1493: Uncovering the New World Columbus Created Read Free

nigh on five centuries. And it is unsettling to think of globalization’s equally long record of ecological convulsion, and the suffering and political mayhem caused by that convulsion. But there is grandeur, too, in this view of our past; it reminds us that every place has played a part in the human story, and that all are embedded in the larger, inconceivably complex progress of life on this planet.
    ·    ·    ·
    As I write these words, it’s a warm August day. Yesterday my family picked the first tomatoes from our garden—the somewhat improved successor of the tomato patch I planted after my visit to the college twenty years ago.
    After I planted the seeds from the catalog, it didn’t take me long to discover why so many people love puttering in their gardens. Messing around with the tomatoes felt to me like building a fort as a child: I was both creating a refuge from the world and creating a place of my own in that world. Kneeling in the dirt, I was making a small landscape, one that had the comfortable, comforting timelessness evoked by words like home .
    To biologists this must seem like poppycock. At various times my tomato patch has housed basil, eggplant, bell peppers, kale, chard, several types of lettuce and lettuce-like greens, and a few marigolds, said by my neighbors to repel bugs (scientists are less certain). Not one of these species originated within a thousand miles of my garden. Nor did the corn and tobacco grown in nearby farms; corn is from Mexico, tobacco from the Amazon (this species of tobacco, anyway—there was a local species that is now gone). Equally alien, for that matter, are my neighbors’ cows, horses, and barn cats. That people like me experience their gardens as familiar and timeless is a testament to the human capacity to adapt (or, less charitably, to our ability to operate in ignorance). Rather than being a locus of stability and tradition, my garden is a biological record of past human wandering and exchange.
    Yet in another way my feelings are correct. Almost seventy years ago the Cuban folklorist Fernando Ortiz Fernández coined the awkward but useful term “transculturation” to describe what happens when one group of people takes something—a song, a food, an ideal—from another. Almost inevitably, Ortiz noted, the new thing is transformed; people make it their own by adapting, stripping, and twisting it to fit their needs and situation. Since Columbus the world has been in the grip of convulsive transculturation. Every place on the earth’s surface, save possibly scraps of Antarctica, has been changed by places that until 1492 were too remote to exert any impact on it. For five centuries now the crash and chaos of constant connection has been our home condition; my garden, with its parade of exotic plants, is a small example. How did those tomatoes get to Ukraine, anyway? One way to describe this book would be to say that it represents, long after I first asked the question, my best efforts to find out.

INTRODUCTION

In the Homogenocene

1

Two Monuments
    THE SEAMS OF PANGAEA
    Although it had just finished raining, the air was hot and close. Nobody else was in sight; the only sound other than those from insects and gulls was the staticky low crashing of Caribbean waves. Around me on the sparsely covered red soil was a scatter of rectangles laid out by lines of stones: the outlines of now-vanished buildings, revealed by archaeologists. Cement pathways, steaming faintly from the rain, ran between them. One of the buildings had more imposing walls than the others. The researchers had covered it with a new roof, the only structure they had chosen to protect from the rain. Standing like a sentry by its entrance was a hand-lettered sign: Casa Almirante , Admiral’s House. It marked the first American residence of Christopher Columbus, Admiral of the Ocean Sea, the man whom generations of schoolchildren have learned to call the discoverer of the New World.
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