This process began, of course, with the arrival in the West Indies in 1492 of the Genoese sailor Columbus, whose journey had been prompted by the shipbuilding and general oceanic navigational skills of one European power, Portugal. Just as trade and exchange underpinned much of America’s indigenous culture, so material goods and changing patterns of consumption were the motivation for the burst of seagoing activity on the part of the Portuguese in the fifteenth century. Their interest in exploration was a by-product of a greater desire to acquire the spices, tea, silks, and, above all, gold around which international trade revolved. These goods had, up to then, been transported overland, from China to the Middle East and then to the Mediterranean, or, in the case of gold, from the Sahara through the northern tip of Africa to Europe. Control of much of this trade had rested with the Venetians and the Turks, and it was these middlemen that the Portuguese hoped to circumvent. In the process, Portugal acquired a stake in what would become one of the Atlantic world’s defining economic and social features - the slave trade. In the context of a European world fast becoming accustomed to not just enjoying cups of tea but to having sugar in them, people - slaves - became as profitable as the luxuries they produced, as Portugal’s sugar plantations on the Azores and Cape Verde Islands made clear. In short, Portugal’s success with sugar, its finding a sea route around the southern coast of Africa, its establishment of trading posts on the continent’s west coast, and, above all, the profits it accrued in all these endeavors prompted the other European powers -especially Portugal’s most proximate neighbor, Spain - to seek a share of the action. It was to this end that Isabella of Spain directed Columbus to locate a westward route to the Indies.
Columbus’s underestimation of the full extent of the globe - one not shared by many of his contemporaries - resulted in his relatively swift arrival in the Bahamas, and his belief that he had in fact reached the East Indies. It was this belief that prompted his inappropriate designation of the inhabitants he encountered as “Indians.” How the “Indians” perceived Columbus is less certain, but what is undeniable is that his arrival inaugurated a period of exploration, acquisition, and conquest of the Americas on the part of several of the European powers in which the benefits of this encounter - the so-called Columbian exchange - were almost all on the side of the new arrivals. From the moment of first contact, it was clear that the European powers regarded the Americas as theirs for the taking. Indeed, Spain and Portugal argued over Columbus’s discovery to such an extent that the Pope was forced to intervene. Via the Treaty of Tordesillas (i494), he divided their competing claims down the middle of the Atlantic. Portugal moved into Brazil while Spain set her sights on the rest of South America and the Caribbean.
At first, successful colonization seemed unlikely. Columbus’s initial settlement on Hispaniola (now occupied by Haiti and the Dominican Republic) was a failure. In 1502, the last year when Columbus himself traveled to the New World, the Spanish explorer Nicolas de Ovando managed to establish a functioning outpost for Spain on Hispaniola at the same time as Italian explorer Amerigo Vespucci realized, as a result of his coastal travels, that what Columbus had encountered was a whole new continent, far larger, and far more populous, than Europeans could ever have imagined. It was not until Ferdinand Magellan’s ships circumnavigated the globe between 1519 and 1520, however, that Europe gained a full appreciation of the world’s size and some idea of the heterogeneous nature of its populations.
In the absence of hard evidence, imagination played a very large part in European reactions to the American continent, even before any European set foot on it; imagination, but also its opposite, an almost pathological inability to comprehend, let alone envisage any compromise with the lives of others. Yet it is important neither to exaggerate the effects of the Columbian exchange nor to bring the indigenous peoples into the historical frame simply that they might play the role of victim in a European-directed drama of greed-inspired genocide. Greed there was in abundance, certainly, but this alone does not account for the catastrophic demographic effects, for America’s indigenous populations, of the first European-American encounter. Disease played a major part. The Arawak/Taino population of Hispaniola, estimated at 300,000 to i million in 1492, all but disappeared within the space of fifty years, whereas Mexico’s population fell by as much as 90 percent in the sixteenth century. Yet although diseases such as smallpox, measles, or yellow fever wreaked havoc in the Americas, there is little medical evidence to suggest a particular indigenous susceptibility to European disease strains. Smallpox alone could prove devastating even in a population that enjoyed herd immunity to it. The death rate from that disease among white Union soldiers in the Civil War (1861-65) was around 38 percent - about the same as for Aztec society in 1520.
The danger for America’s indigenous peoples in the sixteenth century was not solely the diseases carried from the Old World to the “New.” The main problem was who carried them. Violence and virus worked in tandem, and to devastating effect, in the Americas after first contact, and continued to do so well into the late nineteenth century. Both emanated from a European environment that, although not inured either to conflict or contagion, was certainly familiar with both. The sixteenth century was a violent age, made more so by the religious realignments prompted by, first, the Protestant Reformation inaugurated by Martin Luther in 1517 and, later, England’s version of it, ushered in by Henry VIII’s Act of Supremacy (1534) through which he challenged the power of the papacy and established himself as head of the Church of England. When that, coupled with the inevitable greed for gold and all the power that it could purchase, moved across the Atlantic, the results were devastating. Competition and conflict were certainly not alien to the native populations of the Americas, but it was the relatively sudden burst of competitiveness among the European powers during what has been termed the First Great Age of Discovery that overwhelmed them. Inspired and threatened by the impact of Columbus’s encounter in equal measure, the British and the French in particular sought to challenge Spanish dominance, in Europe as in the Americas.
The English were especially keen on undermining the power of Spain, and to that end sent Venetian explorer Giovanni Caboto (anglicized to John Cabot) to Newfoundland in 1497. His journey did a great deal for the European fishing industry, but England lacked the resources to follow up on Cabot’s initiative. Further south, the Spanish had kept their eyes on the greater prize that the imagined wealth of the Americas offered. Naked greed, however, found it both convenient and, in the context of the Reformation, expedient to wrap itself in the banner of religion. So the Spanish conquistadores set out from Hispaniola in a New World echo of the crusades of the eleventh and twelfth centuries. Accompanied by missionaries, they marched under the sign of the cross to convert - or crush - the peoples they encountered. The most famous Spanish explorer of this period was, of course, HernUn Cortes, whose encounter with the Aztec civilization of central Mexico in 1519 was swiftly followed by a smallpox epidemic that facilitated his defeat of the Aztecs and the destruction of their main city, TenochtitlHn. The Incas in what is now Peru fared little better against Francisco Pizzaro a few years later.