Mankind

by Pamela D. Toler

  LATEEN SAIL

  The triangular lateen sail, borrowed from Arab ships, was a key feature of the Portuguese caravel.

  With a square sail, a ship could only sail before the wind. The lateen sail had a crossbar on its diagonal side that was bisected by a vertical mast. With its free corner secured near the stern, it could take the wind on either side, allowing a ship to tack into the wind in a zigzag fashion, creating forward momentum in any direction and allowing faster navigation in all weather conditions.

  Because Dias’s ship was rigged with lateen sails, he could sail into the wind, push out into the ocean and escape the rugged coastline, and navigate right around the southern tip of Africa. The combination of bravery and technology allowed him to pioneer a sea route to the riches of the East.

  Rejected by the Portuguese king, Columbus turned to Spain. He first proposed the expedition to Isabella of Castile in 1486. The Spanish queen was in the fifth year of the costly war with Granada and had no resources to devote to exploration. He laid the proposal before Isabella a second time in 1491, when she was camped outside the city of Granada. With victory at hand, the queen was at least willing to listen. She had Columbus present his proposal to an assembled committee of experts. Like their Portuguese counterparts, Isabella’s experts advised against the venture, saying Columbus couldn’t possibly be right about the distance to China and the ease of sailing there and back.

  After the Moors surrendered in 1492, Isabella agreed to sponsor Columbus’s voyage. She was willing to pawn her jewels if that was what it took to fund the expedition, but the manager of the royal treasury said public funds could be used. Wealthy Spaniards and Genoese merchants who lived in Spain also put up money for the voyage. In addition, Isabella put pressure on the coastal town of Palos, which owed the crown an as-yet-unpaid fine for smuggling, to provide Columbus with two caravels.

  Isabella drew up a contract with Columbus, outlining their agreement. The crown would retain control over all discovered territories. Columbus would receive the hereditary title of Admiral of the Ocean Sea, serve as governor over any discovered territories, and would have the right to one-tenth of the riches he brought back.

  Columbus thought he could make the voyage in four days. Instead, it took seventy.

  On August 3, 1492, Columbus set out on his voyage in his three famous ships, the Niña, the Pinta, and the Santa Maria. The ships were well-provisioned with salt cod, bacon, biscuits, flour, wine, olive oil, and plenty of water, far more than needed for the brief voyage Columbus anticipated. He carried a letter of safe conduct from Isabella and Ferdinand, declaring, “We send Christopher Columbus with three caravels through the Ocean Sea to the Indies, on some business that touches the service of God and especially of the Catholic faith and our own benefit.” Since Columbus expected to land in India, he made sure at least one crew member was a native speaker of Arabic, the lingua franca of the Asian trading world.

  Columbus thought he could make the voyage in four days. Instead, it took seventy. The discrepancy did nothing to shake his conviction that he had reached Asia. Neither did the differences between Marco Polo’s description of the complex cultures of the East and the tribal cultures of the islands on which he landed.

  OCTOBER 12, 1492. CHRISTOPHER Columbus had expected to reach China, or at least Japan, by now. His fleet of three small ships had left the Canary Islands five weeks ago, heading west across the uncharted Ocean Sea. There was still no sign of land. Food and water were growing short, too short for turning around to be an option. Worse, his crew was on the verge of mutiny. Some of them whispered that they should just throw the red-haired Italian overboard. Why should they risk their lives listening to a crazy foreigner?

  They were hungry, they were tired—and they were afraid. None of them had ever been out of sight of land for so long. The Ocean Sea was sometimes called the Sea of Darkness. Everyone knew dangerous monsters lurked beneath the waves: sea serpents and giant crabs that could crush a ship in its pincers.

  Columbus offered a fine silk coat to the first man who sighted land.

  The men greeted the announcement with sullen silence. What good would a silk coat do if they were lost at sea?

  The caravels that Christopher Columbus set out on his expedition: Pinta, Niña and Santa Maria

  Later that day, Columbus spotted a flock of birds flying toward the southwest. Land had to be close. He ordered the ships to follow the birds.

  The next night, the moon rose shortly before midnight. Two hours later, a sailor on watch on the Pinta yelled out, “Land! My God! Land!” He fired a cannon to catch the attention of the other two ships. Sailors crowded the decks to catch a glimpse of land. At dawn, the Niña, the Pinta, and the Santa Maria dropped anchor in calm, blue waters alongside a stretch of white sand. They lowered their boats and rushed to the shore. Instead of the silk-robed Chinese they had expected, the people waiting to greet them on the beach were almost naked and had no weapons other than long wooden fishing spears.

  When Christopher Columbus stepped foot in the Bahamas, he thought he was in Japan. In fact, when Columbus veered a thousand miles off course and landed in the Caribbean, he stumbled across an entire hemisphere full of people whose cultures had nothing to do with Europe or Asia. In sharp contrast to the encounter five hundred years earlier between the Vikings and the Innu, Columbus took a peaceful stance toward the native islanders, and the Tainos responded in kind. Columbus was there looking for gold, not conquest. And he was willing to trade for it. Before departing, Columbus exchanged gifts with the Taino people. Then he and his crew boarded their ships for the trip home.

  Little did he know that he had left something unintended—and deadly—behind: smallpox.

  UNDAUNTED BY THE SURPRISING appearance of the natives and landscape he encountered upon reaching solid ground in the Bahamas, Columbus sailed back to Spain loaded with enthusiasm and souvenirs; monkeys, parrots, cinnamon, chili peppers, ten members of the Taino tribe, and most significantly, several small pieces of gold—setting off a centuries-long gold rush in the Americas.

  Columbus helped create his own celebrity by sharing the diary he kept of his exploits. Of his time on the Bahamian island he had named San Salvador, Columbus wrote: “I kept my eyes open and tried to find out if there was any gold, and I saw that some of them had a little piece hanging from a hole in their nose. I gathered from their signs that if one goes south, or around the south side of the island, there is a king with great jars full of it, enormous amounts. I tried to persuade them to go there, but I saw that the idea was not to their liking.”

  As word spread, people crowded the roads from Lisbon to Seville, hoping to catch a glimpse of the explorer and his exotic finds.

  EUROPEAN DISEASES IN THE AMERICAS

  Some of the most influential actors in human history were not great men but microscopic organisms. Diseases such as flu, measles, yellow fever, and smallpox are thought to have originated in the animals that the peoples of the ancient Middle East domesticated thousands of years ago. Centuries of contact with these animals meant Europeans gradually built up resistance that protected them from these diseases.

  Native Americans had few domesticated animals, no exposure to their diseases—and no developed immunities. The arrival of Europeans and the diseases they brought with them killed millions.

  The Caribbean island of Hispaniola had more than a million inhabitants when Christopher Columbus landed there in 1492. Within twenty years, more than a third of the population was dead, most of them from an epidemic disease they had never seen before—smallpox.

  Hernán Cortés and his men wreaked the same havoc on the people of Tenochtitlán, when they unwittingly left behind a time bomb in the form of a dead, smallpox-infected Spanish soldier. Within weeks, the entire capital was under siege by the smallpox virus, which killed one-fourth of the city’s inhabitants.

  The epidemic spread throughout Mexico and eventually helped the Spaniards defeat the Inca Empire. Without the help of the dead
ly smallpox virus and other epidemics, Europeans might not have conquered the New World so easily. Within a single century, 90 percent of all Native Americans died from those first contacts with Europeans.

  Today, the smallpox virus that once devastated the Americas has been eradicated. Many other diseases are controlled, thanks to mass vaccination. However, our age-old struggle with microscopic enemies is not over. Following the same ground rules—what evolutionary theorist Herbert Spencer dubbed the ‘Survival of the Fittest’—as mankind, viruses and bacteria are constantly changing their own immunities to modern medicines in order to survive. More confrontations and challenges to our survival on earth undoubtedly lie ahead.

  Columbus made three more trips to America between 1493 and 1504. He visited the Greater and Lesser Antilles, as well as the Caribbean coast of Venezuela and Central America, claiming them for the Spanish Empire. Even after completing four voyages to the New World, Columbus failed to realize he had not discovered a new route to Asia. That honor went to Amerigo Vespucci.

  In 1499, Ferdinand and Isabella were growing concerned about the conflicting reports that were coming back from the new colony of Hispaniola. They asked Vespucci, who had been involved in equipping ships for Columbus’s second and third voyages, to take part in a new expedition. Two ships would go to Hispaniola; two would sail farther south and explore.

  Vespucci was a pilot on one of the ships of exploration. His ship sailed south along the coast of what Vespucci still believed to be India. The almanac he carried with him showed the position of the moon and the planets for each hour of the night for every night of the year.

  One night in mid-August, he noticed that the almanac said the moon and the planet Mars would stand at the same place in the sky in the city of Ferrara at midnight on August 23. On the evening of August 23, he noted that at his location those same bodies stood in conjunction at 5:30, not at midnight, a difference of six and one half hours.

  CALCULATING LATITUDE

  Columbus used a quadrant to help him navigate.

  The quadrant was a quarter circle of metal with two sighting holes on one of its straight sides. A string with a weight on one end was tied on the straight edge. Degrees were marked along the curved edge. The pilot aligned the quadrant so the North Star could be seen through both sighting holes. The weighted string would fall across the curved edge, showing the pilot how many degrees above the equator he was.

  The quadrant became useless when sailors went south of the equator and the North Star was no longer visible. Portuguese navigators learned to find their latitude by determining the height and angle of the noonday sun and checking it against astronomical navigation charts.

  CALCULATING LONGITUDE

  Amerigo Vespucci’s method of calculating longitude was too complicated for the average mariner. It required a stable platform for taking observations and an astronomical almanac. It was 1735 before English clockmaker John Harrison invented the marine chronometer that could measure time accurately on a rolling ship, the first step toward establishing longitude.

  Suddenly Vespucci realized he could now figure out his distance from Ferrara in miles. The Greek geographer Ptolemy had calculated that the earth was twenty-four thousand miles in circumference and that it turned all the way around every twenty-four hours. If the earth turned one thousand miles an hour, the time difference meant he was sixty-five hundred miles away from Ferrara. Since he knew the distance from Ferrara and Lisbon, he was now able to calculate his position east and west as well as north and south. Using this new navigational tool, Vespucci realized that his ship was nowhere near India. Columbus had not found a new route to Asia. He had found a fourth continent that no European knew existed.

  AMERIGO GETS HIS NAME ON THE MAP

  German mapmaker Martin Waldseemüller was making a world map that showed the new continent as a narrow strip of land that blocked the way to Asia, with the island of Japan just beyond its borders in a hitherto unknown sea. He had recently read accounts of the new continent attributed to Amerigo Vespucci and named the continent America. Spanish mapmakers continued to call the continent either the New World or the Indies. Waldseemüller removed the name America from later maps, but it was too late. As far as Europeans were concerned, the New World was America.

  THE AZTECS BELIEVED THAT their god, Huitzilopochtli, had given them a sacred duty to conquer the entire world.

  The Aztecs migrated to the Valley of Mexico in the early thirteenth century. They believed that the gods had ordered them to leave their homeland and migrate south. At least seven different tribes left on the great migration. Most settled along the way. The Aztecs continued moving south. They would stay in one place for ten or twenty years, clearing land for farms and building temples. But they always moved on, driven by a vision from Huitzilopochtli telling them that they would know they had reached their final homeland when they saw an eagle resting on top of a cactus growing out of a rock.

  When the Aztecs reached the Valley of Mexico, they first settled in a desolate region known as Grasshopper Hill. The neighboring peoples drove them away. The king of Culhuacan, a region near the southern shore of Lake Texcoco, allowed them to settle for a short time in a snake-infested swamp near the lakeshore. They soon fought with their neighbors and were driven from their homes once more. For years, they wandered the regions surrounding Lake Texcoco, which filled much of the Valley of Mexico. Finally, in 1325, they encountered a large eagle, sunning itself with extended wings on a cactus growing from a large rock. The Aztecs had found their homeland in the swampy islands at the southern end of Lake Texcoco.

  The Aztecs named their new city Tenochtitlán (today’s Mexico City), the place of the “cactus on the rock.” They turned swamp into fertile land by building raised gardens on reclaimed swampland and inventive systems of dikes and canals across the lake. By the end of the fourteenth century, Tenochtitlán’s population had quintupled and their uninviting swamp had turned into a garden that produced a stable food supply.

  Their political power grew more slowly. For many years, they paid an annual tribute of military service to a powerful city-state ruled by the Tepanec, who had settled on the lake’s western shore in the twelfth or early thirteenth century. In 1426, the Aztec ruler, Itzcoatl, organized the local peoples to revolt against the Tepanec. When the revolt was over, the Aztecs, the Tlacopan, and the Acolhua joined together as the Triple Alliance. The control of the Triple Alliance spread throughout the Valley of Mexico and over much of Mesoamerica, creating an empire based on the payment of tribute rather than direct control. The empire was vast, but control was loose, rebellion was common, and war was almost constant.

  Thanks to a succession of strong Aztec leaders, by 1486, the Triple Alliance had effectively become the Aztec Empire, with local kings replaced by Aztec-dominated puppet rulers. Tenochtitlán had a larger population than Paris or London, though it was still smaller than Venice or Istanbul. It was an astonishing city built on artificial islands and canals in the middle of a great mountain lake. Its streets were clean and wide. Its stone palaces and temples were ornately carved. Its markets were full of goods from the far corners of the empire and beyond. Three giant causeways linked the island city to the mainland. Long aqueducts carried fresh water from the mountains and over the lake to the heart of the city.

  THE STONE OF TIZOC

  THE GODS NEED NOURISHMENT AGAIN, AND THE time has come for another sacrifice. The Aztecs have chosen their victim: the notorious prisoner and onetime warrior Tlachicole. Tlachicole, already intoxicated with a ceremonial drink, is tied to the Stone of Tizoc.

  His opponent, the celebrated warrior Motepopoca, is armed with a flat club of wood set with razor-sharp obsidian blades. Tlachicole is given a similar stick—fairly heavy, but set with feathers instead of obsidian. He knows he can’t win with it, but he will try.

  The fight begins. It is not a fair contest; a rope restrains the fallen warrior. But Tlachicole is a brave fighter; he will not go down easy.

&nbs
p; His opponent attacks, again and again, but with each attack, Motepopoca gets hurt himself! Amazing that Tlachicole can still inflict damage with a weapon such as he has. And even tied to a stone, he wears out the great Motepopoca.

  But it is only a matter of time. Minutes in, Tlachicole collapses, exhausted. He is now ready for the gods. His adversary, the mighty Motepopoca, cuts out his heart—and offers it to the sun.

  In 1502, a new ruler came to the Aztec throne: thirty-four-year-old Montezuma II.

  The Aztecs felt indebted to and dependent on their gods. As the gods had sacrificed themselves to create the world and human beings, then humans needed to give thanks to them with the most precious substance they had, their own blood. The Aztecs believed that spilled human blood nourished and fortified the gods, in particular, the Sun.

  The Aztecs feared that everything would cease to exist if the gods did not receive an adequate amount of human blood. This fear compelled the Aztecs to war. The need to pay their debt to the gods was the main reason for war.

  OBSIDIAN

  Native American cultures never learned to forge iron, but they made good use of obsidian, a naturally occurring volcanic glass. Obsidian is hard and brittle, making it easy to fracture into thin blades with sharp edges that were used for swords, spears, and the ritual knives used to cut the hearts out of sacrificial victims in Aztec religious festivals. Obsidian was so important to the Aztecs that they believed that death by an obsidian blade was a form of life: offering up the hearts and blood of brave humans to the gods was the only thing that could ensure that the universe would not end.

  Today obsidian is still used for some surgical scalpel blades.