Charles C. Mann Quote

What happened in 1518 and 1519 is not. In those years, according to Bartolomé de Las Casas, a missionary priest who lived through the incident, Spanish orange, pomegranate, and cassia plantations were destroyed from the root up. Thousands of acres of orchards were all scorched and dried out, as though flames had fallen from the sky and burned them. The actual culprit, Wilson argued, was the sap-sucking scale insects. But what the Spaniards saw was S. geminata—an infinite number of ants, Las