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Lands of Red and Gold #29: Shards of Pangaea

Something of a change of pace this time...

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“For all mankind that unstained scroll unfurled,
Where God might write anew the story of the World.”
- Edward Everett Hale

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From: “Three Worlds in Collision: The Globe in Upheaval”
By Shimon Grodensky

Step back in history for a millennium, and the blue-green globe we call Earth was not, in truth, one world. Mankind had reached all of the habitable portions of the globe save for a few scattered islands, but the planet remained divided. Not one world but three, each following separate paths.

The Old World, with the four united continents of Europe, Asia, India and Africa and outlying islands, contained the bulk of the world’s area and population, the earliest agriculture, the earliest civilizations, and the most advanced technology. With their common geography, the fates of these four continents had been entwined since the emergence of the human species.

The New World, with the continents of North and South America joined at the Isthmus of Panama, accompanied by the isles of the Caribbean, reached from the tropics to the poles. While smaller in area than the Old World, and only reached by mankind ten or so millennia before, it still provided a third of the world’s habitable land surface and supported substantial human civilizations.

The Third World, the island continent of Aururia and the then-uninhabited islands of Aotearoa, held only a small fraction of the world’s area and an even smaller fraction of its population. In its flora and fauna, though, it had followed an independent path for so long that the first explorers who saw its plants and animals believed that it was the product of a separate creation.

One thousand years ago, these three worlds had developed largely according to their own destinies, with only occasional contact which did not significantly affect their isolation. The Old World and the New saw limited crossings of peoples across Broch Strait [Bering Strait]; the Old World and the Third encountered each other in hesitant interactions across Torres Strait.

In the course of the last thousand years, these three separate worlds were forged into one globe with a unified destiny. Still, the first efforts at fusion were abortive. Pioneering Austronesians had anticipated the joining of the worlds, visiting Aururia long enough to leave behind dogs, and visiting South America to swap chickens for sweet potatoes. Yet these landmark contacts were not sustained. Norse settlers colonised Greenland and landed on North America, only to be driven out by the indigenous inhabitants. The ancestors of the Maori colonised empty Aotearoa and then crossed the Tethys Sea [Tasman Sea] to encounter the Aururian peoples, but then lost contact with their relatives in Polynesia.

Sustained contact, and the global unification which this would produce, awaited the birth of more determined explorers. Christopher Columbus’s discovery of the Caribbean islands set in motion a course of events which would join the Old World to the New. While Columbus was not the first to discover the Americas [1], his accomplishment was in making sure that this contact would endure. A century and a quarter later, Frederik de Houtman created a place for himself in history when he achieved a similar feat in discovering Aururia. Again, de Houtman was not the first discoverer of the island continent, but he was the first man to ensure that Aururia would not return to its isolation.

The three paths of human existence came together in a crossroads forged by two men. The expeditions first of Columbus and de Houtman started to bring the three worlds together; two voyages which marked the first tremors of exchanges that would shake the globe.

The Columbian Exchange and the Houtmanian Exchange were the most significant events in human history. They transformed the globe over the course of the last five centuries; no corner of the planet was untouched by the events set in motion by Columbus and de Houtman. The modern world as we know it was in large part created by the consequences of these two exchanges.

The Exchanges marked an immense transfer of people, diseases, plants, animals, and ideas between the three previously separate worlds. These exchanges had massive effects on every human society on the globe. New diseases spread around the world, devastating many societies. Large-scale migrations transformed or replaced many cultures. The spread of new plants and animals marked a more beneficial aspect of the Exchanges; more productive or more resilient crops allowed increased human populations...

Of all the changes to human ways of life which the Exchanges brought, none were more profound than the spread of crops and livestock. New staple crops transformed the diets of peoples on every continent, as much larger growing regions were opened up for cultivation. The spread of domestic animals revolutionised transportation, farming practices, and entire ways of life of peoples around the globe.

Consider, for instance, that maize and cassava, when introduced into Africa, replaced the former dietary staples to become the premier food crops on much of the continent. Red yams and cornnarts [wattles] became the highest-yielding crops around most of the Mediterranean. South American potatoes had never been seen in Europe before 1492, but within three centuries they became so important in Ireland that potato blight threatened mass starvation on the island; the dire situation was only averted by expanding cultivation of another imported crop, this one from the other end of the globe: murnong.

Horses had never been seen in the New World before Columbus, but they spread throughout the North American prairies, leading entire cultures to abandon farming and turn to a nomadic lifestyle. Coffee and sugar cane were native to the Old World, but the Columbian Exchange saw their cultivation expand to massive plantations in the New. Rubber was native to the New World, but its greatest use has now become in plantations in the Old. Kunduri was native to the Third World, but during the Houtmanian Exchange it became widely cultivated in plantations in both the Old and New Worlds, while cultures throughout the globe were transformed by the influence of kunduri...

Some crops and animals which spread during the Exchanges have become so iconic to distant regions that it is hard to imagine that five hundred years ago, the peoples of those regions had never seen or heard of them. Who can imagine Tuscany without tomatoes, Ireland without potatoes, Sicily without red yams, Thijszenia [Tasmania] without apples, Tegesta [Florida] without oranges, West Africa without peanuts, Costa Rica without bananas, Maui [Hawaii] without pineapples, or Tuniza without quandongs? What would Bavaria be without chocolate, South Africa without kunduri, or France without the klinsigars [cigarettes] produced from it? Or who can picture Tejas without sheep, the Neeburra [Darling Downs, Queensland, Australia] without horses, or Argentina without wheat and cornnart and the immense herds of cattle they sustain?

Indeed, the list of exchanged plants and animals that have become naturalised in new regions could be expanded almost endlessly. Before de Houtman, Ethiopia had no nooroons [emus] and no murnong, Brittany had no sweet peppers [2], Portugal had no lemon verbena [lemon myrtle], and Persia had no lutos [bush pears]. Before Columbus, there were no chilli peppers in Siam and India, no coffee in New Granada, no vanilla in Madagascar, no sunflowers in Daluming, no avocados in Ceylon, no rubber trees in Africa, and no oca in Aotearoa...

Nothing offers greater testament to the agricultural benefits of the Exchanges than a comparison of the origins of the modern world’s major crops. The world’s agriculture is dominated by a mere twenty crops. They are the titans of the plant kingdom, which between them contain the best-suited staple crops for all of the diverse climes around the globe. Together, these crops account for around nine-tenths of the tonnage of all crops grown under human cultivation.

Six of these foremost crops come from the New World (potato, maize, cassava, sweet potato, tomato, chilli & bell pepper), eleven are from the Old World (rice, sugar cane, grape, wheat, soybean, barley, orange, onion, sorghum, banana, apple), and three are from the Third World (red & lesser yam, cornnart, and murnong). Today their cultivation is global, but a millennium ago each of these crops was confined to one of the three worlds, and often had restricted range even within their native world...

The two Exchanges have much in common in their effects on the globe: they transformed agriculture and cuisine, and made each world’s resources available to a much larger area. Still, the two Exchanges had distinctly different characters, particularly in their relative effects on the Old World, and in the fates of the peoples and cultures in the two smaller worlds.

In the Columbian Exchange, many major crops moved in both directions, and Eurasia swallowed many of the New World’s resources. In most other aspects, however, the Columbian Exchange was in effect unidirectional. In the movement of diseases, Old World epidemics devastated the populations of the New World, while not a single significant human disease made the reverse journey back across the Atlantic to Europe or elsewhere in the Old World. The Americas did not provide a single major domestic animal that greatly transformed Old World societies – cavies, turkeys and muscovy ducks were only of minor importance – while Eurasia provided horses, cattle, sheep, pigs, and chickens which all transformed life in the New World. The shifts of language and peoples in the Columbian Exchange were all cases of Old World peoples expanding at the expense of the native languages and peoples of the New World. And while the resources of the New World would feed the burgeoning commerce and ultimately manufacturing of Europe, no significant changes to Old World religion or science came about as a result of Columbus’s contact...

In the Houtmanian Exchange, as in its Columbian predecessors, major crops were exchanged in both directions. Yet the Third World did not provide as many resources to feed Europe’s growth, mostly because of the much smaller size of Aururia and Aotearoa.

De Houtman’s legacy saw a true exchange of diseases between the Old and Third Worlds, although the character of this interaction was markedly different from that which followed Columbus. Aururian diseases were much swifter in their effects on the Old World (and the New), due to their individual nature and the facts of geography which made them easier to transmit around the globe. The effects of Old World diseases on Aururia were slower, more insidious and ultimately much more destructive.

In the exchange of domestic animals, the Old World again provided many more kinds of livestock which would transform the societies of the Third World – horses, camels, donkeys, pigs and chickens. Nonetheless, the Third World provided one domestic animal, the nooroon, whose arrival changed human ways of life in a substantial part of the Old World.

In the transfer of peoples and language, the Houtmanian Exchange was more complex than the Columbian, but ultimately bidirectional. Likewise, while the flow of ideas was largely a tide flowing from the Old World, contact with Aururia did lead to significant developments in the history of religion and science...

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From: “Europe’s Assault on the Globe”
By Hans van Leeuwen

Chapter 7: Drive to the East

Europe’s interest in the East began long before Columbus inadvertently began the European assault on the West; indeed, the misguided Genoan had intended to reach the East by sailing west. The lure of spices had inspired the Portuguese to explore Africa and round the Cape before Columbus set foot on the isles of the Caribbean, and even those intrepid explorers were merely seeking to gain easier access to Eastern goods which had previously passed through Muslim and Venetian hands.

Vasco de Gama reached India a handful of years after Columbus’s wayward voyage led him to what he had fondly believed was the Spice Islands. In this era, Spanish conquistadors followed in Columbus’s wake, pursuing gold and visions, and delivered the first blows in what would become Europe’s assault on the Americas. With Spain thereby distracted from Eastern ambitions, it fell to Portugal to become the vanguard of Europe’s drive to the East...

While the East held and holds many diverse regions, the early aims of the Powers were focused on four prizes that held the greatest rewards to match Europe’s interests. Cathay, then the most advanced nation on the globe, source of much silk and porcelain (and later tea), and an endless sink for bullion. The East Indies, politically divided and often unwelcoming, but the source of many of the most valuable spices in the world. India, dominated by the expanding might of the Great Mughals, had long been the emporium of the world, attracting many other goods even from the prizes of the East, and which offered cotton, dyes, silk, and saltpetre. Aururia, isolated, divided and primitive, but with supplies of gold to rival the resources of the West, home to and at first the exclusive supplier of kunduri, and a source of new spices, some of which offered new markets, and others which would ruin the market for what had until then been the most valuable spice in the world.

These were the four prizes which lured the Powers to explore the vastness of the globe, and whose wealth drew individual Europeans to make long voyages even at the risks of privation, disease, and far too common death. Unlike in the West, where military might was quickly aimed at the native inhabitants, in the East, the early Europeans came as traders more than as conquerors. To be sure, European powers fought in the East where it suited their purposes, but their aims were not conquest, but access and ultimately control of trade markets. Commerce was their aim, military force merely their tool. In the East, when Europeans turned to force of arms, as often as not their targets would be other Europeans, not the Eastern peoples...

Chapter 10: In Pursuit of Gold and Spices

In Aururia, as elsewhere in the East, the early Powers who descended on the continent were the Dutch, Portuguese and English. Unlike the other Eastern prizes, in the South Land the Dutch were the pioneers, and the other Powers were the ones seeking to unseat them.

As in the rest of the East, though, the Powers were competing for wealth. There was not yet any thought of major settlement, even though parts of this island continent were as empty as much of the Americas. Lucre drew them, not land, for the shipping distances were far longer and the diseases much more formidable, even in those parts of the continent where the natives were not yet any more advanced than the Red Indians. For those Europeans who wanted land, the Americas were closer and more welcoming. Those who were prepared to travel across half the world wanted something much more rewarding for their endeavours...

The Dutch, in the guise of their trading company, had little difficulty establishing the first European trading outposts in western Aururia. Mutual trade suited both Dutch and natives, profitable enough to thrive despite the first ravages of Aururian plagues across the world and the first of many Eurasian epidemics in Aururia.

The problems which the Dutch faced would derive from their rival Powers, not the natives. Rumours of gold spread even faster than the dying cough [Marnitja]. The Portuguese were the Power keenest to heed these rumours, and with the fortunate capture of a Dutch ship, received access to excellent charts, and were informed of the unprotected Fort Nassau. The temptation was overwhelming, the lust for gold insatiable, and Portugal launched the first strike in the European struggle for control of Aururia. There could hardly be a more telling omen of the fate that awaited the Land of Gold than that this blow had been delivered by one European power upon another...

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[1] Of course Columbus was not the first to discover the Americas; for a start, they had already been discovered by the Americans themselves.

[2] The plants which are here called sweet peppers are pepperbushes (Tasmannia spp) from *Australia. They are not the OTL plants which are called sweet peppers, bell peppers or capsicum (which ATL are usually called bell peppers or pimentos). Also unlike them, Tasmannia is very “hot”; the name “sweet pepper” came into use because the plant has an initially sweet taste, but an intense, hot aftertaste.

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Thoughts?