Biology Reference
In-Depth Information
abandon the sites, and toward the end of that same cold period Washington's
troops would suffer a near-fatal winter at Valley Forge in 1777. These cli-
matic events, future changes in climate, and their potential consequences
are recounted in Richard Alley's
The Two-Mile Time Machine
(2000), Brian
Fagan's
The Little Ice Age
(2000), and Tim Flannery's
The Weather Makers
(2005). The changes were on a regional to near-global scale:
On the last day of 1607, Edmund Shakespeare [brother to William] was
buried. It was a time of almost unbearable cold. By the middle of Decem-
ber the Thames had frozen solid so that “many persons did walk halfway
over the Thames upon the ice, and by the thirtieth of December the multi-
tude . . . passed over the Thames in divers places.” A small tent city sprang
up on the ice, with wrestling bouts and football matches, barbers shops and
eating-houses, trading upon the novelty of the silent and immobile river.
(Ackroyd 2005, 457)
On 5 October 1492, some fi ve hundred years after the Viking's discovery of
the New World, a lookout on board the Pinta cried out “Tierra” and claimed
the 5000-maravedi prize for being the fi rst to sight land—the Caribbean
island of San Salvador. In 1502 Columbus made his last voyage to the New
World, sailing along the coast of Central America, which he still believed
was China. He was in search of the elusive strait described by Marco Polo
as a passage from China into the Indian Ocean, by which he intended to
return to Spain and thereby confi rm the belief already widely suspected by
geographers that the Earth was a sphere. It was left to Amerigo Vespucci, on
a voyage beginning on 13 May 1501, to recognize that South America was
a new continent: “We arrived at a new land which, for many reasons that
are enumerated in what follows, we observed to be a continent” (quoted in
Boorstin 1983, 233). Gerardus Mercator published a map of the world in
1538 and it showed for the fi rst time lands called North America and South
America.
These early wanderers were concerned primarily with food and survival;
suitable lands for establishing colonies; and wealth, converts to Christian-
ity, and slaves. The crew often included prisoners racked with contagious
diseases and convicted of the most heinous crimes. They were unleashed
fully armored, mounted on never-before-seen horses, and armed with guns
capable of frightening and seemingly magical devastation. They were dan-
gerous, and some were fanatically religious. As Tina Rosenberg notes in
Children of Cain
(1991), destruction of the early social structure and the
subsequent history of the New World accounts in part for the attitudes of
