Precolonial North American History: Early Spanish forays into the Southeast

In the early 1500s, having struck it rich with the Incas and Aztecs, the Spanish began to probe Florida and Southeastern North America for more gold. In these excursions, they learned much about the geography of the New World and its indigenous people but uncovered little material wealth. The Amerindians proved to be farmers and hunter gatherers, not empire builders. Florida and the Southeast never became more than a backwater region for Spain and was important mostly as a strategic buffer between New Spain, its Caribbean colonies, and the burgeoning English colonies to the north.

Ponce de Leon was the first European to land on Florida in 1513, and he charted the Atlantic coast down to the Florida Keys and north along the Gulf Coast. In 1521, he sailed from Cuba with 200 men in two ships to establish a colony on the southwest coast of the Florida peninsula, but vicious attacks from the local Calusa forced the colonists to flee. In one of the skirmishes, Ponce de León was wounded in his thigh and later died from the wound.

In 1525 Lucas Vázquez de Ayllón set out with six ships carrying 700 colonists to establish a settlement at Sapelo Sound, Georgia, which he called San Miguel de Gualdape. They landed too late to plant crops and were not able to get help from the local Mississippians. After only three months and the death of Ayllón, the remaining 150 survivors abandoned the colony and fled back to Spain.

Next came Panfilo de Narváez who tried to settle the Gulf Coast of Florida in 1527. After landing and setting out for the interior to find food and gold, the local people attacked them and they were forced to retreat back to the coast, where they built boats and sailed westward and then traveled on foot across Texas and Northern Mexico to New Spain. De Narvaez died on route and only four members of his party made it back alive, after wandering through the Southwestern US and northern Mexico for eight years.

Hernando de Soto led an invasion force for four years and four months (1539 – 1543) marching through Florida, South Carolina, North Carolina, and Tennessee, before heading southwest through the northwestern corner of Georgia into central Alabama and down the Mississippi River. They traveled from one indigenous community to another following local trails and camping near villages where stores of maize could be found. They discovered many rich agricultural societies but little gold and silver.

Pedro Menéndez de Aviles was sent by King Philip II in 1565 to explore the coast of Florida, disrupt any French settlements he found, and build a permanent outpost. He and his solders established the first permanent city of European origin in North America at St. Augustine and cleared the area of French intruders. He then tried to seal Spain’s hold on the Southeast by founding a series of forts and settlements at every deep water port across the region. This expansion proved ephemeral as subsequent famines, mutinies, and Indian warfare gradually whittled the Spanish presence back to Saint Augustine.

A group of Jesuits who had accompanied Aviles to Florida opened several missions along the southeastern coast and in the interior of Florida, but these efforts ultimately failed in 1572 due to hostilities with the local Amerindians. Franciscans came the following year to resume the effort and built several missions, but they too faced considerable rebellion and native intransigence, and had only limited success.

Illustration: 17th century Spanish engraving (colored) of Juan Ponce de León. Wikipedia

Bibliography:

Hoffman, P. E. (1990) A New Andalucia and a Way to the Orient: The American Southeast during the Sixteenth Century. Louisiana State University Press, Baton Rouge

Hudson, C. (1997) Knights of Spain, Warriors of the Sun: Hernando de Soto and the South’s Ancient Chiefdoms. Athens, University of Georgia Press.

Lockhart, J. and Stuart B. Schwartz, S. B. (1983) Early Latin America: A History of Colonial Spanish America and Brazil. Cambridge University Press

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Precolonial North American History: The great sassafras hunt of Martin Pring

In the early 1600’s, it was believed that Sassafras was a wonder drug that could cure just about anything, slow old age, help as a pain reliever, remove kidney stones, and prevent colds. It became so popular that by the mid 1600’s it was Americas’ number two export to Europe, second only to tobacco.

The first expedition to the New World for sassafras was led by Captain Martin Pring in 1602. It was sponsored by the mayor, alderman and merchants of Bristol, including the famous historian, Richard Hakluyt. They obtained their license from Sir Walter Raleigh, who had been granted a royal charter “to explore, colonize and rule any remote, heathen and barbarous lands, countries and territories, not actually possessed of any Christian Prince or inhabited by Christian People”.

Two ships made the journey – the Speedwell, a 60-ton vessel commanded by Pring with a crew of 30 and the Discoverer, a 26-ton vessel with 13 men captained by William Browne and Robert Salterne. They arrived at Penobscot Bay, Maine in June 1603 and then followed the coast south to the mouth of Piscataqua River, where they disembarked and found little sassafras. They sailed further south and anchored at the mouth of Pamet River, near Cape Cod where they discovered abundant supplies of sassafras. Here they set up camp and built a small barricade to protect them from possible attack from the local Wampanoag.

Initially, they had numerous friendly encounters with the local Wampanoag. Pring wrote in his account of the voyage (Burrage, 1906): “During our abode on shore, the people of the country came to our men sometimes ten, twenty, forty or three­ score, and at one time one hundred and twenty at once. We used them kindly and gave them diverse sorts of our meanest merchandise.  They did eat peas and beans with our men. Became We had a youth in our company that could play upon a Gittern [Medieval bowl lute], in whose homely music they took great delight … and danced twenty in a Ring, and the Gittern in the midst of them, using many Savage gestures, singing lo, la, lo, la, la, lo: him that first brake the ring, the rest would knock and cry out upon.“

Not all the early encounters were congenial; however, as Pring and his crew enjoyed tormenting the locals with their two mastiffs.  “We carried with us from Bristol two excellent Mastiffs, of whom the Indians were more afraid, than of twenty of our men”.  When Pring and his crew became bored “we would let loose the Mastiffs, and suddenly with outcry’s they would flee away.”

By the end of July, the crew had finished loading the Discover “with as much Sassafrass as we thought sufficient”and Pring sent it home. The crew then began filling the hold of the Speedwell when all hell broke loose. Several men in their barricade were confronted by “about seven score Savages armed with their bows and Arrows” and their ship was attacked by a large force of warriors. The men in the barricade were lucky to have the two mastiffs who cleared a path back to the ship through the Wampanoag. Pring immediately set sail for England and as they left, the Wampanoag set the woods on fire and “they came down to the shore in great number, very near two hundred by our estimation.”

Pring didn’t record what they had done to wear out their welcome, but the attack may have been a last ditch effort by the Wampanoag to get as much from the English as they could before they left. It is also possible that the Wampanoag were reacting to Pring snatching some captives to take back to England, a common practice among European explorers at that time.  We will never know.

Bibliography

Burrage, H. S. (ed.) (1906) Early English and French voyages 1534-1608, Chiefly from Hakluyt. In: Original Narratives of early American History, Jameson J. F. (ed.) Charles Scribner’s Sons, New York

Morison, Samuel Eliot (1971). European discovery of America: The Northern voyages.Oxford University Press.

Illustration – Engraving of Pring’s fortification and surrounding Ameridians from 1706 Dutch translation of the account from Purchas.

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Age of Discovery: Portuguese discovery and conquest of Ceylon (Sri Lanka)

When the Portuguese began their conquest of the Indian Ocean, an important stopover for Indian, Arab and Chinese merchants was Ceylon, where the world’s finest cinnamon could be obtained along with gems, pearls, ivory, elephants, turtle shells and cloth.  Ships from across the eastern world came to Ceylon for its native products and goods brought to it from other countries.  

Tomé Pires, the Portuguese chronicler of Indian Ocean trade in the 15^th century, described the island as: “The beautiful island of Ceylon … is large; it must be three hundred leagues in circumference, much longer than it is wide. It is very populous; it has many towns and large houses of prayer, with copper pillars, and with roofs covered with lead and copper … It has all kinds of precious stones, except diamonds, emeralds, turquoises … It has a great abundance of elephants and ivory; it has cinnamon … Ceylon trades elephants, cinnamon, ivory and areca [palm nuts] with the whole of the Choromandel and Bengal, [and] Pulicat, taking rice, white sandalwood, seedpearls, cloth and other merchandise in return. Rice, silver, copper, a little quicksilver, rosewater, white sandal-dise of wood and Cambay cloths “(Cortesão, 1944, p. 86).

The first European to visit Ceylon was Lourenço Almeida, son of the first viceroy of India – Francesco de Almeida. He bumped into Ceylon on his way to the Maldives from Malacca seeking Arab ships to plunder and destroy. Lourenço made the most of his accidental landing and took on a load of pepper. Surprisingly he did not take on much cinnamon, probably because the bales of cinnamon had to be handled and stowed carefully, while pepper could simply be poured into every available space of the ship.

When Almeida blew into Ceylon in 1505, there were three kingdoms there, Kotte in the Southwest ruled by Vijayabahu VI (1445 – 1521), Kandy in the west ruled by Sēnasammata Vikramabāhu (1469-1511), and Jaffna in the northeast ruled by Jayabahu II (1469-1511). Trade was dominated by a collection of Arab, Indian, Malay, and Chinese merchants, who transported a wide spectrum of cargo, from spices to elephants. The Portuguese first contact was with Kotte, whose King gave them favorable trade concessions in 1518 and allowed them to build a fort in his capitol at Colombo.

In 1521, the three sons of the King of Kotte had him assassinated, then partitioned the kingdom among themselves and commenced fighting. The eldest, Bhuvanaikabahu, took control of the north-western half of Kotte; another, Pararajasinghe, became the ruler of Raigama in the southern quarter of the old kingdom; and the third, Mayadunne, became king of Sitawaka in the east. Bhuvanaikabahu reached out to the Portuguese to help maintain and build his kingdom, while Mayadunne allied himself with the powerful Muslim Zamorin of Calicut, India. He became a fierce opponent of the Portuguese and dedicated his life to overthrowing Bhuvanaikabahu, to preserve the independence of Ceylon. The other brother Pararajasinghe kept Raigama neutral.

Over time, Bhuvanaikabahu became more and more dependent on the Portuguese for his defense and in 1556 his heir – Dharmapala – was converted from Buddhism to Christianity by the Franciscan order of the Roman Catholic Church. When his conversion was announced there was a great public outcry and as a result, he was forced to rely even more on Portuguese protection. In 1580 the Portuguese convinced him to deed his kingdom to them and after his death, they took formal possession of it.

Mayadunne and his successor son Rajasinha were able to hold the Portuguese at bay on land for most of the 16^th century but were almost defenseless against Portuguese sea power. When Rajasinha died without a clear successor in 1593, his kingdom disintegrated and was absorbed by the Portuguese.

Mostly Hindu, Jaffna fought mightily against Catholic conversion and through most of the sixteenth century, the influence of the Portuguese remained minimal. However, in 1591 under the instigation of Christian missionaries, the Portuguese invaded and installed a puppet government in Jaffna. In 1619, the Portuguese undertook another expedition and fully annexed the kingdom.   

As the 16^th century ended, The Portuguese controlled most of the island, except the Central Highlands and the eastern coast of Kandy, where Vimaladharmasurya I now had control. The Portuguese were eager to establish hegemony across the entire island and fought long and hard against him. They suffered two humiliating defeats in the Battle of Danture in 1594 and the Battle of Balana in 1602, but ultimately were able to expand their control to the lower reaches of the Central Highlands and the east coast ports Trincomalee and Batticaloa.  

Illustration: Political map of Sri Lanka in early 17^th century. Based on Wikipedia content; original image by Nishadhi.

Bibliography

Cortesão, A. (tr.) (1944) The Suma Oriental of Tomé Pires and The Book of Francisco Rodriques. Hakluyt Society, Second Series No. LXXXIX. Digitized version from McGill University Library.

De Silva, K. M., & de Silva, K. M. (1981). A history of Sri Lanka. Univ of California Press.

Ferguson, D.  (1907) The discovery of Ceylon by the Portuguese in 1506. The Journal of the Ceylon Branch of the Royal Asiatic Society of Great Britain & Ireland 19(59), 284–385.

Gaur, A. (2015) Kandy: historical kingdom, Sri Lanka. Encyclopædia Britannica. Available at: https://www.britannica.com/place/Kandy-historical-kingdom-Sri-Lanka (accessed 28 January 2021).

Hancock, J. F. (2021) Spices, scents and silk: Catalysts of trade. CABI International. Wallingford, UK.

Pieris, P.E. and Naish, R.B. (1999) Ceylon and the Portuguese, 1505–1658. Asian Educational Services, New Delhi.

Sudharmawathei, J.M. (2017) Foreign trade relations in Sri Lanka in the ancient period: with special reference to the period from 6th century BC to 16th century AD. Humanities and Social Sciences Review 7, 191–200.

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Age of Discovery: Vasco da Gama discovers an unimagined world

For most of the Medieval ages, the Portuguese lusted for a piece of the spice trade coming from the East through the Venetians. In 1497, King João II decided the time was right and selected the nobleman Vasco da Gama to find the source of pepper, cloves, nutmeg and cinnamon. Da Gama was to follow the pathway pioneered by Bartolomeu Dias, who had learned to use the strong east winds of the mid-Atlantic to hurl himself and his crew around the African Cape of Good Hope into the Indian Ocean.   

Da Gama set off on 8 July 1497 with a squadron of four well-armed ships, three years of supplies and a store of cheap goods to trade with what was assumed would be unsophisticated natives. Unfortunately, instead of boomeranging directly around the Cape, da Gama got caught in the doldrums of the central Atlantic and did not make it around the Cape. After sailing for 95 days, he landed 125 miles north of it at St Helena Bay. 

Da Gama then headed down the rest of the west coast, travelled through the stormy seas around the Cape and passed the Great Fish River (Eastern Cape, South Africa) where Dias had previously anchored, before sailing into waters previously unknown to Europeans. Vasco da Gama’s first landing on the eastern coast of Africa was on Mozambique, in early March of 1498. At first, he had pleasant interactions with the local natives who were interested in trading for his cheap trinkets, but this atmosphere changed dramatically when he arrived at his first settlement of Muslim traders in Mozambique City. The local sultan was insulted by the poor quality of the brass pots, trinkets and clothing that he was offered and after a series of altercations, da Gama fled the city and continued north.

As da Gama moved up the coast, he was astonished to find a series of rich, sophisticated city states. What he had stumbled upon was the south-western periphery of the prosperous trade network that stretched all the way from Africa to India, down to Malaysia, and through the islands of Indonesia to China. He was moving into a largely Muslim world that was far more deeply layered and complex than the Portuguese had anticipated in their wildest dreams.  Da Gama also made the startling discovery that Muslim trading vessels were unarmed, a situation totally alien to Mediterranean traders who were heavily armed. Da Gama realized it would be easily to prey on any Muslim trading vessels he came upon, taking gold, silver, foodstuffs and hostages from the unarmed ships.

Da Gama finds India and returns

Da Gama made a brief stop at Mombasa where the locals proved hostile and then on 14 April he arrived at the friendlier port of Malindi, whose sultan was at war with Mombasa. Da Gama was able to acquire some trade goods there and most importantly, was provided with a Gujarati pilot who showed the Portuguese the way to India on the monsoon winds.

Vasco da Gama left Malindi for India on 24 April 1498 and arrived at Calicut less than a month later. Here he found a Hindu kingdom, ruled by the king of Calicut, the zamorin or samoothiri. When Da Gama showed the Zamorin the gifts that he had brought, they were immediately rejected, but after a tense, confusing audience with the Zamorin and shows of force on both sides, da Gama was allowed to do some trading, but the Zamorin made it clear that da Gama would pay customs duty, just like any other merchant.

A frustrated da Gama left Calicut on 20 September 1498, ignoring local warnings that the monsoons had not yet turned. His ships subsequently became trapped at sea by still winds and when they did finally reach Malindi 132 days later, his sailors were again in terrible shape with scurvy. So many had died that da Gama could no longer man all of his remaining ships and the leakiest was scuttled. His two remaining ships rounded the Cape of Good Hope with little incident and reached the western coast of Africa on 25 April 1499. Here the ships got separated and headed to Portugal by different routes. Vasco da Gama stayed behind with his dying brother on Cape Verde for about a month and was the last to arrive in Lisbon in early September. 

Vasco da Gama was given a hero’s welcome by the King for opening the sea route to India. His success had come at a great cost in human lives, but the small quantities of spices he had brought back signaled great future profits for the crown.

Bibliography

Crowley, R. (2015) Conquerors: How Portugal Forged the First Global Empire. Random House, New York.

Hancock, J. F. (2021) Spices, Scents and Silk: Catalysts of trade. CABI, Waddingford, Great Britain

Lunde, P. (2005) The coming of the Portuguese. Aramco World: Arab and Islamic Cultures and Connections 56(4). Available at: https://archive.aramcoworld.com/issue/200504/the.coming.of.the.portuguese.htm

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US History: Ethnic cleansing and slavery in the Cotton Kingdom

Cotton growing in the New World really began to pick up steam in the last quarter of the 17th century when the British cotton mills started to roll out significant amounts of cotton yarn and textiles during the Industrial revolution. As the British factories insatiable need for raw cotton continued to grow, US cotton production keep pace by expanding from the original British colonies of South Carolina, Virginia and Georgia into the vast, rich Mississippi Delta.  

To support this expansion, the Native American occupants were ruthlessly eliminated, and the huge, now surplus slave populations of the southeastern states were relocated. As Walter Johnson describes it, “White privilege on an unprecedented scale million enslaved people were forcefully redistributed across hundreds of miles in a vast domestic slave trade was wrung from the lands of the Choctaw, the Creek, and the Chickasaw and from the bodies of the enslaved people brought to replace them”.

It was largely Andrew Jackson who directed the ethnic cleansing of the southeastern quarter of the United States. From 1817 to 1840 he supervised the depopulation of the region, first as a general in the US army, then as military governor of Florida and finally as President of the United Sates. He started the process with an illegal war with the Spanish in Florida, then took on the Seminole Nation, and moved steadily west subjugating the Chickasaw, Choctaw and Cherokee. All tribes suffered the same fate – an offer of “equal land”, which ultimately became a forced relocation to the Indian Territories (Oklahoma). Indian leaders had no other option after protracted; running battles had left their tribal strength weakened to the point of certain defeat. Thousands died on route in “trails of tears”. 

As the Native Americans were driven out, the cotton plantations moved in. Cotton profits spurred westward expansion, as planters sought new opportunities and rich soils to replace their exhausted ones.  The Mississippi Delta also had superior inland waterways compared to Georgia, Virginia and South Carolina. The path to southern aristocracy was to own both land and slaves, and cotton provided the profits to obtain more and more of both. By the end of the antebellum period, there were more millionaires per capita in the Mississippi Valley than anywhere else in the US.

To provide the Cotton Kingdoms work force, probably a million enslaved people were forcefully redistributed across hundreds of miles in a vast domestic slave trade. Slavery was given an unfortunate rebirth. The domestic slave trade began with individual speculators who would purchase slaves on credit in Virginia and Maryland, and then march them, chained wrist to wrist, first to Georgia and later to Louisiana, Mississippi and Alabama. Soon, huge slave trading firms emerged in the South with fine offices, show rooms and jails where up to a 100 slaves could be kept captive.

Major slave trade routes developed: coastal ones from Upper South ports to New Orleans and overland ones starting in New Jersey and fanning out through from places like Richmond, Virginia and Fayetteville North Carolina to Florence, Alabama and Jacksonville, Mississippi.  Agents were hired to scour the countryside for available human chattel. At least half of the slave purchases broke up families. Slaves were classified by their sex, age and condition; their hands were considered to be especially important. Long, nimble fingers were thought to be best for the picking of cotton.

By 1850, about half of the total US cotton crop was grown by slaves in just three states, Alabama, Mississippi and Louisiana.  In 1800, there were 100,000 slaves in what is now Mississippi and Louisiana, 250,000 in 1840 and 750,000 in 1860. Rich forests had been cleared to make way for cotton growing and abandoned when the soil was exhausted. Most of the plantations were large scale operations – an optimal size was considered to be 1,000 to 1,500 acres, with 75 to 100 slaves.  Cotton growing was unique from the other plantation crops, in that only the raw product was produced; there was no processing or refining. Most food and provisions were bought and shipped from the north, as cotton was too profitable to grow anything else.

Illustration: “Trail of tears”. The Granger Collection, New York.

Adapted from: Hancock, J. (2016) Plantation Crops: Power and plunder, Evolution and Exploitation. Routledge, London and New York

Literature cited: Johnson, W. 2013. River of dark dreams, Slavery and empire in the cotton kingdom. The Belknap Press of Harvard University. Cambridge, MA.

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Early Modern: The search for a Northwest Passage to China

Throughout the 16^th and early 17^th century, the Europeans made many futile attempts to find a Northwest Passage through North America to the spices of China.

The first to head towards coastal North America was Venetian John Cabot commissioned by Henry VII of England. He made two trips in 1497 and 1498 of which only sketchy details exist. In his first trip he landed in southern Labrador, the island of Newfoundland or Cape Breton Island. On his second trip, he and his crew likely died at sea trying to advance further.

Frenchman Jacques Cartier was next to search for the Northwest Passage in three expeditions between 1534 and 1542. In his first voyage, he travelled along the west coast of Newfoundland, discovered Prince Edward Island and explored the Gulf of St Lawrence. He returned with great tales of potential riches and two captive Iroquois, being rewarded with another mission with more ships and a bigger crew. Guided by the two Indians, he sailed this time up the St Lawrence River as far as the island of Montreal, where rapids prevented him from going any further. There he spent a difficult, cold winter and many of his men died of scurvy before it was safe to return.

In 1541 Cartier was sent on a third mission, this time to support the nobleman, Jean-François de La Rocque de Roberval, in establishing a French colony. He left a year ahead of the colonists to continue his quest for riches, found minerals that he thought contained gold and diamonds and overwintered in Quebec, again greatly suffering from the cold. In the spring he fled home without waiting for the colonists, only to find that his stash of gold and diamonds was worthless ‘fool’s gold’.

In 1576, Englishman Martin Frobisher set sail for North America in the first of three expeditions to find the fabled Northwest Passage. During his first trip, he reached Labrador and Baffin Island and returned home convinced that North America was a land rich in gold. Based on that promise he got royal backing for two more missions in 1577 and 1578. On these he spent most of his time looking for precious metals and attempted to start one ill-fated settlement. When he returned empty-handed for the third time, he lost his financial backing.

Englishman John Davis was next to get royal support to search for the Northwest Passage, leading three missions between 1585 and 1587. In his first he bumped into the icebound east shore of Greenland, headed south, rounded Cape Farewell, and then sailed northwards along the coast of western Greenland. He then turned west in what he thought was the direction of China and sailed for some distance up Cumberland Sound before turning back. In his other two missions he spent a lot of time exploring the coast of Greenland and never got much further than Baffin Bay.

Henry Hudson undertook four major expeditions in search of a passage from Europe to the Orient. In 1607, he went east from England  in search of an ice-free sea that would lead to China. He was stopped by ice near the Svalbard archipelago. A year later, he got as far as the islands of Novaya Zemlya before being set upon by ice fields. In 1609, he set out on another mission east but this time when he was stopped by ice, he decided to sail west towards the New World rather than return home. He found a large waterway that we now call the Hudson River, which he followed as far Albany before realizing it was not his ticket to the Pacific.

In his last expedition in 1610, the British East India Company commissioned him to try going further north in another search for the fabled Northwest Passage. He sailed through the strait that now bears his name and into the Hudson Bay where he explored its southern regions and then spent months sailing aimlessly through its great expanse. As winter approached, with no clear route to the Pacific in sight, Hudson’s starving crew mutinied and put the explorer, his son and all hands sick with scurvy into a small lifeboat and set them adrift. The crew made it back to England, but Hudson was never heard from again.

Adapted from: Hancock, J.F. (2021) Chapter 17. Spices, scents and silk: Catalysts of trade. CABI, Wallingford, UK

Illustration: The Voyages of Henry Hudson (Credit: Jon Platek) The Mariners Museum and Park

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Columbian Exchange: World cotton production

Remarkably, four different cotton species were domesticated at about the same time (5,500 to 6,000 years ago) at several distant corners of the earth. In the New World, Sea Island cotton (G. barbadense) was first farmed in central-coastal Peru and Upland cotton (G. hirsutum) in the Tehuacan Valley of Mesoamerica. Both cottons were native to these areas. In the Old World, humans first began growing tree cotton (G. arboretum) and Levant cotton (G. herbaceum) in India. Tree cotton was native to India but Levant cotton originated in eastern Africa and must have been introduced by traders in antiquity. 

When the first Europeans arrived in the western hemisphere, almost the same spinning and weaving technologies were being used across both the Old and New Worlds. Columbus found the native Taino’s to be quite adept in cotton growing and textile manufacturing, and by his arrival, G. barbadense was a common dooryard garden plant throughout the Caribbean. When the Spanish explorers arrived in Mexico and South America in the 16th centuries, they also discovered that the Aztecs and Incas were producing cotton textiles from G. hirsutum. These early explorers found a prehistoric cotton belt stretching from the southwestern US, through Mexico, Central and South America to the Caribbean.

In the 1500s, the Spanish and Portuguese traders introduced G. barbadense and G. hirsutum into Spain, Africa and India, but their cultivation did not take hold in a major way until centuries later. Cotton was initially much more important in their American colonies. The Europeans first made a profit growing New World cottons in the Caribbean, beginning in Barbados (1630) and then Jamacia (1660).  Cotton production in the West Indies was dwarfed by sugar production but gained a toehold as a means of diversification.

Cotton was also introduced into the Carolina colonies of North America in the 1600s. The first cottons widely grown there were “Sea Island” types of G. barbadense imported from the West Indies (Stephens, 1976). These Sea Island cottons may have been introduced into Barbados from Peru in the early 1600s. Speculation abounds, but it is possible that the Sea Island cottons hybridized with local wild upland types of G. hirsutum before they found their way to the US. The original Sea Island cottons grown in the West Indies flowered only when days were short, while those grown in South Carolina and Georgia have  the day-neutral flowering trait found in the upland types. Feral races of both types can still be found in the West Indies. 

Cotton growing in the New World really began to pick up steam in the last quarter of the 17th century, when the British cotton mills began to roll out significant amounts of cotton yarn and textiles. The West Indies and Brazil were the first major suppliers of raw cotton to England, with Jamaica leading the way. The southeastern US took command in 1800, producing about 50% of the cotton that fed the British mills. By 1820, this proportion had risen to about 80%, where it remained until the Civil War. The West Indies had all but abandoned cotton growing by 1835 and Brazil was reduced to a minor player by that time.   

As the British factories insatiable need for raw cotton grew, US cotton production keep pace by expanding from the original British colonies of South Carolina, Virginia and Georgia into the vast, rich Mississippi Delta. To support this expansion, the Native American occupants were ruthlessly eliminated, and the huge, now surplus slave populations of the southeastern states were relocated. To provide the Cotton Kingdoms work force, probably a million enslaved people were forcefully redistributed across hundreds of miles from the southeastern US in a vast domestic slave trade. 

With the western expansion of cotton growing in the US came a great change in the types of cotton grown. In the late 1700s, in the Carolinas and Georgia, the Sea Island Cottons were cultivated. These were not particularly high yielding, but had exceptionally long staples that could be pulled away from the seeds with relative ease. Unfortunately, they were not well adapted to the climate of the Mississippi Delta, suffering from frosts and the prevalent saline soils. Much higher yielding in the Deep South were the Mexican Upland varieties of G. hirsutum that had been introduced in the 1700s.

By the mid-1800s, most of the worlds raw cotton was produced in the US. This dominance came crashing down in 1862 with the advent of the Civil War. The great textile mills of Europe were forced to search for new sources of cotton, and Egypt, India and Brazil took up much of the slack. The Indians continued to produce their cotton from G. arboretum, whilethe Brazilian and Egyptian Industries relied on G. barbadense.What came to be called “Egyptian Cotton” was based on 19^th century hybrids of introduced Sea Island types and old perennial forms of G. barbadense.

After the Civil War, the US regained its prominence in cotton production, although India and Brazil remained strong throughout the 19^th century. China became a force in the 20^th century.  Gossypium hirsutum now represents almost all of the worldwide acreage, comprising about 95% of the world’s crop. Gossypium barbadense accounts for all but 1% of the rest.

Illustration: Currier & Ives’ “A Cotton Plantation on the Mississippi”

Source: Hancock, J.F. (2016) Plantation Crops, Plunder and Power: Evolution and Exploitation. Routledge

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Columbian Exchange: The Portuguese colonization of the Americas

The emergence of a Portuguese empire in the Americas came about much differently than the Spanish one. First, Brazil was discovered by accident rather than intent. In 1498, Vasco da Gama sailed from Portugal around the southern tip of Africa to India, achieving what Columbus had hoped to accomplish, establishing an overseas route between Europe and Asia. He was able to boomerang around the Cape of Good Hope by sailing west into the Atlantic Ocean and letting the westerly winds catapult him. In 1500, Pedro Alvares Cabral set out to replicate da Gama’s journey, but veered too deeply west into the Atlantic and bumped into the shores of Brazil. He was able to continue to India, but not before taking a few days to explore and send a ship back to Portugal to inform the King of his discovery.

Second, the Portuguese focus on Brazil was initially much less than that of the Spanish on the rest of the Americas. They initially saw Brazil as more of a trading post than a place to colonize. They were already heavily invested in the Indian Ocean trade. Between 1500 and 1530, they deployed a few missions to chart the coast and obtain brazilwood, but at the same time sent dozens of expeditions to eastern Africa, India and Indonesia for trade.

Third, instead of finding a wealthy, dense and organized society, they discovered a largely undeveloped, sparse, and mostly nomadic people. There was not an advanced civilization with precious metals for the taking, or a social organization that could provide steady tribute. Instead, they found a society of mostly hunter–gatherers who employed slash–and–burn agriculture; they had no great cities and no domestic animals. The local people, the Tupi, were far less hierarchical and organized than the Aztecs, Inca and Maya and offered no great civilization to conquer and subjugate.  The Portuguese came to view Brazil as a place for trading stations and plantations, not empire building.

The economy of Brazil would go through two major stages under Portuguese rule, starting with the dyewood trade, which was based on the tropical hardwood, Brazilwood. To obtain it, they largely relied on the native Tupi. In the early stages of trade, the Tupi were satisfied with cheap gewgaws, but this barter system very soon began to collapse, and by the 1530s the Amerindian demand had shifted from cheap trinkets to much more expensive firearms and ironware. The Portuguese dependence on native willingness to trade became a vulnerability, greatly increasing the cost to obtain Brazilwood.

Over time, the Portuguese crown realized that it must take over possession of the land to maximize its colonies profitability. The focus of the Portuguese efforts came to revolve around the establishment of plantations that generated products that could be sold for a profit in Europe.  First came sugar, and then cocoa and coffee. Sugarcane was grown along the coast from about five degrees south latitude to about twenty-two degrees (near Rio de Janeiro), but the bulk of the sugar was produced in the northeast. The first cocoa was cultivated by the Jesuits in their missionary gardens in the colonial capital city, Salvador de Bahia in the second half of the 17^th century along with sugarcane. In 1679, King Pedro II issued a royal directive that encouraged all Brazilian landowners to plant cacao trees on their property and the first coca plantations were begun in southern Bahia. Cacao cultivation soon became of foremost economic importance to Bahia and Amazonia in equatorial Brazil, both under Portuguese colonial and, after 1823, Brazilian independent rule. Coffee came to northeastern Brazil in 1723, and by the mid-1800s it had taken over the coastal and upland regions around Rio de Janeiro and Sao Paulo. From there, the coffee frontier moved westward.

The Portuguese started out trying to use the Tupi as the labor force on their plantations, but this proved to be a failure. The Tupi resisted mightily to the routine, sedentary lifestyle of farming and were particularly uncooperative slaves, finding it relatively easy to run away and hide in the dense forest. The Portuguese solution to this labor problem was to turn to African slavery, a system they had already employed in their Atlantic sugar plantations off the coast of Africa.

The economy of Brazil during the colonial period came to rely totally on African slaves. By the mid-1500s, the sugar plantations of Brazil were receiving regular shipments of slaves from the central coast of Africa. In 1600, there were between 13,000–15,000 enslaved Africans in Brazil and about half were working on Bahia’s sugar plantations. Bahia may have imported as many as 409,000 slaves from Africa between 1785 and 1852, 25 % from the Guinea-Bissau region of equatorial Africa.

Illustration: A painting of a slave market in Portuguese Brazil by Jean-Baptiste Debret from an original 19th-century engraving by Johann Moritz Rugendas.

For more histories of agriculture and trade: https://www.worldhistory.org/user/geneticsofberries

Columbian Exchange: New World crops in China

The population of China almost tripled from 130 million in 1500 to 400 million in 1900, accounting for approximately one-third of the whole world’s population growth (Chen and Kung, 2016). This population explosion was made possible by the arrival of three crops from the Americas – sweet potato from Amazonia, maize from Mexico and white potato from the Andes.

Until 1500, most people in China relied on rice and wheat as their staple crops. In the 1580 and 90s, China fell into a mini-ice age with widespread flooding destroying the great rice paddies of Fujin, Guangdong and Sichuan, resulting in famine everywhere. Remarkably, the relief would come from widespread planting of the sweet potato, the first crop from the Americas to have a major impact in China.

The sweet potato found its way into China in the early 1500s, when a merchant named Chen Zhenlong came across it in his contact with Spanish merchants in the Philippines. He bribed the Spanish for some vines which he smuggled into China by twisting them in ropes on his ship. He was caught by the Spanish authorities but was allowed through anyways and after planting his vines he found them to flourish.  Chen’s son later showed the sweet potato to the governor of Fujian and persuaded him to let the people try it for famine relief. It was a great success and spread across China rapidly, feeding multitudes in the chaos surrounding the fall of the Ming dynasty.

Maize was introduced to China in the 1500s from the Americas by three routes. The first was the Silk Road winding across Central Asia and the Pamir Mountains into Gansu, a province in northwest China. The second was through India and Myanmar into the southwestern province of Yunnan; and the third was by sea into the coastal province of Fujian in the south, brought in by Portuguese traders.

The initial diffusion of maize was extremely slow across China, but by 1750 its cultivation had spread across more than a third of the region north of the Yangtze River and over seven provinces in the south. The area covered by maize nearly doubled from 1651 – 1750 and doubled yet again over the next 150 years. By the turn of the twentieth century, maize was planted virtually everywhere in the country.

The Hakka people of China were instrumental in spreading maize and sweet potato in China. At the end of the 16^th century, as the population of China began to burgeon, many people were forced to migrate into the barren hills and mountains that had not supported traditional food production. In these environments resided the Hakka people, who were mocked as “pengmin” (shack people), although they were excellent horticulturalists and rented their land from the farmers in the fertile valleys below. The Hakka employed slash-and-burn agriculture, moving constantly northward as they sought new virgin lands. They ultimately came to reside in a 1,500-mile stretch of China’s southeast coastline from the hills of Fujian to the cliffs around the Huang He in the northwest.

Another crop from the Americas – potato – would also make major inroads into Chinese Agriculture, but not until maize and sweet potato had become well established. The potato didn’t arrive until 1640 in Formosa, 1700 in mainland China and wasn’t widely distributed across China until the mid-1800s during the colonial period. Early on, it was important only in cold, mountainous regions. Its wide adoption didn’t occur until the latter half of the nineteenth century, when population increases and a subsequent need to increase food production, coupled with greater peasant mobility, led to its rapid spread.

Taste preferences may have slowed the adoption of the potato in China versus the other New World staple crops, but it was more likely that there were simply fewer areas of China that it was well adapted. Only about 10% of the land in China was suitable for cropping the potato, compared to 20% for the sweet potato and over 55% for maize (Chen and Kung, 2016). This was opposite to the situation in Ireland – where the environment was much more suitable to planting the potato, than the other two New World staple crops.

Bibliography

Chen, S. and Kung, J.K. (2016) Of maize and men: the effect of a New World crop on population and economic growth in China. Journal of Economic Growth 21:71–99

Mann, C.C. (2011) 1493: Uncovering the New World Columbus created. Vintage Books, New Your.

Sauer, J.D. (1993) Historical Geography of crop plants.: A select roster. CRC Press, Boca Raton, FL.

Illustration:

For more histories of agriculture and trade: https://www.worldhistory.org/user/geneticsofberries

Columbian Exchange: With grains in her hair

There are two species of rice that were domesticated – Oryza sativa in Asia and O. glaberrima in west Africa. When the Atlantic slave-trade began in the early 1500s, African rice was planted along the equatorial coast of Africa from Senegal to Côte d’Ivoire (Ivory Coast) and inland all the way to Lake Chad. There were dense populations of Africans “thriving on the botanical achievements of their civilizations which, in addition to rice, had domesticated sorghum, millet and yams.” (Carey, 2004).

A long held oral tradition in Brazil claims that an African woman introduced rice to Brazil during the colonial period by hiding grains in her hair. The seeds are said to have escaped detection, were planted, and rice cultivation ultimately grew into a staple of the slaves. Regardless of whether the legend is true, the Portuguese slavers were likely responsible for the inadvertent introduction of rice to Brazil. They routinely purchased many of the African staples as provisions for the slave ships and decades of transatlantic slavery brought repeated opportunity for the enslaved to establish their dietary preferences in the American Atlantic.  On plantation provision grounds and in their individual garden plots, the slaves likely planted African domesticates alongside the indigenous food crops of the Amerindians.

Confirmation that rice was cultivated by slaves in Brazil is found in the ”Tratado descritivo do Brasil”, written between 1570–87 by a Bahian sugar planter, Gabriel Soares de Sousa. He described how slaves were growing rice in lowland swamps and drylands with ample rainfall. Similar references to rice cultivation abound over the next few decades as plantations spread throughout Brazil’s North-east. Sugar merchant and plantation owner Ambrosio Fernandes Brandão wrote in 1618 that rice cultivation had overtaken maize as the second-most consumed staple food after manioc.  

The early sugar plantations of Bahia in Brazil relied on African slaves brought from the Cape Verde Islands. In the account of Gabriel Soares de Sousa he also notes that rice arrived in Bahia on a ship from the Cape Verde Islands. Other records record that in 1530 a ship from the Cape Verde Islands heading for Brazil carried sugar cane cuttings, African yams, and seed rice. When the Portuguese settled the Cape Verde Islands, rice proved better adapted to the arid tropical climate than wheat and barley, the staple grains favored by them.

By the mid-1500s, the sugar plantations of Brazil were relying heavily on regular shipments of slaves from the Cape Verde islands and São Tomé on the coast of Africa, which had been settled by them and turned into huge sugar factories.  By 1600 there were between 13,000–15,000 enslaved Africans in Brazil and about half were working on Bahia’s sugar plantations. The Guinea-Bissau region of equatorial Africa accounted for at least 25 per cent of the slave population brought to the Spanish and Portuguese colonies during this period.

Rice was not the only African crop that became important in the first century of Brazil’s colonization. A Jesuit priest Jose´ de Anchieta recorded in 1560 that ‘from Guine´ there are many squashes and beans that are better than those from Portugal’. Other plants of African origin grown in the early plantation era included okra, pigeon peas, black-eyed peas, millet, sorghum, yams, the African oil palm, hibiscus, sorrel, pepper, tamarind, and castor bean (whose oil was used for lamps). “Many of these plants would give regional Brazilian dishes their distinctive taste, in a manner similar to the role of African dietary staples in the ‘soul food’ of the US South.” (Carney, 2004).

The movement of crops between Africa and Brazil through the slave trade was by no means a one-way street. There was a south Atlantic Columbian Exchange driven by the slave trade of the Portuguese. Both southern American cassava (manioc) and maize found their way to Africa and become critical staples to large swaths of the continent. Manioc flour was one of the main trade items used by Brazilians in exchange for African slaves in West Central Africa and by 1600, it was a common staple food in the West Central African coast areas dominated by the Portuguese. Maize was being grown by 1571 on the island of São Tomé and had spread to West Central Africa in the second half of the sixteenth century. In the early 17^th century, both cassava and maize had moved into the Congolese and Angolan markets. In a little more than a hundred years of the discovery of Brazil by the Portuguese, the crops of each were entrenched in the other.

Bibliography:

Carney, J. A. (2004). ‘With grains in her hair’: rice in colonial Brazil. Slavery & Abolition, 25(1): 1-27.

Freitas, F. (2019). The South Atlantic Columbian Exchange. Europe, 10: 1-12.

Map:

Overview of the slave trade out of Africa – 1500 to 1900. Source- Eltis D, Richardson D. 2010. Atlas of the Transatlantic Slave Trade. Yale University Pres