reading homework

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A CONTINENT OF CULTURES Recent breakthroughs in archaeology and genetics have demonstrated that the first inhabitants of the Americas arrived from Siberia at least 15,500 years ago BP.* Gradually these nomads filtered southward, some likely following the Pacific coastline in small boats, others making their way down a narrow, glacier–free corridor along the eastern base of the Rocky Mountains and onto the northern Great Plains. There they found and hunted a stunning array of huge mammals, so–called megafauna. These animals included mammoths that were twice as heavy as elephants, giant bison, sloths that were taller than giraffes, several kinds of camels, and terrifying, 8–foot–long lions. Within a few thousand years the descendants of these Siberians, people whom Columbus would wishfully dub “Indians,” had spread throughout the length and breadth of the Americas.

nomad a member of a group of people who have no fixed home and who move about, usually seasonally, in pursuit of food, water, and other resources. Opinion

If your outstretched arm represented North America's human history, contact with Europe would happen around the second knuckle of your index finger, with the fingertips being the present. Why do you think students learn so little about the Americas before 1492?

This first colonization of the Americas coincided with, and perhaps accelerated, profound changes in the natural world. The last Ice Age literally melted away as warmer global temperatures freed the great reservoirs of water once locked in glaciers. A rise in sea levels inundated the Bering Strait, submerging the land bridge and creating new lakes and river systems. The emergence of new ecosystems—climates, waterways, and land environments in which humans interacted with other animals and plants—made for ever–greater diversity. The first human inhabitants of the Americas had fed, clothed, warmed, and armed themselves in part by hunting megafauna, and some combination of overhunting and climate change resulted in the extinction of most of these giants by the end of the Ice Age. As glaciers receded and human populations increased, the first Americans had to adapt to changing conditions. They adjusted by hunting smaller animals with new, more specialized kinds of stone tools and by learning to exploit particular places more efficiently.

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ecosystem a community and/or region studied as a system of functioning relationships between organisms and their environments.

So it was that between 10,000 and 2,500 years ago distinctive regional cultures developed among the peoples of the Americas. Those who remained in the Great Plains turned to hunting the much smaller descendants of the now–extinct giant bison; those in the deserts of the Great Basin survived on small game, seeds, and edible plants; those in the Pacific Northwest relied mainly on fishing; and those east of the Mississippi, besides fishing and gathering, tracked deer and bear and trapped smaller game animals and birds. Over these same centuries, what once seems to have been an original, common language evolved into regional dialects and eventually into a multitude of distinct languages. Linguistic diversity paced other sorts of divergences, in social organizations, kinship practices, politics, and religion. Technological and cultural unity gave way to striking regional diversity as the first Americans learned how to best exploit their particular environments. Glimpses of these profound changes may be found today in burials, stone tools, and some precious sites of long–term or repeated occupation.

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Cultures of Ancient Mexico

Cultures of Ancient Mexico To the south, pioneers in Mesoamerica began domesticating plants 10,000 years ago. Over the next several thousand years farmers added other crops, including beans, tomatoes, and especially corn, to an agricultural revolution that would transform life through much of the Americas. Because many crops could be dried and stored, agriculture allowed these first farmers to settle in one place.

Mesoamerica the area stretching from present-day central Mexico southward through Honduras and Nicaragua, in which pre-Columbian civilizations developed.

By about 1500 BCE farming villages began giving way to larger societies, to richer and more advanced cultures. As the abundant food supply steadily expanded their populations, people began specializing in certain kinds of work. While most continued to labor on the land, others became craftworkers and merchants, architects and artists, warriors and priests. Their built environment reflected this social change as humble villages expanded into skillfully planned urban sites that were centers of trade, government, artistic display, and religious ceremony.

   Aztec merchants, or pochtecas, spoke many languages and traveled on foot great distances throughout Mesoamerica and parts of North America. Pictured at left is Yacatecuhtli, Lord Nose, the patron god of merchants. He carries a symbol of the crossroads, with bare footprints. The merchant on the right carries a cargo of quetzal birds.

The Olmecs, the first city builders in the Americas, constructed large plazas and pyramidal structures and

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sculpted enormous heads chiseled from basalt. The Olmec cultural influence gradually spread throughout Mesoamerica, perhaps as a result of the Olmecs' trade with neighboring peoples. By about 100 BCE the Olmecs' example had inspired the flowering of Teotihuacán from a small town in central Mexico into a metropolis of towering pyramids. The city had bustling marketplaces, palaces decorated with mural paintings that housed elite warriors and priests, schools for their children, and sprawling suburbs for commoners. At its height, around 650 CE, Teotihuacán spanned more than 10 square miles and had a population of perhaps a quarter million—larger even than that of Rome at the time.

More impressive still were the achievements of the Mayas, who benefited from their contacts with both the Olmecs and Teotihuacán. In the lowland jungles of Mesoamerica they built cities filled with palaces, bridges, aqueducts, baths, astronomical observatories, and pyramids topped with temples. Their priests developed a written language, their mathematicians discovered the zero, and their astronomers devised a calendar more accurate than any then existing. In its glory, between the third and ninth century CE, the Mayan civilization boasted some 50 urban centers scattered throughout the Yucatán Peninsula, Belize, Guatemala, and Honduras.

But neither the earliest urban centers of the Olmecs nor the glittering city–state of Teotihuacán survived. Even the glories of the Maya had stalled by 900 CE. Like the ancient civilizations of Greece and Rome, they thrived for centuries and then declined. Scholars still debate the reasons for their collapse. Military attack may have brought about their ruin, or perhaps their large populations exhausted local resources.

Mayan grandeur was eventually rivaled in the Valley of Mexico. In the middle of the thirteenth century the Aztecs, a people who had originally lived on Mesoamerica's northern frontiers, swept south and settled in central Mexico. By the end of the fifteenth century they ruled over a vast empire from their capital at Tenochtitlán, an island metropolis of perhaps a quarter of a million people. At its center lay a large plaza bordered by sumptuous palaces and the Great Temple of the Sun. Beyond stood three broad causeways connecting the island to the mainland, many other tall temples adorned with brightly painted carved images of the gods, zoological and botanical gardens, and well–stocked marketplaces. Through Tenochtitlán's canals flowed gold, silver, exotic feathers and jewels, cocoa, and millions of pounds of maize—all trade goods and tribute from the several million other peoples in the region subjugated by the Aztecs.

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Unsurpassed in power and wealth, in technological and artistic attainments, theirs was also a highly stratified society. The Aztec ruler, or Chief Speaker, shared governing power with the aristocrats who monopolized all positions of religious, military, and political leadership, while the commoners— merchants, farmers, and craftworkers—performed all manual labor. There were slaves as well, some captives taken in war, others from the ranks of commoners forced by poverty to sell themselves or their children.

Farmers, Potters, and Builders of the Southwest

Farmers, Potters, and Builders of the Southwest Recent discoveries suggest that Mesoamerican crops and farming techniques began making their way north to the American Southwest as early as 2100 BCE, though it would be nearly two millennia before regional communities fully adopted sedentary agricultural lifestyles. The most successful full–time farmers in the region were the Mogollon and Hohokam peoples, two cultures that flourished in New Mexico and southern Arizona during the first millennium CE. Both tended to cluster their dwellings near streams, which allowed them to adopt the systems of irrigation as well as the maize cultivation of central Mexico. The Mogollon came to be the master potters of the Southwest. The Hohokam pioneered vast and complex irrigation systems in arid southern Arizona that

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allowed them to support one of the largest populations in precontact North America.

Their neighbors to the north in what is now known as the Four Corners Region of Arizona, Colorado, New Mexico, and Utah, commonly referred to by the term Anasazi, are today more properly known as the Ancestral Pueblo peoples. The Ancestral Puebloans adapted corn, beans, and squash to the relatively high altitude of the Colorado Plateau and soon parlayed their growing surplus and prosperity into societies of considerable complexity. Their most stunning achievements were villages of exquisitely executed masonry buildings—apartment–like structures up to four stories high and containing hundreds of rooms at such places as Mesa Verde (Colorado) and Canyon de Chelly (Arizona). Villages in Chaco Canyon (New Mexico), the largest center of Ancestral Puebloan settlement, were linked to the wider region by hundreds of miles of wide, straight roads.

Besides their impressive dwellings, the Ancestral Puebloans filled their towns with religious shrines, astronomical observatories, and stations for sending signals to other villages. Their craftworkers fashioned delicate woven baskets, beautiful feather and hide sashes, decorated pottery, and turquoise jewelry that they traded throughout the region and beyond. For nearly a thousand years this civilization prospered, reaching its zenith between about 900 and 1100 CE. During those three centuries the population grew to approximately 30,000 spread over 50,000 square miles, a total area larger than present–day California.

Chiefdoms of the Eastern Woodlands

Chiefdoms of the Eastern Woodlands East of the Mississippi, Indian societies prospered in valleys near great rivers (Mississippi, Ohio, Tennessee, and Cumberland), the shores of the Great Lakes, and the coast of the Atlantic. Everywhere the earliest inhabitants depended on a combination of fishing, gathering, and hunting—mainly deer but also bear, raccoon, and a variety of birds. Around 2500 BCE some groups in the temperate, fertile Southeast began growing the gourds and pumpkins first cultivated by Mesoamerican farmers, and later they also adopted the cultivation of maize. Like the ancient farmers of the Southwest, most Eastern Woodland peoples continued to subsist largely on animals, fish, and nuts, all of which were abundant enough to meet their needs and even to expand their numbers.

Indeed, many of the mysterious earthen mounds that would so fascinate Europeans were built by peoples who did not farm. About 1000 BCE residents of a place now known as Poverty Point in northeastern Louisiana fashioned spectacular earthworks—six semicircular rings that rose 9 feet in height and covered more than half a mile in diameter. Although these structures might have been sites for studying the planets and stars, hundreds of other mounds—built about 2,000 years ago by the Adena and the Hopewell cultures of the Ohio and Mississippi valleys—served as the burial places of their leading men and women. Alongside the corpses mourners heaped their richest goods—headdresses of antlers, necklaces of copper, troves of shells and pearls—rare and precious items imported from as far north as Canada, as far west as Wyoming, and as far east as Florida. All these mounds attest powerfully not only to the skill and sheer numbers of their builders but also to the complexity of these ancient societies, their elaborate religious practices, and the wide scope of their trading networks.

Even so, the most magnificent culture of the ancient Eastern Woodlands, the Mississippian, owed much of its prominence to farming. By the twelfth century CE Mississippians had emerged as the premier city– builders north of the Rio Grande, and their towns radiated for hundreds of miles in every direction from the hub of their trading network at Cahokia, a port city of several thousand located directly across from present–day St. Louis at the confluence of the Missouri and the Mississippi Rivers. Cahokia's many broad plazas teemed with farmers hauling their corn, squash, and beans and with craftworkers and merchants plying their wares. But what commanded every eye were the structures surrounding the plazas—more than 100 flat–topped pyramidal mounds crowned by religious temples and elite dwellings.

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Page 6 Historian's TOOLBOX An Ancient Calendar

On a blazing hot summer day in 1977, Anna Sofaer climbed up to the top of Fajada Butte in Chaco Canyon, New Mexico, spotted three sandstone slabs resting carefully against a wall, and walked over to investigate. What she saw against the wall astounded her: a spiral glyph, bisected by a pure shaft of light. An artist and amateur archaeologist, Sofaer had keen interest in how indigenous American cultures harnessed light and shadow in their architecture. Knowing that it was nearly the summer solstice, she recognized instantly that she'd discovered an ancient Anasazi calendar. Later research revealed that the device also marked the winter solstice, the summer and winter equinoxes, and the extremes of the moon's 18–19 year cycle (the major and minor standstills). These discoveries prompted still more research, and scholars now believe that there are structures throughout Chaco Canyon aligned to solar and lunar events.

THINKING CRITICALLY

What practical reasons might there have been to build these sorts of sun and moon calendars? Might there have been cultural, religious, or social purposes to track accurately the movements of the sun and moon?

Life on the Great Plains

Life on the Great Plains Cahokia's size and power depended on consistent agricultural surpluses. Outside the Southwest and the river valleys of the East, agriculture played a smaller role in shaping North American societies. On the Great Plains, for example, some people did cultivate corn, beans, squash, and sunflowers, near reliable rivers and streams. But more typically Plains communities depended on hunting and foraging, migrating to exploit seasonally variable resources. Plains hunters pursued game on foot; the horses that had once roamed the Americas became extinct after the last Ice Age. Sometimes large groups of people worked together to drive bison over cliffs or to trap them in corrals. The aridity of the plains made it a dynamic and unpredictable place to live. During times of reliable rainfall, bison populations boomed, hunters flocked to the region, and agricultural communities blossomed alongside major rivers. But sometimes centuries passed with lower–than–average precipitation, and families abandoned the plains for eastern river valleys or the foothills of the Rocky Mountains.

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Survival in the Great Basin

Survival in the Great Basin Some peoples west of the Great Plains also kept to older ways of subsistence. Among them were the Numic–speaking peoples of the Great Basin, which includes present– day Nevada and Utah, eastern California, and western Wyoming and Colorado. Small family groups scoured their stark, arid landscape for the limited supplies of food it yielded, moving with each passing season to make the most of their environment. Men tracked elk and antelope and trapped smaller animals, birds, even toads, rattlesnakes, and insects. But the staples of their diet were edible seeds, nuts, and plants, which women gathered and stored in woven baskets to consume in times of scarcity. Several families occasionally hunted together or wintered in common quarters, but because the desert heat and soil defied farming, these bands usually numbered no more than about 50 people.

MAP 1.1: EARLY PEOPLES OF NORTH AMERICAEARLY PEOPLES OF NORTH AMERICA

Migration routes across the Bering Strait from Asia were taken by peoples whose descendants created the major civilizations of ancient Americans. The influence of Mesoamerica is most striking among the cultures of the Southwest and the Mississippians.

How would the presence or absence of the ice cap affect the timing of migration over the Bering land

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bridge?

Click here to view the interactive version of this map

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The Plenty of the Pacific Northwest

The Plenty of the Pacific Northwest The rugged stretch of coast from the southern banks of present– day British Columbia to northern California has always been an extraordinarily rich natural environment. Its mild climate and abundant rainfall yield forests lush with plants and game; its bays and rivers teem with salmon and halibut, its oceans with whales and porpoises, and its rocky beaches with seals, otters, abalone, mussels, and clams. Agriculture was unnecessary in such a bountiful place. From their villages on the banks of rivers, the shores of bays, and the beaches of low–lying offshore islands, the ancestors of the Nootkans, Makahs, Tlingits, Tshimshians, and Kwakiutls speared or netted salmon, trapped sea mammals, gathered shellfish, and launched canoes. The largest of these craft, from which they harpooned whales, measured 45 feet bow to stern and nearly 6 feet wide.

By the fifteenth century these fecund lands supported a population of perhaps 130,000. They also permitted a culture with the leisure time needed to create works of art as well as an elaborate social and ceremonial life. The peoples of the Northwest built houses and canoes from red cedar; carved bowls and dishes from red alder; crafted paddles and harpoon shafts, bows, and clubs from Pacific yew; and wove baskets from bark and blankets from mountain goat wool. They evolved a society with sharp distinctions among nobles, commoners, and slaves, the last group being mainly women and children captured in raids on other villages. Nonslaves devoted their lives to accumulating and then redistributing their wealth among other villagers in elaborate potlatch ceremonies in order to confirm or enhance their social prestige.

The Frozen North

The Frozen North Most of present–day Canada and Alaska was inhospitable to agriculture. In the farthest northern reaches—a treeless belt of Arctic tundra—temperatures fell below freezing for most of the year. The Subarctic, although densely forested, had only about 100 frost–free days each year. As a result, the peoples of both regions survived by fishing and hunting. The Inuit, or Eskimos, of northern Alaska harvested whales from their umiaks, boats made by stretching walrus skin over a driftwood frame and that could bear more than a ton of weight. In the central Arctic they tracked seals. The inhabitants of the Subarctic, both Algonquian–speaking peoples in the East and Athapaskan speakers of the West, moved from their summer fishing camps to berry patches in the fall to moose and caribou hunting grounds in the winter.

REVIEW

How did native cultures differ region to region, and what accounts for these differences?

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INNOVATIONS AND LIMITATIONS The first Americans therefore expressed, governed, and supported themselves in a broad variety of ways. And yet they shared certain core characteristics, including the desire and ability to reshape their world. Whether they lived in forests, coastal regions, jungles, or prairies, whether they inhabited high mountains or low deserts, native communities experimented constantly with the resources around them. Over the course of millennia nearly all the Western Hemisphere's peoples found ways to change the natural world in order to improve and enrich their lives.

America's Agricultural Gifts

America's Agricultural Gifts No innovation proved more crucial to human history than native manipulation of plants. Like all first farmers, agricultural pioneers in the Americas began experimenting accidentally. Modern–day species of corn, for example, probably derive from a Mesoamerican grass known as teosinte. It seems that ancient peoples gathered teosinte to collect its small grains. By selecting the grains that best suited them and bringing them back to their settlements, and by returning the grains to the soil through spillage or waste disposal, they unintentionally began the process of domestic cultivation. Soon these first farmers began deliberately saving seeds from the best plants and sowing them in gardens. In this way over hundreds of generations, American farmers transformed the modest teosinte grass into a staple crop that would give rise to the hemisphere's mightiest civilizations.

Indeed, ever since contact with Europe, the great breakthroughs in Native American farming have sustained peoples around the world. In addition to corn, the first Americans gave humanity scores of varieties of squash, potatoes, beans, and other basic foods. Today plants domesticated by indigenous Americans account for three–fifths of the world's crops, including many that have revolutionized the global diet. For good or ill, a handful of corn species occupies the center of the contemporary American diet. In addition to its traditional forms, corn is consumed in chips, breads, and breakfast cereals; corn syrup sweeteners are added to many of our processed foods and nearly all soft drinks; and corn is fed to almost all animals grown to be consumed, even farmed fish.

Other Native American crops have become integral to diets all over the world. Potatoes revolutionized northern European life in the centuries after contact, helping to avert famine and boost populations in several countries. Ireland's population tripled in the century after the introduction of potatoes. Beans and peanuts became prized for their protein content in Asia. And in Africa, corn, manioc, and other New World crops so improved diets and overall health that the resulting rise in population may have offset the population lost to the Atlantic slave trade.

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   Theodore de Bry, Florida Indians Planting Maize. De Bry claimed that this image, produced and published in 1591, was based on a colonist's direct observation. Recently, however, scholars have noted that the image likely contains a variety of inaccuracies. Except for the digging stick, the baskets and tools are all European in design. Moreover, the image suggests that men and women shared agricultural labor, whereas in most American societies this work fell primarily to women and children. Page 9

Landscapers

Landscapers Plant domestication requires the smallest of changes, changes farmers slowly encourage at the genetic level. But native peoples in the precontact Americas transformed their world on grand scales as well. In the Andes, Peruvian engineers put people to work by the tens of thousands, creating an astonishing patchwork of terraces, dykes, and canals designed to maximize agricultural productivity. Similar public–works projects transformed large parts of central Mexico and the Yucatán. Even today, after several centuries of disuse, overgrowth, and even deliberate destruction, human–shaped landscapes dating from the precontact period still cover thousands of square miles of the Americas.

Recently scholars have begun to find evidence of incredible manipulation of landscapes and environments in the least likely places. The vast Amazon rainforest has long been seen by Westerners as an imposing symbol of untouched nature. But it now seems that much of the Amazon was in fact made by people. Whereas farmers elsewhere in the world domesticated plants for their gardens and fields, farmers in the Amazon cultivated food–bearing trees for thousands of years, cutting down less useful species and replacing them with ones that better suited human needs. All told there are more than 70 different species of domesticated trees throughout the Amazon.

At least one–eighth of the nonflooded rain forest was directly or indirectly created by humans. Likewise, native peoples laboriously improved the soil across as much as a tenth of the Amazon, mixing it with charcoal and a variety of organic materials. These managed soils are more than 10 times as productive as untreated soils in the Amazon. Today farmers in the region still eagerly search for the places where precontact peoples enriched the earth.

Native North Americans likewise transformed their local environments. Sometimes they moved forests. Ancestral Puebloans cut down and transported more than 200,000 trees to construct the floors and the

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roofs of the monumental buildings in Chaco Canyon. Sometimes they moved rivers. By taming the waters of the Salt and the Gila Rivers in present–day Arizona with the most extensive system of irrigation canals anywhere in precontact North America, the Hohokam were able to support large populations in a desert environment. And sometimes they moved the land itself. Twenty–two million cubic feet of earth were moved to construct just one building in the Mississippian city of Cahokia.

Indians also employed fire to systematically reshape landscapes across the continent. Throughout North America's great eastern and western forests, native peoples periodically set low fires to consume undergrowth and fallen trees. In this way the continent's first inhabitants managed forests and also animals. Burning enriched the soil and encouraged the growth of grasses and bushes prized by game animals such as deer, elk, beaver, rabbit, grouse, and turkey. The systematic use of fire to reshape forests helped hunters in multiple ways: it increased the overall food supply for grazing animals, it attracted those animal species hunters valued most, and, by clearing forests of ground debris, fire made it easier to track, kill, and transport game. Deliberate burns transformed forests in eastern North America to such an extent that bison migrated from their original ranges on the plains and thrived far to the east. Thus, when native hunters from present–day New York to Georgia brought down a buffalo, they were harvesting a resource that they themselves had helped to create.

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The Influence of Geography and Climate

The Influence of Geography and Climate No matter how great their ingenuity, the first Americans were constrained by certain natural realities. One of the most important is so basic that it is easy to overlook. Unlike Eurasia, which stretches across the Northern Hemisphere along an east–west axis, the Americas fall along a north–south axis, stretching nearly pole to pole. Consequently, the Americas are broken up by tremendous geographic and climactic diversity, making communication and technology

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transfer far more difficult than it was in the Old World.

Consider the agricultural revolution in Eurasia. Once plants and animals were first domesticated in the Fertile Crescent around 10,000 years ago, they quickly began spreading east and west. Within 1,500 years these innovations had been adopted in Greece and India. A thousand years later the domesticated plants and animals of the Fertile Crescent had reached central Europe, and from there it took perhaps 200 years for them to be embraced in present–day Spain. Eurasia's east–west axis facilitated these transfers. Locations at roughly the same latitude share the same seasonal variation, have days of the same length, and often have similar habitats and rates of precipitation, making it relatively easy for plants and animals to move from one place to the next.

In contrast, the north–south orientation of the Americas erected natural barriers to plant and animal transfer. Mesoamerica and South America, for example, are about as far apart as the Balkans and Mesopotamia. It took roughly 2,000 years for plants and animals domesticated in Mesopotamia to reach the Balkans. But because Mesoamerica and South America are separated by tropical, equatorial lowlands, it took domesticated plants such as corn several thousand years to jump between the two regions. Sometimes the transfer never happened at all before European contact. South American potatoes would have thrived in central Mexico, but the tropics stopped their northward migration. Equatorial jungles also denied Mesoamerican societies the llama and the alpaca, domesticated more than 5,000 years ago in the Andes. One wonders what even greater heights the Olmec, Toltec, Mayan, and Aztec civilizations would have achieved if they had had access to these large creatures as draft animals and reliable sources of protein.

Dramatic variations in climate likewise delayed the transfer of agriculture from Mexico to regions north of the Rio Grande. Archaeologists have discovered evidence of 10,000–year–old domesticated squash in a cave in southern Mexico, an indication that agriculture began in the Americas nearly as early as anywhere else in the world. Yet squash and corn were not cultivated in the present–day American Southwest for another 7,000 years, and the region's peoples did not embrace a fully sedentary, agricultural lifestyle until the start of the Common Era. Major differences in the length of days, the growing season, average temperatures, and rainfall between the Southwest and central Mexico meant that farmers north of the Rio Grande had to experiment for scores of generations before they perfected crops suited to their particular environments. Corn took even longer to become a staple crop in eastern North America, which is why we do not see major urban centers arise there until approximately 1000 CE.

By erecting barriers to communication and the spread of technology, then, the predominantly north–south orientation of the Americas made it more difficult for the hemisphere's inhabitants to build on one another's successes. Had American innovations spread as quickly as innovations in Eurasia, the peoples of the Western Hemisphere would likely have been healthier, more numerous, and more powerful than they were when Europeans first encountered them in 1492.

Animals and Illness

Animals and Illness One other profound difference between the Eurasian world and the Americas concerned animals and disease. Most diseases affecting humans originated from domesticated animals, which came inevitably into frequent and close contact with the humans who raised them. As people across Eurasia embraced agriculture and started living with one another and with domesticated animals in crowded villages, towns, and cities, they created ideal environments for the evolution and transmission of infectious disease. For example, measles, tuberculosis, and smallpox all seem to have derived from diseases afflicting cattle.

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   Fewer large mammal species were available for domestication in the Americas, perhaps because the first wave of humans on the continent contributed to mass extinctions. Native Americans did domesticate dogs, shown here in a watercolor-and-ink sketch of a Mandan dog sled painted by Karl Bodmer in 1834. Page 11

Eurasians therefore paid a heavy price for living closely with animals. Yet in the long run the continent's terrible illnesses hardened its population. Victims who survived into adulthood enjoyed acquired immunity to the most common diseases: that is, if they had already encountered a particular illness as children, their immune systems would recognize and combat the disease more effectively in the event of reinfection. By the fifteenth century, then, Eurasian bodies had learned to live with a host of deadly communicable diseases.

But Native American bodies had not. With a few important exceptions, including tuberculosis, pneumonia, and possibly herpes and syphilis, human populations in the Western Hemisphere seem to have been relatively free from major communicable pathogens. Insofar as most major diseases emerge from domesticated animals, it is easy enough to see why. Indigenous Americans domesticated turkeys, dogs, Muscovy ducks, and guinea pigs but raised only one large mammal—the llama or alpaca (breeds of the same species).

This scarcity of domestic animals had more to do with available supply than with the interest or ability of their would–be breeders. The extinction of most species of megafauna soon after humans arrived in the Americas deprived the hemisphere of 80 percent of its large mammals. Those that remained, including modern–day bison, elk, deer, and moose, were more or less immune to domestication because of peculiarities in their dispositions, diets, rates of growth, mating habits, and social characteristics. In fact, of the world's 148 species of large mammals, only 14 were successfully domesticated before the twentieth century. Of those 14 only 1—the ancestor to the llama/alpaca—remained in the Americas following the mass extinctions. Eurasia, in contrast, was home to 13—including the 5 most common and adaptable domestic mammals: sheep, goats, horses, cows, and pigs.

With virtually no large mammals to domesticate, Native Americans were spared the nightmarish effects of most of the world's major communicable diseases—until 1492. After that date European colonizers discovered the grim advantage of their millennia–long dance with disease. Old World infections that most colonizers had experienced as children raged through indigenous communities, usually doing the greatest damage to adults whose robust immune systems reacted violently to the novel pathogens. Often native communities came under attack from multiple diseases at the same time. Combined with the wars that

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attended colonization and the malnutrition, dislocation, and despair that attend wars, disease would kill native peoples by the millions while European colonizers increased and spread over the land. Despite their ingenuity and genius at reshaping plants and environments to their advantage, native peoples in the Americas labored under crucial disadvantages compared to Europe—disadvantages that would contribute to disaster after contact.

REVIEW

How did the native inhabitants of the Americas transform their environments? What natural constraints put them at a disadvantage to Europeans?

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CRISIS AND TRANSFORMATION With its coastal plains, arid deserts, broad forests, and vast grassy plains, North America has always been a place of tremendous diversity and constant change. Indeed, many of the continent's most dramatic changes took place in the few centuries before European contact. Because of a complex and still poorly understood combination of ecological and social factors, the continent's most impressive civilizations collapsed as suddenly and mysteriously as had those of the Olmecs and the Mayas of Mesoamerica. In the Southwest the Mogollon culture went into eclipse around the twelfth century, the Hohokam and the Ancestral Puebloans by about the fourteenth. In the Eastern Woodlands the story was strikingly similar. Most of the great Mississippian population centers, including the magnificent city of Cahokia, had faded by the fourteenth century.

Enduring Peoples

Enduring Peoples The survivors of these crises struggled to construct new communities, societies, and political systems. In the Southwest descendants of the Hohokam withdrew to small farming villages that relied on simpler modes of irrigation. Refugees embarked on a massive, coordinated exodus from the Four Corners region and established new, permanent villages in Arizona and New Mexico that the Spaniards would collectively call the Pueblos. The Mogollon have a more mysterious legacy, but some of their number may have helped establish the remarkable trading city of Paquime in present–day Chihuahua. Built around 1300 Paquime contained more than 2,000 rooms and had a sophisticated water and sewage system unlike any other in the Americas. The city included 18 large mounds, all shaped differently from one another, and three ballcourts reminiscent of those found elsewhere in Mexico. Until its demise sometime in the fifteenth century Paquime was the center of a massive trading network, breeding macaws and turkeys for export and channeling prized feathers, turquoise, seashells, and worked copper throughout a huge region.

The dramatic transformations remaking the Southwest involved tremendous suffering. Southwesterners had to rebuild in unfamiliar and oftentimes less productive places. Although some of their new settlements endure even to this day, many failed. Skeletal analysis from an abandoned pueblo on the Rio Grande, for example, indicates that the average life expectancy was only 16.5 years. Moreover, drought and migrations increased conflict over scarce resources. The most successful new settlements were large, containing several hundred people, and constructed in doorless, defensible blocks, or else set on high mesas to ward off enemy attacks. These changes were only compounded by the arrival of Athapaskan– speaking peoples (known to the Spanish as Apaches and Navajos) in the century or two before contact with Europeans. These hunters and foragers from western Canada and Alaska moved in small bands, were sometimes friendly, sometimes hostile toward different Pueblos, and eventually became key figures in the postcontact Southwest.

In the Eastern Woodlands the great Mississippian chieftainships never again attained the glory of Cahokia, but key traditions endured in the Southeast. In the lower Mississippi valley the Natchez maintained both the temple mound–building tradition and the rigid social distinctions of Mississippian civilization. Below the chief, or “Great Sun,” of the Natchez stood a hereditary nobility of lesser “Suns” who demanded respect from the lowly “Stinkards,” the common people. Other Muskogean–speakers rejected this rigid and hierarchical social model and gradually embraced a new, more flexible system of independent and relatively egalitarian villages that forged confederacies to better cope with outsiders. These groupings would eventually mature into three of the great southeastern Indian confederacies:

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Creek, Choctaw, and Chickasaw.

egalitarian exhibiting or asserting a belief in the equality of humans in a social, political, or economic context.

To the North lived speakers of Iroquoian languages, roughly divided into a southern faction including Cherokees and Tuscaroras, and a northern faction including the powerful Iroquois and Hurons. Like Muskogean peoples to the South, these Iroquoian communities mixed farming with a hunting/gathering economy and lived in semipermanent towns. The distinctive feature of Iroquois and Huron architecture was not the temple mound but rather the longhouse (some stretching up to 100 feet in length). Each sheltered as many as 10 families.

Algonquian speakers were the third major group of Eastern Woodlands people. They lived along the Atlantic seaboard and the Great Lakes in communities that were generally smaller than those of people speaking Muskogean or the Iroquoian languages. By the fifteenth century the coastal communities from southern New England to Virginia had adopted agriculture to supplement their diets, but those in the colder northern climates with shorter growing seasons depended entirely on hunting, fishing, and gathering plants such as wild rice.

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Cultures of equal and even greater resources persisted and flourished during the fifteenth century in the Caribbean, particularly on the Greater Antilles—the islands of present–day Cuba, Haiti and the Dominican Republic, Jamaica, and Puerto Rico. Although the earliest inhabitants of the ancient Caribbean, the Ciboneys, probably came from the Florida peninsula, it was the Tainos, later emigrants from northern South America, who expanded throughout the Greater Antilles and the Bahamas. Taino chiefs known as caciques, along with a small number of noble families, ruled island tribes, controlling the production and distribution of food and tools and exacting tribute from the great mass of commoners, farmers, and fisherfolk. Attending to these elites were the poorest Taino peoples—servants who bedecked their masters and mistresses in brilliant diadems of feathers, fine woven textiles, and gold nose and ear pieces and then shouldered the litters on which the rulers sat and paraded their finery.

North America on the Eve of Contact

North America on the Eve of Contact By the end of the fifteenth century, 5 to 10 million people lived north of the Rio Grande—with perhaps another million living on the islands of the Caribbean—and they were spread among more than 350 societies speaking nearly as many distinct languages. (The total precontact population for all of the Americas is estimated at between 57 and 112 million.)

These millions lived in remarkably diverse ways. Some peoples relied entirely on farming; others on hunting, fishing, and gathering; still others on a combination of the two. Some, such as the Natchez and the Iroquois, practiced matrilineal forms of kinship, in which women owned land, tools, and even children. Among others, such as the Algonquians, patrilineal kinship prevailed, and all property and prestige descended in the male line. Some societies, like those of the Great Plains and the Great Basin in the West, the Inuit in the Arctic, and the Iroquoians and Algonquians in the East, were roughly egalitarian, whereas others, like many in the Caribbean and the Pacific Northwest, were rigidly divided into nobles and commoners and servants or slaves. Some, such as the Natchez and the Taino, were ruled by powerful chiefs; others, such as the Algonquians and the Pueblos, by councils of village elders or heads of family clans; still others in the Great Basin, the Great Plains, and the Far North looked to the most skillful hunter or the most powerful shaman for direction. Those people who relied on hunting practiced religions that celebrated their kinship with animals and solicited their aid as guardian spirits,

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whereas predominantly agricultural peoples sought the assistance of their gods to make the rain fall and the crops ripen.

When Europeans first arrived in North America, the continent north of present–day Mexico boasted an ancient and rich history marked by cities, towns, and prosperous farms. At contact it was a land occupied by several million men, women, and children speaking hundreds of languages and characterized by tremendous political, cultural, economic, and religious diversity. This diversity was heightened by the north–south orientation of the Americas rather than the east–west orientation of Eurasia, since the spread of crops and animals in temperate regions was impeded by the tropical zones of the equator. The isolation from European diseases would make their arrival after 1492 even more devastating. Before 1492, though, the civilizations of North and South America remained populous, dynamic, and diverse.

REVIEW

What was life like in the Americas on the eve of European contact?

For most of our nation's short history we have not wanted to remember things this way. European Americans have had a variety of reasons to minimize and belittle the past, the works, even the size of the native populations that ruled North America for 99 percent of its human history. In 1830, for example, President Andrew Jackson delivered an address before Congress in which he tried to answer the many critics of his Indian removal policies. Although “humanity has often wept over the fate of the aborigines of this country,” Jackson said, the Indians' fate was as natural and inevitable “as the extinction of one generation to make room for another.” He reminded his listeners of the mysterious mounds that had so captivated the founding fathers. “In the monuments and fortresses of an unknown people, spread over the extensive regions of the West, we behold the memorials of a once powerful race, which was exterminated, or has disappeared, to make room for the existing savage tribes.” Just as the architects of the mounds supposedly met their end at the hands of these “savage tribes,” the president concluded, so, too, must Indians pass away before the descendants of Europe. “What good man would prefer a country covered with forests and ranged by a few thousand savages, to our extensive republic, studded with cities, towns, and prosperous farms; embellished with all the improvements which art can devise, or industry execute; occupied by more than twelve millions of happy people, and filled with all the blessings of liberty, civilization, and religion!”

Indeed, stories told about the past have power over both the present and the future. Jackson and many others of his era preferred a national history that contained only a few thousand ranging “savages” to one shaped by millions of indigenous hunters, farmers, builders, and inventors. Yet every generation rewrites its history, and what seems clear from this latest draft is the rich diversity of American cultures on the eve of contact between the peoples of Eurasia, Africa, and the Americas. We are still struggling to find stories big enough to encompass not only Indians from across the continent but also people who have come from all over the world to forge this complex, tragic, and marvelous nation of nations.

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MAP 1.2: Indigenous North America, CA. 1500Indigenous North America, CA. 1500

Establishing the location of native groups in maps of precontact America is always problematic, since many peoples undertook major migrations in the contact period, boundaries between groups were fluid, and names applied to native communities usually differ from what those communities called themselves before colonization. Nonetheless, this map depicts the rough location of some prominent native peoples and their main modes of subsistence on the eve of contact.

California is well suited to farming, yet its large precontact population practiced very little agriculture. Why?

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Page 15 CHAPTER SUMMARY

During the thousands of years after bands of Siberian nomads migrated across the Bering Strait to Alaska, their descendants spread throughout the Americas, creating civilizations that rivaled those of ancient Europe, Asia, and Africa.

Around 1500 BCE Mesoamerica emerged as the hearth of civilization in the Western Hemisphere, a process started by the Olmecs and brought to its height by the Mayas and Aztecs.

These Mesoamerican peoples devised complex ways of organizing society, government, and religious worship and built cities remarkable for their art, architecture, and trade.

Both commerce and migration spread cultural influences throughout the hemisphere, notably to the islands of the Caribbean basin and to North America, an influence that endured long after these empires declined.

The adoption of agriculture gave peoples in the Southwest and the Eastern Woodlands the resource security necessary to develop sedentary cultures of increasing complexity. These cultures eventually enjoyed great achievements in culture, architecture, and agriculture.

Inhabitants of the Great Plains, the Great Basin, the Arctic, and the Subarctic evolved their own diverse cultures, relying for subsistence on fishing, hunting, and gathering.

Peoples of the Pacific Northwest boasted large populations and prosperous economies as well as an elaborate social, ceremonial, and artistic life.

The native inhabitants of the Americas transformed their environments in a variety of ways, from pioneering crops that would eventually feed the world to landscaping mountains and cultivating jungles.

Nonetheless, natural constraints would leave Native Americans at a disadvantage compared to Europe. The continent's north–south orientation inhibited the spread of agriculture and technology, and a lack of domesticatable animals compared to Europe left Native Americans with little protection against disease.

For reasons that remain unclear, many of North America's most impressive early civilizations had collapsed by the end of the fifteenth century. In their wake a diverse array of cultures evolved across the continent.

In the Southwest, Pueblo Indians were joined by Athapaskan–speakers whom Europeans would later call Apaches and Navajos.

In much of eastern North America, stratified chiefdoms of the Mississippian era gave way to more egalitarian confederacies of independent villages subsisting on farming and hunting.

Although Americans in the nineteenth, twentieth, and even twenty–first centuries have been slow to recognize the fact, the societies of precontact America were remarkably populous, complex, and diverse. Their influence would continue to be felt in the centuries after contact.

Additional Reading

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Scholars in several fields are transforming our understanding of the Americas prior to European contact. The magazine Archaeology offers clear explanations of the latest discoveries for nonscientific audiences. For an excellent overview, attentive to controversies among researchers, see Charles C. Mann, 1491: New Revelations of the Americas before Columbus (2005). For North America specifically, see Alice Beck Kehoe, America before the European Invasions (2002). For the Southwest, see Linda S. Cordell and Maxine E. McBrinn, Archaeology of the Southwest (2012). For the Eastern Woodlands, see George R. Milner, The Moundbuilders: Ancient Peoples of Eastern North America (2005). Roger G. Kennedy, Hidden Cities: The Discovery and Loss of Ancient North American Civilization (1994), gives a fascinating account of how white Americans responded to the ruins of ancient American cultures. For the consequences of axis alignment and of domesticated animals, see the captivating work by Jared Diamond, Guns, Germs, and Steel: The Fates of Human Societies (1998).

For the cultures of precontact Mexico, see Michael D. Coe and Rex Koontz, Mexico: From the Olmecs to the Aztecs (7th ed., 2013). For exhaustive surveys of all regional cultures in North America, see William C. Sturtevant, general editor, Handbook of North American Indians, 15 volumes to date (1978–2008).

Page 16 Significant Events

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With sails bellying in a gale, this Dutch ship faced the shallows of a rocky coast. Western European sailors risked much as they crossed the Atlantic in search of fish, silver, gold, and other commodities to trade. What's to Come

19 19 Eurasia and Africa in the Fifteenth Century

22 22 Spain in the Americas

29 29 Religious Reform Divides Europe

31 31 England's Entry into America

An American Story

FISHING NETS AND FAR HORIZONS All the world lay before them. Or so it seemed to mariners from England's seafaring “West Country” coasts, pushing toward unknown lands in the far Atlantic.

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The scent of the new land came first—not the sight of it, but the smells, perhaps the scent of fir trees wafted from beyond the horizon, delicious to sailors who had felt nothing but the rolling sea for weeks on end. Straightaway the captain would call for a lead to be thrown overboard to sound the depths. At its end was a hollowed-out socket with a bit of tallow in it, so that some of the sea bottom would stick when the lead was hauled up. A good sailing master could tell where he was by what came up—“oozy sand” or perhaps “soft worms” or “popplestones” as big as beans.

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Through much of the fifteenth century the search for cod had drawn West Country sailors north and west, toward Iceland. In the 1480s and 1490s a few English tried their luck farther west. They returned with little to show for their daring until the coming of an Italian named Giovanni Caboto, called John Cabot by the English. Cabot, who hailed from Venice, obtained the blessing of King Henry VII to hunt for unknown lands. From the port of Bristol his lone ship set out to the west in the spring of 1497.

This time the return voyage brought news of a “new-found” island where the trees were tall enough to make fine masts and the codfish were plentiful. After returning to Bristol, Cabot marched off to London to inform His Majesty, received 10 pounds as his reward, and with the proceeds dressed himself in dashing silks. The multitudes of London flocked after him, wondering over “the Admiral”; then Cabot returned triumphantly to Bristol to undertake a more ambitious search for a northwest passage to Asia. He set sail with five ships in 1498 and was never heard from again.

By the 1550s Cabot's island, now known as Newfoundland, attracted 400 vessels annually, fishermen not only from England but also from France, Portugal, and Spain. The harbor of present-day St. John's, Newfoundland, served as the informal hub of the North Atlantic fishery. Sailors from three kingdoms dropped anchor there to take on supplies in the spring, trade with native peoples, or prepare for the homeward voyage in autumn. There was eager conversation at this meeting place, for these seafarers knew as much as anyone—if not more—about the new world of wonders that was opening to Europeans. They were acquainted with names such as Cristoforo Colombo, the Italian from Genoa whom Cabot might have known as a boy. They listened to Portuguese tales of sailing around the Horn of Africa in pursuit of spices and to stories of Indian empires to the south, rich in gold and silver that Spanish treasure ships were bringing home.

Indeed, Newfoundland was one of the few places in the world where so many ordinary folk of different nations could gather and talk, crammed aboard dank ships moored in St. John's harbor, huddled before blazing fires on its beaches, or crowded into smoky makeshift taverns. When the ships sailed home in autumn, the tales went with them, repeated in the tiniest coastal villages by those pleased to have cheated the sea and death one more time. Eager to fish, talk, trade, and take profits, West Country mariners were almost giddy at the prospect of Europe's expanding horizons.

Most seafarers who fished the waters of Newfoundland's Grand Banks remain unknown today. Yet it is well to begin with these ordinary fisherfolk, for the European discovery of the Americas cannot be looked on simply as the voyages of a few bold explorers. Adventurers such as Christopher Columbus and John Cabot were only the most visible representatives of a much larger expansion of European peoples and culture that began in the 1450s. That expansion arose out of a series of gradual but telling changes in the fabric of European society—changes reflected in the lives of ordinary seafarers as much as in the careers of explorers decked out in silks.

Some of these changes were technological, arising out of advances in the arts of navigating and shipbuilding and the use of gunpowder. Some were economic, involving the development of trade networks such as those linking Bristol with ports in Iceland and Spain. Some were demographic,

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bringing about a rise in Europe's population after a devastating century of plague. Other changes were religious, adding a dimension of devout belief to the political rivalries that fueled discoveries in the Americas. Yet others were political, making it possible for kingdoms to centralize and extend their influence across the ocean. Portugal, Spain, France, and England—all possessing coasts along the Atlantic—led the way in exploration, spurred on by Italian “admirals” such as Caboto and Colombo, Spanish conquistadores— “conquerors”—such as Hernán Cortés and Francisco Pizarro, and English sea dogs such as Humphrey Gilbert and Walter Raleigh. Ordinary folk rode these currents, too. The great and the small alike were propelled by forces that were remolding the face of Europe—and were beginning to remold the face of the world.

demographic factors relating to the characteristics of populations. Demography is the study of populations, looking at such aspects as size, growth, density, and age distribution.

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EURASIA AND AFRICA IN THE FIFTEENTH CENTURY In 1450, however, the western European kingdoms that would one day dominate much of the world still sat at the fringe of an international economy that revolved around China. By a variety of measures Ming China was the richest, most powerful, and most advanced society in the world. All Eurasia sought Chinese goods, especially spices, ceramics, and silks, and Chinese ships sped these goods to faraway ports. Seven times between 1405 and 1433 China's “treasure fleet”—300 ships manned by 28,000 sailors and commanded by Zheng He (pronounced “Jung Huh”)—unfurled its red silk sails off the south China coast and traveled as far as the kingdoms of eastern Africa. The treasure fleet's largest craft were nine– masted junks measuring 400 feet long, sporting multiple decks and luxury cabins. By comparison, Columbus's largest ship in 1492 was a mere 85 feet long, and the crew aboard all three of his ships totaled just 90 men. Political turbulence led Chinese leaders to ground their trading fleet and end the long– distance voyages. But Chinese luxuries, most transported overland, continued to be Eurasia's most sought–after commodities.

The next mightiest powers in the Old World were not European kingdoms but rather huge Islamic empires, especially the Ottomans in the eastern Mediterranean. The Ottomans rose to prominence during the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, gaining control of critical trade routes and centers of commerce between Asia and Europe. Their greatest triumph came in 1453, when the sultan Mehmet II conquered Constantinople (now Istanbul), the ancient and supposedly impregnable Christian city that straddled Europe and Asia. Mehmet's stunning victory sounded alarms throughout Europe.

Europe's Place in the World

Europe's Place in the World Europe's rulers had good reason for alarm. Distant from Asia's profitable trade and threatened by the Ottomans' military might, most of the continent remained fractious and vulnerable. During the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries 90 percent of Europe's people, widely dispersed in small villages, made their living from the land. But warfare, poor transportation, and low grain yields all created food shortages, and undernourishment produced a population prone to disease. Under these circumstances life was, to paraphrase the English philosopher Thomas Hobbes, nasty, brutish, and usually short. One–quarter of all children died in the first year of life. People who reached the age of 40 counted themselves fortunate.

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   The spread of bubonic plague left Europeans dismayed and desperate. While a priest reads prayers over the bodies being buried in a common grave, a man suddenly taken by the plague writhes in agony. In the background, a cart collects more corpses. And in heaven (upper left) St. Sebastian, a Christian martyr, intercedes with God to end the suffering. Page 20

It was also a world of sharp inequalities, where nobles and aristocrats enjoyed several hundred times the income of peasants or craftworkers. It was a world with no strong, centralized political authority, where kings were weak and warrior lords held sway over small towns and tiny fiefdoms. It was a world of violence and sudden death, where homicide, robbery, and rape occurred with brutal frequency. It was a world where security and order of any kind seemed so fragile that most people clung to tradition, and more than a few used witchcraft in an attempt to master the chaotic and unpredictable world around them.

But Europe was changing, in part because of a great calamity. Between the late 1340s and the early 1350s bubonic plague—known as the Black Death—swept away one–quarter of Europe's population. Some urban areas lost 70 percent of their people to the disease. The Black Death disrupted both agriculture and commerce, and provoked a spiritual crisis that resulted in violent, unsanctioned religious movements, scapegoating of marginal groups, even massacres of Jews. Although Europeans seem to have met recurrent outbreaks of the disease with less panic, the sickness continued to disrupt social and economic life.

Yet the sudden drop in population relieved pressure on scarce resources. Survivors of the Black Death found that the relative scarcity of workers and consumers made for higher wages, lower prices, and more land. These changes promoted an overall expansion of trade. In earlier centuries Italian merchants had begun encouraging commerce across Europe and tapping into trade from Africa, the Middle East, and, when able, from Asia. By the late fifteenth century Europe's merchants and bankers had devised more

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efficient ways of transferring the money generated from manufacturing and trade, and established credit in order to support commerce across longer distances. Wealth flowed into the coffers of traders, financiers, and landlords, creating a pool of capital that investors could plow into new technologies, trading ventures, and, eventually, colonial enterprises.

The direction of Europe's political development also laid the groundwork for overseas colonization. After 1450 strong monarchs in Europe steadily enlarged their power at the expense of warrior lords. Henry VII, the founder of England's Tudor dynasty, Francis I of France, and Ferdinand and Isabella of Spain began the trend, forging modern nation–states by extending their political control over more territory, people, and resources. Such larger, more centrally organized states were able to marshal the resources necessary to support colonial outposts and to sustain the professional armies and navies capable of creating and protecting overseas empires.

Africa and the Portuguese Wave

Africa and the Portuguese Wave European expansion began with Africa. For centuries African spices, ivory, and gold had entered the Eurasian market either through ports on the Indian Ocean or through the Sahara Desert and into the Mediterranean Sea. Powerful African kingdoms controlled the routes through which these prized commodities moved, while Islamic expansion in the fifteenth century made competition all the more intense. European merchants yearned to access West African markets directly, by ship. But navigational and shipbuilding technology was not yet up to the challenge of the Atlantic's prevailing currents, which sped ships south along Africa's coast but made the return voyage virtually impossible.

Portugal was the first to solve this problem and tap directly into West African markets, thanks in large part to Prince Henry “the Navigator,” as he became known. An ardent Catholic and a man who dreamed of turning back Islam's rising tide, Henry understood that direct commerce with West Africa would allow his kingdom to circumvent the costly trans–Sahara trade. To forward his vision Henry funded exploratory voyages, established a maritime school, and challenged sailors and engineers to conquer the problem of the current. The Portuguese responded by developing the caravel, a lighter, more maneuverable ship that could sail better against contrary winds and in rough seas. More seaworthy than the lumbering galleys of the Middle Ages, caravels combined longer, narrower hulls—a shape built for speed—with triangular lateen sails, which allowed for more flexible steering. The caravel allowed the Portuguese to regularly do what few Europeans had ever done: sail down Africa's west coast and return home. Other advances, including a sturdier version of the Islamic world's astrolabe, enabled Portugal's navigators to calculate their position at sea with unprecedented accuracy.

As the Portuguese pressed southward along the Atlantic rim of sub–Saharan Africa, they began to meet peoples who had never encountered Europeans or even possessed any knowledge of other continents. On catching their first sight of a Portuguese expedition in 1455, villagers on the Senegal River marveled at the strangers' clothing and their white skin. As an Italian member of that expedition recounted, some Africans “rubbed me with their spittle to discover whether my whiteness was dye or flesh.”

But the Portuguese were wrong to mistake such acts of innocence for economic or political naïveté. Formidable African chiefdoms and states were eager to trade with Europeans but intent on protecting already established commercial networks. Portugal could not simply take what it wanted from West Africa. With few exceptions, it proved impossible for European powers to colonize territory in West Africa before the nineteenth century, because the region's people were too many and too organized. Furthermore, malaria would kill between one–fourth and one–half of all Portuguese unwise enough to try to stay. To succeed, the newcomers had to seek partners. As the Portuguese built forts and trading houses on the coast, they gave tribute or taxes to local powers in return for trading privileges. The Portuguese

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offered textiles, especially, but also raw and worked metal goods, currency (in the form of cowry shells), and beads. In return Africans gave up prized commodities such as gold, ivory, and malaguetta pepper. Portuguese traders also expressed interest in another commodity, one that would reshape the wider Atlantic world: slaves.

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Sugar and the Origins of the Atlantic Slave Trade

Sugar and the Origins of the Atlantic Slave Trade Unfree labor has existed in nearly all human societies. Although the norms, characteristics, and economic importance of slavery have varied widely over time and place, men, women, and children have been held as slaves from before recorded history to the present. (U.S. and international organizations estimate that today there are as many as 27 million people held in some form of labor bondage and that nearly 1 million unfree people are sold across international borders every year.)

By the Middle Ages, elites in Europe had largely abandoned the slave culture of the Roman Empire and relied instead on serfs or peasants for labor. Slaves became more important as status symbols than as workers, and most were young white women. Indeed, the word slave comes originally from “Slav”; Slavic girls and women from the Balkans and the coasts of the Black Sea were frequent targets of slave raids.

But European slavery began to change again following the Crusades. In 1099 Christian forces captured Jerusalem from the Seljuk Turks and discovered sugar plantations that the Turks had cultivated in the Holy Land. Crusaders recognized sugar's economic potential. But because sugar required intense work during planting and close tending during the growing season, they found it a difficult commodity to produce. On maturity the crop had to be harvested and processed 24 hours a day to avoid being spoiled. In short, sugar demanded cheap, pliable labor, and the newly arrived crusaders relied in part on slaves.

When Islamic forces under the famed leader Saladin reconquered Jerusalem in the twelfth century, European investors established new plantations on eastern Mediterranean islands. In addition to being labor intensive, though, sugar was a crop that quickly exhausted soils and forced planters to move operations regularly. Plantations spread to new islands, and by the early 1400s sugar was even being grown in Portugal. As production expanded, planters had to work harder than ever to obtain the necessary labor because of the Black Death and because Turkish conquests restricted European access to the traditional slaving grounds of the eastern Mediterranean and the Balkans.

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   The rich, volcanic soils of the Azores, the Canaries, and Madeira proved ideal for growing sugar. These islands in the eastern Atlantic were a stepping-stone to later plantations in the Americas, such as the one pictured in this engraving by Theodore de Bry from 1596.

Thus by the fifteenth century the Portuguese were already producing sugar on slave–run plantations, but they were seeking new cropland and new sources of slaves. Once again Prince Henry's vision enhanced his kingdom's economic interests. While Portugal's merchants were establishing trading posts along the west coast of Africa, Iberian mariners were discovering or rediscovering islands in the eastern Atlantic: the Canaries, Madeira, and the Azores, islands with rich, volcanic soils ideally suited to sugarcane. By the late 1400s sugar plantations were booming on the Atlantic islands, staffed by West African slaves. By 1550 people of African descent accounted for 10 percent of the population of Lisbon, Portugal's capital city.

Now convinced that they could reach coveted Asian markets by sea, ambitious Portuguese mariners sailed their caravels farther and farther south. In 1488 Bartolomeu Dias rounded the Cape of Good Hope on the southern tip of Africa, sailing far enough up that continent's eastern coast to claim discovery of a sea route to India. Ten years later Vasco da Gama reached India itself, and Portugual's interests ultimately extended to Indochina and China.

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Portuguese geographers had long felt certain that travel around Africa was the shortest route to the Orient, but an Italian sailor disagreed. Cristoforo Colombo had spent a decade gaining experience from Portugal's master mariners. He also threw himself into research, devouring Lisbon's books on geography and cartography. Columbus (the Latinized version of his name) became convinced that the fastest route to China lay west, across the uncharted Atlantic Ocean. He appealed to Portugal's king to support an exploratory voyage, but royal geographers scoffed at the idea. They agreed that the world was round but insisted (correctly, as it turns out) that the globe was far larger than Columbus had calculated, making any westward route impractical. Almost a decade of rejection had grayed Columbus's red hair, but— undaunted—he packed up in 1485 and took his audacious idea to Spain.

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REVIEW

Why did Europeans begin to develop commercial networks in the Atlantic, and how did the Portuguese operate in Africa?

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SPAIN IN THE AMERICAS He arrived a few years too early. Spain's monarchs, Ferdinand and Isabella, rejected Columbus's offer because they were engaged in a campaign to drive the Muslims out of their last stronghold on the Iberian Peninsula, the Moorish kingdom of Granada. For centuries Arab rulers from Africa had controlled part of present–day Spain and Portugal. But in 1492 Ferdinand and Isabella finally completed what was known as the Reconquista, their military reconquest of this territory. Flush with victory, the pair listened to Columbus argue that a westward route to Asia would allow Spain to compete with Portugal and generate enough revenue to continue the reconquest, even into the Holy Land itself. Ignoring the advice of their geographers, the monarchs agreed to his proposal.

Reconquista military reconquest of the Iberian Peninsula from Islamic Moors of Africa by European Christian rulers.

Columbus's first voyage across the Atlantic could only have confirmed his conviction that he was destiny's darling. His three ships, no bigger than fishing vessels that sailed to Newfoundland, plied their course over placid seas, south from Seville to the Canary Islands and then due west. On October 11, a little more than two months after leaving Spain, branches, leaves, and flowers floated by their hulls, signals that land lay near. Just after midnight a sailor spied cliffs shining white in the moonlight. On the morning of October 12, the Niña, the Pinta, and the Santa Maria set anchor in a shallow sapphire bay, and their crews knelt on the white coral beach. Columbus christened the place San Salvador (Holy Savior).

The Spanish Beachhead in the Caribbean

The Spanish Beachhead in the Caribbean Like many men of destiny, Columbus mistook his true destination. At first he confused his actual location, the Bahamas, with an island near Japan. He coasted along Cuba and Hispaniola (today's Haiti and Dominican Republic), expecting at any moment to catch sight of gold–roofed Japanese temples or fleets of Chinese junks. He encountered instead a gentle, generous people who knew nothing of the Great Khan but who welcomed the newcomers profusely. Columbus's journals note that they wore little clothing, but they did wear jewelry—tiny pendants of gold suspended from the nose. He dubbed the Taino people “Indians”—inhabitants of the Indies.

It would take some years before other mariners and geographers understood clearly that these newfound islands and the landmasses beyond them lay between Europe and Asia. One of the earliest geographers to do so was the Florentine Amerigo Vespucci, who first described Columbus's Indies as Mundus Novus, a “New World.” Rather than dub the new lands “Columbia,” a German mapmaker called them “America” in Vespucci's honor. The German's maps proved wildly successful, and the name stuck.

Unlike the kingdoms of West Africa, the Taino chiefdoms lacked the military power to resist European aggression. And Europeans decided that the societies they encountered were better suited to be ruled than partnered with. Moreover, while the newfound islands eventually presented their own threats to European health, they seemed a good deal more inviting than the deadly coast of West Africa. Hints of gold, a seemingly weak and docile population, and a relatively healthy climate all ensured that Columbus's second voyage would be one of colonization rather than commerce. During the 1490s and early 1500s Spanish colonizers imposed a brutal regime on the Tainos, slaughtering native leaders and forcing survivors to toil in mines and fields.

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Only a few Spaniards spoke out against the exploitation. Among them was Bartolomé de las Casas, a man who spent several years in the Caribbean, participating in conquests and profiting from native labor. Eventually Las Casas renounced his conduct and, as a Dominican friar, became a tireless foe of Spanish cruelties toward Indians. He railed against the “unjust, cruel, and tyrannical” war waged to force the native peoples into “the hardest, harshest, and most heinous bondage to which men or beasts might ever be bound into.” Las Casas's writings, translated throughout Europe and illustrated with gruesome drawings, helped give rise to the “Black Legend” of Spanish atrocities in the Americas.

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MAP 2.1: PRINCIPAL ROUTES OF EUROPEAN EXPLORATIONPRINCIPAL ROUTES OF EUROPEAN EXPLORATION

Click here to view the interactive version of this map

The warnings had some effect, but not for decades. Within a generation of Columbus's landfall, the Taino

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population had nearly collapsed from war, overwork, malnutrition, despair, and strange new Eurasian diseases. Ambitious Spaniards began scouring the Caribbean basin, discovering new lands and searching for new populations of Indians to subjugate or enslave in place of the vanishing Tainos. Soon the Bahamas were depopulated by Spanish slavers, and conquests had done to present–day Cuba, Jamaica, and Puerto Rico what they first had done to Hispaniola.

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Conquest of the Aztecs

Conquest of the Aztecs Would–be conquistadors turned their eyes to the mainland. In 1519 an expedition led by the impetuous Hernán Cortés made contact with native peoples on Mexico's gulf coast. They spoke of an oppressive imperial people who occupied a fantastic city to the west. These were the Aztecs.

Aztecs had much in common with Spaniards. Both societies were predominantly rural, with most inhabitants living in small villages and engaging in agriculture. In both places merchants and specialized craftworkers clustered in cities, organized themselves into guilds, and clamored for protection from the government. Aztec noble and priestly classes, like those in Europe, took the lead in politics and religion, demanding tribute from the common people. Finally, both societies were robustly expansionist, bent on bringing new lands and peoples under their control.

Yet critical differences between these two peoples shaped the outcome of their meeting. The Aztecs lacked the knowledge of ocean navigation, metal tools and weaponry, and firearms. Equally important, the relatively young Aztec Empire had not yet established total control over central Mexico. Formidable peoples remained outside Aztec domination, and conquered city–states within the empire bitterly resented Aztec rule. Cortés exploited that weakness. Massing an army of disgruntled native warriors, he and his men marched inland to the mighty Aztec capital, Tenochtitlán, home to more people (roughly a quarter million) than any city then existing in Europe. When the emperor Moctezuma's ambassadors met Cortés on the road and attempted to appease him with gold ornaments and other gifts, an Indian witness noted that “the Spaniards … picked up the gold and fingered it like monkeys… . Their bodies swelled with greed.” The newcomers were welcomed into the city as honored guests but soon seized Moctezuma and took him captive. For months Cortés ruled the empire indirectly, but the Aztecs drove the Spanish out after Moctezuma's death.

In the midst of this victory the city encountered another foe—smallpox. Geographically isolated from Eurasia and its complex disease environment, the Aztecs and all other native peoples in the Americas lacked the acquired immunity that gave Europeans a degree of protection against Old World pathogens. The resulting virgin soil epidemics—so called because the victims had no previous exposure—took a nightmarish toll. Smallpox claimed millions in central Mexico between 1520 and 1521. This, too, presented Cortés with opportunities. Supported by a massive Indian force, he put Tenochtitlán to siege, killing tens of thousands before the ragged, starving survivors surrendered in August of 1521. The feared Aztec Empire lay in ruins. Conquistadors fanned out from central Mexico, overwhelming new populations and eventually learning of another mighty kingdom to the South. Again relying on political faction, disease, technological advantages, and luck, by 1532 Spaniards under Francisco Pizzaro and his brothers had conquered the Inca Empire in South America, which in certain regards outshone even the Aztecs.

virgin soil epidemic epidemic in which the populations at risk have had no previous contact with the diseases that strike them and are therefore immunologically almost defenseless.

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The Columbian Exchange

The Columbian Exchange Virgin soil epidemics, which contributed to the collapse of many Indian populations, were only one aspect of a complex web of interactions between the flora and fauna of the Americas on the one hand and those of Eurasia and Africa on the other. Just as germs migrated along with humans, so did plants and animals. These transfers, begun in the decades after Columbus first landed in the Caribbean, are known by historians as the Columbian exchange, and they had far–reaching effects on both sides of the Atlantic. Europeans brought a host of American crops home with them, as seen in Chapter 1 (page 8). They also most likely brought syphilis, an American disease that broke out across Europe in more virulent form than ever before. Europeans brought to the Americas the horses and large dogs that intimidated the Aztecs; they brought oranges, lemons, figs, and bananas from Africa and the Canary Islands. Escaped hogs multiplied so rapidly that they overran some Caribbean islands, as did European rats.

Columbian exchange transition of people, plants, insects, and microbes between the two hemispheres, initiated when Columbus reached the Americas in 1492.

The Columbian exchange was not a short–lived event. In a host of different ways it reshaped the globe over the next 500 years as travel, exploration, and colonization brought cultures ever closer. Instead of smallpox, today bird flu from Asia or the West Nile virus threatens populations worldwide. But the exchanges of the sixteenth century were often more extreme, unpredictable, and far–reaching, because of the previous isolation of the two hemispheres.

Page 25 Dueling DOCUMENTS HOW DID SPANIARDS AND AZTECS REMEMBER FIRST CONTACT?

The first encounter between the Spaniards under Hernan Cortés and ambassadors of the emperor Moctezuma in 1519 represents a fateful turning point in history. While we have no full contemporary account of that meeting, two remarkable sources present Spanish and Mexican memories of the event written years later. The first selection below was written in the 1560s by one of Cortés's lieutenants, the conquistador Bemal Díaz. The second section comes from a work compiled in the 1540s by the missionary Bernardino de Sahagún, in which indigenous informants recalled Aztec culture, religion, society, and history up to and through the conquest.

DOCUMENT 1 Bernal Díaz

Seeing the big ship with the standards flying they knew that it was there that they must go to speak with the captain; so they went direct to the flagship and going on board asked who was the Tatuan [Tlatoan] which in their language means the chief. Doña Marina who understood the language well, pointed him out. Then the Indians paid many marks of respect to Cortés, according to their usage, and bade him welcome, and said that their lord, a servant of the great Montezuma, had sent them to ask what kind of men we were and of what we were in search… . [Cortés] told them that we came to see them and to trade with them and that our arrival in their country should cause them no uneasiness but be looked on by them as fortunate… .

[Several days later, one of Montezuma's emissaries] brought with him some clever painters such as they had in Mexico and ordered them to make pictures true to nature of the face and body of Cortés and all his captains, and of the soldiers, ships, sails, and horses, and of Doña Marina and Aguilar, even of the two greyhounds, and the cannon and cannon balls, and all of the army we had brought with us, and he carried

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the pictures to his master. Cortés ordered our gunners to load the lombards with a great charge of powder so that they should make a great noise when they were fired off… . [The emissary] went with all haste and narrated everything to his prince, and showed him the pictures which had been painted… .

Source: Bernal Dlaz, The True History of the Conquest of New Spain, excerpted in Stuart B. Schwartz, ed., Victors and Vanquished: Spanish and Views of the Conquest of Mexico (2000), pp. 85–90. DOCUMENT 2 Fray Bernardino de Sahagún

When they had gotten up into [Cortes's] boat, each of them made the earth-eating gesture before the Captain. Then they addressed him, saying, “May the god attend; his agent Moteucçoma who is in charge in Mexico for him addresses him and says, ‘The god is doubly welcome.'”

Then they dressed up the Captain. They put on him the turquoise serpent mask attached to the quetzal- feather head fan, to which were fixed, from which hung the green-stone serpent earplugs. And they put the sleeveless jacket on him, and around his neck they put the plaited green-stone neck-band with the golden disk in the middle. On his lower back they tied the back mirror, and also they tied behind him the cloak called a tzitzilli. And on his legs they placed the green-stone bands with the golden bells. And they gave him, placing it on his arm, the shield with gold and shells crossing, on whose edge were spread quetzal feathers, with a quetzal banner. And they laid the obsidian sandals before him… .

Then the Captain ordered that they be tied up: they put irons on their feet and necks. When this had been done they shot off the cannon. And at this point the messengers truly fainted and swooned; one after another they swayed and fell, losing consciousness… . Then [Cortés] let them go.

[Upon returning to Tenochtitlán and reporting to Moteucçoma, he replied] “I will not hear it here. I will hear it at the Coacalco; let them go there.” And he gave orders, saying, “Let some captives be covered in chalk [for sacrifice].”

Then the messengers went to the Coacalco, and so did Moteucçoma. There upon the captives died in their presence; they cut open their chests and sprinkled their blood on the messengers. (The reason they did it was that they had gone to very dangerous places and had seen, gazed on the countenances of, and spoken to the gods.) …

When this was done, they talked to Moteucçoma, telling him what they had beheld, and they showed him what [the Spaniards'] food was like.

And when he heard what the messengers reported, he was greatly afraid and taken aback, and he was amazed at their food. It especially made him faint when he heard how the guns went off at [the Spaniards'] command, sounding like thunder, causing people to actually swoon, blocking the ears. And when it went off, something like a ball came out from inside, and fire went showering and spitting out. And the smoke that came out had a very foul stench, striking one in the face. And if they shot at a hill, it seemed to crumble and come apart… . Their war gear was all iron. They clothed their bodies in iron, they put iron on their heads, their swords were iron, their bows were iron, and their shields were iron.

And the deer that carried them were as tall as the roof. And they wrapped their bodies all over; only their faces could be seen, very white… .

And their dogs were huge creatures, with their ears folded over and their jowls dragging. They had burning eyes, eyes like coals, yellow and fiery… .

When Moteucçoma heard it, he was greatly afraid; he seemed to faint away, he grew concerned and

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disturbed.

Source: Fray Bernardino de Sahagún, Florentine The Codex, excerpted in Schwartz, ed., Victors and Vanquished, pp. 91–99. THINKING CRITICALLY

How did the Aztecs and the Spaniards communicate? Why does Díaz pay so little attention to the gifts the emissaries brought cortés? Why might the painters be absent from the Nahua account? What principles of critical thinking should be kept in mind when reading such documents?

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   Both the Aztecs and the Spanish tried to understand the new in terms of the familiar. Hence an Aztec artist portrayed Cortés as an Indian with strange clothes and a stranger beard (left), whereas a European artist depicted Moctezuma in the style of a Greco-Roman warrior (right). Page 26

The Crown Steps In

The Crown Steps In Proud conquistadors did not long enjoy their mastery in the Americas. Spain's monarchs, who had just tamed an aristocracy at home, were not about to allow a colonial nobility to arise across the Atlantic. The Crown bribed the conquistadors into retirement—or was saved the expense when men such as Francisco Pizarro were assassinated by their own followers. The task of governing Spain's new colonies passed from the conquerors to a small army of officials, soldiers, lawyers, and Catholic bishops, all appointed by the Crown, reporting to the Crown, and loyal to the Crown. Headquartered in urban centers such as Mexico City (formerly Tenochtitlán), an elaborate, centralized bureaucracy administered the Spanish empire, regulating nearly every aspect of economic and social life.

Few Spaniards besides imperial officials settled in the Americas. By 1600 only about 5 percent of the

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colonial population was of Spanish descent, the other 95 percent being Indian, African, or of mixed heritage. Even by 1800 only 300,000 Spanish immigrants had come to live in the Americas. Indians often remained on the lands that they had farmed under the Aztecs and the Incas, now paying Spanish overlords their taxes and producing livestock for export. More importantly, Indians paid for the new order through their labor, sometimes as slaves but more often through an evolving administrative system channeling native workers to public and private enterprises throughout the Americas. The Spanish also established sugar plantations in the West Indies; these were worked by black slaves who by 1520 were being imported from Africa in large numbers.

Spain's colonies returned even more spectacular profits by the 1540s—the result of huge discoveries of silver in both Mexico and Peru. Silver mining developed into a large–scale capitalist enterprise requiring substantial investment. European investors and Spanish immigrants who had profited from cattle raising and sugar planting poured their capital into equipment and supplies used to mine the silver deposits more efficiently: stamp mills, water–powered crushing equipment, pumps, and mercury. Whole villages of Indians were pressed into service in the mines, joining black slaves and free European workers employed there.

By 1570 the town of Potosí, the site of a veritable mountain of silver, had become larger than any city in either Spain or its American empire, with a population of 120,000. Local farmers who supplied mining centers with food and Spanish merchants in Seville who exported European goods to Potosí profited handsomely. So, too, did the Spanish Crown, which claimed one–fifth of all extracted silver. During the sixteenth century, some 16,000 tons of the precious metal were exported from Spanish America to Europe.

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MAP 2.2: SPANISH AMERICA, CA. 1600SPANISH AMERICA, CA. 1600

By 1600 Spain was extracting large amounts of gold and silver from Mexico and South America, as well as profits from sugar plantations in the Caribbean. Each year, Spanish treasure ships ferried bullion from mines such as the one at Potosí to the Isthmus of Panama, where it was transported by land to the Caribbean coast and from there to Spain. An expedition from Acapulco sailed annually to the Philippines as well, returning with Asian spices and other trade goods.

For an English adventurer looking to capture Spanish silver, which geographic location would be the best place to pick off Spanish treasure ships?

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The Search for North America's Indian Empires

The Search for North America's Indian Empires Riches and glory radicalized Spanish expectations. Would–be conquistadors embarked on an urgent race to discover and topple the next Aztec or Inca Empire, a race to become the next Cortés or Pizarro. The prevailing mood was captured by the portrait of a Spanish soldier that adorns the frontispiece of his book about the West Indies. He stands with one hand on his sword and the other holding a pair of compasses on top of a globe. Beneath is inscribed the motto

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“By compasses and the sword/More and more and more and more.”

Some of the most ambitious adventurers felt certain that more lands and riches would be found in the North. The Spanish had probed the North American coast up to present–day South Carolina, looking for slaves. But Juan Ponce de León, the conquerer of Puerto Rico, launched the first official expedition to the mainland, which he named Florida in 1513. Everywhere he met armed resistance and was repulsed, because the inhabitants had come to despise Spaniards as slave raiders. Eight years later, he returned, only to be mortally wounded in a battle with Calusa Indians.

Still, the dreams of northern Indian empires persisted. In 1528 Pánfilo de Narváez, a red–bearded veteran from the conquest of Cuba, led a major expedition back to Florida. Ignoring advice from his second–in– command, Alvar Núñez Cabeza de Vaca, Narváez separated from his main force near Tampa Bay and led 300 men on a harrowing march in search of riches. For months Narváez plundered his way through Florida, while the men fell ill or fell victim to Indian archers, whose longbows could bury an arrow six inches into a tree. Disillusioned and desperate, 242 survivors lashed together makeshift rafts and tried to sail along the Gulf Coast to Mexico. Weeks later proud Narváez and most of his men had disappeared at sea, whereas Cabeza de Vaca and a handful of survivors washed up on islands off the Texas coast.

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Local Indian groups then turned the tables and made slaves of the Spaniards. After years as prisoners Cabeza de Vaca and three others, including an African slave named Esteban, escaped to make an extraordinary trek across Texas and northern Mexico. Somewhere in present–day Chihuahua they passed through what had been the trading hinterland of Paquime, and Cabeza de Vaca noted an enduring regional commerce in feathers and “green stones”—turquoise. Finally, in July 1536 a shocked party of Spanish slavers stumbled across the four rag–tag castaways and brought them to Mexico City.

The stories the four men told of their ordeal inspired two more massive expeditions to the north. The first, led by Hernán de Soto, scoured the Southeast's agricultural villages searching for gold and taking whatever he wanted: food, clothing, luxury goods, even young women whom he and his men “desired both as servants and for their foul uses… .” De Soto's men became the first and last Europeans to glimpse several declining Mississippian chiefdoms, echoes of Cahokia's ancient majesty. Some native communities resisted, inflicting substantial losses on the expedition. Others feigned friendship and sent de Soto to hunt gold in neighboring villages, thus ridding themselves of a great danger and directing it at enemies instead. De Soto's men never found the treasures they sought as they traveled through much of the present–day South (see Map 2.1). But the expedition's cruel and destructive foray did hasten the transformation of the southeastern chiefdoms into decentralized confederacies.

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   As Hernán de Soto traveled through North America, he brought a herd of pigs much like this razorback hog. At times the herd numbered more than 700. The animals were an efficient way of providing protein to the expedition. More than 80 percent of a carcass could be consumed, compared with only 50 percent of a cow or sheep. Hogs could be herded on the march as well, foraging for food as they went. But some anthropologists and historians believe that the hogs were also carriers of disease that migrated to humans. The diseases may have sparked the deaths of thousands of Indians, who lacked the immunity built up by Europeans over centuries of exposure to Eurasian illnesses.

Spanish ambition met a similar fate in the West. In 1539, 29–year–old Francisco Vázquez de Coronado led 300 Spaniards and 1,000 Mexican Indian warriors north into the present–day American Southwest. Coronado was emboldened by tales of cities more wondrous than Tenochtitlán, but his brash confidence began to fail him when instead he found only mud and straw pueblos inhabited by modest farmers. Desperate to turn his hugely expensive expedition to advantage, Coronado sent men in all directions. To the west his scouts were blocked by the vastness of the Grand Canyon. Others traveled east, forcing themselves on the Pueblo peoples of the upper Rio Grande, descendants of the Anasazi. Finally Coronado followed an Indian he dubbed the Turk out onto the Great Plains in search of a rumored kingdom called Quivira. Perhaps the Turk had in mind one of the easternmost Mississippian chiefdoms, but the frustrated conquistador became convinced he had been deceived. He had the Turk strangled somewhere in present– day Kansas and in 1542 returned to Mexico, where Crown authorities tried him for inflicting “great cruelties” on Indians.

Such North American expeditions ruined conquistadors such as Coronado and de Soto, but Spain could afford these blunders. It had taken vast wealth from the Americas, conquered the Western Hemisphere's mightiest peoples, and laid claim to the bulk of the New World. Yet for most of the sixteenth century rival European powers took little interest in the Americas. England's fishermen continued to explore the North Sea, Labrador, and Newfoundland. Portugal discovered and laid claim to Brazil. France launched expeditions along North America's eastern shoreline (Giovanni da Verrazano, 1524) and the St. Lawrence River valley (Jacques Cartier, 1534, 1535, and 1541). These efforts proved important in the long run, but for most of the century Spain could treat the Americas as its own.

Spain owed that luxury, in part, to religious upheaval in Europe. During the second decade of the sixteenth century—the same decade in which Cortés laid siege to Tenochtitlán—religious changes of enormous significance began spreading through Europe. That revolution in Christianity, known as the Protestant Reformation, occupied European attention and eventually figured as a crucial force in shaping the history of the Americas.

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REVIEW

How did the Spanish respond to the discovery of a “new world”?