Captain Pugwash's ship is the Black Pig(El Swino Negra), so he has a love of the pig. Jews and Muslin's have one thing in common, they won't eat pork. A pig is easily domesticated as they will befriend anything that feeds them. When they are awake, they are constantly in search of something to eat.....some people are like that.
In the dawn of civilization the pig was the first domestic animal as the tribesman figured out that if he fed a pig it would follow him and he could kill it and eat it when he got hungry. However since the pig would eat everything, he would get diseases and transfer them to humans when he was eaten without proper cooking. This spread cholera and other bad diseases throughout the developing world, virtually wiping out entire civilizations, especially when pigs were introduced to indigenous tribes of the Americas.
The Jews first decided to stop the practice of eating the pigs. They kept them as garbage disposals, but would not eat them. Mohammed thought that was a good idea so he added that as a no-no to the Koran. Pigs nearly died out until the Europeans decided to branch out and go exploring. They needed a steady supply of food in their exploits and what better way to get that than to drag some pigs along and butcher one when the troops needed a little protein.
This is what led to the demise of most of the indigenous people of North, Central, and South America. The pigs got loose, rapidly reproduced, and became game food for the hunter-gathers.
The diseases they carried were unknown and so there was no natural immunity….lots of dead Indians.
The point of all of this is that if it were not for the pig, European expansion could not have happened. The population of Indigenous people in North, Central, and South America was ten times the population of Europe. When Cortez landed in Mexico, Mexico City was 100,000 people, Paris, the largest city in Europe, was 20000.
We would all be Incas if the pig hadn’t been invited to come to the party. It goes to show you how frail our civilization really is when it owes everything to a pig.
