Mission San Juan Capistrano by Kathleen Edgar (2000) Page 6
Spanish Interest in Alta California: The Spanish became interested in the land we now call California after Christopher Columbus discovered the New World (Central America, North America, and South America) in 1492. Many countries wanted to send explorers to these new lands and claim them for their kings and queens. The king of Spain sent
men to the New World to see what riches it offered, hoping to find gold and spices.
Some of the Spanish also wanted to claim the New World for religious reasons. A religious order called the Franciscans
wanted to share their religions with the American Indians who lived there. The Spanish were Catholics and believed in
the teachings of the Christian Bible. They wanted to convert the Indians to Catholicism.
In 1542, the Spanish sent Juan Rodriguez Cabrillo to the Californians by ship. In those days the term “Californias” was
used to describe the area of land that included the state of California and the Baja Peninsula of Mexico. The southern
portion of the Californias was named “Baja” (or lower) California, while the northern portion was called (Alta (for upper) California
The Columbian Exchange (Text Book – 2008) pg 44-45
The arrival of the Spanish in the Americas brought more than a clash of peoples and cultures. It also brought a movement of plants, animals, and diseases between the Eastern and Western hemispheres. This movement of living things
between hemispheres is called the Columbian Exchange.
Trade Brings Disease: One result of the Columbian Exchange was the transfer of germs from Europe to the Americas.
Before the Europeans arrived, Native American farmland stretched all along the eastern seaboard of what is now the
United States. Many of the communities that farmed these lands were wiped out by European diseases before the
settlers began arriving in large numbers. The Native Americans had no immunity to the germs that caused such diseases as smallpox, measles, and influenza. Exact numbers are unknown, but historians estimate that diseases brought by
Europeans killed more than 20 million Native Americans in Mexico in the first century after conquest. The population of
Native Americans in Central America may have decreased by 90 to 95 percent between the years 1519 and 1619. The
result was similar in Peru and other parts of the Americas. Bernardino de Sahagún, a Spanish missionary in Mexico, described the effects of smallpox on the Aztecs: “Very many died of it. . . . They could not move: they could not stir. . . .
And if they stirred, much did they cry out. Great was its destruction.”
Positive Effects of the Exchange: Other effects of the Columbian Exchange were more positive. The Spanish brought
many plants and animals to the Americas. European livestock—cattle, pigs, and horses—all thrived in the Americas.
Crops from the Eastern Hemisphere, such as grapes, onions, and wheat, also thrived in the Western Hemisphere. The
Columbian Exchange benefited Europe, too. Many American crops became part of the European diet. Two that had a
huge impact were potatoes and corn. Potatoes, for example, became an important food in Ireland, Russia, and other
parts of Europe. Without potatoes, Europe’s population might not have grown as rapidly as it did. By mixing the products of two hemispheres, the Columbian Exchange brought the world closer together. Of course, people were also
moving from one hemisphere to the other, blending their cultures in the process.
1493 by Charles Mann (2011) page 424
American history is often described in terms of Europeans entering a nearly empty wilderness. For centuries, though,
most of the newcomers were African and the land was not empty, but filled with millions of indigenous people. Much
of the great encounter between the two separate halves of the world thus was less a meeting of Europe and America
than a meeting of Africans and Indians – a relationship forged in the cage of slavery and in the uprisings against it.
Largely conducted out of the sight of Europeans, the complex interplay between red and black is hidden history that
researchers are now beginning to unravel.
Even when school text books acknowledge the hemisphere’s majority populations, they are all too often portrayed
solely as helpless victims of European expansionism: Indians melting away before colonists’ onslaught, Africans chained
in plantations, working under the lash. In both roles, they have little volition of their own – no agency! To be sure, slavery forced millions of Africans and Indians into lives of misery and pain. Often those lives were short: a third to half of
Brazil’s slaves died within four to five years. More still died on the journey within Africa to the slave port, and on the
passage across the Atlantic. Yet people always seek to exert their will, even in the most terrible circumstances. Africans
and Indians fought with each other, claimed to be each other and allied together for common goals, sometimes all at
the same time. Whatever their tactics, the goals was constant: freedom.
Questions
What is the Columbian Exchange?
What similarities do these three authors share?
What differences do these three author’s share?
Which of the three short articles would you argue for as presenting the most accurate viewpoint? You must support
your response.