31.8 America: a.d. 1601 to 1700

By this century the Caribbean Taino Indians were extinct and the African slaves took the places of these vanishing Americans, perhaps in part because they were resistant to malaria. This disease arrived in the Gulf area after 1650, with the imported Africans. The first epidemic of yellow fever occurred in Guadeloupe and St. Kitts in 1635 and in Yucatan and Havana in 1648 after the Aedes Aegypti mosquito had voyaged over on ships from Africa. As a result of these diseases even the whites decreased in numbers or disappeared as the blacks increased. (Ref. 150 , 140 ) Overall perhaps as many as 340,000 black slaves were brought from Africa in this century alone. (Ref. 213 , 160 ) Settlement in these West Indies was for a long time more extensive than on the American mainland, however, and by 1700 there were 121,000 inhabitants in this area.

South america

Northern and western south america

Even at the beginning of this 17th century the Spanish were continuing to search for "Eldorado, the Land of Gold", but up to the early decades, except for a few nuggets of gold, a fairly good supply of emeralds and some cinnamon, there was little to show for the century of exploration. The entire west coast of the continent had been explored, however, and the foundations had been laid for every one of the 20 republics of Central and South America, excepting Argentina. In one generation the Spaniards had acquired more territory than Rome conquered in 5 centuries-and the Spaniards organized and administered all that they conquered. (Ref. 151 ) The Spanish New World was first divided into two great viceroyalties of Nueva Espana (Mexico) and Peru, to which La Plata (Argentina and Chile) and Nueva Granada (Columbia and Venezuela) were later added. Portuguese traders had infiltrated all of Spanish America. Even in a town like Santiago, Chile, with 10,000 people, one could find a Portuguese merchant. They often also doubled as bankers and occasionally, as in Potosi in 1634, public opinion accused them of being "new Christians" or even Jews and subsequent Inquisition trials put an end to their property. (Ref. 292 )

By 1650 Potosi, in Bolivia, was the largest city in South America, with 160,000 people, with Indian peasants forced to work in the great silver mines under extreme hardship conditions. (Ref. 175 ) The South American Indians felt that they could not work or go on trips without chewing the coca leaf mixed with ground lime. Containing cocaine, this half-stimulant and half-narcotic does deaden fatigue, pain, and hunger and facilitates breathing at high altitudes. The terrible effects of widespread use of the purified drug, however, are now becoming all too obvious in the United States. (Ref. 211 ) It is not well known, but statistics from the archives of the Peruvian viceroyalty show that at least 300,000 Africans were brought into Peru in this century. By that time the number of native Indians had fallen to 700,000 so one may judge the impact of this importation of blacks. The lowlands of Ecuador and Colombia had also been Africanized to an unknown degree. In the highlands of the Andes, however, any African traits are ancient and from tropical Asiatic (Melanesian or Australoid) fringes or even of ancient Atlantic crossings by Africans.

Eastern and central south america

Only in this century did the Portuguese finally win tremendous areas in the New World. Economic and political power was concentrated in the hands of great plantation owners in Brazil. By 1623 there were 350 sugar plantations in that country and 25 years later there were 150,000 to 200,000 civilized people, with 3/4 being Indian, Negroes or "Mixed". The state of Maranhao was created and Jesuit missions were established along the Amazon. In 1635 the Dutch invaded and occupied the whole northern part of Brazil and a little later they wrested the whole Gold Coast from Portugal. They were thrown out in 1654, but in the meantime, the locals had learned a great deal about sugar production from the Dutch. At the end of the century slaving operations in the interior of Brazil were being resisted by the Jesuits, who tried to protect the Indians.

Gold was found in 1690 in the central region of Minas Gerais, today one of the richest states in Brazil. A few years later diamonds were also found in the same region. (Ref. 175 ) As in Central America, malaria arrived with the African Negro and yellow fever came only slightly later. (Ref. 140 , 222 , 134 )

In central South America, east of the Andes, and in the more temperate southern zone were wide open lands suitable for sheep and cattle breeders. The original Gauchos, who were mixed Spanish and Indian and almost entirely lawless, preyed on those cattle, simulating in many respects the old nomads of central Asia of a thousand years earlier. (Ref. 211 ) Since indigenous animals were few in what later became Argentina, the empty countryside was soon filled with European horses and cattle, which banded in wild herds across the great pampas and so existed until the 1 9th century. The Indians had some of those horses, too, so that the natives of Argentina and particularly the Araucanians of Chile continued to be tough adversaries for another two centuries. (Ref. 260 )

Paraguay was founded by Jesuits in 1608. (Ref. 222 ) It is of some interest that the first Europeans to sail around Cape Horn, instead of through the Strait of Magellan, were the Dutchmen Willem Corneliszoon Schouten and Jacob Le Maire and the cape was named after the former's birthplace, Hoorn. They were en route to Indonesia in 1615. (Ref. 134 )

Forward to America: A.D. 1701 to 1800

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