11. Europe'S Distant Reach

European voyagers were at once impressed by the bird-life of the Atlantic and the New World. Columbus reported to King Ferdinand and Queen Isabella that, on the islands of the Caribbean, he had found himself surrounded by ‘birds of a thousand sorts.’ Island groups were named the Canaries, the Azores (from the Portuguese for hawks), Brazil was referred to as ‘Parrot-land’ and several islands in the Gulf of St. Lawrence and off Newfoundland and Labrador were called Iles des Oiseaux and Iles des Margaux (‘Magpie Islands’, after the black and white great auks). There are ornithological records for the Atlantic islands as early as those by Fructuoso (1522–1591). Tropical villages of the East and West Indies were found to be overrun with pets and sailors of every European nation returned with monkeys and parrots. Soon, there were pet shops for the home population and zoos where the public might view the rarer or less domesticated species. Canaries became the most popular household songsters and, by about 1500, all the well-to-do in Portugal were said to be keeping them. Genoese and Tuscan ships began to visit the Canary Islands to buy canaries and the species began to appear in captivity in other parts of Europe. Rather than rely on the trapping of wild birds, by 1580 Spanish merchants were persuading peasants and small craftsmen to ‘farm’ canaries in numbers.