Tamed

by Alice Roberts

  The Dutch Tauros breeding programme started in 2008 with the explicit aim of creating something as close as possible to an aurochs, for release into wild reserves – to put back what has been lost: to resurrect the natural dynamics of ecosystems. They hope to have something very much like an aurochs, ready to be let loose, by 2025. It’s astonishing to think that large, wild cattle could soon be roaming the rewilded wilderness in Europe. The stately, reddish-brown, long-horned ur-oxen that we know from Ice Age cave paintings could be back in the landscape very soon.

  4

  MAIZE

  Zea mays mays

  In chalky, barren lands bordered

  by the sea, along

  the rocky Chilean coast,

  at times

  only your radiance

  reaches the empty

  table of the miner.

  Your light, your cornmeal, your hope pervades America’s solitudes …

  Pablo Neruda, ‘Ode to Maize’

  Gateway to a New World

  Maize, along with wheat and rice, is one of the most important crops in the world – a crucial source of food, fuel and fibres. And it’s grown in an astonishing variety of different places. When you choose plants for your garden – whatever those plants are – you might look for species or varieties that are naturally suited to the habitat. The garden may have clay or crumbly, humic soil; it might be cold and damp or hot and dry. Some plants will tend to do better than others in it. Even within a garden, some plants will do better in darker, cooler spots, while others will flourish against a south-facing wall.

  But maize, it seems, is not so difficult to please. It appears to be extraordinarily cosmopolitan. It’s the most geographically ubiquitous grain. In the Americas, it grows in fields in the south of Chile, forty degrees south of the equator – all the way up to fifty degrees north, in Canada. It thrives in the Andes, 3,400 metres above sea level – all the way down to the lowlands and coasts of the Caribbean. The key to maize’s global success surely lies in its prodigious diversity – in looks, habits and genes. But as a global crop, its history is incredibly difficult to disentangle. Although its worldwide expansion happened in just the last five hundred years, written sources are very vague, for instance, about the introduction of maize to Africa and Asia. DNA provides additional clues, but global trade and exchange have ensured that the genetic history of maize is a very tangled web. The globalisation of maize is intertwined with human history, following that ebb and flow – with voyages of discovery, trade routes stretching around the world, and the expansion and collapse of empires. But there’s one thread that is easy to pick out from this mesh: a distinct moment in time that would ensure the globalised future of maize.

  During the thirteenth century CE, Mongol emperor Genghis Khan and his successors carved out a huge territory for their Empire – stretching across Asia from the Pacific Ocean in the east to the Mediterranean Sea in the west. Nearly a century of aggressive expansion was followed by several decades of relative political stability: the Pax Mongolica, or ‘Mongol Peace’. During this time, trade routes between east and west were actively protected, and business flourished. Then it all began to fall apart. In 1259, Genghis’s grandson, Mongke, had died without a successor – and the great empire had already begun to fragment into separate khanates or kingdoms. Still, relative peace had prevailed and the Silk Road remained open for business. But by the end of the thirteenth century, the khanates of the Mongol Empire were only very loosely allied. In the early fourteenth century, wars between these separate states divided them, and one by one, they fell, to other rising powers across Asia. At the same time, the hideous spectre of the Black Death hitch-hiked along the routes that had once conveyed spices, silks and porcelain, and both Asia and Europe were plunged into turmoil.

  And yet Europe still yearned for the spices of the east. These flavours of the Orient were highly sought-after precisely because they were exotic. Sandalwood, nutmeg, ginger, cinnamon and cloves were the flavours of power, the scents of status. The overland connection to the East was not only dangerous, it involved chains of middlemen, all wanting a mark-up. And so European merchants and explorers had been searching for some time for a viable sea route to the Orient – to India, the Spice Islands, Cathay and Cipangu (which we know as Japan). Africa was unhelpfully in the way. In 1488, the Portuguese explorer Bartolomeu Dias battled on, round the Cape of Storms – later renamed the ‘Cape of Good Hope’ – and the prospect of a south-east sea route seemed possible at last. But Italian explorer Christopher Columbus had another idea. A Florentine astronomer called Paolo Toscanelli had suggested that sailing west from Europe could be a quicker route to the Far East. Earlier that century, others had made attempts – they’d got as far as the Azores, only to be beaten back by westerly winds.

  Columbus had worked as a sugar merchant, sailing out west from Europe to Porto Santo, in the eastern Atlantic, near Madeira. From the contacts he made on his voyages, he learnt that, while westerly winds predominated in the north, when you moved further south in the Atlantic, the winds mostly blew from the east. It was a risky thing to try – explorers usually preferred to sail into the wind, knowing they would be assured a safe return trip. But Columbus had a thirst for discovery – and social advancement. He didn’t just want to find new territory, he wanted to claim it for himself: to be the governor of any islands he discovered, and to pass that position on to his heirs. Eventually, he secured financial backing from King Ferdinand and Queen Isabella of Spain, and the voyage was on.

  In the third century BCE, the Greek mathematician and geographer Eratosthenes had reckoned the circumference of the globe to be 252,000 stadia. That’s about 44,000 kilometres. The actual circumference is just over 40,000 kilometres – Eratosthenes was only 10 per cent out. But later geographers thought the Ancient Greeks might have profoundly overestimated the size of the earth. Toscanelli was one of them. And in 1492, a cartographer in Nuremberg – who had corresponded with Toscanelli – produced a small globe of the known world: an ‘erdapfel’, or earth-apple. It’s the oldest known globe in the world, and historian Felipe Fernandez-Armesto has called it ‘the most surprising object’ of 1492. And on it, the Americas are conspicuously absent. The implication is: if you set sail from Europe, heading west, you’ll eventually reach Asia.

  Setting off in 1492, Columbus chose to sail west from the Canary Islands, just off the coast of Morocco, with three ships. Not only was the wind filling their sails here, they were embarking on what they believed, from record of previous explorations, to be just about the right latitude to hit the famous port of Guangzhou in China. And so, heading into the unknown, the tiny fleet – the Niña, the Pinta and the Santa Maria – weighed anchors on 6 September. After a month – no landfall, and Columbus’s fellow commanders were becoming impatient. The sailors were looking a little mutinous. The three ships changed course, to the south-west. In the early hours of Friday 12 October, a lookout on the Niña spied land. It was probably the island we now know as San Salvador, in the Bahamas.

  Just imagine those Iberian explorers and sailors arriving on this island. This, to them, was the Indies: an island off the east coast of Asia. After so long at sea, they’d reached this idyllic place – the darkness of the deep sea changed to the clearest turquoise as they approached the palm-fringed beach. The island was lush and forested, full of promise. And although history is full of strings of happenstance and contingency, it feels as though it turns on this point, when Columbus sets foot on that beach – as his boots sink into the sand.

  He met the islanders. They seemed not to be desperately suspicious of his motives, and instead were amicable and hospitable. How different history might have been had Columbus not met with such a friendly reception. To Columbus, the natives were humans, not monsters; they were naked and natural; they were morally pure, perhaps – but also easy to conquer. But this was not the Eastern civilisation he was expecting to encounter. There were none of the riches of the Orient here. There were crops, tho
ugh. On 16 October 1492, Columbus wrote in his ship’s log: ‘It is a very green island, and very fertile and I don’t doubt that all year round they plant and harvest panizo.’

  When some of his companions came back from exploring nearby Cuba, on 6 November, Columbus recorded that they’d found a distinct type of cereal growing there: ‘… another grain, similar to panizo, that they call mahiz, and it tastes good when boiled and roasted.’

  It’s likely that these two cereals – on San Salvador and on Cuba – were in fact the same plant: maize. Plant scientists think that Columbus probably saw maize in flower on San Salvador, and thought it looked similar to panizo – sorghum or millet, something he was familiar with back home. So the ‘panizo’ he described was in fact the same thing as the ‘panizo-like’ grain that the Cubans called mahiz – maize.

  And so, with those mahiz grains in his pocket, Columbus went on to explore other islands. The islanders, who travelled around by canoe, knew the local geography very well – and shared this knowledge with Columbus. But where was Japan? Where was China? He had high hopes of finding Asian civilisation on Cuba – but it wasn’t there. There were no spices and silks. The inhabitants were quite poor – these were not the trading partners he was looking for.

  He sailed on to the island of Hispaniola, now divided between the Dominican Republic and Haiti. There, he found both civilisation – at least a civilisation capable of producing stone-built architecture – and, perhaps more importantly, gold. Leaving a garrison on Hispaniola, he gathered up his trophies – including gold, of course, but also chilli, tobacco, pineapples and maize – and headed home. Battered by storms on the return journey, Columbus was forced to land in Lisbon – where he was interrogated by Bartolomeu Dias, before being released to sail on to Huelva. Although many doubted his story, he insisted to his patrons, Ferdinand and Isabella, that he’d fulfilled his contract: he’d found the eastern edge of Asia. In fact, he didn’t know where he’d been – but he knew how to get back there.

  He returned the following year, but the friendly reception he’d enjoyed in 1492 had turned sour. The garrison on Hispaniola had been massacred. Rumours of cannibalism proved to be true. And the climate was feverishly hot and humid. The indigenous people of the New World were not going to acquiesce to foreign sovereignty as easily as Columbus had imagined.

  Columbus is, of course, a person who has inspired admiration and vilification in almost equal measures. He forged a connection which would see the empires of Europe rising to become global superpowers, while the Eden of the Americas was plundered and its civilisations destroyed. Setting foot on that beach, he sealed the fate of tens of millions of Native Americans and ten million Africans. The impact of that moment would ripple out through history. Until this point, Europe had been something of a backwater – but the establishment of colonies in the New World would change all that. The rise of the West had begun.

  And the impact would be felt not just throughout human societies, around the world, but by the species that had become our allies – on both sides of the Atlantic. This contact between Europe and the Americas would quickly turn into a sustained connection between the Old and New Worlds. These supercontinents had been largely separate since the break-up of Pangaea, which began around 150 million years ago. During the Great Ice Age, the Pleistocene, the world went through repeated glaciations. And during the glacial periods, sea levels would fall to such an extent that the north-east tip of Asia would be joined to the north-west corner of North America, via a tract of land known as Beringia – or the ‘Bering land bridge’. This bridge would allow some interchange of plants and animals between Asia and North America. It was the route by which humans first colonised the Americas, around 17,000 years ago. And yet the ancient, underlying theme of divergence and difference between the flora and fauna of the Old and New Worlds persisted – until the human-mediated transfer of plants and animals which started with Columbus bringing back his pineapples, chilli and tobacco in 1492. Plants and animals which had been contained and separate from each other made that leap across the pond, to find themselves facing new landscapes, new challenges and new opportunities on the opposite side. Cattle and coffee, sheep and sugar cane, chickens and chickpeas, wheat and rye travelled from the Old World to the New. Turkeys and tomatoes, pumpkins and potatoes, Muscovy duck and maize made the reverse journey.

  The Columbian Exchange has been described by some as the most significant ecological event on the planet since the dinosaurs were wiped out. It was the beginning of globalisation: the world became not just interconnected but interdependent. But it had a wretched inception.

  The fortunes of Europe (and, in due course, Asia and Africa) were transformed by the domesticated species brought back from the New World. Novel crops boosted agriculture and populations began to recover from war, famine and plague. But that was in the Old World. In the Americas, a scene of devastation ensued. Just as plants and animals had followed separate evolutionary trajectories on either side of the Atlantic, the pace and direction of technological change had been different in the Old World compared with the New. The Europeans possessed advanced technology: their military and maritime kit was vastly superior to that of the Native Americans. The immediate consequences of contact, with heart-stopping, dreadful inevitability, were tragic. Disease organisms were also part of that Columbian Exchange: the Europeans brought back syphilis from the Americas, while introducing smallpox there – with disastrous consequences. The indigenous population of the Americas plummeted after conquest. It was decimated: by the middle of the seventeenth century, 90 per cent of the indigenous population had been wiped out.

  It’s easy to focus on the power imbalance that existed between the Old and New Worlds in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. Human societies had developed in different ways in the Americas and in Europe, but it wasn’t as though the Native Americans were entirely without technology – far from it. When it came to their exploitation of natural resources, they were clearly experts. It’s wrong to see the pre-Columbian Americas as, on the one hand, a natural Garden of Eden, and on the other, an innovation vacuum in need of European inspiration to realise its potential. Native American societies had a rich and diverse history of innovation, and the Americas contained completely independent centres of domestication. Many of the pre-Columbian societies of the Americas were large, urbanised – and already dependent on agriculture.

  The Spanish explorers didn’t pluck wild plants, out of relative obscurity, recognise their utility for the first time, and transform them into something which would greatly benefit humanity. What the Europeans found on the other side of the Atlantic were organisms which had already changed away from wildness, over thousands of years – which had already entered into a tightly bound, successful alliance with humans. What Columbus discovered was not only a new land, previously unknown to Europeans, but a wealth of useful, tamed animals and plants – ready-made domesticates.

  Among those prizes was that cereal he’d spotted and written about, just four days after landing on San Salvador – the cereal that was not only a staple food but a sacred food for the Aztecs and Incas, whose civilisations would soon be swallowed up by the Spanish Empire: maize.

  Maize in the Old World

  Columbus returned home from his first voyage to the Bahamas with samples of seeds, bringing back even more on his subsequent trips. News of the arrival of maize spread quickly – reaching the Pope and his cardinals by 1493. Written on 13 November, a letter from an Italian historian attached to the Spanish court, Pedro Martir de Angleria, to an Italian cardinal, Ascanio Sforza, described the new grain:

  The ear is longer than a hand, pointed in shape and as thick as an arm. The grains are beautifully laid out, and are a similar size and shape to chickpeas. They are white when unripe, becoming black when ripe; after milling, they are whiter than snow. This type of grain is called maize.

  A follow-up letter from Martir in April 1494 apparently accompanied a sample for the cardinal. And in 1517, m
aize appeared in a fresco painted on a wall in Rome. But although this tropical plant seems to have settled in well in Spain, it didn’t take well to more temperate climates. Cold winters stunted its growth, and long hours of daylight in summer would have discouraged the plant from setting seed. So it seemed that, in central and northern Europe, maize was highly unlikely ever to become a dependable crop and a staple food, as it was in the Caribbean. And yet it started to pop up in increasing numbers of records – and not just from southern Europe. In 1542, the German herbalist Leonhart Fuchs wrote that it was ‘now growing in all gardens’. By 1570, it was growing in the Italian Alps. It seems extraordinary that this tropical plant had evolved so quickly, adapting to the significant challenges of a temperate climate.

  Careful reading of the great sixteenth- and seventeenth-century European herbals suggests that something else was happening. The writers of these botanical records tended to follow a fairly strict format: they’d list the names of a plant; then they’d describe the plant – its leaves, flowers and roots as well as its uses; its medicinal properties were laid out; and its geographic origin. The entries were accompanied by illustrations printed from woodcuts. Maize first appears in these herbals in the 1530s. But for some thirty years after that, its New World origin isn’t mentioned. While the Spanish explorers were writing about this cereal that they’d brought back with them, many people seemed to think that maize had arrived in Europe from Asia. The first reference to maize in the herbals appears in the work of the German herbalist Jerome Bock in 1539. He referred to maize as welschen korn – ‘strange grain’, something new in Germany – and he thought it had come from India. The Medieval herbalists were so entranced with the classical world, it was almost as though they couldn’t escape its stranglehold. Confronted with novel plants, they looked to the Ancient Greeks – especially Pliny and his contemporary, Dioscorides – for help. Surely they’d described everything: they must have the answer. The geographic confusion and conflation that accompanied the discovery of the New World certainly didn’t help the matter. The Spanish explorer and inspector of mines, Oviedo, had written a History of the Indies. Even having visited the Americas, and seen maize growing there, he thought that it had probably been described by Pliny. He says of Pliny’s ‘millet of India’ – ‘I think it is the same as what we call “mahiz” in our Indies.’