Lesson 2: the Columbian Exchange

Shaping America Final Script

TITLE:Lesson 2: "Worlds Transformed”

PREPARED FOR:Dallas TeleLearning

WRITER:Gretchen Dyer

PRODUCER:Julia Dyer

DRAFT:Final

DATE:April 19, 2001

Lesson 2: The Columbian Exchange  Final Script  4/19/01  1

VisualAudio

FADE IN:

Introduction (1.5 mins.)
Footage of Columbus Day rally in Colorado-crowds protesting, demonstrators / MALE PROTESTOR We’re all, pretty much, told one story in school and its not necessarily what’s true.

1. STUART SCHWARTZ on camera

/ STUART SCHWARTZ (Roll 6678, 4:05:50) A hundred years ago, Columbus was the great hero because he was the one who essentially opened the New World to the colonization by Europeans. By the end of the 20th century, we were less sure that that was such a good thing.

1. AL CROSBY on camera

/ AL CROSBY (Roll 6646, 11:04:50) If William the Conqueror had come ashore in England in 1066 and said, “Look at me, I’m discovering England,” the Saxons would have said, “That’s ridiculous. You’re invading the place.” Which is what Columbus did in the West Indies.

1. early images of Columbus, the Indians of the Caribbean and South America

/ NARRATOR: For better or worse, Columbus’ voyage had epic consequences. His so-called “discovery” of the New World ushered in an era of opportunity for Europeans, and one of defeat and near extinction for the people he called “Indians.”
After Columbus, the world would never be the same.
Segment One
“Columbian Exchange”
/ transitional music up

1. UTA-37: medieval maps showing dangers lurking in western ocean

/ NARRATOR: For centuries western Europeans had dreaded the dangers of the Atlantic Ocean. They called it the Green Sea of Darkness.

1. UTA-38: map highlighting Portuguese routes down west coast of Africa
2. images of Renaissance navigational instruments

/ But by the mid-1400s, new advances in navigation allowed the intrepid Portuguese to sail partway down the western coast of Africa, and as far west as the Cape Verde Islands.

1. image of Columbus

/ While the Portuguese tried to discover a route eastward to the Indies, a young man from Genoa was convinced that the East Indies could be reached by sailing west.

1. cont’d above
   ACTOR, Taylor, Roll 7205, 00:10:41, Last Take

/ ACTOR (Christopher Columbus): “Aristotle says that between the end of Spain and the beginning of India is a small sea, navigable in a few days.”

1. images of Ferdinand and Isabella, their advisers (?)

/ NARRATOR: Almost everyone else thought Christopher Columbus was wrong.

1. image of Columbus with Ferdinand and Isabella

/ But after six years of indecision, King Ferdinand and Queen Isabella of Spain finally consented to Columbus’ “Enterprise of the Indies.”

1. images of Nina, Pinta, Santa Maria

/ And on August 3, 1492 he set out with three ships on a journey he expected to last no more than a few weeks.

1. images of Columbus’ ships, stock footage of empty ocean expanse (Florida footage, Tape #7112)

/ More than two months later his ships were still at sea. His crew, frightened of the unknown and worried that they would not be able to return, threatened to mutiny if he did not turn back.

1. image of Columbus sighting land; Florida footage of beach and water (7112)

/ On the following day, October 11th, from the deck of the Santa Maria, Columbus sighted land.

1. image of Columbus greeting natives on San Salvador

/ From the moment Columbus and his men set foot on the island he christened San Salvador, they began an irreversible process of biological, cultural, and material exchange that continues to this day.

1. Stuart Schwartz on camera;
2. Historic map layered with images illustrating various life forms and materials involved in Columbian exchange. From Old World to New: horses, cattle, goats, chickens, cats, sheep, wheat, cannons, guitars, smallpox, alphabet, African slaves, Catholicism. From New World to Old: tobacco, corn, tomatoes, potatoes, pineapple, syphillis, gold, silver…(what animals?)

/ STUART SCHWARTZ (Roll 6678, 4:08:53) The Columbian Exchange is an idea that what happened when Columbus arrived in the New World was it began a whole system of exchanges between the Old World and the New World; not only in human terms but in biological terms.

1. Al Crosby on camera; different images illustrating the exchange (see text, p. 67)

/ AL CROSBY (Roll 6646, 11:14) Before 1492, life forms in the world had been developing divergently because of geographical isolation in the Old World and the New World. And then Columbus connected the two, and ever since then, we’ve been connecting them tighter and tighter and tighter and there is just an avalanche of life forms back and forth.

1. Stuart Schwartz on camera; images of Indians circa 1500

/ STUART SCHWARTZ (Roll 6678, 4:10) In some ways, the short terms effects were disastrous. The introduction of European diseases, for example, decimated American Indian populations. It was really a holocaust, which in many places whole peoples dying out, and in large sections of the Americas, up to 90% of the population decimated by diseases.

1. Al Crosby on camera; images of corn growing, Irish harvesting potatoes, Italians harvesting tomatoes, Africans growing corn (Maybe Van Gogh’s “The Potato Eaters”).

/ AL CROSBY (Roll 6647, 12:00:45) After the initial disease crash, the food crops that the Europeans and Africans brought with them fueled a population growth in the Americas that’s still going on. What happened in the Old World is even more spectacular, and probably more important because you cannot imagine how all those people could be living in Asia, in Eurasia, in Africa, without American Indian crops. Maize is the most important single crop for highland Indonesia. Potatoes have been the staple of very nearly every meal in Scandinavia; right across Northern Europe, Russia.

1. Stuart Schwartz on camera

/ STUART SCHWARTZ (Roll 6678, 4:11) We’re still living today with the results of the Columbian Exchange. And many people have said that, in fact, 1492 and the so-called “Discovery of America” was perhaps the most important event in the history of the world, as a real sort of marker in the history of the world, and that the history of the world really should be developed to be “Before 1492” and “After 1492”, for the reason of the Columbian Exchange.
Segment Two
“The Conquest of the Americas”
/ transitional music up

1. Map of the world layered with ocean water

/ NARRATOR : Columbus’ voyage permanently linked the four continents of Europe, Africa, South America and North America for the first time.

1. Columbian-era maps showing “Cipangu” and other islands off the coast of India and China (Possible UTA-38)

/ But Columbus would go to his grave believing that what he had found was not a new continent, but simply the outlying islands of the Far East.

1. Ptolemy’s map (Across the Ocean Sea, G. Sanderlin, p. 244) (UTA also has Ptolemy-style map from 1493—need to shoot)

/ In 1492, mapmakers still depicted the world much as Ptolemy had some fourteen centuries earlier.

1. pre-Columbian map drawn by Martellus (about 1490) (Sanderlin, p. 244)

/ North and South America were not represented at all on maps of this period.

1. Map 2-1(a) showing routes of various explorers

/ But Columbus’ voyage set off a frenzy of exploration that led in rapid succession to the European discoveries of South America, Central America, Florida, the southern and eastern coastlines of North America, and Mexico.

1. Waldseemuller’s map (Sanderlin, p. 250) (UTA also has this map—need to shoot)

/ In 1507, a German cartographer named Martin Waldseemuller first showed the new lands as a fourth continent, completely separate from Europe, Asia and Africa. Waldseemuller had no proof of this; he based his map on scientific theories about the size and shape of the globe.

1. UTA-39, featuring Pacific Ocean

/ NARRATOR: In 1513, twenty years after Columbus sailed into the Caribbean, Vasco Nuñez de Balboa crossed the isthmus of Panama and found the Pacific Ocean on the other side.

1. Ortelius’ map (Sanderlin, p. 250), or continue above

/ Europeans finally had proof that what they had discovered was more than just a western route to Asia--it was a world unto itself.
transitional music up

1. image of Columbus
   ACTOR, Taylor, Roll 7205, 00:13:14, Last 2 takes

/ ACTOR (Christopher Columbus): “My desire was to pass by no single island without taking possession of it.”

1. Map 2-2, showing demarcation line of the Treaty of Tordesillas

/ NARRATOR: In 1493, the Pope divided the New World, giving everything east of the demarcation line to Portugal, and everything west of that line to Spain.

1. Stuart Schwartz on camera; images of Spanish Conquistadors

/ STUART SCHWARTZ (Roll 6679, 5:00:45) The old expression is that the Spanish were motivated by “Glory, God, and Gold”, and in some ways that’s accurate. God – because the expansion, and the Spanish crown justified the expansion by the concessions given to it to carry the word of the church to heathen lands. Gold – because they saw no contradiction in gaining wealth for Spain, for the king. And Glory – because these are people of the Renaissance who have a concept of themselves and what they’re doing. That they, through their own efforts, are able to make their name, make their reputation, serve their king and serve God all at the same time.

1. David Weber on camera; images of Christianity, copystand of Requirimiento; images of conquistadors reading the proclamation to Indian peoples

/ DAVID WEBER (Roll 6666, 6:13) The explorers, or conquistadors, were told to read to the Indians a document that explained that they represented the king, and the king represented the pope. And the king and the pope had told the Indians essentially to submit or if they resisted, they would be smashed. So I think this is more than simply a justification. It’s a deep sense of righteousness that the Spaniards brought with them.

1. Map 2-3(a), showing where Cortes landed; image of Cortes

/ NARRATOR: In search of new lands to conquer, Hernán Cortés led an expedition that landed on the eastern shores of Mexico in 1519.

1. Map 2-3(b), highlighting Cortés route inland and Tenochtitlan; images of Cortés party

/ NARRATOR: Following rumors of a rich civilization, Cortés headed inland toward Tenochtitlan, the capital of the Aztec empire.

1. b-roll of eastern/central Mexico landscapes, flowers, jungle foliage (7204)
2. UTA-40 (roll 7150): historic map/drawing of Tenochtitlan

/ STUART SCHWARTZ (Roll 6678, 4:13) The people who lived in central Mexico are the people that we have come to call Aztecs. They would have called themselves “Mexica”.

1. Mayan ruins (7204)

/ Central Mexico had been an area of developed civilization for thousands of years before the Mexica came on the scene. Great civilizations had risen and fallen.

1. Images of Aztecs; ruins of Tenochtitlan (7002)

/ So the “Aztec Empire” as it came to be called really dates in the last 50 or 70 years prior to the arrival of the Europeans.

1. Stuart Schwartz on camera
2. Plan of city, and ruins of Tenochtitlan (7002)

/ STUART SCHWARTZ (Roll 6678, 4:28:13) Tenochtitlan, which is where the present core of Mexico City is located, was really a wondrous place. The city held perhaps somewhere between 150,000 and 300,000 people; which would have made it on a scale as large as any of the great European cities. It was in fact a great city. It had a great marketplace. It was a political center, and it was also a center for industry.

1. image of Montezuma

/ NARRATOR: Word of Cortés’ approach quickly reached Montezuma, the ruler of the Aztecs. When the Spaniards marched into Tenochtitlan, it was a unique moment in world history.

1. Stuart Schwartz on camera

/ STUART SCHWARTZ (Roll 6679, 5:04) Here were two incredible civilizations that had developed independent of each other, had no knowledge of each other, and then are brought into contact. Each side had to draw on itself to explain the other side. “Where did these people come from? How could we explain them? How did they fit into our vision of the world?”

1. images of La Noche Triste (from Victors and Vanquished, S. Schwartz)

/ NARRATOR: Relations between the Aztecs and the Spaniards were peaceful at first, but the Spaniards soon angered the Indians.
After barely escaping Tenochtitlan alive, Cortés and his followers returned the following year with an army of Indians from neighboring areas.

1. Stuart Schwartz on camera

/ STUART SCHWARTZ (Roll 6678, 4:18) The Aztecs, partly for religious reasons and partly because of the resistance of their opponents, left a few areas unconquered in the area under their general control. What happened when the Europeans arrived is that these unconquered areas provided natural allies to the Europeans against the Mexica.

1. Stuart Schwartz on camera

/ STUART SCHWARTZ (Roll 6679, 5:12:19) The military conquest was complete. The Spanish in the last days of the fighting for the capital Tenochtitlan essentially went building by building and the city was destroyed.

1. image of Cortés at the head of his army, or fall of Tenochtitlan
   ACTOR, Carlos 2-3, Roll 6973, 19:01:28 (skip down)

/ ACTOR: Aztec Nobleman
Those whose assignment it was to do the killing just went on foot, each with his metal sword and his leather shield. Then they surrounded those who were dancing, going among the cylindrical drums. They struck a drummer’s arms; both of his hands were severed. They struck his neck; his head landed far away.

1. David Weber on camera; images of Spanish soldiers, weaponry and animals; images of Indians ravaged by disease

/ DAVID WEBER (Roll 6666, 6:15:43:23) Cortés and the conquistadors were successful, historians think, because of technology, European technology – guns, powder – because they brought large animals with them that frightened Indians and vicious dogs that were not present in the hemisphere before. Also, famously, because of disease; particularly smallpox that wiped out the Aztec Empire. I think we have to think about the extraordinary surprise that was involved here; in that, the conquistadors played by different rules. In the case of the Aztecs who performed almost ceremonial wars in which they took captives alive in order to sacrifice them, they weren’t used to an adversary who arrived with the intention of killing one, and of achieving total victory.

1. images of treasure sent back to Spain (from textbook), Spanish ships on the ocean

/ NARRATOR: After his conquest of the Aztecs, Cortés sent several shiploads of stolen treasure back to Spain, including gold, silver, emeralds, pearls, rare gems, exotic plants and animals, and Indian slaves.

1. images of conquistadors

/ This magnificent plunder whetted the appetites of other conquistadors, and they soon followed Cortes’ lead.

1. images of Pizarro, conquest of Peru

/ In South America, Pizarro’s conquest and looting of the Incan empire returned unheard of quantities of gold and silver to Spain.

1. images of fabled Seven Cities of Cibola (?)

/ But the conquistadors of North America would search in vain for such fabulous riches.

1. David Weber on camera; intercut with image of De Soto

/ DAVID WEBER (Roll 6666, 06:18:45) Hernando de Soto was one of the most experienced of conquistadors. He’d already been successful in Peru with the Pizarros. And yet, like so many conquistadors, there was never a point where he seemed to reach complete saturation. There was another conquest to be made, he thought, in North America.

1. Map 2-4(a), highlighting routes of De Soto and Coronado

/ NARRATOR: De Soto and Coronado between them crossed much of the North American continent. Their insatiable greed and their unflinching cruelty toward the Native Americans are legendary.

1. Map 2-4(b), add Cabeza de Vaca’s route, and push in on Galveston
2. image of Cabeza de Vaca

/ But another would-be conquistador had quite a different encounter with Indian peoples. Cabeza de Vaca and a number of other Spaniards were taken captive when their expedition shipwrecked along the coast of Texas. They eventually escaped and wandered for years across the region, trying to find their way back to Mexico.

1. UTA-43: Cabeza de Vaca entry
   ACTOR, Mathis, Roll 7205, 00:06:42, Last 2 takes

/ ACTOR: Cabeza de Vaca (pick-ups, voice only, Carlos or Wood)
“We traveled in that region through so many different villages of such diverse tongues that my memory gets confused.”

1. David Weber on camera

/ DAVID WEBER (Roll 6666, 6:17) Cabeza de Vaca finally runs into a group of Pima Indians in Northwest Mexico in what is today Sonora. And the Pimas say to him in effect, “How can you be one of those Spaniards that you’re trying to rejoin? They kill people. You’ve cured people. They rob people. You’ve generously given to us. You’re naked. They come with armor and swords.” Cabeza de Vaca very much had entered an Indian world and had come to appreciate it and I think it’s the rarity of that experience that he had that so fascinates us yet today.

1. images of Indians of Central and North America

/ NARRATOR: Cabeza de Vaca was more or less alone in his respect for the Indians.

1. Image of Indian slaves in mines

/ As more and more Spanish settlers came to colonize the New World, they found the Indians themselves to be its most valuable resource. With their labor the riches of New Spain were extracted and cultivated.

1. Empty landscape

/ But even the Indians turned out to be a limited resource, as disease, hunger and exhaustion quickly depopulated a world once inhabited by perhaps as many as a hundred million native Americans.
Segment Three
“New Spain” / music up

1. 16th century Spanish gun
   ACTOR, Mathis, Roll 7205, 00:03:49, Last 2 takes

/ ACTOR (Spanish priest in Florida): “Gunpowder frightens the most valiant and courageous Indian and renders him slave to the White Man’s command.”

1. images of New Spain; historic map of Nueva Hispania (UTA-41, Roll 7150)

/ NARRATOR: Despite the fact that they were greatly outnumbered by the Native Americans, Spanish colonists quickly subdued and settled many areas of the New World.