And When There Was No Crawdad to Be Found

The annals of the poor may be short and simple, but they need not remain so. The methodologies of social history, pioneered by the French Annalistes in the mid-twentieth century, have uncovered considerable details about the lives of rural peasants, urban workers, and other people who left few formal written records. Other professional disciplines can also add to our knowledge of the marginalized. Archaeologists and genetic specialists in Milan, for example, have spent the last decade and a half studying a unique historical archive: a crypt beneath the city’s old hospital for the poor, the Ca’Grande.

From 1637 to 1697, the hospital staff deposited the corpses of those who had died in their care - tens of thousands of people - in brick vaults beneath a nearby church. The depositors hoped the human remains would decay quickly. They hoped in vain. The city sewer lines ran near the vaults, creating a cold, humid atmosphere that inhibited decomposition. The bodies liquified, saponified, or putrified, creating a smell so intense that the hospital managers finally sealed the vaults.

 

Horsetail grass. Any port in a storm.

A few centuries later, modern forensic researchers realized that the Ca’Grande patients’ remains could reveal a great deal about their personal lives, particularly their dietary and medical histories. Since 2010 they have exhumed and analyzed about one-tenth of the bones and teeth in the vaults. The patients’ skeletons reveal that many of them were afflicted with tuberculosis and syphilis. Their dental plaque, meanwhile, reveals widespread malnourishment. Most ate a diet comprised entirely of grain; some ate horsetail grass, a northern-Italian famine food. Some were apparently willing to eat potatoes, a new import from South America that many other Europeans avoided. That many potato-eaters wound up dying (of other causes) in hospital would not have recommended the crop to their neighbors.

Particular surprises came from analysis of brain tissue clinging to some of the skulls. Some of the tissue contained a variety of opioids, end products of the opium that some patients took for pain relief. In a few cases the researchers found telltale evidence of consumption of another South American import: coca leaf. Scholars had no previous evidence of coca or cocaine consumption in Europe prior to the late nineteenth century, so this was quite a find. If this mild stimulant was in use in Milan, moreover, other workmen probably consumed it in other southern European cities. Writers of historical fiction who want to create a seventeenth-century analogue of Sherlock Holmes take note: if you place your fictional detective in the right city, you don’t have to deprive him of his favorite seven percent solution. 

Sic transit: Alfred Crosby's Intellectual Legacy

I was sorry to hear of the recent death of Alfred Crosby (1931-2018), professor emeritus at the University of Texas and one of the more influential historians of the past half-century. Crosby’s principal claim to fame was his authorship of The Columbian Exchange (1972), a study of the transfer of organisms between the Eastern and Western Hemispheres that became a foundational text in colonial and environmental history. Crosby’s book was so far ahead of its time that he could not find a university press willing to publish it and had to sign with Greenwood, an obscure independent academic publisher. Greenwood and Crosby had the last laugh, as Columbian Exchange went on to sell more than 80,000 copies (about 100 times as many as the typical academic book) in the next quarter-century.

Crosby observed that the word “exchange” in his title misled readers somewhat. Most of the biological transfers he studied ran in one direction, from the Old World to the New. Europeans introduced to the Americans new plants, like wheat and peaches and Kentucky bluegrass; new animal species, like pigs and horses and cows (all of which flourished); tens of millions of human beings, most of whom, prior to 1860, came involuntarily from Africa; and new diseases like smallpox and typhoid, which reduced the indigenous American population by more than eighty percent. In three of these categories little flowed back to the Old World. Only two or three thousand Native Americans voyaged to Europe before 1800, almost no American animals adapted to Eurasian or African environments (apart from a few small mammals like the raccoon), and no American diseases, except possibly syphilis (and Crosby expressed skepticism about its alleged American origin), crossed the Atlantic from west to east. Plants proved the great exception: Eurasians and Africans slowly but steadily adopted high-yield American food crops like maize, potatoes, and cassava, along with such piquant or addictive newcomers as cacao, tobacco, tomatoes, and chilis. American cultivars increased the total food supply of Eurasia and helped sustain high population growth there,* even as the Native American population plummeted. Columbus and his successors set off not only a major biological exchange but a global demographic revolution.

Crosby followed up this seminal publication with two more works that Native Americanists and colonialists found (I think) equally important. "Virgin Soil Epidemics as a Factor in the Aboriginal Depopulation in America" (1976) asked why Eurasian diseases hit Native Americans with such ferocity, and found an answer in social dynamics. A "virgin-soil" illness, hitting a population with zero acquired immunity, sickens the entire community or region at once, leaving no-one well enough to take care of the sick. Hunger, dehydration, and cold kill many who would otherwise have a fighting chance at recovery. Ecological Imperialism (1986) extended Crosby's observation about the imbalanced character of the Columbian Exchange. In this later book he argued that the success of European colonial ventures in the "Neo-Europes," the high-latitude settler-colonial societies like Australia and the United States, depended chiefly on the organisms that the colonists brought with them, their "portmanteau biota" of livestock, weeds, and pathogens. European imperialism owed its conquests to biology, not technology or culture.**

Alfred Crosby continued publishing into his seventies. His last three books studied quantitative knowledge, projectile weapons, and energy technology, discussing these highly-technical subjects in clear, crisp, often witty prose. That he kept his mind and his writing sharp during the onset of Parkinson's Disease showed a grace and endurance most of us can only hope to attain. For my part, I will account myself very successful indeed if I can write a book even one-tenth as influential as Columbian Exchange. And I am sorry I never had a chance to meet the maestro in person.

* Europe's population doubled and China's population tripled between 1650 and 1800. 

** Ecological Imperialism won an audience outside of History departments and well beyond the academy. I first heard of the book during a panel on world-building at the 1989 World Science Fiction Convention.

Achtung! Waschbaeren!

Previously on this blog, I have referred to Alfred Crosby's concept of the Columbian Exchange - the exchange of plants, animals, microorganisms, and humans between the Old World and the New that accompanied and followed Columbus's voyages. As Crosby observed, the transfer of species was almost entirely one-way: Eurasia and Africa contributed far more people, pathogens, and animals to the Americas than the reverse. The only American species to flourish in the Old World were domestic crop plants - maize, potatoes, and cassava in particular - one disease organism, treponema (which causes syphilis), and a few small animals, such as gray squirrels.

To the last group, we may now add one of the most distinctive small American mammals, the raccoon. Introduced to Germany during World War Two, procyon lotor is now flourishing in that nation's woods and cities. This article, while a bit old, tells the story - and features the best headline I've seen since I started this weblog. This article, from May 2007, observes that many Germans have adopted raccoons, or "wash-bears," as pets (one 80-year-old woman had 50 of them in her home), and that they have now spread into France and Belgium and as far east as Chechnya. It now seems only a matter of time before the Nazi raccoon invasion of Britain begins.

The Cows, and Coming Home

This week (Saturday the 23rd) marks the 200th anniversary of the return of the Lewis & Clark expedition. Earlier in the month the Corps of Discovery passed several traders' pirogues heading up the Missouri River, but on September 20th, 1806 -- two centuries ago today -- they encountered their first definite sign of European settlement in two years: cattle. "We saw some cows on the bank," William Clark reported, "which was a joyful sight to the party and caused a shout to be raised for joy." (William Bakeless, The Journals of Lewis and Clark, 382.)

It may seem a comical episode, but it also helps affirm Alfred Crosby's observation that the most important feature of early modern European expansion was the "portmanteau biota" Europeans brought with them: cattle, sheep, horses, swine, rabbits, wheat, grapes, peaches, various weed species, and epidemic diseases like smallpox. These plants, animals, and microbes provided European colonists with larger and more reliable supplies of food, fiber, and animal energy than their indigenous competitors, not to mention a biological arsenal (however inadvertantly used) that was far more lethal than Europeans' muskets and artillery. William Clark didn't mention all this in his journal entry, of course, but he did suggest that the most characteristic sound of Euro-American civilization in 1806 was not the pealing of church bells or the clanking of steam engines, but rather the mooing of American settlers' bovine vanguard.

Voyagers to the East: Indians in Europe, Part I

Last semester my students and I were discussing Alfred Crosby's term "Columbian Exchange," first used in his 1972 book describing the exchange of people, animals, plants and diseases between the Old World (Eurasia and Africa) and the Americas. We observed that most of these exchanges were one-way: the spread of diseases and domestic animals from Europe to the Americas far outweighed the spread of American microbes and animals to the rest of the world. The exchange of people was the most uneven: about 15 million people journeyed from Africa and Europe to the Americas between 1492 and 1850, while few Native Americans made the journey in the other direction.

It occurred to me that there were so few Indian travelers to Europe that it might be possible to write accounts of nearly all of those for whom we have records, and to construct a preliminary census. So today's post will be the first of a series on these "voyagers to the east" and their historical significance.

Christopher Columbus, of course, bears the responsibility for starting the Columbian Exchange, and it was he who first carried Native American travelers to Europe. On November 11, 1492, while sailing along the coast of Cuba, the navigator decided to take several Taino Indians to Spain so that they could learn the Spanish language and religion, and act as translators and missionaries to their people. Language and faith would serve as tools of empire, making the peoples of the West Indies easier to govern and exploit, though Columbus opined in his diary that the Tainos were already so "timid" and "trusting" that they were nearly ready-made servants. (Robert Fuson, trans., The Log of Christopher Columbus [Camden, Maine: International Marine Publishing, 1987], pp. 106-107.) "They are suitable to be governed and to be made to work and sow and...to build villages and be taught to wear clothing and observe our customs." (ibid, 138)

Columbus apprehended 20 people -- ten men, seven women, a boy and two girls -- from Taino villages in Cuba and Hispaniola. He took women and children along in order to ensure the good behavior of the men, for all-male groups tended, in his experience, to be dispirited and unruly. Columbus had done this sort of thing before: in the 1480s he took several men from the Guinea coast of western Africa to Portugal in order to train them as translators. The absence of women in the African group, however, had made the men ill-tempered. (ibid, 107)

Most of the Tainos who returned with Columbus after his first voyage were involuntary passengers. Three men whom the captain picked up on Cuba escaped before Columbus left the Indies. One man, the father of the three children, volunteered to go, doubtless because his children were hostages. There may have been other volunteers, but the captain did not make note of it, which tells us a great deal about his attitude toward Indians. Columbus notes in his log that the Indians on his ships did try to make the best of their situation by fishing or swimming when they got the chance (pp. 110, 179).

Columbus presented at least six of his passengers to King Ferdinand and Queen Isabella when he arrived back in Spain in the spring of 1493, but as to whether any became translators or Christians, or ever returned to the Western Hemisphere, he does not say. We may guess that at some of the seventeen Indian voyagers perished of disease en route or in Europe, beginning a long and grim story.


For the next entry in this series, click here.