The Columbian Exchange: Trading Corn for Smallpox If Native Americans had been able to sail across the Atlantic Ocean shortly before Christopher Columbus, they would have been able to conquer and colonize countries like Spain or Portugal? Assuming this was possible, there is one significant factor that would have given the old world an advantage in such a scenario. This article will show that even if the Native Americans were the first to reach and make contact, history would still have favored the Iberians. To set the context, we need to go back 270 million years ago, when most of the earth's land masses were gathered together into a single continent, a supercontinent, called Pangea (Encyclopedia Britannica, 1). Historian Alfred Crosby explained that this brought together all of the earth's terrestrial biology in one place, creating a single Darwinian “arena for competition” (Crosby, 1). Or in other words, a large evolutionary vessel. Crosby also explains that 180 million years ago, Pangea split into two large land masses, what is now the Americas in the Western Hemisphere as one land mass and Euro-Asia and Africa as the second land mass (Crosby, 1). What was once a single evolutionary vessel was now split in two, allowing plant and animal life to take different evolutionary paths. These two worlds remained relatively separate from each other until the arrival of Christopher Columbus and other European explorers. That contact between the old world and the new world brought two distinct evolutionary arenas to collide with each other and brought the majority of Earth's land mass back into a single Darwinian pot, (Crosby, 1). Pangea."When these two landmasses were "reunited",...... middle of paper...... Sir, 4). To put this in perspective, “The 150 years since Columbus' arrival have taken a toll in human lives in this [Western] hemisphere comparable to all the world's losses in World War II” (Lord, 4). In his book Plagues and Peoples, William McNeill attributes this population reduction to old world diseases that “they spread across the hemisphere much faster than the Europeans who brought them” (Lord, 1). To return to the original question of what would happen if the new world attempted to colonize the old, I think it is important to point out that the premises. presented in this article remain constant regardless of which hemisphere initiated contact. The new world's lack of resistance to diseases introduced by the old led them to miss one of the most irregular agreements in modern human history: the exchange of corn for smallpox...