(^70) THE WEALTH AND POVERTY OF NATIONS
chant shippers. Meanwhile the Portuguese crown took a third or more
of the gross in the form of license fees, sugar contracts, and taxes.
These plantations then served as models for later, even more profitable
developments in the New World.
The Atlantic islands enormously extended Europe's reach. In a few
bold leaps, seamen found sailing platforms hundreds of miles west
ward and southward, launching pads into the unknown, harbors home.
Here were oases in the ocean desert: they eased the pain and made the
impossible possible. Was it luck or forethought that led Columbus to
the farthest Canary isle, right in the path of the great easterlies, before
setting out? Whatever; he found himself on the boulevard of the equa
torial trades, and those warm, steady winds drove him across the At
lantic in a month.
Crazy. But in 1492 the Spanish thought they could do anything.
Columbus was a maverick. He wanted to go to Asia by going west,
which held no interest for Portugal. But the plan made sense to Spain,
which had agreed to divide the world with Portugal and had conceded
the eastern (African) route to its rival—another testimony to the hubris
of these kingdoms. For Spain, it was westward ho! or nothing. Colum
bus happened to underestimate his task: he thought the world much
smaller than it was. But that was not a bad way to begin; the ocean was
in fact narrower than he thought.
What Columbus found was a new world. Even on his deathbed he
did not believe that, thinking he had come on an archipelago off the
coast of China and Cipangu (Japan). Nor did he know that beyond the
islands lay two large landmasses, the continents that came to be known
as North and South America. He found naked or near-naked people
still living in the Stone Age, who cut their hands at first grasping the
Spaniards' swords by the blade.^14 He brought some of them back to
Spain as specimens—like animals for a zoo.
What Columbus did not find was great treasure of gold or silk or
spices or any of the other valuables associated with the Orient. Gold
above all he wanted, not so much for himself (he wanted rank and
fame more) as for his monarchs, for he understood that nothing was
so likely to keep the crown interested and supportive.
The scarcity of gold was a disappointment, but he made the best of
things and assured that these islands could be an abundant source of
slaves; that they were moreover eminentiy suitable for sugar cultivation,
which he knew from the Canaries and Madeiras. They would also sup
port livestock; and so it went. Caribbean history after the coming of the
nora
(Nora)
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