THE COLUMBIAN EXCHANGE AND NEW WORLDS

9 Because Australia and New Zealand had been cut off from the rest of the world for close to 100 million years, the evolutionary process was given free rein to elaborate plants and anima

THE COLUMBIAN

EXCHANGE AND

NEW WORLDS

Why, then, the world’s mine oyster, Which I with sword will open

Shakespeare (1564–1615) 1

OCEANIA

In the south of Southeast Asia, Alocasia or dryland taro, perhaps originating

in India or Burma, has been under cultivation for at least 7,000 years Wetland (Colocasia) taro, yams, and (probably) dry and wet land rice came along later Yet, as mentioned earlier, a mystery is why the Austronesian farmer-pioneers, who sailed off to settle the Philippines and the East Indies at about this time (6000BCE), were accompanied by taro, yams, pigs, and dogs, but not rice The most logical answer is that rice had not yet become a staple

in Southeast Asia But it is not a particularly satisfactory answer because, despite many ensuing waves of Pacifi c pioneers, when the Europeans fi rst entered the world’s largest body of water, rice was absent from the whole of the Pacifi c, save for the Mariana Islands Did rice somehow get lost from the horticultural complex? Or were taro and yams just easier to cultivate? 2

The pioneers originated in Southeast Asia and neighboring New Guinea, and their initial waves fanned out into the Philippines and the East Indies These were an Austronesian-speaking people whose descendents, with their distinctive Lapita pottery, became the ancestors of the Polynesians

Around 3,500 years ago they launched epic voyages of exploration and colonization, moving swiftly in their double-hulled canoes to establish settlements in Fiji, and then in Samoa and Tonga – the latter two islands becoming jump-off points for the eventual settlement of the rest of Polynesia, ending with Hawaii around 1,500 years ago and New Zealand some 1,000 to 2,000 years ago 3

These seafarers were fi shermen to be sure, but also farmers, whose con-tribution to Pacifi c comestibles was as impressive as their navigation skills They added pigs, dogs, and chickens to a region short on edible land ani-mals, along with plant foods like taro and yams, and food producing tech-niques like sago palm cultivation (starch is extracted from the trunks) 4

Also introduced were domesticated coconuts, invaluable for their milk; meat, and oil; 5 bananas and plantains that became a staple for many; 6

along with breadfruit and sugarcane, all of which spread widely through-out the Pacifi c 7

Yet, incredibly, these pioneering peoples were actually latecomers when compared with their Australoid predecessors, who long before had taken advantage of lowered sea levels to walk and fl oat across the straits

to New Guinea (or Sumatra and Java) and then on to Australia where, around 50,000 years ago, they struggled ashore to enter a hunter-gatherer’s heaven 8 In addition to a plethora of wild plants, there was an abundance

of large animals, including giant marsupials and fl ightless birds on hand for the taking 9

Because Australia and New Zealand had been cut off from the rest

of the world for close to 100 million years, the evolutionary process was given free rein to elaborate plants and animals that were decidedly differ-ent from those found on the Eurasian land mass 10 Australian kangaroos, for example, are browsers But as marsupials they bear little resemblance

to European cattle or North American bison, browsers also, but placental animals In New Zealand, penguins roosted in trees and sea lions stretched out for a nap in forest clearings And its huge ostrich-like moa birds, some around nine feet in height, were unique 11 But they, along with many other

fl ightless birds, are extinct now, victims like so many other species the world over, of hungry humans

Plants that became staples for the Australian Aborigines had also taken a different evolutionary path, despite apparently familiar English names for

“bush tucker” such as “sunrise lime,” “bush tomato,” “bush banana,” “bush bean,” and “Australian carrot.” Desert Aborigines received an estimated

70 to 80 percent of their dietary bulk from plants such as these, and in the humid southeast, approximately 140 species of plants were eaten – fore-most among them the roots and tubers of lilies, orchids, native yams, and a variety of fruits and seeds 12

In New Zealand, bees buzzed, making honey from the fl owers of the Manuka tree that was employed by the Maori as a medicine as well as a food.13 The Maori consumed much bird fl esh starting earlier on with that

of the moa and working their way through penguins, ducks, and a variety

of “bush birds” – pigeons, various gulls, albatross, and the like They also ate substantial amounts of fi sh and shellfi sh, as well as human fl esh from time

to time, although the latter was apparently a ritual form of cannibalism reserved for those killed or captured in war 14

Over the span of millions of years, watertight, buoyant seeds had fl oated from Southeast Asia to Australia and to other parts of the Pacifi c, or had caught a ride in the plumage or bowels of birds But it was only with the arrival of humans that Oceania, and especially Australia and New Zealand, experienced a genuine reunion with the biota of the larger world

In returning to a mystery mentioned earlier, most Pacifi c peoples were eating sweet potatoes when the Europeans fi rst encountered them, and, according to their folklore, had done so for a very long time But because the tuber was an American plant, it obviously must have been introduced

at some juncture, and three different hypotheses attempt to shed some light on how and when this occurred 15 The fi rst, and most intriguing, of these would have the sweet potato introduced to the Eastern Pacifi c some-time between 400 and 800AD and diffusing from there – which, of course,

fi ts right into another riddle of Oceanic prehistory How ancient was its contact with South America?

One interesting tidbit of linguistic evidence is the Polynesian word for

sweet potato ( kumala or kumara), which is strikingly similar to the Que-chua word for the tuber ( cumara) suggesting to some that the sweet potato

reached Polynesia from Peru, with Quechua speakers somehow implicated

in that transfer But if so, why only the sweet potato? Why not other useful Americans foods like white potatoes, manioc, or maize? 16

A second hypothesis would have the sweet potato, taken to the East by the Portuguese in the sixteenth century, somehow fi nding its way into the Pacifi c a couple of centuries before Captain James Cook arrived (during the years 1768–71 and 1772–75) to report on its presence there A third, and more pedestrian, hypothesis has the Manila Galleon traffi c introducing

the sweet potato to the Pacifi c, where it spread so rapidly that it seemed like a long-established foodstuff to the members of the Cook expeditions Still another possibility is that, although sweet potatoes cannot fl oat, their seeds could have hitched a ride in the bowels of birds such as the golden plover – a strong fl yer that ranges over Polynesia, but visits western South America now and again Clearly, when and how the sweet potato reached Oceania are still open questions But what is not disputed is that whenever the tuber made a Pacifi c appearance, it readily fi t into the diets

of the peoples of that vast region 17

There were no pigs in Australia and New Zealand before the Europeans brought them Chickens they had, along with the “dingo” of Australia, a descendent of the Asian wolf that must have accompanied a later wave of settlers from Southeast Asia because it had to be domesticated fi rst Cook introduced pigs to New Zealand in 1778 and the wild ones are still called

“Cookers.” 18 Pork was much esteemed by the Maori and added some vari-ety to diets whose animal protein had previously been provided by birds and only two four-legged animals – the dog and the rat In Australia pigs came ashore with the British colonizers and, with no natural enemies, pro-liferated to the point where in the twentieth century the Australians went

to war with their wild pig population

Less troublesome were Merino sheep, introduced in 1833, to add meat

to the diet and wool to the economy Today, pastoralism has produced the world’s largest sheep population in Australia and one of the highest human-to-sheep ratios in New Zealand Cattle fl ourished about as well as pigs in the absence of predation Two bulls and six cows arrived with the First Fleet in 1788 to become the progenitors of the millions of cattle that,

in the nineteenth century, were fi rst a nuisance and then, along with mut-ton, the foundation of Australia’s meatpacking industry 19

These grazing animal legions opened the door for opportunistic Euro-pean weeds such as white clover, and with the introduction of the honey-bee to pollinate the clover, Old World animals were once more munching

on an Old World favorite It is not surprising that both Australia and New Zealand became nations of meat eaters It was a matter of self-defense

As for plant foods, white potatoes carried by the colonizers were promptly utilized by the Aborigines in part, at least, because they were easier to grow than sweet potatoes Maize was the fi rst cereal to gain acceptance

in Australia and New Zealand Wheat only became widespread around the middle of the nineteenth century, as did European and American

vegetables, Eurasian fruit trees, and grapevines Winemaking was fi rst tried

in Australia in the late eighteenth century, the vines brought from Europe and from South Africa where winemaking was already established The earliest vineyard in New Zealand was planted shortly before 1820

As one might expect, long geographic isolation triggered the occasional ecological nightmare as new fauna reached both Australia and New Zealand The brown rats from Europe that jumped ship in New Zealand all but exter-minated their local counterparts and grew to enormous sizes – which, at least, provided more good quality protein for the Maori In Australia, a few rabbits were imported in 1859 by a farmer to provide a little sport for hunters

He was apparently ignorant of the rabbit’s spectacular reproductive capacity (females can deliver up to eleven litters each year) in the absence of natural enemies and got far more sport than he had bargained for 20

In fact, that sport soon became a grim, but fruitless, campaign of exter-mination as the Adam and Eve rabbits multiplied into an estimated 20 mil-lion within 30 years, and hordes of them spread across the continent to compete with livestock for grazing land 21 The rabbits did provide food for the lower classes, however, and in the 1880s rabbit meat was being canned

in Australia, and hundreds of tons were exported More recently, Austra-lian possums have invaded New Zealand to destroy forests and spread tuberculosis among its cattle Fortunately, most other Pacifi c peoples were spared this sort of ecological excitement and, despite missionary meddling, their diets remained more or less traditional until the middle of the next century

Aside from offi cers and cabin passengers, the fi rst settlers to wobble down gangplanks in Australia were convicts sentenced to “transportation,” along with their guards – hardly representatives of British Isles elites 22

Aboard ship their “rations” had centered on salted meat and bread, and such “prison food” continued to be issued ashore to the rural work force until the fi rst half of the twentieth century Called “Ten, Ten, Two, and a Quarter” the weekly rations consisted of 10 pounds of fl our, ten of meat, two of sugar, and a quarter pound of both tea and salt Many who migrated voluntarily after the 1830s were spared this “crew culture,” although not those who began the settlement of New Zealand from Australia in the 1840s The New Zealand Company also relied on such tried and true (not

to mention cheap) rations

The success of pastoralism meant a surfeit of available meat, and quan-tity not quality determined the success of a middle-class meal But the

upper classes, with a penchant for French-style cuisine, enjoyed a variety of viands, thanks in no small part to the naturalist Joseph Banks He had sailed with Cook on the 1769 expedition, equipped the founding expedition to Australia, and expected Botany Bay to have a Mediterranean air about it Accordingly, Mediterranean citrus fruits, peaches, apricots, grapes, and fi gs were imported to change the landscape and perk up the fare of the genteel, although peaches became so plentiful they were used to fatten hogs 23

The preference of most, however, was plain food and plenty of it It was a part of their British heritage and a far cry from today’s globalized and sophisticated cuisines of the Antipodes Change in this direction was gradual Beginning in 1842, religious persecution drove German and Prus-sian Lutherans to South Australia where they planted fruits and vegeta-bles and began making wine to found the Barossa wine industry Shortly after, as early as the 1850s, Chinese immigrants, with no luck in those gold

fi elds that had lured them to Australia, turned to gardening and became Australia’s vegetable and fruit specialists 24 Next, steamships, railroads, and refrigeration expanded the initial stock of American, European, and local foods while urbanization fostered larger markets

Change accelerated during and after World War II Air transport brought Australia and New Zealand squarely into the orbit of the West Coca Cola and Spam accompanied American troops, and after the war, chain super-markets began to spring up Meat pies and fi sh and chip carts gave way to Kentucky Fried Chicken, McDonald’s, and Pizza Hut restaurants More Asians arrived with their cuisines, and immigrants from the Mediterranean brought their recipes and methods of food preparation so that Chinese food, gyros, and kebabs all joined in the fast food competition

Everyday cuisine was also transformed as local resources such as kanga-roo, quandong, and Macadamia nuts were blended with a variety of Asian and Mediterranean vegetables and herbs that could be grown locally Stir-frying became common, and new foods arrived Some from America, like sweet potatoes (“kumara” in New Zealand), had been on hand from the very beginning of European colonization and white potatoes that followed were joined by tomatoes, feojoas, tamarillos, pepinos, avocados, babacos, passion fruits, and guavas Other foreign fruits, like the Chinese gooseberry (kiwifruit) and persimmon, appeared in “down under” orchards while gar-lic, ginger, soy sauce, and tomato sauce became staple condiments in the new Antipodal cuisine Almost unnoticed was the virtual annihilation of the British culinary heritage 25 And uncommented on was that, unlike the

Americas, Oceania had little to give the world in the way of foodstuffs and practically everything to receive

THE AMERICAS

In 1492, the only land animal in the Antilles was the hutia, a large rodent But the second voyage of Columbus changed that The seventeen ships that dropped anchor at Hispaniola in 1493 were veritable Noah’s Arks, dis-gorging horses, pigs, dogs, cattle, sheep, and goats – meat animals for a hemisphere where good quality protein was in short supply 26

Pigs – eight of them – from the Canary Islands trotted ashore to fl ourish

in a hemisphere that harbored few natural enemies With a reproductive capacity some six times that of cattle, and a willingness to eat practically anything, pigs conducted their own conquest of the Americas with the help

of Spanish explorers who scattered them about to assure a supply of meat for those that followed – dropping them off on Caribbean islands as well

as the mainland 27 To say simply that they multiplied, trivializes the ensu-ing feat of fertility In the case of Cuba, for example, its conqueror Diego Velázquez wrote the Crown in 1514 that the two dozen pigs he had earlier introduced to the island had already increased by some thirty thousand 28

Pigs swarmed everywhere that offered water, shade, and food In New England they rooted for clams at the water’s edge; in the Carolinas they ate peaches; in the jungles of Brazil they munched on wild roots, lizards and frogs As early as 1531, Gonzalo Pizarro introduced swine to Peru, and

in 1539 the Hernando de Soto expedition drove a herd of them from Florida

to Arkansas, where they became the feral razorbacks that later on lent their name to athletic teams of that state’s university 29 Pork had almost instantly become the preferred meat in much of the Americas, and there was plenty of it to eat – too much, in fact, wherever swine populations bal-looned to the point that they threatened crops

Cattle from Spain and from the Canary Islands also came ashore in

1493 and, like pigs, proved excellent colonizers, especially on open savan-nahs, although they multiplied so prodigiously in the Antilles that ranching developed very early in Híspaniola A century and a half after their introduc-tion, all West Indies islands supported great herds of wild cattle (and pigs) that were more hunted than herded, and their hides and smoked meat sold

to passing ships by – among others – those European outcasts who later on promoted themselves to buccaneers 30

Cattle reached Mexico from Cuba in 1521 and thrived Ponce de Leon brought them to the North American mainland in that same year, and just two decades later, when Coronado crossed the Rio Grande and the Pecos rivers to reach the vast prairies west of the Mississippi, he reported huge herds of wild cattle preyed upon by “primitive peoples.” 31 By century’s end,

in northern Mexico, a herd of a “mere” 20,000 animals was sneered at as small

Cattle invaded South America with the Portuguese Those introduced

to the Brazilian “Sertão” south of São Paulo and the upper São Francisco valley were the progenitors of the great herds that occupied the Argentine and Uruguayan Pampas In both Mexico and South America, cattle ranch-ing was done with semi-feral animals, on large fenceless tracts of land, by mounted cowboys 32 By 1600, wherever cattle were numerous, beef was the cheapest food that could be purchased; by contrast, and perhaps ironi-cally, it remained a luxury item in the Old World that had supplied the animals to begin with

Although wild sheep had preceded the Spaniards in the New World by many millennia, Columbus brought the fi rst domesticated ones There was, however, no immediate prodigious procreation of sheep like that accom-plished by pigs and cattle Tropical lowlands were not their ideal habitat But in the sixteenth century, sheep were taken to highland Mexico and to the high meadows of Peru, after which they were moved south to Chile and southeast to Argentina, and Uruguay 33 All of these regions emerged as important sheep-ranching centers

The goat, a close relative of sheep, also sailed with Columbus in 1493 This “poor man’s cow” dedicated itself to climbing the cliffs and browsing the mountainous terrain of most Caribbean Islands In Mexico, goats of the poor –an early part of the rural tradition – grazed on the countryside’s sparsely vegetated slopes whose offerings the nannies converted into rich milk The resulting butter and cheese were generally the sole source of animal protein for their owners, although on festive occasions roasted goat,

in Mexico as around the Mediterranean, served as the centerpiece 34

Horses were essential to the Iberians in their conquest of the Ameri-cas and, like most other barnyard animals of the Europeans, needed little encouragement to multiply In 1580, just 60 years after their introduction

to the La Plata region, it was reported that horses were already the prop-erty of Native Americans, and that they had become excellent horsemen 35

It took another century before their native counterparts in North America

managed to acquire their own horses This happened during the Pueblo Revolt of 1680 when horses were forcibly liberated from the Spaniards – after which Native American traders and raiders spread horse ownership across the Great Plains and into Canada 36

The Spaniards drove horses into Alta California during the 1770s Sev-enty years later, at the time of the gold rush, there were so many of them

in the region grazing on grass that stockmen fi gured should go to their cattle, that thousands of them were driven off the cliffs at Santa Barbara – a repetition of one hunting technique used by Amerindians during the late Pleistocene to help bring the horse of the New World to extinction 37

Whether chickens were already in the Americas when the Spanish arrived has been the subject of some speculation South American natives had names for what may have been a chicken and, if so, the only one in the world to lay blue and green eggs Most agree, however, that even if these South American curiosities were chickens, they probably were not natives but rather had reached the hemisphere with Pacifi c Island voyagers – those other pioneers who became Native Americans 38 Chickens that the Europeans were accus-tomed to only arrived in the New World via Híspaniola in 1493 39

Bees were producing honey in tropical America before humans set foot

on the earth, and the Spaniards, famous for their honey, probably brought bees with them But North America had no honey bees until the English turned them loose in Virginia in the 1620s and in Massachusetts a couple

of decades later They thrived, multiplied, and, although the Appalachian Mountains blocked them for a time, by the end of the eighteenth century they had buzzed their way west of the Mississippi Their honey made a fi ne addition to the Native American diet, although the latter called the bee an

“English fl y” – its very presence announcing the advance of the white man, and a harbinger of wrenching change to come 40

Seeds and plant cuttings also rode in the holds of those ships that put into Híspaniola in 1493 Wheat, however, although eventually the most important of the Old World cereals introduced to the New World, did not do well in the Antilles where the Spaniards reluctantly made do with zamia and manioc breads But wheat grew well enough in Mexico, so much so that in the eighteenth century that country served as a breadbas-ket for the many sailors and soldiers garrisoned in Havana Argentina and Chile became even greater wheat producers and were joined later on by California, although the transformation of the Great Plains (with its tough soils impervious to pre-industrial tools) into a vast granary that is now

regarded as the “world’s breadbasket,” did not take place until after the Civil War 41 Wheat was in the vanguard of this transformation, but ironi-cally, although Native Americans accepted the new food animals readily enough and had long before adopted maize, they were always slow to adopt wheat 42

Columbus gets no credit for rice – the second most important cereal to reach the Americas Pedro de Alvarado introduced it to Central America

in 1524, and it quickly became a backbone of Caribbean cookery, a staple

of some slave populations, and, in the nineteenth century, a familiar food for East Indian and Chinese contract laborers who replaced the slaves after abolition.43 Rye showed up in Mexico to be welcomed by the colonists because of a hardiness that let it grow at altitudes where maize had

dif-fi culty, as well as on lowlands where high winds frequently threatened wheat crops 44

The chickpea that the Spanish called garbanzo – and a food that had

been in Iberia since the days of the Phoenicians – sailed with Columbus to take up New World residence, as did grapevines offl oaded for winemaking

A few years later, Hernando Cortez invigorated Mexican viticulture with his decree that 1,000 grapevines be planted for every 100 workers on an estate 45 Bananas were carried to Híspaniola by a friar from the Canary Islands in 1516, and they, along with Asian melons, oranges, lemons, limes, and European peaches, radishes, and salad greens worked such a dietary transformation that just fi ve years after the conquest of Mexico they had become so familiar that their prices were being set by the government in Mexico City 46

In 1519, when the men of Cortez were marching on Tenochtitlan, Bernal Diaz reported seeing Eurasian onions, leeks, and garlic 47 Could this be more tantalizing evidence of contact between the pre-Columbian Ameri-cas and the larger world? Or was it the Ameri-case that the alliums planted by Columbus’ crews on Híspaniola in 1494 had somehow managed to spread

to the mainland? Probably not, because the Aztecs had words for their plants, suggesting a longer acquaintanceship than a mere quarter of a cen-tury More likely, Diaz mistook the Eurasian allium varieties he was famil-iar with for the bulbs and leaves of the chivelike, native American allium

representatives Allium shoenoprasum var sibericum.

Unhappily, we cannot be certain of this, and most likely never will be because wherever the Eurasian varieties were introduced, they spread like wildfi re Cortez grew garlic in Mexico, and it was adopted by the natives