Original subtitles

[narrator] A man has a crazy idea.

He'll sail west to reach the east.

A queen makes it possible.

Christopher Columbus and his band of desperados

set sail in 1492.

Aiming for India, they find a new world.

A vast continent of a hundred million people

and ancient civilizations.

This is the untold story of what the invaders found here

and how they conquered the Americas with European animals,

plants and diseases.

Land!

[narrator] It is October the 12, 1492, when Columbus sights land.

[man as Columbus] I saw neither sheep nor goats nor any other beast.

All the trees were as different from ours as day from night,

and so the herbage, the rocks, and all things.

[narrator] Three Spanish ships sail west for three months in search of India.

Then, finally, they arrive.

Eighty-seven men, among them conquistadors, pig farmers, murderers.

But this is not Asia. It is an island in the Caribbean.

They have no idea that they have come to a New World.

The air is hot, the water is warm.

They have survived the voyage and have found land for the Spanish crown

and in the name of God.

They are exhausted: tired but thankful.

What land is this?

Where are the ports, the cities, the ships and traders they expected?

The natives have seen many people arrive from the sea.

Other tribes, but no one like this.

[speaking Arawak]

They will both soon discover that this is just the beginning.

Columbus and his men stay for three months in the Bahamas

and have no idea that they are on the edge of two great continents...

about ten times as large as Europe.

From the tropical seas...

to the arid deserts.

It is vast.

There is space.

With room for every possible landscape.

Stretching from the northernmost almost to the southernmost points of the globe.

They will find animals and plants they have never seen before:

bison on the prairie...

great herds of antelope and caribou in the mountains of the north.

They look as though they are living in pristine, untouched countryside.

[birds squawking]

But this is a managed land...

by the inhabitants of America.

In 1491, America is home to a hundred million people...

with civilizations as varied as its landscapes.

Not only hunters and gatherers,

but fishermen and farmers, kings, soldiers and slaves.

But the civilizations are separate from each other.

There are no books, no wheels to help them communicate.

They know nothing of each other.

Northern tribes have never met the cultures in the canyons.

And these have never seen the huge settlements along the Amazon.

And all of them know nothing of Europe.

It is Isabella, queen of Spain, who made Columbus's voyage possible.

[knock on door]

It is the year 1493, and for seven months she has been waiting for news.

Upon his return he delivers a report to the queen.

[parrot squawks]

In a few pages, Columbus describes the paradise he has found in her name.

Land to conquer, converts for Christianity,

riches to exploit.

And gold.

In Europe no news stays local for long.

Traders, armies and pilgrims carry news across the continent in weeks.

Columbus's letter is translated, copied, and becomes a bestseller.

Now many Europeans are aching for their share of the treasures.

A few months later, in Spain,

men are moving towards the ports of the Atlantic and the Mediterranean.

Men who have no land and no work.

They cross the barren Spanish regions that offer nothing to live off.

Desperados with nothing to lose.

Men in need of a job.

And the queen needs them.

Anyone can come along.

Anyone can be a conquistador.

Even a pig farmer can win glory and riches in faraway lands.

[birds calling]

In 1493, 17 ships arrive in the New World,

on an island in the Caribbean Sea, carrying 1,200 Spaniards.

Columbus's second voyage begins a stampede

of Spanish exploration and conquest.

Some will go south, some to the Andes, some along the Mississippi.

It is the conquest of the Americas.

Driven by greed, carrying weapons,

and with one animal that does not exist on this continent.

With the horse, the Spanish are able to annihilate whole empires

in just a few decades.

[soldiers shouting]

Within 40 years, the Inca in the Andes fall to Pizarro.

And the Aztecs in Central America to Cortez.

Where, in 1491,

there were towns and cities inhabited by millions of people,

the Spaniards leave only ruins.

And no one to manage the land.

Spanish explorers invade the Americas and bring with them the horse.

First brought to the Caribbean islands,

these animals reproduce and spread in the New World as fast as the wind.

Horses have not been seen here since the Ice Age.

Now they're back.

It's as though the landscape has been waiting for them.

Once ashore, a few horses run wild,

and a new breed evolves, which soon takes over North America:

the mustang.

Within 200 years, they have reached the Central Plains

and the Rocky Mountains.

At the end of the 18th century, the mustang makes it as far as Canada.

A hundred and fifty years later,

there may be seven million wild horses in North America.

For the nomadic tribes like the Blackfoot, Cheyenne, Sioux,

and Comanche in the Central Plains, these wild horses are a blessing.

What they used to do on foot -- fighting, hunting, traveling --

they can now do on the backs of wild horses from Europe.

It transforms their lives.

This Old World animal becomes a symbol of their native culture.

Although the horse once came from across the Atlantic,

it is now an image of nomadic America.

As soon as the conquistadors have control of South and Central America,

one of them heads north.

Hernando de Soto travels from Florida, up the Mississippi River,

looking for gold.

The Spaniards leave death in their wake,

and something else they bring along to keep them alive.

[pig squealing]

As they journey through unknown jungles, the pigs help them survive.

They are the perfect source of food.

They don't take up much space in the boats.

They look after themselves and they eat everything they can in this new continent.

They're prolific little beasts.

A healthy sow can give birth to ten piglets.

The conquistadors leave some behind as they go,

creating an ever-growing food supply for those who come after them.

The pigs are the key to their survival.

But to Native Americans, they are a curse.

In North America, natives do not fence their fields,

and their staple crop of corn is irresistible.

It seems the Indians have no idea how to fight this plague of pigs.

Soon European swine are eating the seeds and young shoots.

[pig snorting]

Only a few generations after running wild,

the animal becomes very different from the typical farm pig.

It grows tusks and gets bigger and aggressive.

What began with a few pigs

becomes a daily nightmare for the Native Americans.

As well as the horse,

Columbus had brought eight pigs to America on his second voyage.

Within 20 years, there are 30,000 pigs on the island of Cuba alone.

They multiply, conquering the Andes, the Amazon, and North America.

But the Spaniard, his horse and his pig,

would never have been so successful in the conquest of the New World...

without a hidden passenger.

It is when the Old and New Worlds touch that the American Indian

meets his worst enemy, a "very black dose" for the continent.

A Spanish missionary reports...

[man as missionary] An epidemic broke out, a sickness of pustules.

Large bumps spread on people, some were entirely covered.

On the face, the head, the chest.

They lay in their dwellings and sleeping places,

no longer able to move or stir.

The pustules caused great desolation.

Very many people died of them and many starved to death.

No one took care of others any longer.

[narrator] Deadly diseases contaminate the entire continent.

"For the natives," writes a chronicler,

"they are near all dead of the smallpox.

So the Lord hath cleared our title to what we possess."

To this day, scientists are still working to identify these diseases,

to trace their paths and count the dead.

[Isenberg] Smallpox was accidentally introduced to the Americas

in the 16th century.

The smallpox virus is very hardy.

In blankets that are used by smallpox victims,

the scabs can live for weeks, carrying the virus,

and smallpox can also pass from host to host

onboard a transatlantic vessel until it reaches the Americas.

And of course once smallpox reached the Americas,

it was introduced to millions of new hosts, human hosts,

who had no acquired immunities to these diseases.

And so smallpox, together with measles and influenza,

had a devastating impact on Native American populations.

No one knows exactly what the mortality was.

Conservative estimates are about 50%.

It was probably closer to 90% or even higher.

[narrator] Through trade between native peoples,

diseases spread throughout the whole continent.

Many natives die of foreign diseases without ever seeing a European.

Microbes move faster than the conquistadors who brought them.

Some 50 years after Columbus discovered the Americas,

conquistadors and explorers find neither towns nor people.

No one stands in their way.

Most of the people are dead.

And nature reclaims the land.

Everything that they now find is pure wilderness,

a Garden of Eden, without humans.

[animals screeching]

"A thousand different kinds of birds and beasts of the forest,

which have never been known, neither in shape nor name,

and whereof there is no mention made, neither among the Latins nor Greeks,

nor any other nations of the world,"

reports a Spanish missionary.

[honking]

"It may be God hath made a new creation of beast."

Explorers send exotic plants and animals,

evidence of God's second creation, on the ships back to Spain.

[parrot whistles]

[speaking Spanish]

Corn, chilli and pumpkins, domesticated in the New World,

unknown in Europe.

Tomatoes and potatoes.

But there is an unwelcome passenger on board.

An unintentional gift from the natives.

It will lead to death in Europe.

It will spread in the brothels in the ports and cities of the Old World.

It will be painful.

It drives its victims mad.

And it can take a long, long time to kill.

This is the French pox, or the Spanish sickness: syphilis.

[thunder crashing]

Europeans believe that syphilis is a punishment for their sins.

They have no idea it comes from America,

where more and more of them are desperate to go.

And in the 17th century,

a new wave of people head to the New World: the settlers.

England has defeated Spain to become the new European superpower.

The English crown sets out to claim its share.

In 1607, the British found a colony on the east coast of North America,

in what is now Virginia.

They name it Jamestown, after their king.

This will become their New World.

Their job is to make money

for the British trading companies that sent them here.

The land they seize seems to be the perfect place to exploit.

Forests and rivers, coasts and lakes, owned by no one.

But not all Native Americans have succumbed to European diseases.

And this land is neither empty nor uninhabited.

It is the land of the Powhatan.

Fifteen thousand people living in small communities.

Around 200 villages on the coast and along rivers,

in large houses surrounded by cleared forests

and mixed fields of squash, beans and corn.

These are farmers and hunters.

There is no gold, no silver that settlers dream of.

Just the land and its people.

[speaking Algonquian]

[giggling]

[speaking Algonquian]

[giggling]

[narrator] For a while, the settlers and the natives lead separate lives.

[twig snaps]

This land is rich with resources that Europe lacks.

In the long run, resources that are far more valuable than gold and silver.

And there's more than enough for everyone.

Europeans wanted to travel west, to the great empires of Asia.

Instead the New World they found amazed them with its natural abundance.

The first settlers in North America left Europe.

They sailed from estuaries that were brown and muddy

with sediment washed off the land.

They were polluted with refuse,

and so this was what they had grown up with, they were familiar with it.

When they discovered the New World, they sailed into estuaries

that were crystal-clear water.

You could see all the way down to the bottom.

You could see the vegetation on the bottom of the estuary.

You could see fish in abundance, and they discovered

almost miraculous, unbelievable quantities of fish in these estuaries and rivers.

One particular kind of fish which very much impressed settlers

was the river herring, or alewife as it's otherwise called.

And seasonally these would ascend the rivers

to spawn from the sea in their millions.

For example, in the Potomac River near Washington, DC,

during the 18th century, something like 750 million alewife were caught

just from that one river in one year.

It was a remarkable abundance

and people described the rivers as having more fish than water.

[narrator] Whole shoals are caught in the settlers' nets.

In the 17th century, hundreds of thousands of tons of cod are shipped every year

from North America to England, France, Portugal, and Spain.

Fishing boats sink under the weight of their catches and the colonies thrive.

It takes settlers only 200 years to achieve

what had taken a thousand years in Europe: overfishing.

Overfishing can impact on populations in many ways,

and one thing that it does over a period of generations

is to change the way that an animal reproduces and how fast it grows.

So fishing tends to remove the biggest, oldest individuals from a population

and by doing this, it changes the selective pressures on the population

so that fish begin to grow more slowly.

They reach reproductive maturity at a smaller size and earlier in life,

and these things all reduce the productivity of a population.

So over time, fisheries become less good at supplying the protein

that we like them to do.

[narrator] Fish are salted, packed and sent home for money.

Along with them, the settlers send another resource

that the Old World is desperate for.

[man as settler] There are trees as far as the eye can see,

such that a squirrel starting off at the Atlantic coast

need never touch the ground till he got to the Mississippi.

[narrator] This is so different from the Europe they left behind.

They have finally found a replacement for something that is disappearing at home.

An infinite, accessible source of the raw material of the age.

The forests must fall if the settlers are to succeed.

From now on the trees are doomed.

[Radkau speaking German]

[interpreter] When the first settlers arrived in the New World,

they found forests of a kind they had never seen in Europe,

endless forests with huge trees.

Penetrating into the heart of the land became a war against the forest.

The axe was the Yankee emblem.

At the same time, forests were the great resource the land had to offer.

You could make plenty of money exporting timber.

In Europe, wood had become expensive.

And so the greatest forest destruction in history now took place.

[narrator] "The clearing of forests that seem to belong to no one and cost nothing

goes so far that today many areas along the east coast

and many of the Atlantic islands are completely bald.

[man as settler] An incredible amount of wood

is really squandered in this country for fuel.

[narrator] Day and night, all winter, for nearly half a year in all rooms,

a fire is kept going," said one European visitor.

"The resources in this vast continent seem to be inexhaustible."

But in time, fish stocks will dwindle in the Americas, too.

Europeans change America by cutting down the forests and depleting the seas.

They create this New World in the image of the one they left.

But they haven't just taken away.

They change this continent even more by what they bring with them.

They leave their homes in search of their own land,

something most could never dream of in Europe at that time.

They come in search of religious freedom, in search of a better life.

They believe they are responsible for their own success and happiness.

For the first time, women settlers come too,

and they bring a whole way of life with them.

They bring animals and plants that are all new to the American continent.

[sheep bleating]

[squawking]

Livestock and grains from Europe will transform the New World

and make of it a true New England.

With the newly imported plough,

they will leave not one piece of land untilled.

[horse whinnies]

Domesticated livestock and metal tools, never seen on this continent.

An environmental revolution takes place.

In no time, their European wheat is growing in this foreign soil.

Wheat, barley, oats and rye are brought to America.

But in the process, some less welcome guests hitch a ride.

[Isenberg] Europeans introduced crops such as wheat to the Americas,

but in the bags of seed that they brought with them to the Americas,

they also brought along seeds for weeds: dandelions, other kinds of weeds,

and these are everywhere in the Americas now.

[narrator] From the most insignificant weed

to the continent's greatest mammal,

nothing is untouched.

America's native flora and fauna will be displaced.

Where the bison once reigned, cattle will soon take over.

To the settlers' delight,

their livestock multiplies more quickly here than it did in Europe.

In a few hundred years, European cows eat away the American grass

and trample the soil,

depositing their excrement and distributing the seeds of the weeds.

[horses whinnying]

The invasion of European animals changes the American landscape forever.

Horses, pigs, sheep, goats, chickens, and huge herds of cattle

take over North and South America.

The cattle alone double in numbers every 15 months...

and feed the settlers.

The settlers defend themselves inside sturdy forts.

But there are no shortages of any kind.

Meat has become the cheapest food in the Americas.

They are the best-fed people in the world.

Very interesting knives. You have something a little better?

[woman] We have this.

Boys, you're gonna want a shot of rum. This is fresh rum from...

[narrator] Hides are in great demand, in America as well as in Europe.

And the fur of the wild animals they shoot brings in a steady export income.

Some, like the beaver, are hunted almost to extinction.

Settlers are not forced to adapt to the landscape.

They domesticate and dominate it.

"All trees were cut down and turned into pasture and gardens

where all kinds of vegetables and root crops that we know in England

grow in profusion."

They replace the trees they cut down with their own trees.

The Europeans bring peaches, pears, and plums.

They bring figs, olives and bananas.

Their trees will flourish.

They never know how lucky they are.

Because the settlers brought bees with them, for their honey.

The native American bee pollinates only a few species,

but European honeybees can live almost everywhere

and will pollinate any plant in sight.

Gardens will turn into plantations, for consumption at home and abroad.

Apples will one day be a major industry in North America.

With a yearly harvest of five million metric tons,

it will lead worldwide exports, all beginning with European seedlings.

This is biological imperialism in full swing.

Europe's fruits and vegetables have conquered the New World.

But it is also an exchange.

It is the Columbian Exchange.

European kitchens may not see native meat from America, bison or llama.

But New World vegetables will make a big impact.

The plant with the greatest impact on Europe

needs a couple of centuries to take root in its culture.

"This tuber is insipid and mealy.

It cannot be classed among the agreeable foodstuffs.

But it furnishes abundant and rather wholesome nutrition

to men who are content to be nourished.

It is justly regarded as flatulent,

but what are winds to the vigorous organs of peasants and labourers?"

wrote Diderot in his Encyclopaedia in the 18th century.

First introduced into Spain, potatoes slowly spread to Italy

and to northern and eastern Europe.

By 1600, the potato has conquered Austria, Holland, France, Switzerland,

England, and Germany.

Frederick the Great himself urges its cultivation in Prussia.

But it is the Irish who adopt the potato with open arms.

They have a limited food supply and grain grown here

has often been destroyed or burnt as the result of war.

But the potato, safely underground, survives these hardships.

In a hundred years, the Irish population more than doubles.

And towns like Berlin grow into great cities.

By 1700, there is an unprecedented population explosion in Europe...

thanks to a plant from the faraway Andes.

Yet only one animal from the New World sets foot in Europe.

[turkey gobbling]

The turkey.

Domesticated by the Aztecs in Mexico, it enriches the European diet.

[Isenberg] So, why was the Columbian Exchange so one-sided?

Why did it go primarily in one direction, from Europe to America,

with the exception of things like potatoes and potato blight?

Why was Europe not overtaken by American plants and animals?

It's difficult to say why something did not happen,

but you have to remember that the ecological invasion

was a cooperative enterprise,

disease and plants and animals working together,

and Europe remained densely populated.

It didn't have diseases depopulate its people.

And so you didn't have niches open up for livestock to graze,

and then weeds to take over the areas that livestock had overgrazed and trampled.

So without that critical part, it worked in one direction primarily.

[narrator] The European elite want more than just potatoes from the New World.

They want luxury products.

Sugar and tobacco meet the requirements of the upper class.

The first British settlers quickly acquire a taste for American tobacco

and export large shipments to Europe.

To satisfy such high demand, settlers build immense plantations.

Growing sugar becomes a business on the same scale as tobacco.

The new monocultures cover entire landscapes.

For this sole purpose, some ten million Africans are transported to America,

enslaved to cultivate luxury items for Americans and Europeans.

[Isenberg] Because of the rapid depopulation of the Americas

owing to disease,

Europeans faced a shortage of labour in their effort to exploit the resources

in the New World, particularly to exploit the soil.

So the Europeans, first the Portuguese and then the Dutch,

and then eventually the English, imported slaves from West Africa

to cultivate sugar in the Caribbean and Brazil, tobacco in Virginia,

rice in South Carolina, and by the 19th century

in mainland North America, cotton.

It's no exaggeration to say that these cash commodities

produced by slave labour were essential to the export economies of the Americas.

[narrator] By the 18th century,

the metamorphosis of much of America is almost complete.

New Spain and New England are fully established.

Nature has been transformed and is in the hands of man.

Now pioneers are heading west.

There is still empty land in that direction.

They will complete what was begun in the East.

In the creation of the New World,

perhaps 90% of the Native American people died.

The people who took their place came from all over Europe, as conquistadors...

settlers...

colonists...

and pioneers.

And they came from Africa as slaves.

But it was the transfer of animals and plants from Europe to the Americas

that really made the creation of the New World possible.

In today's chrome and steel cities, we sometimes seem so cut off from nature

that it may be difficult to believe the Columbian Exchange ever happened.

[car horn honks]

But in the final analysis, the skyscrapers and the melting pot of the races

owe their existence not only to humans, but also to the natural world.

[Isenberg] People came to the Americas for many reasons.

Some came to make money, some came for religious freedom,

some came involuntarily as slaves,

but those populations took hold in the Americas

because of the accident of ecology.

Because of the microbes, the plants, the animals that they brought with them

that gave them an advantage over the people who were already here.

And the legacy of the Columbian Exchange is also still largely biological,

and that legacy will continue into the future.

[narrator] It all began 500 years ago.

Columbus had a vision.

And three ships set out in a quest for India...

and found the New World.