“The Columbian Exchange” is a term used by academics to describe the sudden, extensive, and often catastrophic coming-together of the “old” and “new” worlds post-1492, with plants and animals, foods, goods, technologies and diseases making an almost overnight appearance in places where they were previously unknown.

Imagine a modern world culture without the treasures of the Americas….

Italy without spaghetti sauce.  Unthinkable.  And yet, the tomato was unheard of in Italy until long after the death of Leonardo da Vinci.

No courgettes for “French” ratatouille.  No sunflowers for van Gogh to paint in the south of France.

Imagine a world without chocolate, or a cinema without popcorn.

A world without vanilla.

No blueberry muffins, and no cranberry sauce to go with turkey.  And no turkey, for that matter…

No chilis, no peanuts, no maple syrup and no pecans.  Forget cashews and avocados.

No papayas.  No pineapple for ruining a perfectly good pizza.

No potatoes.  Neither mashed, fried, crisped, baked, roasted, nor boiled.

No kayaking or canoeing.  No hammocks in the back garden.

The list of things Europeans and Asians and Africans introduced to the Americas is even longer, but one of those things – above all others – changed the course of world history in an incalculable way.

Disease.

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Ask any person on the street, and they will probably believe that the European overthrow of indigenous American societies was inevitable, a case of technologically advanced people arriving on a primitive shore with superior military tactics and superior weaponry – including horses, steel and gunpowder.

But consider this.

When Columbus landed in the Americas sailing under the flag of the Crowns of Spain, the Iberian peninsula (583,254 km2) was home to just under 8 million people.

At the same time, Mexico (1,972,550 km2), Central America (523,780 km2), and the ten largest Caribbean islands (217,009 km2) were probably home to around 26 million souls.

Hernán Cortés should not have been able to bring down the mighty Aztec Empire, even with his advantages in terms of armor and weaponry.

In 1519, the first Spanish attempt to take the Aztec capital of Tenochtitlan in fact failed, after its inhabitants rose up in anger at the Spanish capture and house arrest of their leader Moctezuma.

 

Cortés had hoped to rule this part of Mexico by using Moctezuma as his puppet, but his men were forced to flee after the death of Moctezuma – in circumstances which remain unclear to this day.

Hernán Cortés returned in 1521 with more Spanish soldiers and thousands of reinforcements from Tlaxcala, which was the main regional rival to the Aztec Empire.

Cortés had also taken as his consort a Nahua-speaking woman called Malintzin (or “la Malinche“), who bore him a son, and acted as an indispensable advisor and interpreter.

 

The Spanish and their new Tlaxcalan allies laid siege to Tenochtitlan for months, cutting-off its supplies of food and water.

The largest city in Spain at the time was Granada, with around 70,000 inhabitants.  Tenochtitlan is estimated to have been home to between 200,000 and 400,000 people.

But something far worse than siege warfare had overtaken this magnificent city.

Disease.

The city was being eaten from within by smallpox and measles introduced during the first Spanish attempt to take it.

The “history of the victors” which was told for centuries portrayed the Aztecs as a bloodthirsty and treacherous people “deserving” of being laid low by Christian conquerors.

And during the Middle Ages and Early Modern Era, victory in battle was usually attributed to a combination of warrior heroics and the blessings of God.

Not the failure of the human immune system in the face of novel pathogens…

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The indigenous population of North America at the time of the fall of the Aztec Empire has been estimated to have been anywhere between 5 million and 12 million.

The Vikings, some of the fiercest warriors ever produced in Europe, had got their butts thoroughly kicked every time they attempted to settle or colonize anywhere along the eastern seaboard of the Americas, pre-1492.

Every attempt by the Spanish to gain a foothold in North America in places like Florida, the Carolinas, and Southern Appalachia during the 1500s saw them defeated and sent packing by indigenous fighters.

In 1620, a century after the fall of Tenochtitlan, the population of England (132,932 km2) was still less than 3 million.

But sometime between the Viking Age, the age of conquistadors, and the arrival of the “Pilgrims” in Massachusetts in 1620, something had changed.

Smallpox.  And tuberculosis.

After Columbus, regular Spanish and Portuguese exploration parties (and increasing visits by Basque fishermen) in North America had introduced diseases for which Native American immune systems had no answer.

Anywhere between 70% and 90% of the pre-contact Native American population of the southern and eastern part of the North American continent was dead by 1620.

This would be like New York City shrinking to the size of Nashville, Tennessee in just 100 years.

The “Pilgrim fathers”, a group best characterized as religious extremists, did not arrive on a wild shore with innumerable “savages” lurking in a boundless woodland wilderness.

They arrived in the deserted shopping mall of a zombie apocalypse.

Empty villages.  Fields cleared from woods but devoid of workers.  Fragmented groups of survivors eager to make peace with the strangers new on their shore.

Things did not turn out well for the Indigenous peoples who walked the path of amity and peace.

Just ask the people in dusty Oklahoma trailer parks today, whose Lenape ancestors once called the leafy environs of present-day Harvard College and Boston their home.

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The echoes of “The Columbian Exchange” continued to ripple-out in strange ways, though.

Consider the life of the notorious pirate Blackbeard.

Edward Thatch, privateer turned pirate among pirates, was born in about 1680 in Bristol, a slave port in western England, and a port second only to London at the time.

Born to an educated, middle-class family.

Blackbeard might have retired with any one of his fourteen purported wives/consorts in blissful, wealthy, “legitimate” anonymity (thanks to sweet deals with local eminences), but no.

 

Like a formulaic plot out of Hollywood, he came out of early retirement for the proverbial “one last job”.

His “one last job” was interrupted by a small problem.  Many of his crew were suffering from syphilis.

Syphilis. One of the few diseases apparently gifted back to the “Old World” from the “New” post-Columbian Exchange.

In 1718, Blackbeard blockaded the port of Charles Town (later Charleston) in South Carolina, in order to procure medical supplies for his syphilitic crew.

These medical supplies included mercury, and medical syringes for injecting mercury directly into the urethra of the penis.

 

Yes, this was the best medical advice at the time for treating one of the nastiest of STDs.

Western medicine has moved on, but Edward Thatch did not.

His blockade of Charles Town was the final straw which set him in direct opposition to the Royal Navy, and he died in hand-to-hand combat off Okracoke Island the same year.

Who decides the fate of nations?

Men, women, or microbes?