DIRECTIONS: Sort each thing by which way it crossed the ocean. Two are not objects.
Why sail at all? Europe wanted a sea route to Asia's spices and silk. Nobody set
out to find a continent, and it was not a fair trade: one side arrived armed.
Thing
Which way did it cross?
What difference did it make?
1. potatoes
2. horses
3. corn (maize)
4. cattle and pigs
5. tomatoes
6. guns and steel
7. smallpox and measles
8. chocolate
The Part That Is Hard to Take In
Grade 5 · Contact · Page 2 of 3
Disease did most of it. The Americas had never met smallpox, measles or flu,
so bodies had no defense. Within about a hundred years of contact, most of the population had died of imported
disease, in many places nine in ten, often before any European arrived.
Some early settlers arrived to find cleared fields and empty villages, and took it as a sign the land was meant for them. What had actually happened?
Why did disease travel so much faster than the people carrying it?
Horses reached the Plains and changed how whole nations hunted and fought within a couple of generations. Explain why one animal mattered that much.
Potatoes and corn went the other way and fed enormous numbers of people in Europe, Africa and Asia. Does that make the exchange fair? Give your reasoning.
Whose Story Is It?
Grade 5 · Contact · Page 3 of 3
DIRECTIONS: Ask of each account: who was actually there?
The same voyage gets described three ways:
A. "In 1492 Columbus discovered America." B. "In 1492 Columbus landed on an island in the Caribbean, where the Taíno people had been living for
centuries." C. "In 1492 ships arrived carrying men who claimed our island for a king we had never heard of."
What is wrong with the word discovered in sentence A?
Who is telling sentence C? How can you tell from the words alone?
All three sentences can be about the same day and none of them contains a lie. Explain how that is possible.
Write a fourth sentence about the same event that a Spanish sailor might have written home. Then say what it leaves out.