Page 39 - Encyclopedia Of World History

columbian exchange 389

ernment (who died in 1858) and Many Horses, the
wealthiest Piegan (who died in 1866). Lesser chiefs
and prominent warriors received this honorary burial lower classes of northern Europe. In Ireland it became
on a less grandiose scale. indispensable for the peasantry, and when, in the 1840s,
Everyone in camp attended the funeral.The horses an American fungus, Phytophthora infestans, arrived and
to be sacrificed were led to the door of the death destroyed the potato crop, a million died of starvation
lodge. Each horse in turn was shot with a gun, and disease and a million and a half fled the country.
pressed against its head and fired by a relative of the The list of examples of the influence of the Columbian
deceased. After all the horses were killed the riding exchange in the Old World diets is a long one; it includes
gear of the dead man’s favorite horse sometimes was the tomato in Italian cuisine, the chili in Indian recipes,
stripped off and placed inside the death lodge. At the presence of maize in most sub-Saharan African diets,
other times the people of the camp were privileged to and so forth. By way of illustrative example, let us con-
strip the dead horses of their gear for their own use. sider the story of American food crops in a land usually
Green Grass Bull explained the Blackfoot belief that thought of as resistant to outside influences: China. No
the spirit of the horse joined that of its owner, wear- Old World people adopted these alien plants faster than
ing the gear it bore at the time it was killed. After the the Chinese.
horse’s spirit had departed the actual trappings had The eagerness with which the Chinese received Amer-
no more value to the dead Indian than did the carcass ican foods is related to population pressure. Between
of the sacrificed horse itself. 1368 and 1644, the years of the Ming dynasty, the Chi-
Source: Ewers, J.C. (1955). The horse in Blackfoot Indian culture, with comparative mate- nese population doubled at the same time that farmers of
rial from other western tribes. (pp. 284–285).Washington: U. S. Government Printing
Office. the traditional staples, wheat in the north and rice in the
south, were running into problems of diminishing
returns.They were close to raising as much food as they
could on suitable land using existing techniques. The
nificantly in Europe, Asia, or Africa as food sources, and problem may have been especially pressing in the south,
the llama was so obviously inferior to several Old World where most of the level and near-level land close to mar-
animals as a beast of burden that it has never had more kets and sources of water for irrigation was already occu-
than novelty value in the Eastern Hemisphere. pied by rice paddies.
Amerindian crops, however, had enormous effect on The Spanish and the Portuguese, both with American
the Old World. Most of those which became standard in empires, carried the Amerindian crops to East Asia. The
Old World diets were brought back by the Spanish and port of Manila, newly Spanish and only a few days’ sail
Portuguese to Iberia, where they were being cultivated by from the China coast, played a major role in the transfer
the sixteenth century; they spread out from there. Some of native American crops to China. Sweet potatoes, a
would flourish where Old World crops would not; man- calorically rich food, arrived in China some time in the
ioc, for instance, where the rainfall was too much or too last years of the sixteenth century. This crop did well in
little, the soil infertile, and the pests too voracious for tra- inferior soils, tolerated drought, resisted insect pests, and
ditional staples like rice and yams. Several American prospered with little care compared with existing staples
foods were more nourishing, more productive, and eas- such as paddy rice. By 1650 sweet potatoes were com-
ier to cultivate and to harvest than traditional Old World mon in Guangdong and Fujian provinces and well on the
crops. Maize became a standard crop in sub-Saharan way to becoming the staple of the poorer peasants wher-
Africa, in some regions the most important crop. ever climate would allow.
The white potato, from the high, wet, cool Andes, Maize arrived in China even before the mid-sixteenth
became one of the most important food sources for the century. It, too, was hardy and required no more attention