Seven Cargoes: How Corn, Horses, and Disease Remade Native America
By Daniel R. Whitcomb
Length5h 19m
About this audiobook
The horses came ashore swimming. Late in 1493, the men of Columbus's second fleet, seventeen ships and some twelve hundred men, drove them down timber ramps into the surf off Hispaniola and let them flounder to the beach, while Taino villagers who had no word for an animal that could carry a man looked on in silence. Behind the horses came cattle, pigs that would eat anything, wheat seed, sugarcane and grapevine cuttings: the first Old World farm bound for a new world's soil.
What followed ran in both directions, and the book takes it one cargo at a time. Epidemics ran ahead of the Europeans themselves. Maize and the potato went east to feed the Old World. Horses returned to the continent where their ancestors first evolved, and Native nations built new ways of life around them. Mosquitoes brought fevers no one in the Americas had known, tobacco and silver built the first global economy, and the beaver trade drew whole nations into European wars.
From there the story runs through the redcoats and the traders, the young republic's push west, removal and the roads that followed it, and the railroads that finished the buffalo herds, to a reckoning with what no ledger shows. In Seville, clerks at the House of Trade wrote down every mare and every vine cutting bound for the Indies. Nobody wrote down what the sailors carried in their lungs.
Audiobook details
GenreHistory
Length5 hrs 19 mins
Narrated byListen with 1,000+ voices
FormateBook with Audio
Publish dateSep 18, 2026
LanguageEnglish
Table of contents
1Chapter 1: Seventeen Ships
2Chapter 2: The Cities That Vanished Before the Ships
3Chapter 3: Maize and the Potato
4Chapter 4: The Return of the Horse
5Chapter 5: The Mosquito's Cargo
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6Chapter 6: Tobacco, Silver, and the First Global Economy
7Chapter 7: The Fur and the Beaver
8Chapter 8: Redcoats, Traders, and the Sovereignty of Nations
9Chapter 9: The Corps and the Country
10Chapter 10: Removal, Roads, and the Great Shift
11Chapter 11: The Herds and the Iron Road
12Chapter 12: What the Ledger Does Not Show
13About the Author
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