The Columbian Exchange: Disease, Food, and New World Impact

Introduction to the Columbian Exchange

The Columbian Exchange is a term used to refer to the transfer of various elements between Europe and the New World following the arrival of Columbus. This exchange included positive elements such as foodstuffs, agricultural products, and farming methods, as well as the negative elements that many historians have focused on in recent years, particularly disease. Much of the immediate transfer took place between the Spanish and the Native Americans—both North and South—in the New World.

Disease Immunity and Pre-Columbian Health

According to historians, Columbus arrived and inadvertently introduced diseases into the New World that killed thousands of Indians who had no immunity to organisms that had long since ceased to have any adverse effects on the people of Europe. Some historians have noted a tragic irony in the fact that the greatest threat to the health of Native Americans was, in a sense, their extraordinary good health at the time the European explorers arrived:

"For in the tens of thousands of years of isolation from the rest of the earth's human populations, the indigenous peoples of the Americas were spared from contact with the cataclysms of disease that had wreaked such havoc on the Old World, from China to the Middle East, from the provinces of ancient Rome to the alleyways of medieval Paris."¹

Columbus and his men introduced diseases into the New World that killed thousands of Indians who had no immunity to organisms that had long since ceased to have any adverse effects on Europeans. Columbus himself cannot reasonably be blamed for this outcome, since he could not have known it would result from his arrival—especially given that he initially believed he had reached India rather than an entirely new continent. Europe had long been afflicted by devastating illnesses including leprosy, ergotism, scurvy, cholera, smallpox, measles, diphtheria, typhus, tuberculosis, and influenza—diseases deadly on a scale that is difficult to imagine.²

There were some diseases in the New World before Columbus, and people did die from them. However, the great plagues that had brought entire societies in Asia, Africa, and Europe to their knees did not emerge on their own among the native peoples of the Western Hemisphere. Among the diseases not found in the New World were smallpox, measles, bubonic plague, diphtheria, influenza, malaria, yellow fever, typhoid, and others. The ocean provided a natural barrier keeping these diseases in the Old World until Columbus carried them across. The natives had no immunity to these diseases, so an illness like smallpox could wipe out enormous numbers of people: "Such devastating contagion was simply unknown in the histories of the Cree or other indigenous peoples of the Americas."³

Smallpox and the Devastation of Native Populations

To this day, researchers debate the presence or absence of certain diseases in the pre-Columbian New World population, including tuberculosis and syphilis. These may or may not have existed before Columbus. Recent research suggests there was some form of "tuberculosis-like pathology" in the population before 1492, though it was not associated with pulmonary disease. There was also a relatively benign nonvenereal treponemal infection related to syphilis. There is no evidence, however, that either disease was widespread in North or South America. Detailed studies show that large-scale sedentary societies in the Americas, where such diseases might have taken hold, did not in fact develop them. Studies of ancient small-scale migratory societies—even those in harsh environments such as the frigid northwestern plains—indicate that their members lived long lives without significant infectious conditions or serious injury. The range of potentially serious diseases among indigenous peoples was apparently limited, consisting primarily of gastrointestinal ailments and minor infections, and even these had been mitigated by thousands of years of exposure, as well as by generally favorable living conditions and adequate nutrition.⁴

Smallpox was the most powerful ally of the Conquistadores who followed Columbus, killing huge numbers of the native population. The virus incubated in the Antilles after the arrival of the Europeans. Smallpox had been a common but not typically fatal affliction in the densely populated regions of Europe during the Middle Ages. Around 1500, however, it evolved into a more virulent form with a greater tendency to kill its hosts. It became so prevalent in Atlantic-facing cities that nearly all urban children soon caught it and were either killed or left immune—in either case, no longer serving as carriers for the disease's further propagation.

When circumstances provided the means for the disease to cross to the Americas some two decades later, it arrived either through a few smallpox scabs in a bale of waste cloth or via the serial infection of immunologically inexperienced young men from rural Castile who traveled to the colonies in search of fortune. It reached the colonies around Christmas of 1518, cutting a wide swath through the Tainos. The smallpox epidemic left no more than 1,000 people alive on Hispaniola.⁵ When Columbus had first arrived in the region, there were two to three million Arawak-speaking people in the Antilles; within a hundred years they were extinct.⁶

Conclusion: Weighing the Costs and Benefits

The primary transfer of agricultural methods was from Europe to the New World, while many more crops moved in the opposite direction—from the New World to Europe. The benefits to Europe were considerable, and while the New World received certain advantages as well, the massive deaths caused by unfamiliar diseases must be seen as a major catastrophe, even before accounting for the era of the Conquistadores and the mass violence of that period.