Not far from my location is Head-Smashed-In Buffalo Jump (a Canadian National Historic Site, a Provincial Historic Site, and a UNESCO World Heritage Site), which is worth a visit if you’re in the neighbourhood. Closer to home, in a local park called “Indian Battle Park,” the Battle of the Belly River, between the Cree and the Blackfoot Confederacy, is commemorated.
It was certainly a different way of life from that which the Europeans later brought, but it was definitely no peaceful and idyllic Garden of Eden existence either.
They didn’t find really find a bountiful land, so much as EXCELLENT fishing off the Grand Banks. This was covered in my recent Early US History class, but my text book is at home. I can dig up cites when I do get home though…
And yeah, they salted the fish, same as other fishermen of the day.
Salting is what made long distance commerical fishing possible. If you don’t salt the fish, you have to get it to market the same day, or it will rot. Therefore if you’re going to sell fresh fish you can’t sail farther than a few hours from your market. It wouldn’t matter if richer fishing was available farther out, because you couldn’t bring it to market before it spoiled.
But with cheap salt available in the Renaissance, a new type of fishing was possible. You’d go out in your ship and stay out until your hold was full of preserved fish, they you’d head back to market. And that made deep sea fishing possible, where ships would be gone for weeks or months.
Seawater isn’t enough to preserve fish, and you can’t manufacture salt from seawater onboard ship–it’s a very energy intensive process, you need either solar evaporators or boilers. Or you could get salt from salt mines rather than sea salt. So they’d bring loads of salt with them.
For a long time, salt fish was a mainstay of the bottom rung of European society. Heck, even when I was a kid fish was considered cheap crap. I remember my mom feeding us cheap fishsticks in the 70s. Check out the price of fishsticks nowadays.
Back to Columbus. “Columbus discovered America” is a pretty problematic statement, because of course Columbus insisted to his dying day that he hadn’t discovered a new continent, merely a new way to reach India. How can you discover something when you’re sure you haven’t discovered it?
And there’s the reaction to the simple-minded narrative of Columbus as hero that was spoon-fed to children for decades. But that narrative is incorrect on nearly every point. So where does that leave us? Columbus didn’t argue over the sphericity of the world. Queen Isabella didn’t pawn her jewels. Columbus never set foot on the mainland. His crew never mutinied. He was so brutal as a governor that he was arrested and sent back to Spain in chains. He wasn’t the first European to sail to the Americas. And so on.
Note, however, that I directly linked Columbus to European civilization, not to random Europeans. The fishermen returned with cod, (and one could spend weeks on the Grand banks without ever catching sight of Labrador, much less the North American continent), but cod was available in Europe, already. The rest of the American influence on Europe, whether it was the large number of interesting crops, some amazing artwork, or the occasional disease, remained unknown to Europe until Columbus returned from his voyages, prompting others to follow him.
Is Kurlansky’s book an expansion on the chapters he devoted to cod in Salt? Cuz I read the latter and can’t imagine that there was more to say. Yes, cod are yummy. No, I don’t eat them anymore because of the overfishing.
There’s evidence that at least one European military commander planned to infect Native Americans with smallpox in hopes of killing them. It’s not clear whether this plan was actually put into effect, but it was definitely considered.
I don’t have any problem with the term “Discovery”. I do, however, have a lot of problems with the implied “right to ownership and exploitation” that it carries.
The discovery of the Americas by Columbus is a discovery relevant to the entire interconnected Euroasian continent from which we all draw our relevant progressive history of mankind. Politics , the arts, religion, technology and science. This discovery unleashed a rapid tumultuous upheaval of immigration and a whole new powerful world power within 250 years as well as a dozens of countries based on the European model.
To be blunt, only the Europeans saw any interest in developing a knowledge of the peoples, flora , fauna and geography everywhere in the world and thus the tern “discovery” is most meaningful to them and those everywhere who have inherited their broad knowledge.
One way of looking at it is to say that Columbus discovered the width of the Atlantic ocean.
He was the first to be able to draw a map showing both coasts and to be able to tell people–on both sides–“there’s land over there”.
Everything that came after was the direct result of the information that Columbus brought back that you could sail west from Europe to vast lands, and a complete understanding of the shape of the world would come soon after.