Columbian Exchange Quotes

Infectious diseases introduced with Europeans, like smallpox and measles, spread from one Indian tribe to another, far in advance of Europeans themselves, and killed an estimated 95% of the New World's Indian population.

I should be judged as a captain who went from Spain to the Indies to conquer a people numerous and warlike, whose manners and religion are very different from ours, who live in sierras and mountains, without fixed settlements, and where by divine will I have placed under the sovereignty of the King and Queen our Lords, an Other World, whereby Spain, which was reckoned poor, is become the richest of countries. Columbus is coming from the Indies as a prisoner to Cadiz.

Although the pineapple had been widely disseminated for centuries among the native peoples of South and Central America, it didn't figure in European history until 1493.

Christopher Columbus, as everyone knows, is honored by posterity because he was the last to discover America.

It's striking that Native Americans evolved no devastating epidemic diseases to give to Europeans, in return for the many devastating epidemic diseases that Indians received from the Old World.

Within a century or so after the discovery of America, more than fifty new foods had been carried back to the Old World, including maize, turkey, white potato, pumpkin, squash, the so-called Jerusalem artichoke, avocado, chocolate, and several kinds of beans. Potatoes and maize now rank second and third in total tonnage of the world's crops, behind rice but ahead of what is probably man's oldest cultivated grain, wheat.

In 1492, the natives discovered they were Indians; they discovered they lived in America.

Shortly after Christopher Columbus and his sailors returned from their voyage to the New World, a horrifying new disease began to make its way around the Old. The "pox," as it was often called, erupted with dramatic severity.

Columbus did not discover a new world; he established contact between two worlds, both already old.

If it is the case that you need just a first 11 and three or four more players, then why did Christopher Columbus sail to India to discover America?

If Columbus in an island of America had not caught the disease, which poisons the source of generation, and often indeed prevents generation, we should not have chocolate and cochineal.

I believe that there are many herbs and many trees that are worth much in Europe for dyes and for medicines; but I do not know, and this causes me great sorrow. Arriving at this cape, I found the smell of the trees and flowers so delicious that it seemed the pleasantest thing in the world.

What a blessing this smoking is! Perhaps the greatest that we owe to the discovery of America.

Columbus and his men, they say, Conveyed the virus hither Whereby my features rot away And vital powers wither; Yet had they not traversed the seas And come infected back, Why, think of all the luxuries That modern life would lack.

Turkey is undoubtedly one of the best gifts that the New World has made to the Old.