when worlds collide Flashcards
Before______, each half of the world had developed largely on its own. The trees in America “were as different from ours as day from night,” commented Columbus.
1492
Dandelions and bluegrass are common sights today in American fields; both came from ____ after 1492.
Europe
_______, a black conquistador who was with Cortés at Tenochtitlán and afterward settled there, became the first “to plant and harvest wheat in this land.”
Juan Garrido
When a storm threatened, the Spanish slipped belly bands under the animals and hoisted them until their hooves dangled in the air to prevent frightened stallions from___________.
rearing and raising havoc.
For that reason those deadly regions of the ocean were known as the _________.
“horse latitudes.”
And as Leoncico showed, conquistadors brought _________ both as companions and warriors.
Dogs
By the 1800s the _______ depended so much on the crop that peasants starved by the thousands when a plant disease ruined it.
Irish
The Indians who first raised the vegetable five thousand years ago called it ________, and at that time an ear grew only as big as a man’s finger.
teosinte
The unintended voyagers that journeyed with a man named Francisco ________ were invisible.
de Eguia
We know almost nothing of de Eguia other than that he was ________ and came with the conquistadors; and of course people of that day knew nothing of invisible disease-spreading germs.
African
Soon after arriving in Central America, ________fell ill, wracked by a cough and burning fever. Sores appeared all over his body—viruelas, the Spanish called them.
Francisco
By _____most Europeans were able to resist it to some degree because their bodies had been exposed to the germs for so many years. They had developed an immunity.
1520
The sick “could not move; they could not stir; they could not change position …. And if they stirred, much did they ______.”
Cry out
And because the sick were too weak even to find food or “go to the fountain for a gourd full of water,” thousands more died from __________.
Starvation
When the victorious Spanish marched into the city, they discovered that “the streets, squares, houses, and courts were filled with________, so that it was almost impossible to pass.
Bodies
