Transcript
The Oath
June 12, 1494
On June 12, 1494, off the coast of Cuba, a notary told Columbus's crews the penalty for any ship's boy who broke his oath:
Pérez de Luna · our translation of his record …a hundred lashes, and they would cut out his tongue.
Every man had to swear that Cuba was part of the mainland of Asia, and never say otherwise.
Columbus needed Cuba to be Asia, because he had promised Spain's monarchs a short western route to the spices and gold of the East. He had staked his fortune and his reputation on that promise, and Spain wanted the route to Asia before Portugal found one. Portugal was far ahead, because its ships had been working their way down the coast of Africa for more than half a century.
Christians and Spices
1434–1480s
Pepper grew in India, and on its way to Venice it passed through the hands of many traders, each adding to the price.
Portugal, on the Atlantic edge of Europe, wanted a sea route to Asia that went around all of them.
For decades, Prince Henry of Portugal, later called Henry the Navigator, paid for voyages down the Atlantic coast of Africa.
Prince Henry · reported later by Zurara You cannot find a peril so great that the hope of reward will not be greater.
Henry wanted trade, allies against the Muslim rulers of North Africa, and converts to Christianity. To get home against the wind, his captains sailed their small, fast caravels far out into the Atlantic to catch winds blowing toward Portugal. Pilots steered by the compass, a Chinese invention that reached Europe through Arab merchants, and found their latitude with an astrolabe.
In 1444, Portuguese raiders brought African captives ashore at Lagos, a port in southern Portugal, and Henry took his share.
Henry's chronicler, Gomes Eanes de Zurara, wrote to praise the prince, yet he recorded the families' grief:
Zurara · his words, written later …then was it needful to part fathers from sons, husbands from wives, brothers from brothers.
On Atlantic islands such as Madeira and, later, São Tomé, the Portuguese put enslaved Africans to work growing sugar. Portuguese planters grew rich on that sugar, and Europeans later carried the same plantation system to the Americas.
By the 1480s, printers across Europe were selling maps and travel books. A sailor from Genoa named Christopher Columbus read them closely, and in Lisbon he asked Portugal's king to pay for a voyage west to Asia.
The Short World
1492
Portugal's king turned him down, and in Castile, one of the Spanish kingdoms, a panel of scholars doubted him too. They knew the Earth was round, but they said the Indies, as Europeans called Asia, lay much too far west to reach.
Columbus never accepted their objection, and years later, in a letter of 1498, he was still making the same case:
Christopher Columbus Aristotle says that the world is small…
Christopher Columbus …and that it is easy to pass from Spain to the Indies.
In January 1492, Spain's monarchs, Ferdinand and Isabella, conquered Granada, the last Muslim kingdom in Spain. That April, at their army camp outside the city, they agreed to back Columbus's voyage. They hoped for Asia's riches, an edge over Portugal, and converts to the Catholic faith.
Columbus · journal prologue, Markham …they made great concessions to me, and ennobled me…
He would become Admiral of the Ocean Sea and keep a tenth of any riches he found.
Measure the ocean Columbus expected, then measure the real one. Asia was more than four times as far as he claimed, and two continents that Europeans did not know about were in the way.
Columbus sailed from Spain on August 3, 1492, with three small ships and about ninety men. From the Canary Islands he sailed west for five weeks without sight of land, and when his crews complained, he would not turn back.
In the Way
October 1492 – February 1493
On October 12, 1492, Columbus went ashore on Guanahaní, an island in the Bahamas, and claimed it for Spain. The island was home to the Lucayans, a Taíno people, and they watched the strangers row ashore.
Christopher Columbus I… will take hence… six natives for your Highnesses, that they may learn to speak.
He took several Lucayans captive, so that they would learn Spanish and become his guides and interpreters.
Christopher Columbus …with fifty men they can all be subjugated and made to do what is required of them.
For ten weeks he sailed from island to island, past Cuba to Hispaniola, hunting for gold and for China's emperor.
On Christmas Day 1492, Columbus's flagship ran aground off Hispaniola, the island now shared by Haiti and the Dominican Republic. Guacanagarí, the Taíno ruler of that coast, sent canoes, and his people unloaded the wreck and guarded the cargo. Other Taíno traders offered pieces of gold for little brass hawk's bells, and Columbus wanted more gold.
Through signs, Guacanagarí told Columbus about raiders from other islands, and the admiral fired a small cannon and promised that Spain would destroy them. Guacanagarí had rivals of his own, and well-armed strangers could make him stronger.
Columbus's men built a fort from the wreck's timbers, and he named it La Navidad and left part of the crew to search for gold. It was the first Spanish settlement in the Americas.
In February 1493, on the way home, Columbus wrote to Luis de Santángel, a royal official who had helped pay for the voyage.
Columbus · letter to Santángel, 1493 …they are guileless, and so liberal of all they have that no one would believe it who had not seen it…
In the same letter, he promised the monarchs gold, spices and cotton, and one more cargo:
Christopher Columbus …slaves, as many of these idolators as their Highnesses shall command to be shipped.
A Line Down the Atlantic
1493–1498
Storms forced Columbus into Lisbon on the way home, and Portugal's King João II claimed the new islands for Portugal. Spain asked the pope, head of the Catholic Church, to back its claim, and in 1493 he drew a line down the Atlantic. João wanted more ocean, so in 1494 the two kingdoms moved the line farther west in the Treaty of Tordesillas.
Spain claimed the lands west of the line and Portugal those to the east, which later gave Portugal its claim to Brazil. Neither crown asked the millions of people who already lived on those lands.
Columbus had already sailed again before the treaty, in September 1493, with seventeen ships, more than a thousand men, and horses. In the Canary Islands, the fleet loaded calves, goats, sheep, pigs, chickens and seeds. This time the Spanish came to stay, and their ships began what historians call the Columbian Exchange.
When the fleet reached Hispaniola that November, it found La Navidad burned and every man left there dead.
The colonists brought their horses ashore on Hispaniola, the first horses in the Americas in more than ten thousand years. Their pigs and cattle multiplied fast, and the sugar cane they planted had taken root by January 1494.
In May 1498, Vasco da Gama sailed around Africa to Calicut, in India, and sent a convict ashore, where two North African merchants met him.
A merchant from Tunis · journal-reported speech May the Devil take thee! What brought you hither?
A Portuguese convict sent ashore · reported answer We came in search of Christians and of spices.
Portugal now had its sea road to India, while Columbus insisted until his death in 1506 that he had reached Asia.
Enemies of the Mexica
1519
In 1519, about five hundred Spanish soldiers led by Hernán Cortés landed on the Gulf coast of Mexico. Inland, the Mexica, often called the Aztecs, ruled an empire that took tribute from hundreds of conquered towns.
After a battle at Tabasco, on the coast, local Maya lords gave Cortés twenty women. One of them, Malintzin, had been given away as a child, so she spoke both Nahuatl, the Mexica language, and Maya. A shipwrecked Spaniard who knew Maya put her words into Spanish, so Cortés could now talk with the Mexica.
In August, Cortés marched inland toward the Mexica capital, Tenochtitlan, an island city whose great market he later described to his king:
Cortés · Second Letter to Charles V, 1520 There is one square, twice as large as that of Salamanca, all surrounded by arcades, where there are daily more than sixty thousand souls, buying and selling…
In September, Cortés reached Tlaxcala, an independent state that the Mexica had fought for decades without conquering. Tlaxcala's army fought the Spanish at first, and then its leaders chose to ally with them against their old enemy.
In October, at Cholula, a city allied with the Mexica, Spanish and Tlaxcalan troops killed thousands of people and sacked the city. Cortés justified the killing by claiming that Cholula's leaders had planned an ambush.
Bernal Díaz, one of Cortés's soldiers, later remembered the first sight of the island city:
Bernal Díaz · his words, written decades later And some of our soldiers even asked whether the things that we saw were not a dream?
On November 8, 1519, Moctezuma, the Mexica ruler, came out along a causeway to meet Cortés, with Malintzin between them.
When Cortés stepped forward to embrace Moctezuma, the ruler's attendants stopped him, and Malintzin translated Moctezuma's welcome. In a letter of 1520 to Charles V, Spain's king and Holy Roman Emperor, Cortés described that welcome as a surrender.
The Fall of Tenochtitlan
1519–1521; later population estimates
Within a week of the meeting, in November 1519, Cortés took Moctezuma hostage in his own city and tried to rule through him.
In May 1520, Spanish soldiers massacred Mexica nobles at a festival, and the city rose against them. Moctezuma died while still their prisoner, and at the end of June the Mexica drove the Spanish out across the causeways.
The survivors limped back to Tlaxcala, where a young war leader, Xicotencatl, urged the council to make peace with the Mexica instead. Hear each side's argument, and what it meant for the wounded Spanish waiting at the door. The council kept the alliance, choosing to destroy the Mexica, Tlaxcala's old enemy, with Spanish help.
That autumn, smallpox swept through central Mexico, and because the disease had never reached the Americas before, no one there was immune.
Nahua authors of the Florentine Codex, Book 12 They could not stir, move from their place, or turn from one side to the other.
Whole families fell sick at once, including Moctezuma's successor, Cuitláhuac, and many starved because no one was well enough to cook.
In May 1521, Cortés besieged the island city with thirteen small warships, built in Tlaxcala, and tens of thousands of Native allies. After nearly three months, in August 1521, Tenochtitlan fell to Spanish weapons, Native armies, hunger and smallpox together.
After the surrender, Cortés demanded the gold his men had lost in their retreat, and when the lords brought some, Malintzin spoke for him:
Malintzin Our captain says it is not all here.
By the 1590s, central Mexico had lost most of its Native people, and historians' estimates of the loss range from about 65 to 95 percent. Disease did most of the killing, and war, hunger and forced labor made each epidemic worse. With so many dead, the survivors had far less strength to resist Spanish rule.
Under a system called encomienda, the Spanish crown granted colonists the tribute and labor of whole Native towns.
As Native workers died and sugar plantations spread, colonists turned to the system Portugal had built on its Atlantic islands. By the 1520s, Spanish ships were bringing enslaved Africans to work the sugar mills of Hispaniola.
Small World
The 1500s
In 1553, a Spanish soldier named Pedro de Cieza de León described the food that kept people alive in the Andes of South America:
Pedro Cieza de León They dry these potatoes in the sun, and keep them from one harvest to another.
After 1492, plants, animals and germs crossed the ocean in both directions. Sort them by the direction each one crossed.
Potatoes and maize fed more people per acre than wheat, and farmers from Ireland to West Africa to China took them up. Over the next two centuries, those American crops fed growing populations across Europe, Africa and Asia.
Horses went the other way and spread north through Native trade, reaching the Great Plains in the 1600s. Plains peoples who had followed the bison on foot, with dogs hauling their gear, became hunters on horseback.
In 1545, after Francisco Pizarro's conquest of the Inca Empire, Spaniards found a mountain of silver at Potosí, in present-day Bolivia.
Silver was worth far more in Ming China than in Europe, and from 1571 Spanish galleons carried American silver across the Pacific. At Manila, in the Philippines, it bought Chinese silk and porcelain.
In Europe, American silver paid for trade and backed loans, and merchants and bankers grew rich alongside landowning nobles. Over time, money invested in trade came to matter as much as land, a slow shift from feudalism toward capitalism.
In 1553, London merchants pooled their money, each buying shares, to send three ships to look for a northern route to China. Two ships froze in the Arctic ice and their crews died, but the investors shared the loss, and the third opened a trade with Russia.
England had already sent John Cabot west in 1497, probably to Newfoundland, and in the 1530s France sent Jacques Cartier up the St. Lawrence River.
By the 1580s, the Protestant Reformation had split Western Christianity, and Protestant England saw Catholic Spain as its rival. In 1584, the writer Richard Hakluyt urged Queen Elizabeth to found English colonies in America, and his first reason was religion:
Richard Hakluyt This western discovery will be greatly for the enlargement of the gospel of Christ.
His next reasons were trade, and power over Spain:
Hakluyt · Discourse of Western Planting, 1584 (spelling modernized) This western voyage will yield unto us all the commodities of Europe, Africa, and Asia, as far as we were wont to travel.
Hakluyt · Discourse of Western Planting, 1584 (spelling modernized) This voyage will be a great bridle to the Indies of the King of Spain.
England's first colony, on Roanoke Island off North Carolina, failed within a few years.
In the early 1500s, Spanish slave raiders carried Lucayans from homes like this one to work on other islands. Elsewhere, Native nations went on making their own alliances, as Guacanagarí and Tlaxcala had, even as disease killed millions of their people. Across Spain's empire, colonists forced Native survivors and enslaved Africans to work their mines and fields.