EUROPEAN VISIONS OF AMERICA
The European discovery of America was fueled by curiosity. People had long imagined what lay beyond the western horizon. Norse expeditions to the New World during the tenth and eleventh centuries are the earliest that can be verified, and even they have dissolved into legend. Around A.D. 985 an Icelander named Erik the Red—the New World’s first real-estate booster—colonized the west coast of a rocky, fogbound island he deceptively called Greenland, and about a year later a trader missed Greenland and sighted land beyond. Knowing of this, Leif Eriksson, son of Erik the Red, sailed out from Greenland about A.D. 1001 and sighted the coasts of Helluland (Baffin Island), Markland (Labrador), and Vinland Newfoundland), where he settled for the winter. The Norse settlers withdrew from North America in the face of hostile natives, and the Greenland colonies vanished mysteriously in the fifteenth century. Nowhere in Europe had the forces yet developed that would inspire adventurers to subdue the New World.
THE EXPANSION OF EUROPE
During the late fifteenth century, Europeans developed the maritime technology to venture around the world and the imperial ambitions to search for riches, colonies, and pagans to convert. This age of discovery coincided with the rise of an inquiring spirit; the growth of trade, towns, and modern corporations; the decline of feudalism and the formation of national states; the Protestant and Catholic Reformations; and the resurgence of some old sins—greed, conquest, exploitation, oppression, racism, and slavery—that quickly defiled the fancied innocence of the New World.
RENAISSANCE GEOGRAPHY For more than two centuries before Columbus, the mind of Europe quickened with the so-called Renaissance— the rediscovery of ancient texts, the rebirth of secular learning, the spirit of inquiry, all of which spread more rapidly after Johannes Gutenberg’s invention of a printing press with movable type around 1440. Learned Europeans of the fifteenth century held in almost reverential awe the authority of ancient learning. The age of discovery was especially influenced by ancient concepts of geography. As early as the sixth century B.C., the Pythagoreans had taught the sphericity of the earth, and in the third century B.C. the earth’s size was computed very nearly correctly. All this was accepted in Renaissance universities on the word of Aristotle, and the myth that Columbus was trying to prove this theory is one of those falsehoods that will not disappear even in the face of evidence. No informed person at that time thought the earth was flat. Progress in the art of navigation accompanied the revival of learning. In the fifteenth century, mariners employed new instruments to sight stars and find the latitude. Steering across the open sea, however, remained a matter of dead reckoning. A ship’s captain set his course along a given latitude and calculated it from the angle of the North Star or, with less certainty, the sun, estimating speed by the eye. Longitude remained a matter of guesswork since accurate timepieces were needed to determine it. Ship’s clocks remained too inaccurate until the development of more precise chronometers in the eighteenth century.
THE GROWTH OF TRADE, TOWNS, AND NATION-STATES The forces that would invade and reshape the New World found their focus in Europe’s rising towns, the centers of a growing trade that slowly broadened the narrow horizons of feudal culture. In its farthest reaches this commerce moved either overland or through the eastern Mediterranean all the way to east Asia, where Europeans acquired medicine, silks, precious stones, dyewoods, perfumes, and rugs. There they also purchased the spices—pepper, nutmeg, clove—so essential to the preserving of food and for enhancing its flavor. The trade gave rise to a merchant class and to the idea of corporations through which stockholders would share risks and profits.
The foreign trade was chancy and costly. Goods commonly passed from hand to hand, from ships to pack trains and back to ships along the way, subject to tax levies by all sorts of princes and potentates. The Muslim world, from Spain across North Africa into central Asia, straddled the important trade routes, adding to the hazards. Muslims tenaciously opposed efforts to “Christianize” their lands. Little wonder, then, that Europeans should dream of an all-water route to the coveted spices of east Asia and the Indies.
Another spur to exploration was the rise of national states, ruled by kings and queens who had the power and the money to sponsor the search for foreign riches. The growth of the merchant class went hand in hand with the growth of centralized political power. Merchants wanted uniform currencies, trade laws, and the elimination of trade barriers. They thus became natural allies of the monarchs who could meet their needs. In turn, merchants and university-trained professionals supplied the monarchs with money, lawyers, and government officials. The Crusades to capture the Holy Land (1095–1270) had also advanced the process of international trade and exploration. They had brought Europe into contact with the Middle East and had decimated the ranks of the feudal lords. And new means of warfare—the use of gunpowder and standing armies—further weakened the independence of the nobility relative to royal power.
By 1492 the map of western Europe showed several united kingdoms: France, where in 1453 Charles VII had emerged from the Hundred Years’ War as head of a unified state; England, where in 1485 Henry VII had emerged victorious after thirty years of civil strife known as the Wars of the Roses; Portugal, where John I had fought off the Castilians to ensure national independence; and Spain, where in 1469 Ferdinand of Aragon and Isabella of Castile had ended an era of chronic civil war when they united two great kingdoms in marriage. The Spanish king and queen were crusading expansionists. On January 1, 1492, after nearly eight centuries of religious warfare between Spanish Christians and Moorish Muslims on the Iberian peninsula, Ferdinand and Isabella declared victory at Granada, the last Muslim stronghold. They gave the defeated Muslims a desperate choice: convert to Christianity or leave Spain. Soon thereafter the Christian monarchs gave Sephardi, Jews from Spain or Portugal, the same awful ultimatum: baptism or exile.
These factors—urbanization, world trade, the rise of centralized national states, and advances in knowledge, technology, and firepower—combined with natural human curiosity, greed, and religious zeal to create an outburst of energy, spurring the discovery and conquest of the New World. Beginning in the late fifteenth century, Europeans set in motion the events that, as one historian has observed, bound together “four continents, three races, and a great diversity of regional parts.”
THE VOYAGES OF COLUMBUS
It was in Portugal, with the guidance of King John’s son Prince Henry the Navigator, that exploration and discovery began in earnest. In 1422 Prince Henry dispatched his first naval expedition to map the African coast. Driven partly by the hope of outflanking the Islamic world and partly by the hope of trade, the Portuguese by 1446 had reached Cape Verde and then the equator and, by 1482, the Congo River. In 1488 Bartholomeu Dias rounded the Cape of Good Hope at Africa’s southern tip.
Christopher Columbus, meanwhile, was learning his trade in the school of Portuguese seamanship. Born in 1451, the son of an Italian weaver, Columbus took to the sea at an early age, making up for his lack of formal education by teaching himself geography, navigation, and Latin. By the 1480s, Columbus, a tall, white-haired, pious man, was an experienced mariner and a skilled navigator. Dazzled by the prospect of Asian riches, he developed an outrageous plan to reach the Indies (India, China, the East Indies, or Japan) by sailing west across the Atlantic. Columbus won the support of Ferdinand and Isabella, the Spanish monarchs. They awarded him a tenth share of any pearls; gold, silver, or other precious metals; and valuable spices he found in any new territories. The legend that the queen had to hock the crown jewels is as spurious as the fable that Columbus set out to prove the earth was round.
Columbus chartered one seventyfive- foot ship, the Santa María, and the Spanish city of Palos supplied two smaller caravels, the Pinta and the Niña. From Palos this little squadron, with eighty-seven officers and men, set sail westward for what Columbus thought was Asia. The expedition stopped at the Canary Islands, the westernmost Spanish possessions, off the west coast of Africa. Early on October 12, 1492, a lookout on the Santa María yelled, “Tierra! Tierra!” (Land! Land!) It was an island in the Bahamas east of Florida that Columbus named San Salvador (Blessed Savior).Columbus decided they were near the Indies, so he called the island people los Indios. He described the “Indians” as naked people, “very well made, of very handsome bodies and very good faces.” He added that “with fifty men they could all be subjugated and compelled to do anything one wishes.” The natives, Columbus wrote, were “to be ruled and set to work, to cultivate the land and to do all else that may be necessary . . . and to adopt our customs.”
Columbus continued to search for a passage to the fabled Indies through the Bahamian Cays, down to Cuba (a place-name that suggested Marco Polo’s Cipangu [associated with modern-day Japan]), and then eastward to the island he named Española (or Hispaniola, now the site of Haiti and the Dominican Republic), where he first found significant amounts of gold jewelry. Columbus learned of, but did not encounter until his second voyage, the fierce Caribs of the Lesser Antilles. The Caribbean Sea was named
after them, and because of their alleged bad habits the word cannibal was derived from a Spanish version of their name (Caníbal).
On the night before Christmas 1492, the Santa María ran aground off Hispaniola. Columbus, still believing he had reached Asia, decided to return home. He left about forty men behind and seized a dozen natives to present as gifts to Spain’s royal couple.When Columbus reached Palos, he received a hero’s welcome. The news of his discovery spread rapidly across Europe thanks to the improved communications brought about by Gutenberg’s printing press. In Italy, Pope Alexander VI, himself a Spaniard, was so convinced that God favored the conquest of the New World that he awarded Spain the right to control the entire hemisphere so that its pagan natives could be brought to Christ. Buoyed by such support and by the same burning religious zeal to battle heathens that had forced the Moors into exile or conversion, Ferdinand and Isabella instructed Columbus to prepare for a second voyage. The Spanish monarchs also set about shoring up their legal claim against Portugal’s pretensions to the newly discovered lands. Spain and Portugal reached a compromise agreement, called the Treaty of Tordesillas (1494), which drew an imaginary line west of the Cape Verde Islands and stipulated that the area west of it would be a Spanish sphere of exploration and settlement. Columbus returned across the Atlantic in 1493 with seventeen ships, livestock, and over 1,000 men, as well as royal instructions to “treat the Indians very well.” Back in the New World, Admiral Columbus discovered that the camp he had left behind was in chaos. The unsupervised soldiers had run amok, raping native women, robbing Indian villages, and as Columbus’s son
later added, “committing a thousand excesses for which they were mortally hated by the Indians.” The natives finally struck back and killed ten Spaniards. A furious Columbus immediately attacked the Indian villages. The Spaniards, armed with crossbows, guns, and ferocious dogs, decimated the natives and loaded 550 of them onto ships bound for the slave market in Spain.
Columbus then ventured out across the Caribbean Sea. He found the Lesser Antilles, explored the coast of Cuba, discovered Jamaica, and finally returned to Spain in 1496. On a third voyage, in 1498, Columbus found Trinidad and explored the northern coast of South America. He led a fourth voyage in 1502, during which he sailed along the coast of Central America, still looking in vain for Asia. Having been marooned on Jamaica for more than a year, he finally returned to Spain in 1504. He died two years later.
To the end, Columbus refused to believe that he had discovered anything other than outlying parts of Asia. Full awareness that a great land mass lay between Europe and Asia dawned on Europeans very slowly. By one of history’s greatest ironies, this led the New World to be named not for its discoverer but for another Italian explorer, Amerigo Vespucci, who sailed to the New World in 1499. Vespucci landed on the coast of South America and reported that it was so large it must be a new continent. European mapmakers thereafter began to label the New World using a variant of Vespucci’s first name: America.
THE GREAT BIOLOGICAL EXCHANGE
The first European contacts with the New World began an unprecedented worldwide biological exchange. It was in fact more than a diffusion of cultures: it was a diffusion of distinctive social and ecological elements that ultimately worked in favor of the Europeans at the expense of the natives. Indians, Europeans, and eventually Africans intersected to create new religious beliefs and languages, adopt new tastes in food, and develop new modes of dress.
If anything, the plants and animals of the two worlds were more different than the people and their ways of life. Europeans had never seen such creatures as the fearsome (if harmless) iguana, the flying squirrel, fish with whiskers like those of a cat, or the rattlesnake, nor had they seen anything quite like several other species: bison, cougars, armadillos, opossums, sloths, tapirs, anacondas, American eels, toucans, condors, and hummingbirds. Among the few domesticated animals they could recognize the dog and the duck, but turkeys, guinea pigs, llamas, and alpacas were all new. Nor did the Native Americans know of horses, cattle, pigs, sheep, goats, and (maybe) chickens, which soon arrived from Europe in abundance. Yet within a half century whole islands of the Caribbean would be overrun by pigs.
The exchange of plant life between Old and New Worlds worked a revolution in the diets of both hemispheres. Before Columbus’s voyage three staples of the modern diet were unknown in Europe: maize (corn), potatoes (sweet and white), and many kinds of beans (snap, kidney, lima, and others). The white potato, although commonly called Irish, actually migrated from South America to Europe and reached North America only with the Scotch-Irish immigrants of the early eighteenth century. Other New World food plants include peanuts, squash, peppers, tomatoes, pumpkins, pineapples, sassafras, papayas, guavas, avocados, cacao (the source of chocolate), and chicle (for chewing gum). Europeans in turn soon introduced rice, wheat, barley, oats, wine grapes, melons, coffee, olives, bananas, “Kentucky” bluegrass, daisies, and dandelions to the New World.
The beauty of the exchange was that the food plants were more complementary than competitive. Corn, it turned out, could flourish almost anywhere—in highland or low, in hot climates or cold, in wet land or dry. It spread quickly throughout the world. Before the end of the 1500s, American maize and sweet potatoes were staple crops in China. The nutritious food crops exported from the Americas thus helped nourish a worldwide population explosion probably greater than any since the invention of agriculture. The dramatic increase in the European populations fueled by the new foods in turn helped provide the surplus of people that colonized the New World.
Europeans, moreover, adopted many Native American devices: canoes, snowshoes, moccasins, hammocks, kayaks, ponchos, dogsleds, and toboggans. The rubber ball and the game of lacrosse have Indian origins. New words entered European languages: wigwam, tepee, papoose, tomahawk, succotash, hominy, moose, skunk, raccoon, opossum, woodchuck, chipmunk, hickory, pecan, and hundreds of others. And new terms appeared in translation: warpath, war paint, paleface, medicine man, firewater. The natives also left the map dotted with place-names of Indian origin long after they were gone, from Miami to Yakima, from Penobscot to Yuma. There were still other New World contributions: tobacco and a number of other drugs, including coca (for cocaine), curare (a muscle relaxant), and cinchona bark (for quinine).
By far, however, the most significant aspect of the biological exchange was the transmission of infectious diseases from Europe and Africa to the New World. European colonists and enslaved Africans brought with them deadly pathogens that Native Americans had never experienced: smallpox, typhus, diphtheria, bubonic plague, malaria, yellow fever, and cholera. In dealing with such diseases over the centuries, people in the Old World had developed antibodies that enabled most of them to survive infection. Disease-toughened adventurers, colonists, and slaves invading the New World thus carried viruses and bacteria that consumed Indians, who lacked the immunologic resistance that forms from experience with the diseases.
The results were catastrophic. Epidemics are one of the most powerful forces shaping history, and disease played a profound role in decimating the indigenous peoples of the Western Hemisphere. Far more Indians died of contagions than from combat. Major diseases such as typhus and smallpox produced pandemics in the New World on a scale never witnessed in history. The social chaos caused by the European invaders contributed to the devastation of native communities. In the face of such terrible and mysterious diseases, panic-stricken and often malnourished Indians fled to neighboring villages, unwittingly spreading the diseases in the process. Unable to explain or cure the contagions, Indian chiefs and religious leaders often lost their stature. Consequently, tribal cohesion and cultural life disintegrated, and efforts to resistEuropean assaults collapsed. Over time, Native Americans adapted to the presence of the diseases and better managed their effects. They began to quarantine victims and infected villages to confine the spread of germs, and they developed elaborate rituals to sanctify such practices.
Smallpox was an especially ghastly and highly contagious disease in the New World. Santo Domingo boasted almost 4 million inhabitants in 1496; by 1570 the number of natives had plummeted to 125. In central Mexico alone, some 8 million people, perhaps one third of the entire Indian population, died of smallpox within a decade of the arrival of the Spanish. Smallpox brought horrific suffering. The virus passes through the air on moisture droplets or dust particles that enter the lungs of its victims. After incubating for twelve days, the virus causes headaches, backache, fever, and nausea.Victims then develop sores in the mouth, nose, and throat. Within a few days gruesome skin eruptions cover the body. Death usually results from massive internal bleeding.
In colonial America, as Indians died by the thousands, disease became the most powerful weapon of the European invaders. A Spanish explorer noted that “half the natives” died from smallpox and “blamed us.” Many Europeans, however, interpreted such epidemics as diseases sent by God to punish Indians who resisted conversion to Christianity.
Aucun commentaire:
Enregistrer un commentaire