ABSTRACT
The bardic version of the Columbian voyages and their consequences was the product of narrative historians where most of the nineteenth-century writers did their work when the people of the republics of the New World looked upon the Americas as fresh and without sin, at least as compared to decadent Europe. Until the end of the eighteenth century, most of the people who crossed the Atlantic from the Old to the New World, and the majority of those who took up the ax and machete and hoe to labor on the plantations, were black, about 10 million. The Atlantic slave trade, the greatest such trade in all history and the source of revolutionary changes in all of the four continents facing the Atlantic, was part of the legacy of Columbus. This chapter explains geographic, biological, and demographic effects of the Columbian voyages, and the assessment of the Columbian Exchange.
