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

change would have seemed shocking; an order that had characterized human affairs for millennia had been overturned, at least for a while.
    Today the tumult of ecological and economic exchange is like the background radiation of our ever more crowded and unstable planet. It seems distinctly contemporary to find Japanese loggers in Brazil and Chinese engineers in the Sahel and Europeans backpacking in Nepal or occupying the best tables in New York niteries. But in different ways all of these occurred hundreds of years ago. If nothing else, the events then remind us that we are not alone in our current jumbled condition. It seems worthwhile to take a look at how we got to where we are today.
    1 Short of water, the expedition drank from rivers. Some researchers believe that Colón and his men thus caught shigellosis, a disease caused by a feces-borne bacterium native to the American tropics. In reaction to the bacterium, the body can develop Reiter’s syndrome, an autoimmune disease that makes sufferers feel as if large chunks of the body, including the eyes and bowels, are swollen and inflamed—symptoms that afflicted Colón later that summer. Reiter’s is always painful and sometimes fatal. If, as these scientists suspect, Reiter’s led, years later, to the admiral’s death, Columbus himself was an early victim of the Columbian Exchange.
    2 Every species has a scientific name with two parts: the name of its genus—the group of related species it belongs to—and the species name proper. Thus Solenopsis geminata belongs to the genus Solenopsis and is the species geminata. By convention, the genus is abbreviated after the first time it appears with the species name: S. geminata.
    3 It is conceivable that Colón knew before his departure that the Atlantic could be crossed. He wrote in the margin of one of his books that while in Ireland he’d seen “people from Cathay [China]”—“a man and a wife brought in on a couple of logs in an extraordinary manner.” Some writers argue that the “logs” were dugout canoes, and the people therefore Inuit or Indians. Most historians do not agree, though, because there is little evidence that Colón visited Ireland, let alone that he saw two Indians there. The couple could have been Sami from Finland, who often have Asian features. In addition it seems implausible that the sole record of this amazing event—Indians paddling a canoe to Europe!—should be a few marginal scribbles in a book.
    4 Because China did not make enough beeswax for its needs, many Chinese made candles from a substitute: the lower-quality wax produced by a scale insect. The Philippines house both the Asian honeybee and the giant honeybee; the huge nests of the latter are rich sources of wax.
    5 In the United States the name is “corn.” I use “maize” hereafter for two reasons. First, multicolored Indian maize, which was usually eaten after drying and grinding, is strikingly unlike the sweet yellow kernels conjured up in the U.S. by the word “corn.” Second, “corn” in Britain refers to a region’s most important cereal crop—oats in Scotland, for example.

PART ONE

Atlantic Journeys

2

The Tobacco Coast
    “LOWLY ORGANIZED CREATURES”
    It is just possible that John Rolfe was responsible for the worms. Earthworms, to be precise—the common nightcrawler and the red marsh worm, creatures that did not exist in the Americas before 1492. Rolfe was a colonist in Jamestown, Virginia, the first successful English settlement in the Americas. Most people know him today, if they know him at all, as the man who married Pocahontas, the “Indian princess” in countless romantic stories. A few history buffs understand that Rolfe was a primary force behind Jamestown’s eventual success. The worms hint at a third, still more important role: all inadvertently, Rolfe helped to unleash a permanent change in the American landscape.
    Like many young English blades, Rolfe smoked—or “drank,” as the