Biology and History
inform one another:
Columbus in the Americas, 1492-1517. 
Colonization, and the ecology of invasions. The story of American settlement is best revealed in the related subjects of: island biogeography, geographical epidemiology, famines, and cultural anthropology to yield a fuller comprehension and deeper appreciation of the ethnohistory called by Alfred Crosby: the Columbian exchange.
setting | maps | Columbus | problem | consequences | ethnocentricity | conclusions
Columbus' routes on his four voyages are depicted on the above map.
Competitive exclusion principle:
Creatures "must not only excel in the struggle for existence, they must also adapt themselves to meet new conditions and still win out over their competitors."
(Storer, p. 98)
"No two species can occupy the exact same niche over time without one giving way to the more adapted or more numerous species."
(Dasmann, pp. 78-79 [1984])
A map of the planet's biomes or extensive, biological communities.
Any exotic species will crowd out a native species when it is introduced and occupies the same niche as the endemic species that it replaces.
Pigs & Chickens replaced native ground dwelling species like, turtles, lizards and disrupted fields planted in manioc, yams, squash or beans, the basis of Indian food supplies.
African slaves accostumed to the biological communities of the tropical areas, especially rain forests and savanna. Africans were were brought by the Portuguese, Spanish, Dutch, French ,and English to replace the indigenous Brazilian and island populations. Many indigenous people were victims of European diseases, overwork, and famines that occurred subsequent to contact with the colonizers. Slaves began to arrive from Africa as early as the 1520s. Sugar replaced tobacco as an important crop from the West Indies between 1509 and 1590.
What accounts for Columbus' success?
map | Columbus | problem | consequences | ethnocentricity | conclusions
Columbus' journals of his voyage:
Writer Barbara Hyatt feels that
Columbus had a "messianic idea" that in Hispaniola he could find enough gold to restore Jerusalem to Christendom -- to extend the reconquista to the holy city itself!
PROBLEM:
conflicting statements in a diary
The double reckoning of Christopher
Columbus
by Barbara Hyatt
first he is glib:
"Today it rained."
"Adrift"
More from Columbus' journals :
August 3rd, Pinta breakdown in rigging -- en route to the Canaries & Columbus suspected sabotage. He wrote:
"The pilots of the three ships disagreed on our location, adrift."
His diary raises the twin issues of: 1) the ethics of voyage and 2) the function of discovery.
His genocide of the Arawaks and the Caribs reveals a tension in the Medieval mind--souls were to be saved, yet non-believers were threats. The tensions was resolved based on the hubris of arrogant knowledge and the resolution in torture of the natives mislead those responsible for expeditions.
Spanish experience in the Crusade to oust the Moors, who where of the Islamic faith, led Conquistadores and missionaries to treat non Christians as threats to the internal security of the Crown and their own salvation from hell, so intent where they to claim their rewards in heaven.
setting | map | Columbus | consequences | ethnocentricity | conclusions
Such ethnocentric beliefs led to the Spanish and Portuguese:
A) enslavement of the native islanders,
B) rape of the native women,
C) destruction of sacred, native sites of worship.
IN THE WEST INDIES
Columbus describes the young women
"as naked as their mother's bore them."
Of these natives he says:
"They should be good and intelligent servants."
Columbus deliberately decided to minimize the size of the Atlantic for fear of his crew's response, "deciding to count less distance than was run so that if the voyage should be long the men would not be frightened or dismayed."
{9 September 1492}
"I do not wish to tarry, in order to reach and visit many islands so as to find gold."
{Oct. 15}
December 6, he anchored off of Hispaniola (Haiti & Domin. Republic)
"all the trees were as different from ours as the day from the night and so the fruits, the herbage, the rocks & all things."
of the Island Arawaks:
"are very unskilled with arms . . . [and] could all be subjected & made to do all that one wished."
"In another island . . . greater than Espanola . . . . there is gold beyond counting !"
setting | map | Columbus | problem | consequences | conclusions
Crosby's Conclusions:
"It seems more likely that the number of human beings on this planet today would be a good deal smaller but for the horticultural skills of the neolithic American."
[p. 202
"The Columbian exchange has left us with not a richer but a more impoverished genetic pool. We, all of the life on this planet, are less for Columbus, and the impoverishment will increase."
[p. 219
"The . . . exchange continues & will continue."
"The positive result has been an enormous increase in food production &, thereby, in human population. The negative results have been the destruction of ecological stability over enormous areas and an increase of erosion that is so great that it amounts to a crime against posterity."
[p. 211
"The source of the earliest migration of Old World peoples to the New World" was?
[213
The "greatest transoceanic migration in all human history began, at first a freshet in the" Antilles, called by the Portuguese the West Indies to distinguish them from Indonesia, the spice islands, and Singapore in the East Indies.
[214
"the Columbian Exchange has created markets for Europe without which she would have been and would now be a very different and much poorer region of the earth, and poverty a palpably heavier burden on the connubial propensities of young adults."
Biodiversity | Science related pages
Did the Columbian Exchange create capitalism or did the commerce of slavery and the triangular trade clay the foundations of capitalism in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries?
setting | map | Columbus | problem | consequences | ethnocentric | conclusions
