and cockroaches; honeybees, dandelions, and African grasses; rats of every description - all of them poured from the hulls of Colon's vessels and those that followed, rushing like eager tourists into lands that had never seen their like before.

Cattle and sheep ground the 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 [with wide leaves] 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 grows 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 [the silk-cotton tree] became forest of Australian acacia [small tree of the mimosa family], Ethiopian shrubs, and the Central American logwood. Scurrying below, mongooses from India eagerly drove Dominican snakes toward extinction. The changes continue to this day. Orange groves, introduced to Hispaniola from Spain, have recently begun to fall to the depredation of lime swallowtail butterflies, a citrus pest from Southeast Asia that probably came over in 2004. Today Hispaniola has only small fragments of its original forest.

Excerpt 2

Close Reading Questions

9. According to the author and his sources, what unintended import came in to Hispaniola with plantains?
With the plantains came scale insects.

10. How does the author define scale insects?
They are small creatures with tough, waxy coats that suck the juices from plant roots and stems.

11. Define "ecological release."
Ecological release is when an invasive species is introduced into an environment with no natural predators and subsequently the population explodes.

12. Using the example of scale insects as evidence, why are natural predators important to an ecosystem?
They help to regulate the population of a species and keep an ecosystem in balance.

13. What was the unintended effect of this import, scale insects, according to Wilson? Why did they have this effect?
The scale insects sucked juices from plants and stems. They had no natural enemies, so their populations grew greatly. The scale insects became a food source for fire ants. With a virtually unlimited food source, the fire ant population grew greatly. The fire ants invaded settlers' homes. This proved to be dangerous to the settlers.

14. Mann begins the second paragraph in this excerpt with "So far this is informed speculation." What effect does this admission have on our perception of Mann as an author?
It reminds the reader that Mann is approaching his topic from a scientific perspective, being careful to alert readers to what is proven and what is not. This helps to establish him as a writer we can trust.

15. What document from the 1500s seems to confirm this unintended effect?
Bartolome de Las Casas wrote of a sudden infestation of fire ants in 1518 and 1519.

16. What was the unintended effect to settlers of the introduction of plantains to Hispaniola?
Although they had plantains to eat, they also had to deal with fire ants. As a result, they abandoned their homes.

17. How does Mann combine 16th and 20th century evidence?
He uses 20th century science to explain a 16th century eye-witness account.

Here Mann gives a specific example of unintended consequences.

Natives and newcomers interacted in unexpected ways, creating biological bedlam. When Spanish colonists imported African plantains [a tropical plant that resembles a banana] 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." This 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. 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 Bartolome de Las Casas, a missionary priest who lived through the incident, Spanish orange, pomegranate, and cassia plantations were destroyed "from the roots 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 insects....

Excerpt 3

Close Reading Questions

18. What is the thesis of this excerpt?
Mann asserts that "the most dramatic impact of the Columbian Exchange was on humankind itself."

19. What evidence does Mann use to develop this thesis?
He uses Columbus's original account, 16th century official Spanish documents, and estimates by modern historians.

20. Why did the Spanish conduct a census of the Indians on Hispaniola in 1514? What did the census find regarding the Taino population?
The Spanish conducted a census in order to count the Taino so that they could be assigned to Spanish settlers as laborers. This was part of the encomienda system, whereby a Spanish settler was given a plantation as well as the labor of all the Indians who lived on that plantation. The census-takers found that there were few Taino left, perhaps only about 26,000.

21. According to the author, what two factors caused this change in population? Which cause was the most influential?
The two causes were Spanish cruelty and the introduction of diseases by the Columbian Exchange. The most influential was the introduction of disease.

22. The third sentence in paragraph 2 of this excerpt uses a rhetorical device called asyndeton. Asyndeton is a list of items with conjunctions omitted and can be used to imply that there are more items that could be added to the list. What types of items does the author list using asyndeton? What is the effect?
The author lists diseases, both viruses and bacteria. The effect is a "piling up", implying that more diseases were brought to Hispaniola as well, but the author may not have the space in the sentence to list them. In fact, other diseases were introduced by the Columbian Exchange, including malaria, yellow fever, whooping cough, chicken pox, the bubonic plague, and leprosy.

23. Why was the introduction of these diseases so devastating for the Taino and not the Spanish explorers?
The Taino had never been exposed to these diseases before and therefore had no natural immunity to stop or control the spread of the disease. The Spanish did have some natural immunity, since the diseases were present in Europe at that time.

24. What is the effect of Mann including the information about the first recorded epidemic, which occurred within one year of Columbus's arrival?
He reminds the reader that the devastating effects of diseases brought by the Exchange happened almost immediately for the Taino. This conveys the seriousness of the Exchange as well as the power of the diseases in a population with no natural immunity.

Mann explains the most "dramatic impact of the Columbian Exchange."

From the human perspective, the most dramatic impact of 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 8,000,000. 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 Colon'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 the 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....

Spanish cruelty played its part in the calamity, but its larger cause was the Columbian Exchange. Before Colon 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....

Follow-Up Assignment

Mann describes in excerpt three a major change in Taino population on Hispaniola and the effects of this change on the Taino population and the Spanish. But another group was also affected - enslaved Africans. The Spanish used the encomienda system in Hispaniola, whereby conquistadors were given large plantations as well as the Indian slave labor of all who lived on the plantation. Through this system the Spanish moved quickly to enslave Indians, even though the official mission of the Spanish was to Christianize them. In response to pressure from the Catholic Church, in 1542 King Carlos V banned Indian slavery, opening the way for African slaves. Mann writes,

By 1501, seven years after La Isabella's founding, so many Africans [as slaves] had come to Hispaniola that the alarmed Spanish king and queen instructed the island's governor not to allow any more to land [but]...the colonists saw that the Africans appeared immune to disease, didn't have local social networks that would help them escape, and possessed useful skills - many African societies were well known for their ironworking and horsemanship. Slave ships bellied up to the docks of Santo Domingo in ever-greater numbers. The slaves were not as easily controlled as the colonists had hoped [and].... No longer were Africans slipped into the Americas by the handful. The rise of sugar production [sugar production is very labor intensive] in Mexico and the concurrent rise in Brazil opened the floodgates. Between 1550 and 1650...slave ships ferried across about 650,000 Africans, with the total split more or less equally between Spanish and Portuguese America.... Soon they [Africans] were more ubiquitous [existing everywhere] in the Americas than Europeans, with results the latter never expected. (Mann, p.387-388)

What do you believe might have been some of the "results the latter [the Europeans] never expected"? In what ways can New World slavery be said to be related to the Columbian Exchange? Discuss the possible unintended consequences with your classmates. Use specific examples as evidence.

Vocabulary Pop-Ups

menagerie: collection of wild or unusual animals

alien: foreign, hostile

depredation: ravages

bedlam: wild confusion

entomologist: insect expert

phenomenon: observable event or fact

dismayed: alarmed

speculation: thoughtful opinion

culprit: villain

horrific: causing horror

fanned: spread out

calamity: great disaster

quirk: peculiar action

maladies: chronic diseases

rapacity: fierce hunger

Text:

Charles C. Mann, 1493: Uncovering the New World Columbus Created (New York: Vintage Books, 2012).

Images:

Bouttats, Pieter Balthazar, 1666-1755, engraver. : El almirante Christoral Colon descubre la Isla Española, iy haze poner una Cruz, etc. / P. B. Bouttats fec., Aqua forti. [1728] Library of Congress Rare Book and Special Collections Division Washington, D.C. 20540 USA http://www.loc.gov/pictures/resource/cph.3a10998/?co=cph (accessed September 15, 2014).

Histoire Naturelle des Indes, Illustrated manuscript. ca. 1586. Bequest of Clara S. Peck, 1983 MA 3900 (fol. 71v-72) The Morgan Library and Museum, New York. http://www.themorgan.org/collection/Histoire-Naturelle-des-Indes/72

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Histoire Naturelle des Indes, Illustrated manuscript. ca. 1586. Bequest of Clara S. Peck, 1983 MA 3900 (fol. 11v-12) The Morgan Library and Museum, New York. http://www.themorgan.org/collection/Histoire-Naturelle-des-Indes/12

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Copyright National Humanities Center, 2015 The Columbian Exchange - the interchange of plants, animals, disease, and technology sparked by Columbus's voyages to the New World - marked a critical point in history. It allowed ecologies and cultures that had previously been separated by oceans to mix in new and unpredictable ways.

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This shows a map of what was exchanged all across the world during the Columbian Exchange. Does not just focus on what was exchanged between Europe and the Americas. Offering students with a more global perspective of what, and how things were exchanged, broadens their understanding surrounding this historical event. Students could use this as a way to first start learning about the Exchange, for it gives a broad overview of what was exchanged between the Old World and the New World.