Chapter 2
In This Chapter
● Exploring the earliest civilizations
● Understanding Native American tribes
● Visiting the visits by Vikings (and others?)
● Spicing things up with pushy Europeans
● Recounting the exploits of Columbus and other explorers
For the most part, the descendants of Europeans (me included) have written the history of America. Because of that, historians have been criticized — sometimes fairly — for overemphasizing the experiences of European settlers and their descendants in the formation of the United States. Historians have also been criticized for not paying enough attention to others who came over (Native Americans included).
In the case of the Native Americans, however, tracking what they did is difficult because they left no written records of their activities. Researchers are left to make educated guesses based on what physical evidence they can find. This chapter covers some of those guesses about the first Americans.
Coming to America
Once upon a time, about 14,000 years ago, some people from what is now Siberia walked across what was then a land bridge but is now the Bering Strait, and into what is now Alaska (see Figure 2-1). They were hunters in search of ground sloths the size of hippopotamuses, armadillos the size of Volkswagens, mammoth-sized woolly mammoths, and other really big game.
They weren’t in any kind of a hurry. Their descendants kept walking south for 4,000 or 5,000 years — not stopping until they got to Patagonia, at the tip of South America. Along the way, they split up and spread out until people could be found in all parts of the continents and islands of North and South America.
Maybe.
Actually, no one knows when humans first showed up in the New World. The most widely accepted view among scholars is the one told in the preceding paragraphs: People got to the Americas by walking across a land bridge during the Ice Age, when there was more ice and the water level of the world’s oceans was lower than it is today.
Scientists formed this theory by working backwards (which you do a lot in history). Some obviously man-made artifacts were found among the bones of mammoths and other giant mammals. This finding proved that people got here during the late Ice Age or before all the animals died out. By estimating how long it might take a group of big-game hunters to walk that far from Alaska, scientists figured that no one was in the Americas until about 12,000 BC.
But recent discoveries have caused many scientists to think that Americans, in one form or another, have been around a lot longer than 14,000 years. Archaeological sites in California, Pennsylvania, Peru, and other places have yielded clues, such as footprints, cooking fires, and artifacts, that indicate humans may have been in the Americas for as long as 20,000 to even 40,000 years. If that’s the case, they may very well have come some other way, such as by water, and from some place (or places) other than Siberia. But from where is anybody’s guess.
The sites also yielded evidence that the first Americans didn’t rely exclusively on hunting giant animals but also gathered and ate plants, small game, and even shellfish. Imagine being the first guy in your tribe to be talked into putting an oyster or a lobster into your mouth.
Other puzzles are popping up to cause scientists to look hard at the Bering Strait theory. One study of human blood types, for example, found that the predominant blood type in Asia is B, and the blood types of Native Americans are almost exclusively A or O. This finding seems to indicate that at least some of the Native Americans’ ancestors came from somewhere other than Siberia.
Figure 2-1: The possible route of nomadic peoples from what is now Siberia, across the Bering Strait, into Alaska, and down into the Americas.
Exploring Early Civilizations
Although it’s unclear who got here first and when, it is known that the forerunners of Native Americans were beginning to settle down by about 1000 BC. They cultivated crops, most notably maize, a hearty variety of corn that takes less time to grow than other grains and can also grow in many different climates. Beans and squash made up the other two of the “three sisters” of early American agriculture.
Growing their own food enabled the groups to stay in one place for long periods of time. Consequently, they could make and acquire things and build settlements, which allowed them to trade with other groups. Trading resulted in groups becoming covetous of other groups’ things, which eventually led to wars over these things. Ah, civilization.
The Anasazi
One of the earliest cultures to emerge in what’s now the United States was the Anasazi. The group’s name comes from a Navajo word that has been translated to mean “ancient people” or “ancient enemies.” Although they were around the southwestern United States for hundreds of years, they flourished from about AD 1100 to 1300.
At their peak, the Anasazi built adobe-walled towns in nearly inaccessible areas, which made the communities easy to defend. The towns featured apartment houses, community courts, and buildings for religious ceremonies. The Anasazi made highly artistic pottery and tightly woven baskets. The baskets were so good that the culture is sometimes referred to as The Basket Makers.
Because of the region’s arid conditions, the Anasazi people couldn’t support a large population and were never numerous. But just why their culture died out so suddenly around the beginning of the fourteenth century is a puzzle to archaeologists. One theory is that a prolonged drought simply made life unsustainable in the region. A much more controversial theory, which has won some backing in archaeological circles, is that marauding Indians from Mexico, who had a most unpleasant habit of eating those they captured or killed in battle, plagued the Anasazi. According to the theory, these cannibals literally absorbed the Anasazi or drove them off. But just who the cannibals were has not been determined. However the Anasazi’s demise came about, their culture was developed enough to continue, in many ways unchanged, and is evident in some of the southwest tribes of today.
The Mound Builders
East of the Anasazi were groups of early Americans who became known as Mound Builders, after their habit of erecting large earthworks that served as tombs and foundations for temples and other public buildings. One group, known as the Woodland Culture, was centered in Ohio and spread east. Their mounds, which took decades to build, reached more than seven stories in height and were surrounded by earthwork walls as long as 500 yards. The largest of these mounds was near what’s now the southern Ohio town of Hopewell.
The largest Mound Builder settlement was on the Illinois side of the Mississippi River, about eight miles from what’s now St. Louis. It was called Cahokia. At its zenith, around AD 1100, Cahokia covered six square miles and may have been home to as many as 30,000 people. To put that in perspective: Cahokia was about the same size as London was in 1100, and no other city in America grew to that size until Philadelphia did, 700 years later.
The residents of Cahokia had no written language, but they had a knack for astronomy and for building. Their largest mounds, like the pyramids of cultures in Mexico, were four-sided, had a flat top, and covered as much ground as the biggest pyramids of Egypt. The Cahokia Mound Builders also had a penchant for constructing stout, wooden stockades around their city. In doing so, however, they apparently cut down most of the trees in the area, which reduced the amount of game in the region and caused silt to build up in nearby waterways. The city also may have suffered from nasty air pollution because of the wood fires that were constantly burning.
How many Native Americans?
Just as no one knows who got here first and when, no one knows just how many Native Americans there were. Estimates of the number at the time of Christopher Columbus's arrival in 1492 range from 8 million to more than 60 million; all but 1 million to 1.5 million of them lived in Mexico, the Caribbean, and Central and South America. In 1824, the newly formed
Bureau of Indian Affairs put the number of Indians in the United States at 471,000. By 1890, the first time Native Americans were included in the U.S. census, the number was 274,000. The 2000 census counted 2.5 million Americans who identify themselves as American Indians or Alaska natives.
By 1200, people were leaving Cahokia and its suburbs in large numbers. By 1400, the city was abandoned, an early victim of the ills of urban growth.
Too Many Tribes, Not Enough Native Americans
Although what’s now the United States didn’t have a whole lot of Native Americans compared to the Americas as a whole — maybe 1 million to 1.5 million or so at the time of Christopher Columbus’s arrival in 1492 — there was certainly a wide variety. Historians estimate at least 250 different tribal groups lived in America at that time. Some estimates have put the number of distinct societies as high as 1,200. They spoke at least 300 languages, none of them written, and many of the languages were as different from each other as Chinese is from English.
In the Northwest
The Northwest Indians were avid traders. Acquisitions of material goods — including slaves — resulted in higher status, and gift-giving in ceremonies called potlatches marked public displays of wealth. Tribes such as the Chinook, the Salishan, and the Makah lived in well-organized, permanent villages of 100 or more. An abundance of fish and a mild climate made many of the tribes relatively prosperous, especially because they dried fish to save for the times of year when food was less available. The Northwest cultures carved elaborate and intricate totem poles, which represented their ancestral heritage.
In the Southwest
The arid conditions made life tougher for tribes in the Southwest. Tribes such as the Apache were foragers, scrounging for everything from bison to grasshoppers, while tribes such as the Hopi scratched out an existence as farmers. In what’s now California, most of the scores of different tribes were pretty laid-back. They lived in villages and lived off the land as hunters and gatherers.
On the Great Plains
Game, especially bison, was plentiful on the plains, but few people hunted it. Hunting was pretty tough because the Plains Indians — who one day became expert horsemen — didn’t have horses until the middle of the sixteenth century. Eventually, Plains tribes like the Cheyenne and Lakota domesticated the wild offspring of animals that Spanish soldiers and explorers brought over.
In the meantime, the Plains tribes made do by stalking, ambushing, and occasionally stampeding a herd of bison over a cliff. The tribes were seminomadic; they packed up their teepees and moved on when the local food got scarce.
In the Northeast
Tribes fell into two large language groups in the Northeast: the Iroquoian and the Algonquian. Because history shows that human beings divided into two groups but living in the same area tend to not get along, guess what? The Iroquois and Algonquin tribes fought a lot. They often used tools and weapons made of copper or slate, which they traded back and forth when they weren’t fighting. The Northeast Indians lived in communal longhouses and invented a light, maneuverable canoe made out of birch bark.
A remarkable event involving the Northeast tribes occurred around 1450, when five tribes — the Cayugas, Mohawks, Oneidas, Onondagas, and Senecas — formed the Iroquois League. The purpose of this league was to form an alliance against the Algonquin and settle disputes among themselves. Some scholars believe the uniting of individual tribes for a common cause may have been looked at by the country’s founding fathers when they were putting together the federalist form of government after the American Revolution.
Native American gifts
Native American contributions to modern culture are plentiful, varied, and often overlooked. They include the names of 27 states and thousands of rivers, lakes, mountains, cities, and towns; foods such as potatoes, sweet potatoes, artichokes, squash, turkey, tomatoes, vanilla, cacao (which is used to make chocolate), and maple sugar; medicines like coca (used to make Novocain), quinine, curare, and ipecac; and other items such as hammocks, toboggans, parkas, ponchos, and snowshoes — oh yeah, and tobacco, too.
In the Southeast
The dominant tribes in the Southeast included the Cherokees, the Choctaws, the Chickasaws, the Creeks, and the Seminoles. These tribes got by through a mix of hunting, gathering, and farming. Europeans would later refer to them as the Five Civilized Tribes, in part because they developed codes of law and judicial systems, but also because they readily adopted the European customs of running plantations, slaveholding, and raising cattle. They also often intermarried with Europeans. However, despite European admiration for the Southeast tribes’ abilities to adapt, the Native Americans were still exploited, exterminated, or evacuated.
De-stereotyping the Native Americans
Both historians and Hollywood have often stereotyped pre-Colombian Native Americans as either noble people who lived in constant harmony with nature or mindless knuckleheads who sat around in the dirt when they weren’t brutally killing one another. The truth is somewhere in between. Like people everywhere else, Native Americans had both virtues and faults. They often showed remarkable ingenuity in areas like astronomy and architecture, yet they lacked important cultural advances like the plow, the wheel, and sailing ships. Some tribes had no clue what a war was; others lived and died for little else.
Although different tribes and cultures sometimes traded with one another for necessities, they generally kept to themselves — unless they were fighting one another. Each group referred to itself as “human beings” or “the people” and referred to other groups as simply “others” or something less flattering.
Some Native Americans acted as environmental caretakers, at least to the extent that they took care not to overuse natural resources. Others engaged in environmentally tortuous acts such as clear-cutting forests or setting fires to catch game or clear land.
But it wasn’t character traits, good or bad, that ultimately hurt Native Americans. Instead, it was a conspiracy of other elements: an unwillingness or inability to unite against the European invader, a sheer lack of numbers, a lack of biological defenses against European diseases, and the unfortunate tendency of many newcomers to see Native Americans not as human beings but as just another exotic species in a strange New World.
Visiting by the Vikings
Native Americans got their first look at what trouble was going to look like when Vikings showed up in North America. All Vikings were Norsemen, but not all Norsemen were Vikings. Viking meant to go raiding, pirating, or exploring. Although some of the Scandinavians of 1,000 years ago surely did all these things, most of them stayed in Scandinavia and fished or farmed.
For about 300 years, the Norsemen who were Vikings conquered or looted much of western Europe and Russia. In the ninth and tenth centuries, sailing in ships was made speedy and stable by the addition of keels. Consequently, the Vikings journeyed west, not so much for loot as for new lands to settle.
Hopscotching from the British Isles to the Shetland Islands to the Faroe Islands, the Vikings arrived in Iceland about AD 870. But Iceland didn’t offer a whole lot of good land, and it got crowded pretty quickly. A little more than 100 years later, a colorful character known as Eric the Red, who was in exile from Iceland for killing a man, discovered Greenland and led settlers there around 985.
Like many things in human history, the Vikings’ first visits to the North American continent were by accident. The first sighting of the New World by a European probably occurred around 987, when a Viking named Bjarni Herjolfsson sailed from Iceland to hook up with his dad and missed Greenland. Herjolfsson wasn’t impressed by what he saw from the ship, and he never actually set foot on land before heading back to Greenland.
Herjolfsson was followed about 15 years later by the son of Eric the Red. His name was Leif Ericsson, also known as Leif the Lucky. Leif landed in what’s now Labrador, a part of Newfoundland, Canada. Mistaking seasonal berries for grapes, Leif called the area Vinland. He spent the winter in the new land and then left to take over the family business, which was running colonies in Greenland that his dad had founded.
His brother Thorvald visited Vinland the next year. Thorvald got into a fight with the local inhabitants, and he thus gained the distinction of being the first European to be killed by the natives in North America. (Vikings called the natives skraelings, a contemptuous term meaning “dwarves.”) After his death, Thorvald’s crew went back to Greenland.
The next Viking visit was meant to be permanent. Led by a brother-in-law of Leif’s named Thorfinn Karlsefni, an expedition of three ships, some cattle, and about 160 people — including some women — created a settlement and dug in.
The Karlsefni settlement lasted three years. Chronic troubles with the natives — who had a large numerical advantage, as well as weapons and fighting abilities that were equal to the Vikings’ — and squabbles arising from too many males and not enough females in the settlement eventually wore the Vikings down. They sailed back to Greenland, and, by 1020, most scholars agree, the Vikings had given up on North America. Supply lines to the homelands were long, the voyages back and forth were dangerous, and the natives were unfriendly. The Norsemen apparently felt that the new land wasn’t worth the trouble. By 1400, the Vikings were no longer even in Greenland; they fell victim to troubles with the Eskimos, the area’s earlier residents, and a climate that became colder.
The Vikings’ forays to the North American continent were relatively brief and had no lasting impact. The main evidence that they were even here is fairly limited: two long sagas written in the Middle Ages and the scattered ruins of three housing clusters and a forge at a place called L’Anse aux Meadows, on the northern tip of Newfoundland. But tales of their voyages were well reported around Europe, and they probably served to whet the exploration appetites of people in other places. Other nations, however, plagued by troubles like, well, plagues, weren’t ready to follow them west for almost 500 years.
Freydis Eriksdottir
In a world of pretty macho guys, Freydis stood out — and not just because she was Leif Ericsson's half-sister. According to Viking sagas, Freydis was part of the Karlsefni settlement. She reportedly stopped one Native American attack when "she pulled her breast from her dress and slapped her sword on it." She also allegedly ended a trading voyage to the New World by having her partners — who happened to be her brothers — murdered. Then she killed five women who her men refused to do in. Her half-brother, Leif, however, declined to punish her. The Vikings were tough businessmen, especially when they were businesswomen!
Determining Who Else Came to America
So if we know that the Vikings were here and the Native Americans — or at least their ancestors — were here before the Vikings, did anyone else get here before Columbus?
Maybe.
For decades, scholars, researchers, and more than a few crackpots have sought proof that someone other than the Native Americans and Vikings visited the New World in pre-Colombian times. The theories and suppositions have ranged from a Jewish hermit named Maba, who supposedly lived in a cave in eastern Oklahoma about the time of Christ, to Prince Madoc, an exiled Welsh nobleman who, story has it, established a colony in what’s now Georgia and Tennessee in about AD 900. The prince also managed to teach the locals to speak Welsh and build burial mounds. Other stories abound: Buddhist monks who toured California, Egyptians who visited the Southeast, and, of course, extraterrestrials who built landing strips in Peru.
The “evidence” for these visits includes petroglyphs, or rock carvings, that no one has been able to figure out. Voyages made in replicas of ancient sailing crafts supposedly demonstrate that making such voyages would have been possible, and stories and legends of the Native Americans who talk about long-ago visits from beings with white skin or abundant facial hair also add some “proof.” But none of the supposed evidence for any of these cases has so far proved conclusive, at least not to most historians. And even if other people did travel to the New World, they, like the Vikings, had no substantial impact on what was to come in America.
Spicing Up Life — and Other Reasons for Exploring
Say you’re walking along the street one day when a stranger stops you and shouts, “Quick! Give me a two-word summary of why Christopher Columbus and all those other people came nosing around North, Central, and South America in the sixteenth century!”
Now, you could answer with “garage sales” or even “Manifest Destiny.” But a far better answer would be “rancid meat.”
For centuries, people in Europe had no way of preserving food other than salting it, which doesn’t make it very palatable. When Europeans were fighting in the Middle East during the Crusades, however, they established overland trading routes that supplied a whole condiment shelf of spices: cinnamon from Ceylon, pepper from India, and cloves and nutmeg from the Moluccan Islands. They also developed a taste for silks from China and Japan, and they already liked the gold and precious metals of the East.
But in 1453, the Turkish Empire conquered Constantinople (now Istanbul), which had been the capital of the Eastern Roman Empire and the crossroads of the overland supply routes. The Turks closed the routes, and Europeans had to begin thinking about finding a sea route to reopen the trade.
More reasons explain the explosion of interest in exploration as the 1400s came to a close. Countries were putting aside the feudal disputes of the Middle Ages and unifying. In Spain, for example, 700 years of war between the Spaniards and the Moors (Arabs from North Africa) were finally over in 1492. The marriage of Ferdinand of Castile and Isabella of Aragon had united the country’s two major realms.
Europe was also stepping briskly toward the Renaissance. People were beginning to believe in the power of the individual to change things and were more willing to take chances.
The Portuguese, the best navigators and sailors in the world at that time (except for the Polynesians), were pushing farther into the Atlantic and down the coast of Africa. When he reached what he named the Cape of Good Hope in 1488, Portuguese explorer Bartelmo Diaz verified that a sea route to India around the tip of Africa did exist.
Meanwhile, other explorers who knew the earth was a sphere were thinking about reaching the Indies and the East by sailing west across the Atlantic. One of them was named Columbus.
Christopher Columbus: Dream Salesman
According to many accounts, Christopher Columbus was obsessive, religious, stubborn, arrogant, charming, and egotistical. He was physically striking, with reddish-blond hair that had turned white by the time he was 30, and he stood 6 feet tall at a time when most adult males were about 5 feet 6 inches. He was also one heck of a salesman.
Columbus meets the natives
"In order to win the friendship and affection of that people, and because I was convinced that their conversion to our Holy Faith would be better promoted through love than through force, I presented some of them with red caps and some strings of glass beads and with other trifles of insignificant worth. They must be good servants and very intelligent, because I see that they repeat very quickly what I tell them, and it is my
conviction they would easily become Christians, for they seem not to have any sect . . . with fifty men, all can be kept in subjection, and made to do whatever you desire."
— From the diary of Christopher Columbus, as reported by contemporary biographer Bartolome de las Casas.
Christopher Columbus was born in Genoa, Italy, in 1451, the son of a weaver.
In addition to running a successful map-making business with his brother, Bartholomew, Columbus was a first-class sailor. He also became convinced that his ticket to fame and fortune depended on finding a western route to the Indies.
Starting in the 1470s, Columbus and his brother began making the rounds of European capitals, looking for ships and financial backing for his idea. His demands were exorbitant. In return for his services, Columbus wanted the title of Admiral of the Oceans, 10 percent of all the loot he found, and the ability to pass governorship of every country he discovered to his heirs.
The rulers of England and France said no thanks, as did some of the city-states that made up Italy. The king of Portugal also told him to take a hike. So in 1486, Columbus went to Spain. Queen Isabella listened to his pitch, and she, like the other European rulers, said no. But she did appoint a commission to look into the idea and decided to put Columbus on the payroll in the meantime.
The meantime stretched out for six years. Finally, convinced she wasn’t really risking much because chances were that he wouldn’t return, Isabella gave her approval in January 1492. Columbus was on his way.
Partly because of error and partly because of wishful thinking, Columbus estimated the distance to the Indies at approximately 2,500 miles, which was about 7,500 miles short. But after a voyage of about five weeks, he and his crews, totaling 90 men, did find land at around 2 a.m. on October 12, 1492. It was an island in the Bahamas, which he called San Salvador. The timing of the discovery was good; it came even as the crews of the Nina, Pinta, and Santa Maria were muttering about a mutiny.
Could've been worse; could've been "Vespucci"
Amerigo Vespucci was an Italian who settled in Spain and helped supply Columbus's voyages. He then took several trips to South America under the command of one of Columbus's captains. In 1504, somewhat exaggerated letters by Vespucci about what he called Mundus Novis — the New World — were printed throughout Europe.
A German mapmaker read the letters, was impressed, and decided in 1507 to call the massive new lands on his maps America, in Vespucci's honor. Which is why we're not called the United States of Christopher.
Columbus next sailed to Cuba, where he found few spices and little gold. Sailing on to an island he called Hispaniola (today’s Dominican Republic and Haiti), the Santa Maria hit a reef on Christmas Eve, 1492. Columbus abandoned the ship, set up a trading outpost he called Navidad, left some men to operate it, and sailed back to Spain in his other two ships.
So enthusiastically did people greet the news of his return that on his second voyage to Hispaniola, Columbus had 17 ships and more than 1,200 men. But this time he ran into more than a little disappointment. Natives had wiped out his trading post after his men became too grabby with the local gold and the local women. Worse, most of the men he brought with him had come only for gold and other riches, and they didn’t care about setting up a permanent colony. Because of the lack of treasures, they soon wanted to go home. And the natives lost interest in the newcomers after the novelty of the Spanish trinkets wore off.
Consequently, Columbus took harsh measures. He demanded tribute in gold, which the Indians didn’t have. He also divided up the land on Hispaniola and enslaved the natives, thousands of whom died. And he hanged some of the “settlers” for rebelling against his authority.
The third and fourth voyages by Columbus also failed to produce the fabulous riches he had hoped for. When he died in 1506, he was largely considered a failure. But even if Columbus was unaware that he never reached the Orient, he knew he had not failed.
“By the divine will,” he said shortly before his death, “I have placed under the sovereignty of the king and queen an ‘other world,’ whereby Spain, which was considered poor, is to become the richest of all countries.”
Discovering a Dozen Other People Who Dropped By
Remember in school when your history teacher would give you a sheet with a list of fifteenth-century explorers’ names on one side and a list of their accomplishments on the other side, and you had to match them? Well, here’s that list again. But before I sum up these people in a paragraph each, it may be a good idea to marvel at what they did. They sailed across unknown stretches of water (see Figure 2-2) in cramped, leaky ships no longer than a tennis court, were provisioned with food that would gag a starving pig, and had crews who were more than willing to cut the throats of their leaders if things went wrong.
When they reached the Americas, they wandered for months (sometimes years) through strange lands populated by people who, though not always hostile, were certainly unpredictable. And then they had to try to get home again to tell someone about what they’d found. Although their motives were rarely pure, they displayed a lot of courage and determination.
Here are a dozen of these daring explorers:
● John Cabot (England): An Italian by birth, Cabot was commissioned by King Henry VII to see what he could find in the New World. Using the northern route that the Vikings used 500 years before, Cabot sailed to Newfoundland in 1497, saw lots of fish, claimed the area for England, and sailed back. In 1498, he took a second trip with five ships, but only one ever returned to England. The other ships and their crews, including Cabot, disappeared and were apparently lost at sea. Even so, Cabot may have been the first European to set foot on what is now the continental United States, and he is credited with giving England its first real claim on America.
● Vasco Nunez de Balboa (Spain): Balboa is credited with being the first European to see the South Seas from the New World. He named it the Pacific because it appeared to be so calm. He was later beheaded by his successor to the governorship of Panama.
● Ferdinand Magellan (Spain): Magellan, a Portuguese explorer who was one of the greatest sailors of his or anyone’s time, led a Spanish expedition of five ships in 1519. He was looking for a quick passage to the East from Europe. He sailed around the tip of South America and into the Pacific. Magellan was killed during a battle with natives in the Philippines, but one of his five ships made it back to Spain in 1522 — the first to sail around the world.
● Giovanni Verranzano (France): Although born in Italy, Verranzano, an expert navigator, was hired by the French to find a quicker passage to the East than Magellan’s. In 1524, he sailed along the east coast of America from what’s now the Carolinas to what’s now Maine, and he decided that the landmass was probably just a narrow strip separating the Atlantic from the Pacific. On a second voyage to the Caribbean, Verranzano was killed and eaten by Indians.
● Jacques Cartier (France): He made two trips to the New World in 1534 and 1535, sailing up the St. Lawrence River. On the second trip, he made it to the site of present-day Montreal. He went back in 1541 with a sizable expedition to look for gold and precious stones but returned to France with what turned out to be just a bunch of quartz. Still, his trips helped France establish a claim for much of what is now Canada.
● Francisco Coronado (Spain): This guy led an incredible expedition in 1540 that went looking for the “Seven Cities of Cibola,” which were supposedly dripping with riches. Instead, in two years of looking for the elusive cities, Coronado’s group explored Arizona, Texas, New Mexico, Kansas, and the Gulf of California, and discovered the Grand Canyon.
But they never found gold.
● Hernando de Soto (Spain): He marched around what are now the Gulf States before discovering the Mississippi River in 1541. He died of a fever on its banks.
● Sir Francis Drake (England): One of the most famous swashbucklers in history, Drake sailed around the world from 1578 to 1580. During his trip, he explored the west coasts of South and North America as far up as present-day Washington state, stopping to claim present-day California before heading for the South Seas, and eventually home to England. He returned with more than $9 million in gold and spices, most of it plundered from Spanish ships and cities. Queen Elizabeth I knighted him for it.
● Sir Walter Raleigh (England): Raleigh inherited the right to establish an English colony from Gilbert, his half-brother. In 1584, Raleigh established a colony in what’s now Virginia, and he was knighted by Elizabeth I for his efforts. Unfortunately, 30 years later he was executed on the orders of Elizabeth’s successor, James I, for disobeying royal orders.
● Juan de Onate (Spain): A conquistador (conqueror) who conquered the Pueblo tribes of the Southwest and established the territory of New Mexico in 1599, Onate was one cruel guy — even by conquistador standards. In one conquered village, he ordered that a foot be cut off every male adult, and in others he required 25 years of “personal services” from all the inhabitants. But he did introduce the horse to the American Southwest: Mounts that escaped or were turned loose by his troops bred in the wild and were eventually domesticated by various Native American tribes.
● Samuel de Champlain (France): A mapmaker by trade, Champlain landed in the New World in 1603 and explored extensively in the northeastern part of the continent. He founded the colony of Quebec in 1608.
● Henry Hudson (Netherlands): Hudson sailed up the bay and river that now bear his name in present-day New York in 1609. He was looking for a northwest passage to the Indies. Instead, he found an area rich in fur-bearing mammals and helped the Dutch lay claim to a piece of the continent. He was cast adrift by his crew in a mutiny in 1611 and was never heard from again.
Figure 2-2: Map showing routes of Christopher Columbus, John Cabot, and Giovanni Verranzano.
The Sword, the Cross, and the Measles
One of the problems in discovering a new land that’s already inhabited is figuring out what to do with the people who got there first. When it came to the Native American populations of the New World, the Europeans generally solved that problem by killing or enslaving them.
Native American slavery
It started with Columbus. By his second voyage to Hispaniola, he set up a system, called the encomienda, which amounted to slavery. Under it, a colonist who was given a piece of land had the right to the labor of all the natives who lived on that land — whether they were interested in a job or not. Columbus also imposed a gold tax on the Indians and sometimes cut the hands off of those who couldn’t or wouldn’t pay it. Between slavery, killings, and diseases, the population of Hispaniola’s natives plummeted from an estimated 250,000 to 300,000 at the time of Columbus’s arrival in 1492 to perhaps 60,000 by 1510, to near zero by 1550.
As the Indians on the main islands died off, the Spanish settlers in the Caribbean simply raided other, smaller islands and kidnapped the residents there. A historian at the time wrote that you could navigate between islands “without compass or chart . . . simply by following the trail of dead Indians who have been thrown from ships.”
When even the populations of the little islands waned, the Spanish looked for other cheap labor sources. They found them in Africa. African slaves were first imported to the New World within a few years after Columbus’s first trip.
By 1513, King Carlos I of Spain had given his royal assent to the African slave trade. He made his decision in part, he said, to improve the lot of the Indians.
Of course, the fact that many Spanish landholders in the New World were beginning to prefer African slaves made his decision easier. They believed the Africans had better immunity to European diseases and were more used to hard agricultural labor because they came from agricultural cultures.
And for the serious sweet tooth . . .
On his second trip to the Americas in 1493, Columbus stopped by the Canary Islands and picked up some sugar cane cuttings. He planted them in Hispaniola, and they thrived. In 1516, the first sugar grown in the New World was presented to King Carlos I of Spain. By 1531, it was as commercially important to the Spanish colonial economy as gold.
Planters soon discovered a by-product as well. The juice left over after the sugar was pressed out of the cane and crystallized was called melasas by the Spanish (and molasses by the English). Mixing this juice with water and leaving it out in the sun created a potent and tasty fermented drink. They called it rum — perhaps after the Latin word for sugar cane, saccharum officinarum. The stuff was great for long sea voyages because it didn't go bad.
Sugar and rum became so popular that sugar plantations mushroomed all over the Caribbean.
The men in the brown robes
Whatever his other motives, King Carlos I and his successors did have their consciences regularly pricked by some church leaders and missionaries who accompanied the early voyagers. In 1514, Pope Leo X declared that “not only the Christian religion but Nature cries out against the slavery and the slave trade.” Likewise, in 1537, Pope Paul III declared that Indians were not to be enslaved.
With twenty-first-century hindsight, it’s tempting to shrug off the work of the early European missionaries as a sort of public relations effort designed to make the nastier things the conquerors did look less nasty.
Although the idea that the cross was used to justify bad treatment of the “heathens” has some truth (a 1513 proclamation required natives to convert or be enslaved or executed), most of the people who committed the worst atrocities apparently didn’t much care who knew about their violent actions. Thus, they didn’t need an excuse.
The horrendous actions of some of their fellow Europeans certainly didn’t make the missionaries’ jobs easier. One Native American chief, who was being burned at the stake — by government officials, not missionaries — for refusing to convert, reportedly replied that he feared if he did join the religion, he “might go to Heaven and meet only Christians.”
Destruction through disease
If they managed to survive slavery, the sword, and the excesses committed in the name of the cross, the New World’s natives were then likely candidates to die from the Europeans’ most formidable weapon: disease. Because they had never been exposed to them as a culture, the Native Americans’ immune systems had no defense when faced with diseases such as measles and smallpox.
The first major epidemic — smallpox — started in 1518 after the disease arrived at Hispaniola via a shipload of colonists. From there, it gradually and sporadically spread through North, Central, and South America by following the Native Americans’ trade and travel routes. Sometimes, disease spread so fast that it decimated tribes before they ever saw a European.
Some historians believe that disease was spread less by the Europeans and more by the livestock they brought with them, particularly the pigs. The theory is that the pigs passed on microbes to the native wildlife, allowing disease to spread more quickly than it could have by mere human transmission.
What’s certain is that over the next 400 years, smallpox, measles, whooping cough, typhus, and scarlet fever killed thousands of times more Native Americans than guns or swords did.
A pox on you
New World Native Americans may have gathered a measure of revenge in the disease department by giving Europeans syphilis. Many researchers believe that Columbus's sailors brought the disease back to Spain from the Americas, where it was relatively common among different Native American groups. The theory was bolstered in early 2008, when a study led by Emory University scientist Kristin Harper determined through molecular genetics that the sexually transmitted version of the disease originated in the New World.
In 1495, after Columbus returned from his first voyage, the rulers of Spain and France sent large armies to besiege the Italian city of Naples. After the city was captured, the soldiers returned and helped to spread the new venereal disease. The French called it "the Neapolitan disease," and the Spanish called it "the French disease." They proved that there are some new things for which no nation wants credit.
Arriving Late for the Party
Spain’s early explorations of the New World gave that country a great head start over its European rivals. Spanish conquerors defeated mighty empires in Mexico and Peru — the Aztecs and Incas. Both empires had huge caches of gold and silver and sophisticated cultures with built-in labor classes. All the Spanish had to do was kill the old bosses and become the new bosses, so they didn’t have to import slaves as they had done in the Caribbean. Moreover, the conquests spawned a herd of adelantadaos (or “advancers”), who roamed all over the lower half of America in search of the next big empire.
But Spain’s position of preeminence was short-lived. In 1588, Spanish plans to invade England with an armada of ships blew up when the fleet was scattered by the English navy and a fierce storm. Within 30 years, both England and France had established colonies in the New World. Eventually, a growing spirit of independence would strip Spain of its New World empire. Early on, it was pretty clear that war-weary Europe would soon be fighting again over the spoils of the New World. In an effort to head that off — and also find a way to put his mark of authority over matters in the Americas — Pope Alexander VI divided the Americas between Spain and Portugal by drawing a line on the map.
This decision left Portugal with what’s now Brazil, Spain with everything else, and the rest of Europe pretty peeved. King Henry VII of England declared that he would ignore the papal edict. King Francis I of France sniffed, “We fail to find this clause in Adam’s will.” Of course, the countries left empty-handed by the Pope’s decree got over it in part by picking off Spanish ships laden with treasure on their way home.
France
Throughout much of the sixteenth century, France’s efforts to get its share of the Americas were marred by civil wars and inept leadership. The French forays to the New World were limited to fishermen who came each year to mine the cod-rich banks off Newfoundland, and explorations of areas that are now New England and eastern Canada.
Moreover, while the Spanish were in it for the loot and the English for the land, the French weren’t quite sure what they wanted. They eventually settled on a little of both. Fur franchises were awarded private companies on the condition that they also start permanent colonies. But the companies didn’t try very hard, and as the 1500s came to a close, the French had little more than a tenuous hold on its New World dominion.
England
Despite early explorations by John Cabot just on the heels of Columbus’s voyages, England lagged behind Spain when it came to exploring and exploiting the New World. Part of the problem was that the English were broke, and part of it was that England feared Spain’s military might.
By the end of the sixteenth century, however, the English were encouraged by the success of raids against Spanish-American cities and ships by privateers (a cross between patriots and pirates) like John Hawkins and Francis Drake. The defeat of the Spanish Armada, the invasion fleet that met with disaster off the coast of England in 1588, encouraged England even more.
In 1587, Walter Raleigh, who had the royal right to colonize in the Americas, sent a group that consisted of 89 men, 7 women, and 11 children to what is now Virginia. They called their colony Roanoke.
Unfortunately, the looming threat of the Spanish invasion meant the little colony got no support from the homeland. In 1590, when a relief expedition finally arrived, the colonists had vanished. They left behind only rotting and rummaged junk and a single word carved in a tree: Croatoan.
The word referred to an island about 100 miles south of Roanoke. No one knows the meaning behind the word. And no one knows exactly what happened to the first English colony in the New World.