From Manila to Fujian: The Columbian Exchange Goes Global

Vines in a Ship's Rope

1In 1593 a Chinese merchant named Chen Zhenlong sailed home to Fujian, a hilly province on China's southeastern coast, from the Spanish-ruled port of Manila in the Philippines. According to a story his family later wrote down, Chen hid cuttings of sweet potato vines in his ship's ropes, because Spanish officials did not want the plant carried away. The sweet potato had first been grown by peoples of the Americas. Since 1565, Spanish galleons had been crossing the Pacific between Mexico and Manila, carrying American silver to buy Chinese silk and porcelain, and American plants traveled with them.

2The next year, drought brought famine to Fujian, and the governor urged farmers to try the new crop. Fujian has little flat land, and rice needs level, flooded fields. Sweet potatoes, however, grew on dry hillsides and in sandy soil and could produce a harvest even in poor years. Over the 1600s and 1700s, sweet potatoes, maize and peanuts from the Americas spread across China. China's population roughly doubled during the 1700s, to around 300 million people by 1800, and many historians think these crops were one of the reasons. Rice remained China's most important grain.

3American crops reshaped Africa and South Asia too. Portuguese traders carried cassava, also called manioc, from Brazil to West Central Africa in the 1500s. Cassava grows in poor soil, survives dry spells and can stay in the ground for months until it is needed, and it became a main food in many African regions. Chili peppers, also first grown in the Americas, reached India on Portuguese ships and became part of many Indian dishes.

4Living things also crossed the Atlantic westward, with terrible costs. On his second voyage in 1493, Columbus brought sugarcane and pigs to the island of Hispaniola. The pigs ran wild and multiplied, and sugar plantations later spread across the Caribbean and Brazil. Planters wanted huge numbers of workers at a time when diseases brought across the Atlantic, such as smallpox, were killing many Native people. European traders forced millions of Africans across the Atlantic into slavery; historians estimate that about 12.5 million people were put on slave ships between the 1500s and the 1800s. The ships also carried mosquito-borne diseases from Africa, such as malaria and yellow fever, which took many lives in the Americas. In 1647 the first recorded yellow fever epidemic in the Americas struck the Caribbean island of Barbados.