Alfred W. Crosby An Abridged Version of the Keynote Address Delivered at the University of Florida's Institute for Early Contact Period Studies Entitled "Rethinking the Encounter: new perspectives on Conquest and Colonization, 1450-1550," Encuentro Quarterly, Vol.IV, No.2, The University of New Mexico Summer, 1988 I want to talk about two things pertaining to the Encounter: one, the way our emerging concept of it differs so sharply from that of our predecessors whose data, like ours, came from the 15th and 16th centuries, but whose interpretations often strike us as shortsighted; and two, I want to think out loud about what I think our emerging concept of the Encounter, in its very broadest outlines, will or at least should turn out to be. Perhaps my dour view of the biological side of imperialism [as found in Professor Crosby's 1972 landmark study, The Columbian Exchange: Biological and Cultural Consequences of 1492] was expressed earlier than many (though not all) similar state- ments, and certainly it does not express what politicians will be proclaiming in 1992. Yet as I look around at a rising ride of gloomy articles and books on the effects of the Encounter on Amerindian demography, on the rate of suicide among Amerindian adolescents and young adults, and on the rate of species extinc- tions, and more, I am confirmed in my belief that I was describ- ing attitudes characteristic of a rising zeitgeist. What is the course of the new zeitgeist? The old one had provided a framework in which to consider the Encounter which was satisfactory for almost all the scholars and the general public, satisfactory all the way from the time of Cortes's secretary, Francisco Lopez de Gomara to that of Samuel Eliot Morison. Lopez de Gomara ranked the European discovery of the Americas as one of the two best things to happen since Creation, the other being the life of Christ. Four hundred years later, Morison ended his magnificent work, The European Discovery of America, with this effusion: "To the people of the New World, pagans expecting short and brutish lives, void of a merciful God and a glorious Heaven." How did we get from that to our current assessment of the Encounter as, in Francis Jennings's words, the "invasion of America," or as Russell Thornton has in part entitled his new book, "The American Indian Holocaust," in full knowledge of the connotations of "holocaust" for us? Let me offer the thought that the primary factor behind our reassessment of the Encounter is a general reassessment of the role of rapid change, even catastrophe, in human history, and even the history of the earth and of the universe. In place of the 19th-century apotheosis of the concept of evolutionary, gradual change, catastrophism (i.e., large-scale change within narrow time limits)__supposedly laid in its grave not long after Georges Cuvier died 150 years ago__has returned thanks to Stalin, Hitler, Pol Pot, Einstein, Fermi, Oppenheimer, and so on. "The Big Bang" has usurped "steady state" among cosmologists. Astron- omers commonly talk about galaxies in collision. Astronomers, geologists, and paleontologists gather together to confer about asteroids and comets raining down on earth every twenty-six million years or so, wiping out most species, and thus providing room for a surge of speciation. And everybody, seemingly, is stricken with fear of the threat of the thinning ozone layer, paired with the greenhouse effect of too much carbon dioxide. Catastrophism is back as a respectable concept, so much so that it is now the preordained conclusion we leap to, and therefore, of which we must be wary. The rapidity and magnitude of change in our century has prepared us to ask different questions about the Encounter than the older schools of scientists and scholars asked. I think ours are better questions because we are equipped by our 20th-century experience to see and recognize changes as great as those that the Encounter unquestionably did cause. A century and a half ago, William Prescott of Boston, Massachusetts, carefully examined all the primary sources on the Spanish conquests of Mexico and Peru that he could find. He read the same pages as we read on the smallpox epidemics that accompanied Cortes in Mexico and preceded Pizarro into Peru, killing many thousands of Amerindians, and yet Prescott granted the epidemic oblique mention in only a few para- graphs. He lived in a society troubled by typhoid fever, chol- era, and many other infectious diseases, but not massively endangered by them. The Black Death had disappeared from Western Europe more than a century before, and as far as he knew, had never appeared in America. Yellow fever disappeared from the northern states of his country while he was a young man. The sanitationists were promising to control future epidemics of whatever kind by means of techniques immediately at hand and easily understood. Smallpox was still circulating, but many Bostonians were effectively defending themselves against that infection by means of vaccination, a technique discovered by Dr. Edward Jenner about the same time Prescott was born. Let me propose that Prescott simply was not equipped to "see," so to speak, what the primary sources had to say about smallpox and the conquest of the great Amerindian empires. We, on the other hand, have the advantage of being terrified by AIDS, with its extremely high death rates and its imperviousness to vaccines and medications. Where do I think our catastrophic rethinking of the Encounter will lead us? Our Euro-American predecessors believed that 1492 was an extremely important year. Those who lived and wrote north of the Rio Grande tended to believe that representa- tive government, the Bill of Rights and the British North Ameri- can act, became probabilities in that year. The whites south of the Rio Grande, the creoles, had similar beliefs pertaining to their several national histories. Amerindians and blacks prob- ably held different views, if they went to the trouble of having any at all__their lives did not leave them much time for academic opinions__but we know little about their thoughts. The one characteristic shared by all the traditional assessments of 1492, whatever the ethnicity of the assessors, is that they far under- estimated the true significance of the Encounter. My view is that it is nearly impossible to exaggerate the importance of the Encounter. Its significance towers far above the origins of this or that kind of government, or even the fate of this or that group of humans. This Encounter marks one of the major discontinuities in the course of life on this planet. The measuring of its influence requires reference to a scale of time far greater than historians or archaeologists normally need, i.e. reference to what geologists and paleontologists, usually an unpoetic lot, have been calling of late "deep time." To find changes comparable to those wrought by Columbus and friends we have to go back, far back, beyond recorded time to events marking the divisions between the periods of geological history. These were characterized by great geological changes__the meeting or separation of continents, the raising up of mountains, the draining or creation of inland seas, and sometimes by large numbers of extinctions and the proliferation of new species. Of course Columbus brought about no geological changes, but look again. Didn't he do so in a de facto sense? Didn't he reverse several score million years worth of continental drift by bringing continents back together again, as a matter of practical fact? If horses died out in the New World and existed only in the Old World, and Columbus brought horses from the Old to the New, then how, in its effect, was that different from any one of the several retreats of the Bering and Chukchi Seas, bringing Siberia and Alaska into contact? If the rate of extinctions of species in the Americas has speeded up considerably since 1492, and so has the advent in the Americas of new species, i.e. the arrival and proliferation here of Eurasian and African species, then how does that, as a practical matter, differ from what happened at the end of the Pleistocene or other geological "moments" of rapid change in the deep past? You may answer that what has happened vis--vis this sort of thing since 1492 is the result of human influence. I will answer that I agree. In this case, the driving force of change happens to be not geological or oceanographic or off-course comets,but one species__homo sapiens. Yet the actual results is much the same: vast changes in the distribution of life forms, and even in extinctions. In time, providing we have time, there will truly be new species, descen- dants, in a manner of speaking, of Christopher Columbus. Offspring matings between Old World cattle and North American buffalo already exist. Let me describe a geological moment of extreme discontinuity in the deep past to which we may want to refer when measuring the full significance of the Encounter. About 220 million years ago, at the end of the Permian Period, there was a great die-off, perhaps the greatest of all time. Nearly one half of the known families of animals disappeared, including 74 percent of the amphibians and 80 percent of the reptiles. Losses among marine invertebrates were even greater. The cause for the die-off was perhaps something like a rain of comets or the untimely arrival of an asteroid, but such deus ex machina devices are still a matter of speculation. What did happen, we are certain, was that the several large continents united to form a supercontinent, which the geologists call Pangaea. Paleontologists point to that massive event as the cause, at least in part, of the extinctions. Let me quote one of their textbooks, The History of the Earth's Crust, by Eicher, McAlester, and Rottman: "As the elements of the supercontinent were assembled, these separate biota from each element were forced into competition. The number of sets of niches was drastically reduced and many species must have become extinct from competitive exclusion" (p. 503). Surely we can interpret what Columbus and the sailors of Europe started in the 15th century in somewhat the same way. Did they not draw and are they not still drawing, lately with the assistance of aviators, the continents together to produce what is politically, socially, economically, botanically, zoologically, and bacteriologically a supercontinent? In fact, are not Peru and Chad, for example, "closer" together today via human transportation system than they were when those lands were part of a single supercontinent? The changes in the biota of our cobbled-together supercon- tinent have been enormous, despite the brief duration of its existence. It is unlikely that so much of the world's land surface and waters, and its flora and fauna, macro and micro, have ever been altered so abruptly before, unless indeed we have had cataclysmic visitations of asteroids or comets. The effects on human society certainly have been vast. I, for one, believe that the coming together of the continents was a prerequisite for the population explosion of the past two centuries, as well as for the Industrial Revolution. The migration across the oceans of the staple food crops of the Old and New Worlds underlies the former, and the vast accession of capital gained by Europe through its domination of the Americas was a necessary element to the later. The drastic alteration of the relative numbers of the various divisions of the world's human population, with Amerin- dians sinking in relation to Euro- and Afro-Americans, has rightly attracted the most attention, but there have been similar changes among other species. While time prevents further elab- oration of this point, let me just mention that in North America we used to have sixty million buffalo, and now instead we have one-hundred million cattle and ten million sheep. There have been a frighteningly large number of extinctions of species, nothing to compare with the Permian die-off, of course, but before we take comfort from that, we must realize that the full effects of the Encounter have yet to materialize. Before you mark me down as yet another raving eco-freak, give me the chance to agree that it is megalomania to think that we can compare the Permian die-off and the Encounter with any precision. Many thousands of years, tens of thousands of years, must pass before the two can be usefully compared. My point is not necessarily that they are similar, but that the impact of the Encounter is so massive that we should consider it with the same sense of scale as we do events connected with the endings and beginnings of the geological periods and eras and their influence on the direction of evolution on the planet. We need to step far back from the specific happenings of 1492 and such trivia as the exact identification of Columbus's first American landfall. We need to look upon the change that he initiated with the same awe and attention to its manifold consequences as we do the change associated with the end of the Permian Period. The Encounter is the most influential event that has taken place on this planet since the retreat of the continental glaciers, and we must pay it its proper due. [Crosby is also the author of Ecological Imperialism: The Biolog- ical Expansion of Europe, 900-1900 (New York: Cambridge Univer- sity Press, 1986)] CROSBY02.SPC