150
CHAPTER
15
THE COLUMBIAN
EXCHANGE AND
NEW WORLDS
Why, then, the world’s mine oyster, Which I with sword will open.
Shakespeare (1564–1615)
1
OCEANIA
In the south of Southeast Asia, Alocasia or dryland taro, perhaps originating
in India or Burma, has been under cultivation for at least 7,000 years. Wetland
(Colocasia) taro, yams, and (probably) dry and wet land rice came along
later. Yet, as mentioned earlier, a mystery is why the Austronesian farmer-
pioneers, who sailed off to settle the Philippines and the East Indies at about
this time (6000
BCE
), were accompanied by taro, yams, pigs, and dogs, but
not rice. The most logical answer is that rice had not yet become a staple
in Southeast Asia. But it is not a particularly satisfactory answer because,
despite many ensuing waves of Pacifi c pioneers, when the Europeans fi rst
entered the world’s largest body of water, rice was absent from the whole of
the Pacifi c, save for the Mariana Islands. Did rice somehow get lost from the
horticultural complex? Or were taro and yams just easier to cultivate?
2
The pioneers originated in Southeast Asia and neighboring New Guinea,
and their initial waves fanned out into the Philippines and the East Indies.
These were an Austronesian-speaking people whose descendents, with
their distinctive Lapita pottery, became the ancestors of the Polynesians.
The Columbian Exchange and New Worlds
151

the taking.
9
Because Australia and New Zealand had been cut off from the rest
of the world for close to 100 million years, the evolutionary process was
given free rein to elaborate plants and animals that were decidedly differ-
ent from those found on the Eurasian land mass.
10
Australian kangaroos,
for example, are browsers. But as marsupials they bear little resemblance
to European cattle or North American bison, browsers also, but placental
animals. In New Zealand, penguins roosted in trees and sea lions stretched
out for a nap in forest clearings. And its huge ostrich-like moa birds, some
around nine feet in height, were unique.
11
But they, along with many other
fl ightless birds, are extinct now, victims like so many other species the
world over, of hungry humans.
Plants that became staples for the Australian Aborigines had also taken a
different evolutionary path, despite apparently familiar English names for
“bush tucker” such as “sunrise lime,” “bush tomato,” “bush banana,” “bush
bean,” and “Australian carrot.” Desert Aborigines received an estimated
152
A Movable Feast
70 to 80 percent of their dietary bulk from plants such as these, and in the
humid southeast, approximately 140 species of plants were eaten – fore-
most among them the roots and tubers of lilies, orchids, native yams, and a
variety of fruits and seeds.
12
In New Zealand, bees buzzed, making honey from the fl owers of the
Manuka tree that was employed by the Maori as a medicine as well as a

chua word for the tuber ( cumara) suggesting to some that the sweet potato
reached Polynesia from Peru, with Quechua speakers somehow implicated
in that transfer. But if so, why only the sweet potato? Why not other useful
Americans foods like white potatoes, manioc, or maize?
16
A second hypothesis would have the sweet potato, taken to the East by
the Portuguese in the sixteenth century, somehow fi nding its way into the
Pacifi c a couple of centuries before Captain James Cook arrived (during
the years 1768–71 and 1772–75) to report on its presence there. A third,
and more pedestrian, hypothesis has the Manila Galleon traffi c introducing
The Columbian Exchange and New Worlds
153
the sweet potato to the Pacifi c, where it spread so rapidly that it seemed
like a long-established foodstuff to the members of the Cook expeditions.
Still another possibility is that, although sweet potatoes cannot fl oat,
their seeds could have hitched a ride in the bowels of birds such as the
golden plover – a strong fl yer that ranges over Polynesia, but visits western
South America now and again. Clearly, when and how the sweet potato
reached Oceania are still open questions. But what is not disputed is that
whenever the tuber made a Pacifi c appearance, it readily fi t into the diets
of the peoples of that vast region.
17
There were no pigs in Australia and New Zealand before the Europeans
brought them. Chickens they had, along with the “dingo” of Australia, a
descendent of the Asian wolf that must have accompanied a later wave of
settlers from Southeast Asia because it had to be domesticated fi rst. Cook
introduced pigs to New Zealand in 1778 and the wild ones are still called
“Cookers.”
18
Pork was much esteemed by the Maori and added some vari-

As one might expect, long geographic isolation triggered the occasional
ecological nightmare as new fauna reached both Australia and New Zealand.
The brown rats from Europe that jumped ship in New Zealand all but exter-
minated their local counterparts and grew to enormous sizes – which, at
least, provided more good quality protein for the Maori. In Australia, a few
rabbits were imported in 1859 by a farmer to provide a little sport for hunters.
He was apparently ignorant of the rabbit’s spectacular reproductive capacity
(females can deliver up to eleven litters each year) in the absence of natural
enemies and got far more sport than he had bargained for.
20
In fact, that sport soon became a grim, but fruitless, campaign of exter-
mination as the Adam and Eve rabbits multiplied into an estimated 20 mil-
lion within 30 years, and hordes of them spread across the continent to
compete with livestock for grazing land.
21
The rabbits did provide food for
the lower classes, however, and in the 1880s rabbit meat was being canned
in Australia, and hundreds of tons were exported. More recently, Austra-
lian possums have invaded New Zealand to destroy forests and spread
tuberculosis among its cattle. Fortunately, most other Pacifi c peoples were
spared this sort of ecological excitement and, despite missionary meddling,
their diets remained more or less traditional until the middle of the next
century.
Aside from offi cers and cabin passengers, the fi rst settlers to wobble
down gangplanks in Australia were convicts sentenced to “transportation,”
along with their guards – hardly representatives of British Isles elites.
22
Aboard ship their “rations” had centered on salted meat and bread, and
such “prison food” continued to be issued ashore to the rural work force
until the fi rst half of the twentieth century. Called “Ten, Ten, Two, and a