Where is the most trafficked place in the Americas?

Darien Graben!

In later generations, the Darién Graben was one of the most unknown areas in the world and one of the most dangerous in the world! The 47,515-kilometer-long Pan-American Highway is only disconnected at the Darien Pass! It is not only a 125-mile narrow mountain range, but also rainforests, rivers and marshes, and there are no roads. Canoeing is the most common mode of transportation here. Cell phone coverage is limited to population centers on the western ridge.

The Darién Graben is dangerous because of its location on the southern border between Panama and Colombia, which is harsh, sparsely populated and uninhabited. In the 21st century, much of the Darién Graben is controlled by Colombian reactionary forces, and it is infested with smugglers, drug lords, Colombian guerrillas, and other paramilitaries. Foreign tourists are sometimes kidnapped and extorted for ransom, so officials restrict foreign tourists from entering.

However, if you think that this is a forbidden area, that Europeans in the 15th and 16th centuries did not dare to enter, you are very wrong!

Those pioneers who pioneered the American continent in the era of geographical discovery really did it if they were not convinced! As mentioned earlier, Balboa led a white team of 191 people from the Caribbean Sea across the Darién Trench to the Pacific coast of Panama, losing 67 people and finally discovering the Pacific Ocean in one fell swoop, a feat that was included in the masterpiece "When the Stars of Mankind Shine". One of the major scientific goals envisioned by scientists in the 21st century is to infiltrate the Darién Graben, and if European explorers who had already done this were allowed to do it again, they would have achieved it long ago.

Alas! Perhaps the courage of mankind is indeed declining, and looking at Europe and the United States, there is no longer a scientific expedition team that can accept the death of 67 people and dare to fight a tough battle with the enemy on the way!

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Having said all this, of course, it was to pave the way for the Spaniards to cross the Darién trench.

Although I am not afraid, why do I have nothing to do to break into these dangerous places?

The reason why the camera shifts to Panama is because the Spaniards in the fortress of Colón, Panama, are looking for two important crops on the west side of the Darién Graben!

That's right, potatoes and tomatoes?!

When Ferdinand sailed off the coast of America, he missed these two crops, not because Ferdinand had forgotten them, but because they were too remote to the west of the Andes, so Ferdinand could not get them at the time. But Ferdinand knew that the Darién graben near the equator should be the northern area of the distribution of these plants.

Therefore, the Spanish Reclamation Corps, which had already established a base in Panama, naturally had to take on the responsibility of searching for these crops. Ferdinand did not just leave it alone, and left a large number of graphic materials describing the forms of plants for the Spanish team left behind to check. Of course, it is not to be hoped that it will be found, and Ferdinand is only leaving a line here. If you can't get a harvest, you have to wait another 30 years to get both crops from Peru.

Although the yields of corn and sweet potatoes were staggering, and helped shape the Qing dynasty's Kang Yongqian dynasty in China, the potato was the most important of the new crops introduced to the Americas for Europe. The potato is widely distributed from the Atlantic Ocean to the Urals and has become one of the staple foods in Europe. In places like Ireland, potatoes are almost a monocrop. As a result, in 1845~1846, due to the emergence of potato wilt in the potato fields in Ireland, Ireland, which was severely affected, fell into a serious famine from a well-off country with food and clothing, and millions of people had nothing to eat.

However, the introduction and promotion of the potato has been so poor that it took almost three centuries to complete its introduction from the Americas to Europe. And during this period, a large number of independent introductions were made, for example, from South America to Europe, and then from Europe to Virginia in North America, and then from Virginia to parts of Europe, so that many people completely reversed the order and thought that potatoes were introduced to Europe through Virginia......

The introduction of potatoes in Spain and their cultivation and consumption on a large scale were the earliest, and potatoes were cultivated before 1570. But the problem is that potatoes are not accepted by most European farmers. With the exception of Ireland, which was already starving, and the poor areas of Spain (the "good news" is that the poor areas were not small), many farmers in other parts of Europe considered the potato crop to be unknown and disease-causing and that they were "the crop for the lowly", and the peasants of Bohemia in 1712 and the poor Prussian peasants of 1764 – even though their food and clothing were in question, refused to conquer the decrees calling for the promotion of potato cultivation. It was only after 1800 that the potato was actually grown on a large scale in central Europe, which shows how slow it was to spread.

Tomatoes, which are also grown in South America, face the same problems as potatoes, and their bright red skin is considered "poison" at first glance, causing it to be ignored for a long time. Later, it was only because someone accidentally ate a tomato and found that it "unexpectedly" had not been poisoned, that these bad misconceptions were dispelled.

Of course, now that Ferdinand is here, there can be no such messy and inexplicable things, if you have any worries, the Spanish Catholic Church has come forward to guarantee that the products produced in the New World will be high-quality, you can enjoy it, you will not fall for the devil's schemes!

Of course, you have to find them first.

Previously, these jobs were not on the schedule of the Spaniards in Cologne. After all, there are more important things, there are only 102 Spaniards in the fortress of Cologne, and the pressure of self-defense is very high, and then it is necessary to explore the nearby area, maintain communication and friendly cooperation with the indigenous Indians, and plant rice and sweet potatoes. Even if it is wealth, the rich pearl resources of the Pacific coast are also at the mercy of others, and there is no effort to run to the dangerous Darien Trench to find crops!

In the summer of 1495, reinforcements finally arrived from the Iberian Peninsula. Although he attached great importance to North America, he could not let go of the backyard of South America, which had historically belonged to him, and Ferdinand also remembered the matter of looking for crops. Two hundred officers and soldiers arrived at the fortress of Cologne, and another two hundred galloped straight southeast to the fortress of Seguru, Brazil.

With a team of 300 people, it's almost time for an expedition. So the detachment of the Spanish Reclamation Corps in the fortress of Cologne sent 192 men to the Darién Trench to find the high-yielding mysterious crops that His Majesty King Ferdinand confessed. As for whether it can be found, this cannot be forced. After all, 192 people are more than 100 kilometers away from the Darien trench, which is really insignificant, and the difficulty index is close to finding a needle in a haystack.

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