IELTS Academic Reading Practice Test 231

Between the middle of the sixteenth century and the end of the eighteenth, the Spanish crown moved the wealth of its American empire across the Atlantic not in single ships but in convoys. Twice a year, in principle, merchant vessels gathered at Seville, took on soldiers, guns and supplies, and sailed under the protection of a naval escort. The system, known to historians as the treasure fleets, was designed less to be fast than to survive. Its ships carried silver from the mines of Peru and Mexico, together with cochineal, indigo, tobacco, cacao and hides, while the outward voyage brought manufactured goods, wine, oil and textiles to the colonies.

The wealth that made the convoys necessary came above all from silver. The mines at Potosí, high in the Andes, were producing by the 1540s, and those at Zacatecas in Mexico soon afterwards. Silver bars and coins flowed to Europe in quantities without precedent; much of it did not stop in Spain at all but passed to the Spanish Netherlands, to Italy and eventually to Asia, in exchange for Chinese silks and porcelain. To manage this traffic, the crown created the Casa de Contratación in Seville in 1503, an institution that licensed ships, registered cargo and collected its share of precious metal, the quinto real, or royal fifth.

Individual ships, however, were easy prey. French privateers attacked Spanish vessels in the Atlantic from the 1520s onwards, and English and Dutch raiders later joined them. The answer, adopted in the 1560s, was the convoy. From 1566, in most years, two fleets sailed, each with an armed escort under a commander appointed by the crown. The Nueva España fleet made for Veracruz with goods for Mexico; the Tierra Firme fleet called at Cartagena and at Nombre de Dios, later Portobelo, on the isthmus of Panama, where it collected the silver that had been brought up the Pacific coast and carried across the isthmus by mule.

The two fleets wintered separately in the Caribbean, then joined at Havana in the spring and returned to Spain together through the Bahama Channel, the narrow passage between Florida and Cuba. The rendezvous mattered: a convoy that left the Caribbean in company was far harder to intercept than a scattering of ships.

Departure was a spectacle. Ships assembled at Seville on the Guadalquivir, but the river was silting, and large vessels completed their loading at Sanlúcar de Barrameda at its mouth; in 1717 the Casa de Contratación itself moved downstream to Cádiz. Officials inspected cargo, checked that every seaman was licensed, and searched for foreign goods and prohibited books. The galleon, a long, low vessel with a high stern, became the standard warship of the escort, though merchant ships of many shapes sailed in the body of the fleet.

Not every convoy came home. In 1628 a Dutch squadron under Piet Heyn surprised the Mexican fleet at anchor in Matanzas Bay on the coast of Cuba and captured it almost without a fight, taking silver that the Dutch West India Company divided among its shareholders. English attacks followed: in 1656 and 1657 the admiral Robert Blake captured treasure ships off Cádiz and destroyed another fleet in the harbour of Santa Cruz de Tenerife. In 1702, in Vigo Bay, an Anglo-Dutch force fell on a combined Spanish and French convoy carrying silver from America, and most of the ships were taken or burned.

The sea was as dangerous as any enemy. In July 1715 a fleet leaving Havana was caught by a hurricane off the Florida coast and eleven ships were wrecked. The survivors found themselves on a long, exposed shore far from any Spanish settlement. Salvage began almost at once, and Spanish divers recovered a large part of the silver, but much remained. The wrecks of the 1715 fleet still lie scattered along that coast.

The ships also carried something less often mentioned in accounts of treasure: people. Officials, soldiers, missionaries and merchants travelled with the fleets. Enslaved Africans were also shipped to the colonies, though mostly outside the fleets, by Portuguese, English, French and Dutch ships under contracts granted by the Spanish crown. The return voyage brought passengers who had made their fortunes, and others who had lost them.

The convoys were also an administrative machine. Every item was registered, taxed and checked on arrival, and the surviving ledgers of the Casa de Contratación are among the richest sources historians have for the economic life of the empire. Yet the system was expensive, slow and increasingly out of step with a changing economy. Merchants complained of delays, colonists bought goods from foreign traders who ignored the rules, and the crown's own officials were frequently involved in smuggling.

In the eighteenth century the great convoys became irregular. After the losses of the war years the crown allowed more and more individual ships to sail on licence, and the old twice-yearly rhythm broke down. By the middle of the century the fleets had largely given way to registered single vessels, and the system was abolished before the end of the century. What survives is a body of wreck material of extraordinary richness: the Atocha, lost in a hurricane in 1622 off the Florida Keys, was found by a salvage team led by Mel Fisher in 1985, and its cargo has been studied by archaeologists ever since.

A hillfort is an enclosure on high ground defended by banks and ditches, built in Britain and Ireland during the Iron Age. The term covers an enormous variety of monuments. Some are small enclosures of less than a hectare; others are vast fortresses with multiple ramparts enclosing many hectares; a few are promontory forts that use sea cliffs as their defence. Well over two thousand have been recorded in Britain alone, with particular concentrations in the Welsh borders, the south-west and the chalk downlands of southern England. Most were built between about 700 BC and the Roman conquest, though a few are earlier and some were reoccupied in later centuries.

The name is in one respect unfortunate, because it assumes a purpose that the builders may never have intended. Nineteenth-century antiquaries, and the excavators who followed them in the early twentieth, tended to see the sites as fortresses and to interpret every bank and ditch as a response to attack. Sir Mortimer Wheeler, whose excavations at Maiden Castle in Dorset between 1934 and 1937 were widely reported, presented the hillfort as a military stronghold taken by storm by the Roman army. That image entered textbooks and museum displays and is still the one most visitors bring with them.

Later work complicated it. Excavation at Danebury in Hampshire, directed by Barry Cunliffe between 1969 and 1988, examined a large part of the interior and produced a picture of a busy working settlement. Hundreds of pits cut into the chalk held grain, some of it charred, and the animal bones showed cattle, sheep and pigs kept in quantity. But the same is not true of most hillforts. Many have produced very little evidence of houses, hearths or rubbish, and some appear to have been visited only occasionally. The suspicion grew that many were not permanent settlements at all but meeting places, stock enclosures, markets or ceremonial centres.

The most quoted evidence for warfare is also the most disputed. Excavations at Maiden Castle, and later at Danebury, recovered thousands of slingstones, many of them stockpiled. Wheeler and others read them as ammunition, proof that such sites were fortresses. Others have pointed out that slingstones are cheap to make, that the same stones could have been used to drive off wolves or thieves, and that a pile of them need not imply a battle. Neither side can settle the question from the objects alone, and the argument has become a small case study in how much interpretation is packed into a single find.

Maiden Castle has been central to the argument. In a cemetery outside the eastern entrance Wheeler found burials, one of them with an iron projectile lodged in the spine; he identified it as a Roman ballista bolt and reconstructed a massacre at the hands of Vespasian's legionaries in the years after the invasion of AD 43. A reassessment of the burials, prompted by new excavations in the 1980s, accepted the wound and the Roman weapon, and few doubt that there was fighting at the site. The number of dead, however, was small, and the reading of the cemetery as the trace of a single massacre has been questioned.

The scale of the earthworks has always invited a different explanation. A large hillfort such as Maiden Castle or Hambledon Hill required many thousands of hours of labour, dug with antler picks and wooden spades and carried in baskets. Calculations of that labour are rough, but they agree in implying the cooperation of a considerable community over months or years. Building, in other words, was itself a statement about who could command work, who belonged and who did not. Some researchers argue that the visibility of a rampart from the surrounding land mattered as much as its height.

The evidence available has been transformed by methods that do not require digging. Aerial photography after the Second World War revealed the crop marks of hundreds of sites, and geophysical survey can now map buried ditches across a whole interior in a few days. Lidar, which measures the ground from an aircraft with a laser, has been especially valuable, since it can record earthworks beneath woodland or pasture where no crop mark would ever appear; surveys in several regions have added substantially to the known total. Analysis of soil, pollen and charred grain has meanwhile supplied a picture of the farming that supported the sites.

Nor were the islands isolated. Similar enclosures were built in the same centuries across much of continental Europe, from the Atlantic coast of France to the Carpathian basin, and imported pottery and metalwork found in some British hillforts show that their inhabitants were in touch with networks reaching far beyond their own valleys.

Yet the gaps remain large. Only a small proportion of hillforts has ever been excavated, and fewer still on a scale that allows the interior to be understood. Dating depends heavily on pottery and on a modest number of radiocarbon determinations, so the sequence of construction at any one site is often uncertain, and two neighbouring sites that look alike may be centuries apart. What the sites meant to the people who built them is, and will probably remain, a matter of argument.

In 2018 the developers of Assassin's Creed Origins, a game set in Ptolemaic Egypt and released the previous year, published a version with no combat, no missions and no story. Discovery Tour: Ancient Egypt allowed players to walk through a carefully modelled Alexandria, to visit the pyramids and to follow guided tours written with the advice of historians. Schools began to use it. The episode is a useful place to begin, because it makes plain a question that has been argued over since the first educational games appeared: can a video game teach history, or does it merely entertain people who believe they are learning?

The case against is easy to state. A game must be playable, and playability has its own demands: a clear goal, a rising challenge, a satisfying ending. History supplies none of these. Designers therefore compress decades into hours, put weapons in the hands of people who never held them, and arrange events so that the player's side can win. The marketing of such games often boasts of accuracy, and the claim is rarely justified in any detail. A player who spends forty hours in a version of medieval Paris may emerge with a vivid sense of the streets and a quite false sense of how power worked.

Yet the case for is stronger than critics sometimes allow. A book can tell a reader that a city was crowded, noisy and ringed by walls; a game can make the reader feel it, and can make the consequence of those walls — the crush at a gate, the wait for a cart to be searched — part of the experience. Games are also unusually good at contingency: at showing that a battle might have gone the other way because a messenger arrived late. That is closer to how historians now think about the past than the tidy narratives of older textbooks.

Games can convey the texture of ordinary life as well. This War of Mine, made in Poland in 2014, puts the player in charge of a group of civilians trapped in a besieged city, and its subject is not heroism but hunger, illness and the moral cost of survival. Valiant Hearts, released the same year, follows ordinary people through the First World War. Neither is a textbook, and neither pretends to be. Both leave players with an impression of what such events did to people who had no say in them.

The research evidence, however, is thinner than the enthusiasm suggests. Studies of learning from historical games tend to be small, short and conducted by the people who designed the games, and they often measure what students remember immediately after a session rather than what they understand months later. Reviews of the field have repeatedly called for larger and more independent trials. It is one thing to show that a class enjoyed a game and could recall some details; it is quite another to show that the game produced a better understanding of the past than a well-taught lesson.

There is also a structural problem. The most successful historical games are built on a model borrowed from strategy: the player accumulates resources, advances through a technology tree and eventually dominates. History, in such games, becomes a story of inevitable progress towards the present, with Europe usually at the summit. Civilization, whatever its charms, teaches a model of the past in which invention follows invention in a fixed order and some peoples are simply further along than others. Players absorb that model without noticing it.

The commercial calculation shapes content in subtler ways too. Violence sells, and a game about the past that contains no fighting is a harder proposition for a publisher than one that does. So the past arrives pre-filtered: kings and battles rather than harvests, tax records and childbirth. Ubisoft's decision in 2019 to offer its detailed model of Notre-Dame as a reference after the cathedral fire, and to make the game available free for a week, was generous and intelligent; it was also a reminder that one of the most detailed reconstructions of a medieval building in existence was made for entertainment, not for scholarship.

None of this means that games are useless in a classroom. The Oregon Trail, first written in 1971 and played by generations of American schoolchildren in later versions, has been criticised for the way it presented Native Americans, and its critics are right. But the criticism itself is the point. A class that plays such a game and then asks who made it, for whom, and what it leaves out is doing history: interrogating a source, noticing its assumptions and comparing it with others. That is a more valuable exercise than memorising a list of dates.

My own view is that the question in the title needs splitting. Can a game, by itself, teach history? No: no single source can, and the claims of accuracy that surround commercial products should be treated with suspicion. Can games, taught well, help students understand the past? Yes, and in some respects better than print, because they can make the constraints within which past people acted feel real. The condition is that a game is treated as a source to be questioned rather than as a textbook to be believed.