1493: Uncovering the New World Columbus Created (47 page)

Almost every bit of Xishuangbanna that can support rubber trees has been cleared and planted (top), a change that is profoundly altering the environment—the region’s morning mists are vanishing, along with its water supply. With China’s rubber companies running out of suitable land in China itself, they have moved across the border to northern Laos (above, a freshly logged hillside). (
Photo credit 7.8
)

Hillside rubber plantations surround Tang’s office in the botanical garden. Because trees are grafted from the wood of high-yielding specimens, the great majority of the rubber trees in Southeast Asia are clones. And the majority of the trees used to create those clones descended from the few sprouts that survived from Henry Wickham’s original expedition—a slice of a slice of a slice. These are the trees that Weir brought to Fordlândia, the varieties so highly susceptible to
M. ulei.
The trees make a canopy of green so unbroken that Beijing legally describes rubber plantations as “forests”; locals can fill fallow farmland with rubber and fulfill government conservation dictates. As the area of rubber increases, it becomes an increasingly inviting target for pests. “That’s the lesson of biology,” Tang said. “Diseases always come in. Sooner or later, they find a way.”

For a century, isolation—the isolation of Southeast Asia from Brazil, of Southeast Asian nations from each other—has spared the rubber plantations. But the world is knitting itself together ever more closely. There are still no direct flights between Amazonia and Southeast Asia, but they will come. And in April 2008 the governments of Cambodia, China, Laos, Myanmar, and Thailand opened a brand-new highway that for the first time links all of these nations and connects them to Malaysia and Singapore. Trucks will be able to zoom in three days from Singapore to Kunming, the capital of Yunnan Province. If and when
M. ulei
arrives from Brazil, this will provide transportation. “In ten or twenty years, Xishuangbanna’s trees could be wiped out,” Tang said. “So would everyone else’s trees, probably.”

The disaster would take a long time to repair. The industrial revolution, one recalls, depends on three raw materials: steel, fossil fuels, and rubber. If one member of that triad suddenly vanished, it would have unwelcome effects. Imagine transportation networks without tires, electric power plants without gaskets and seals, hospitals without sterile rubber hoses and gloves. Industrial civilization could face such disruption worldwide that organizations from the United Nations to the U.S. Department of Defense list
Microcyclus ulei
as a potential biological weapon. Synthetic rubber will be deployed to replace it, but only as an imperfect replacement. “I sure as hell wouldn’t want to be in a 747 about to land on synthetic tires,” the director of the U.S. National Defense Stockpile Center has said.

Breeders are working on new, resistant plants, but progress is slow. “All control measures against this disease have been unsuccessful,” stated the
Annals of Botany
in 2007. Even the most modern techniques “have failed to prevent large losses and dieback of trees.” Asian scientists pulled some more trees from Brazil in 1981 to increase plantations’ genetic diversity. These are being evaluated and cross-bred with more productive plants. Researchers in France announced in 2006 that they had fully resistant clones. But few plantation owners want to take up these varieties, which are new and therefore risky. Every ecologist I spoke with in Brazil, China, and Laos believed that Asia was almost as unprepared for leaf blight today as it was fifty years ago.

When I visited Xishuangbanna, I wore the same shoes that I had worn a few months before in Brazil. Because the spores are fragile, I was pretty sure I wouldn’t cause an epidemic. Still, I sprayed my shoes with fungicide. At the border neither the Chinese nor the Laotian customs officials batted an eye at the two Brazilian visas in my passport, or the entry stamps that said I had passed through Manaus, epicenter of leaf blight. I wanted to do my work, so I didn’t say anything.

Someday, though, there will be a problem. The cycle of the Columbian Exchange will be complete, taking away what it once gave. Trees will die fast. The epidemic will cover an area large enough to be visible from space: black-leaved splotches scattered from the tip of China to the end of Indonesia. There will be a major international mobilization of resources to fight the outbreak. And planters will suddenly be aware that they are living in the Homogenocene, an era in which Asia and the Americas are increasingly alike.

¹
Gough, blind since birth, demonstrated this by touch: he pulled apart the ends of a wide rubber strip and touched it with “the edges of the lips,” which are highly sensitive to heat. He also discovered that rubber shrinks when it is heated up—unlike most other substances, which increase in volume when they get hotter.

²
In general, long-molecule substances are called
polymers.
Many types of polymers are familiar: fibers like silk and wool, for instance, and proteins like the gluten in bread or the albumin in egg whites. Elastomers, with their puzzling behavior, are a special type of polymer.

³
Casement was rewarded with a knighthood. Soon after, Sir Roger quit the Foreign Office to devote himself to the cause of Irish independence. He traveled to Germany to persuade the kaiser to provide arms for an uprising. The plot was discovered and Casement arrested as a German submarine deposited him on the Irish coast. Convicted of treason, he was sentenced to death. Influential friends begged the court for mercy. Casement was unlucky enough to be gay and unwise enough to detail his sex life in diaries. Their discovery after the trial sealed his fate. He was stripped of his honors and hanged on August 3, 1916.

⁴
In 1727 the Brazilian diplomat Francisco de Melo Palheta visited Cayenne, in French Guiana, to negotiate a border dispute. Somehow he obtained coffee seeds—he is said to have received them as a farewell gift from the governor’s wife, whom he had seduced. Under French colonial law coffee seeds were strictly forbidden to foreigners. Melo Palheta smuggled them to Brazil, the rubber historian Warren Dean wrote, launching “a plantation industry that was the mainstay of the Brazilian economy for a century and a half.”

⁵
Jefferson Fox of the East-West Center in Hawaii, who is working with colleagues to evaluate rubber’s impact in Southeast Asia, notes that Vietnam plans to increase its companies’ rubber area by 1,500 square miles—a quarter of that in southern Laos. In January 2009 Fox visited big plantations in southern Laos, he told me, “from which smallholders had been removed from their land in order to grant land concessions to Vietnamese investors.”

PART FOUR
Africa in the World

8
Crazy Soup

JOHNNY GOOD-LOOKING

In the 1520s a solitary man constructed a small chapel on the western highway out of Mexico City, just beyond the causeway that led to the city’s western gate. No description of the chapel survives, but it was probably just two whitewashed adobe rooms: one for the shrine itself, with an altar and cross; one for the man who built and maintained it. Nearby were a few small fields on which he grew crops. The structure was known as the Chapel of the Martyrs or, more impressively, the Chapel of the Eleven Thousand Martyrs. It may have been the first Christian church in mainland America.

The man in the chapel was named Juan Garrido. Little is known about his childhood except that he was not named Juan Garrido. According to his biographer, Ricardo E. Alegría, an anthropologist in Puerto Rico, he was born in West Africa, probably in the 1480s. His rich, powerful family desired to grow richer and more powerful by selling slaves to Europeans. Alegría suggests that Garrido’s family sent the youth to Lisbon as an agent. Matthew Restall, a Pennsylvania State University historian who has also studied Garrido’s life, is skeptical of this idea—very few Africans, he says, came voluntarily to Europe. Almost certainly Garrido arrived as a slave, Restall believes, one of the tens of thousands of African captives then in the Iberian Peninsula (Spain and Portugal).

Whether Garrido came in chains or as a representative of his family, he refused to follow anyone else’s plan. Rather than remaining in Portugal, he crossed the Spanish border and went to Seville. He spent seven years there, giving himself a European name along the way. Something of his personality is hinted at by the name he chose: Juan Garrido, which means, more or less, Johnny Good-looking.

Johnny Good-looking crossed the Atlantic early in the sixteenth century, landing in Hispaniola. As aggressive and ambitious as any other conquistador, a young man with his blood aboil, he quickly attached himself to a local sub-governor, Juan Ponce de León y Figueroa, accompanying him on a mission to take over the island of Puerto Rico. When Ponce de León sank his fortune into an off-kilter hunt for the Fountain of Youth, Garrido joined the futile quest. (Along the way, they became the first people from the opposite shore of the Atlantic to touch down on Florida.) When Spain launched punitive expeditions against Caribe Indians on half a dozen Caribbean islands, Garrido brought his gun. And when Hernán Cortés seized the Triple Alliance, Johnny Good-looking was at his side.

The alliance is more commonly known as the Aztec empire, but the term is a nineteenth-century invention, and historians increasingly avoid it. It was a consortium of three militarized city-states in the middle of Mexico: Texcoco, Tlacopan, and Tenochtitlan, the last by far the most powerful partner. When the Spaniards arrived, this Triple Alliance ruled central Mexico from ocean to ocean and Tenochtitlan was bigger and richer than any city in Spain.

As canny a politician as he was a fighter, Cortés was able to foment an assault on the empire by its many enemies and place himself at its head. But despite taking the Triple Alliance emperor hostage in his own palace—a paralyzing surprise to the enemy—the initial assault failed calamitously. Indeed, the Spaniards barely escaped from Tenochtitlan. When all seemed lost, Cortés had a stroke of luck: the accidental introduction of the smallpox virus. Never before seen in the Americas, transmittable with horrific ease, the virus swept through densely packed central Mexico, killing a third or more of its population in a few months.
¹

An African man, very possibly Juan Garrido, holds Hernán Cortés’s horse as the conquistador, helmet in hand, approaches Motecuhzoma, paramount leader of the Triple Alliance. The drawing is from Diego Durán’s renowned account of the conquest of Mexico,
The History of the Indies of New Spain
(c. 1581). (
Photo credit 8.1
)

As the Triple Alliance reeled from the epidemic, the Spanish-Indian army attacked the capital a second time in May 1521, with as many as 200,000 troops. Tenochtitlan occupied a Venice-like clump of islands, many of them human-made, on the west side of an eighty-mile-long, artificially recontoured lake. Spiderwebbing from the metropolis was an intricate network of causeways, dikes, dams, baffles, and channels that both kept back floods during the wet season and funneled water around the city during the dry season.

Cortés’s strategy was in part to avoid the heavily defended causeways into the city by draining and filling the moat-like channels around them, thus creating dry land from which he could assault less-protected areas of the perimeter. During the siege, the attackers repeatedly tore out dikes and piled up stones and earth during the day, and the Triple Alliance repeatedly reassembled the dikes and reflooded the channels at night. On June 30, the Alliance set a trap at the shore entrance to Tenochtitlan’s western causeway, undermining a bridge that crossed a shallow, reed-thick waterway. When the attackers charged across the bridge, wrote the sixteenth-century chronicler Diego Durán, “the entire thing collapsed, together with the Spaniards and Indians who stood upon it.” From hiding places in the reeds shot canoes loaded with men wielding bows, spears, and stolen Spanish swords. Flailing in the brackish water, the Spaniards and their horses were easy prey; Cortés himself was wounded and almost captured.

As the surviving attackers fled to safety, they heard the boom of an enormous drum—“so vast in its dimensions,” the conquistador Bernal Díaz del Castillo later recalled, “that it could be heard from eight to twelve miles distance.” The Spaniards spun on their heels. Across the water they could see Triple Alliance soldiers dragging Spanish prisoners, still dripping from the watery ambush, to the summit of a great, pyramidical temple. In an act meant to terrify and demoralize, Alliance soldiers and priests ripped open the captives’ chests, tore out their hearts, and kicked the bodies down the temple steps. The next morning they marched another prisoner—“a handsome Sevillian,” Durán wrote—to the edge of the channel and in full view of his friends “ripped him to bits then and there.” When Tenochtitlan fell, Cortés had his revenge. He stood by as his troops and their native allies despoiled the shattered city, slaughtering the men and raping the women.

Tenochtitlan, seen in a present-day artist’s reconstruction, dazzled the Spaniards when they saw it—the city was grander than any in Spain. Protecting the city was an irregular, ten-mile-long dike (far right in image) that separated the brackish water of the main lake from a new, human-made freshwater lake that surrounded the city and provided water for a network of artificial wetland farms known as
chinampas
. (
Photo credit 8.2
)

Juan Garrido may have been at the ambush or known the sacrificed Spaniards or both. In any case, he was asked by Cortés to build the Chapel of the Martyrs, a monument and graveyard for fallen conquistadors, on the spot where the ambush took place. The assignment was but one of many, for Garrido soon became one of the conqueror’s go-to men as he erected Spanish Mexico City literally atop the wreckage of Indian Tenochtitlan. Johnny Good-looking became a kind of majordomo for the new municipal government; protector of the trees that shaded the highways into town (the records give no reason for the position, but one can guess the trees were being cut for fuel); guardian of the main city water supply (Tenochtitlan, which had no water of its own, was supplied via aqueduct from mountain springs); and town crier—a position, Restall says, that could include the duties of a “constable, auctioneer, executioner, piper, master of weights [responsible for assaying silver and gold], and doorkeeper or guard.” As lagniappe, Garrido accompanied Cortés in 1535 on the latter’s ill-fated attempt to cross Mexico and sail to China—the ultimate goal of Spanish adventurers.

Garrido’s biggest contribution occurred after Cortés found three kernels of bread wheat (
Triticum aestivum
) in a sack of rice that had been sent from Spain. The conqueror asked his go-to man to plant them in a plot near the chapel that served as a kind of experimental farm. “Two of them grew,” the historian Francisco López de Gomara reported in 1552,

and one of them produced 180 kernels. They later turned around and planted those kernels, and little by little there was boundless wheat: one [kernel] yields a hundred, three hundred, and even more with irrigation and sowing by hand.… To a black man and slave is owed so much benefit!

Wheat was not only desired by roll-eating, cake-munching, beer-guzzling conquistadors, it was a necessity for the politically powerful clergy, who needed bread to celebrate Mass properly. Repeatedly Spaniards had tried to grow
T. aestivum
in Hispaniola, and repeatedly it had failed in the hot, humid climate. Garrido’s wheat was greeted with joy—in a strange land, it was the taste of home. Soon the golden herringbone tassels of wheat spikelets waved across central Mexico, replacing thousands of acres of maize and woodland. More than that, Mexican smallholders say, Spaniards carried Garrido’s
T. aestivum
to Texas, from where it spread up the Mississippi. If this is accurate, much or most of the wheat that by the nineteenth century had transformed the Midwest into an agricultural powerhouse came from an African roadside chapel in Mexico City.

In planting Cortés’s wheat, Garrido was acting as an agent of the Columbian Exchange. More important, though, he himself was part of the exchange, as were Cortés and the other foreigners.

Previously in this book, I described researchers’ evolving view of the Columbian Exchange. I first looked at the Atlantic (
Chapters 2
and
3
), where the most important effects were caused by microscopic imports to the Americas (initially the diseases that depopulated Indian societies, then malaria and yellow fever, which encouraged plantation slavery). Next I treated the Pacific (
Chapters 4
and
5
), where the major introductions were American food crops, which both helped sustain a population boom and led indirectly to massive environmental problems. In the next section (
Chapters 6
and
7
), I showed how environmental historians have increasingly come to believe that the Columbian Exchange played a role in the agricultural revolution of the eighteenth century and the industrial revolution of the nineteenth. Both occurred first in Europe, and so this ecological phenomenon had large-scale political and economic implications—it fostered the rise of the West. In all this discussion, I have acted as if humankind were in the director’s chair, distributing other species at will, sometimes being surprised by the results. But to biologists
Homo sapiens
is a species that like any other has its own distribution and range. Not only did human beings cause the Columbian Exchange, they were buffeted by its currents—a convulsion within our own species that is the subject of this section of the book.