Leonardo’s Mountain of Clams and the Diet of Worms

by Stephen Jay Gould

  The other two monuments are located a mile or two apart on more plausible landing sites of the leeward west coast—both among the extensive and distinctive Cerion populations of this region. The second monument, placed beside an earlier obelisk erected by a yachtsman in 1951, anticipates the quincentenary of 1992 and celebrates a Japanese voyage of hope and rediscovery:

  In October 1991, a replica of the Santa Maria—built by the Não Santa Maria foundation of Japan—made landfall here on its journey from Barcelona, Spain, to Kobe, Japan. We came to pay homage to Columbus and his crew and to carry our message of hope for a grand harmony in the future: harmony between men and nations, between man and the environment, and between the earth and the universe.

  Haruo Yamamoto

  CAPTAIN, NĀO SANTA MARIA

  The plaque on the “official” monument, a cross erected in 1954 on Long Bay, within site of the excavation that yielded the late-fifteenth-century coin, simply reads: “On or near this spot, Christopher Columbus landed on the 12th of October, 1492. Admiral Samuel Eliot Morison, USNR.” The base contains yet another message of reconciliation:

  Dedication and Christmas services shared by all churches 25 December, 1956. Americans and natives worshipped together as [a] symbol of faith, love, and unity between all nations and for peace on earth.

  And so we reach the crux of all the tension, all the triumph and tragedy, all the drama of this great historical tale—however illuminated or alleviated by a little side story about a distinctive land snail. We must not carp. Columbus opened a new world, and began a process that altered human history in a permanent and fundamental way. He was a brilliant and courageous sailor, and his accomplishments merit all the messages of hope and fortitude proclaimed in unison by the monuments of San Salvador. The messages are therefore “true” in this narrow sense—but ever so partial, and therefore misleading as well.

  As I read Columbus’s log, I could thrill to his accomplishments, but I also felt waves of revulsion at two persistent themes that never find expression on ceremonial tablets, but also set the pathways of later history. First, his lust for gold, his almost single-minded search for the currency that would justify his endeavor and all future exploitation. On San Salvador, he noticed small gold rings in the noses of some Taino natives, and he persistently inquired about the source. He went from island to island, looking for mines, and thinking that he would soon encounter either the fabled golden isle of Cipangu (Japan), or the rich courts of the grand Khan in Cathay (China). As he visited progressively more powerful caciques (local chiefs), he found more and more gold, but never a source area—and (obviously) never the rich and fabled civilizations of eastern Asia. Finally, and tragically for the local people, he did discover a source of gold on Hispaniola—and his kinsmen built the mines that precipitated the enslavement and genocide of the Tainos, and the total depopulation of the Bahamas.

  On October 13, 1492, his second day in the New World, Columbus had already begun his inquiries, writing in his log: “And by signs I was able to understand that, going to the south or rounding the islands to the south, there was a king who had large vessels of it and had very much gold.” In a classic passage, Samuel Eliot Morison writes:

  All the rest of his First Voyage was, in fact, a search for gold and Cipangu, Cathay and the Grand Khan; but gold in any event. In all else he might fail, but gold he must bring home in order to prove la empresa [the undertaking] a success.

  In the Bahamas, his Taino guides spoke of a large nearby island called Colba (Cuba)—but Columbus heard “China” and went off in search of gold. On Cuba, he heard a rumor of gold in the island’s interior at Cubanacan (meaning mid-Cuba)—but he heard El Gran Can, and thought that he would soon reach the imperial court. On the shore of Hispaniola, two days before Christmas, Columbus learned about gold in Cibao (the local name for central Hispaniola)—and he heard Cipangu, or Japan. But this time his countrymen would find their reward.

  Second, Columbus praised the kindness and hospitality of the native Tainos. He could not have proceeded nearly so well without their enthusiastic help. Yet, his commentary speaks only about ease of domination and compulsion to service, not of gratitude or appreciation. In his very first entry for October 12, following his initial meeting and trading session with the Tainos of San Salvador, Columbus noted:

  I gave to some of them red caps and to some glass beads, which they hung on their necks, and many other things of slight value, in which they took much pleasure; they remained so much our friends that it was a marvel; and later they came swimming to the ships’ boats . . . and brought us parrots and cotton thread in skeins and darts and many other things . . . everything they had, with good will.

  Columbus then made an observation with practical import:

  They bear no arms, nor know thereof; for I showed them swords and they grasped them by the blade and cut themselves through ignorance; they have no iron.

  And he drew a conclusion about domination, not brotherhood:

  They ought to be good servants and of good skill, for I see that they repeat very quickly all that is said to them; and I believe that they would easily be made Christians, because it seemed to me that they belonged to no religion. I, praise Our Lord, will carry off six of them at my departure to Your Highnesses, so that they may learn to speak.

  Two days later, he wrote more openly about servitude: “These people are very unskilled in arms . . . With fifty men they could all be subjected and made to do all that one wished.” And, from Hispaniola, near the end of the voyage, Columbus stated a plan for enslavement more explicitly: “They bear no arms, and are all unprotected and so very cowardly that a thousand would not face three; so they are fit to be ordered about and made to work, to sow and do aught else that may be needed.”

  And history then unfolded according to the Admiral’s suggestion. The mines and estates of New Spain needed labor, and the local people, whom Columbus had called “Indians” in a mistaken belief that he had reached eastern Asia, became serfs and slaves because they could not stand against the Spanish technology of swords and gunpowder. As the natives of Hispaniola died from disease, overwork, cruelty, and (no doubt) inner distress, the Spanish governors authorized a “harvesting” of new bodies from neighboring places. And they turned to Columbus’s first landfall—the Bahama islands, small bits ofland with good anchorages, and unarmed people with no place to hide. In his classic book The Early Spanish Main, C. O. Sauer writes:

  Jamaica was known to be populous . . . Its size and tracts of difficult terrain, however, would have demanded well-organized expeditions to round up natives in number. Cuba, large and less well known, would have required even more effort. The Lucayas [Bahamas] on the other hand were a great lot of small islands, lacking refuges except by flight to another island and their people were known to be without guile; these would be the easiest to seize.

  Starting in 1509, and largely under the command of Ponce de León, the lieutenant governor of Puerto Rico, Spanish ships began to capture the Bahamian Tainos to work as slaves in Hispaniola and neighboring islands. The conquerors were thorough and rapid in their grisly work. Estimates vary, but several tens of thousands may have been thus enslaved. As the Bahamian population dwindled, the price per head rose from five to 150 gold pesos. By 1512, only twenty years after the first Columbian contact, not one Taino remained in the Bahamas. (They did not long survive in the mines of New Spain, either—and Africans were soon imported as “replacements,” thus beginning another major chapter of shame in the history of the New World.) We all learned in school that Ponce de León discovered Florida in 1513 as part of a heroic and romantic quest for the Fountain of Youth. Perhaps, in part. But Ponce de León, the chief agent of Taino destruction, had sailed primarily to find a new source of slaves beyond the thoroughly depopulated Bahamian islands.

  Bartolomé de Las Casas (1474-1566) began his manhood as a soldier, and sailed for Hispaniola in 1502. He participated in the conquest of Cuba and received an encomienda (a royal
grant of land with Indian slaves). But Las Casas had a change of heart and became a priest. He preached a sermon against slavery and ill treatment of native peoples in 1514, and returned his Indian serfs to the governor. In 1515, he sailed for Spain to plead before the court for better treatment of Native Americans. He later joined the Dominican order and, in the course of a long and active life spent writing treatises and shuttling between Spain and the New World, he became a passionate and effective advocate for humane treatment of the New World’s first inhabitants.

  The same Las Casas copied Columbus’s log to use as a source for his historical writings. As he considered Columbus’s role in the story of Indian conquest and servitude, Las Casas noted the tragic beginning that might have unfolded otherwise, had only decency been able to conquer greed. Las Casas explicitly discusses the passages from Columbus’s log cited earlier in this essay:

  Note here, that the natural, simple and kind gentleness and humble condition of the Indians, and want of arms or protection, gave the Spaniards the insolence to hold them of little account, and to impose upon them the harshest tasks that they could, and become glutted with oppression and destruction. And sure it is that here the Admiral [Columbus] enlarged himself in speech more than he should and that what he here conceived and set forth from his lips, was the beginning of the ill usage he afterwards inflicted upon them.

  As a final result, and in one of history’s greatest and cruelest ironies, the first people that Europeans encountered in the New World also became the first victims of Western genocide. As one tiny consequence, no historical continuity could be maintained to preserve a human record or legend of Columbus’s first landfall—and we must therefore resort to a fable about a land snail as a hypothetical way (though guaranteed for success if only Columbus had collected a single shell) to resolve this initial puzzle in the modern history of a hemisphere.

  San Salvador remained uninhabited for nearly three hundred years (legends about transient pirate landings notwithstanding)—until British loyalists, fleeing the American Revolution, built plantations and imported slaves of African origin. The descendants of these slaves built the second culture of San Salvador, now vigorously in force.

  We may soften the old observation that a second historical cycle often replays an initial tragedy as a derived farce. Let us only note that repeat performances tend to be more gentle. The wake of Columbus destroyed the first culture of San Salvador in the most cruelly literal way. The long arm of Columbus now threatens the second—not with death this time, but with assimilation to international corporate blandness. Most islands of the outer Bahamas remain largely “undeveloped” by modern tourism and resort culture, but the idea of Columbus’s landfall provides a hook for luring people to San Salvador. After a century of small hostelries that fit well with local culture, Club Med has just built a major establishment that may change this small island into a playground of tinsel.

  But many forces resist homogenization, and we should take heart. Of two examples, consider first the humor of Homo sapiens. A small establishment on the main road of San Salvador calls itself “Ed’s First and Last Bar”—because people tend to stop by both before and after their visit to a much larger and more popular watering hole up the road a piece. But a new sign now graces the First and Last—“Club Ed,” of course!

  As a second example, and if only for symbolic value, consider the tenacity of Cerion. Club Med and its clones may one day envelop the island, sweeping up the vestiges of local culture into a modern, rootless fairyland of more gentle (and literally profitable) modern exploitation. But Cerion will hang tough as a marker of San Salvador’s uniqueness. Unless the entire island becomes paved and manicured, Cerion will survive. Cerion, hearty and indestructable, poses no threat to agriculture or urban existence, and therefore passes largely beyond (and beneath) human notice; Cerion also inhabits the scrubby shoreline environments least attractive for human utility.

  Cerion will survive to provide an unbroken continuity with Columbus and the original Taino inhabitants. Any snail among thousands crowded around the first Columbian monument on Crab Cay may be the great-great-great-great grandchild of a forebear that looked back at the Pinta—and wondered about the future in its aimless, snail-like way—when Rodrigo de Triana first raised his cry of “Tierra!” and altered human history forever.

  12

  THE DODO IN THE CAUCUS RACE

  MOST MEMBERS OF MY IMMIGRANT JEWISH FAMILY TOOK PRIDE IN THEIR supposed assimilation (often more imagined than real), and derided as “greenhorns” those who stuck to old ways and tongues. Nonetheless, I well remember the lilt of Yiddish, liberally sprinkled into heavily accented English, used exclusively for a wide range of jokes and stories, or spoken as a mother tongue by the recalcitrants. In 1993, the last native Yiddish speaker of my extended family died. She was one hundred years old.

  When such valued parts of natural or human diversity disappear as active, living presences, we take special interest—verging sometimes on zealous protectionism for the merest scraps—in preserving the “fossil” artifacts of extinguished vitality. And when we discover such a vestige as a pleasant and entirely accidental surprise, we feel doubly blessed for a gift bestowed by a normally uncaring world—all without our seeking, or expecting. Two recent and personal examples struck my heartstrings more than my brainstuff, and channeled my thinking to the general topic of extinction and preservation.

  I saw a ten-story building, standing tall among the tenements of East Broadway on New York City’s Lower East Side. I noted some Hebrew letters in raised and decaying metal along the top story. (The first raysh has fallen off entirely, but the outline of the Hebrew r can still be discerned in the incised stone beneath.) I soon recognized the word as Yiddish, not Hebrew, as I began to spell: fay, alef, raysh (in the incised stone) . . . Farvarts, or “Forward.” I had found the old home of the greatest Yiddish newspaper in a once-vibrant press. Many of my relatives bought the paper daily, and I knew both the pathos and bathos of a publication that seemed almost organic in intensity—the campaigns for social justice in the sweatshops, and the Bintel Brief (or bundle of letters), the advice column, chockablock with questions from parents bemoaning the modern ways of their children. I felt so happy to know that the site has survived in recognizable form, even if the institution must eventually perish. (The Forward, now published uptown, maintains health in the altered form of weekly English and Russian editions—but the Yiddish edition drops continually in circulation, as the last speakers die.)

  A few days later, I went to the movies to see Independence Day, the outer-space summer blockbuster of 1996. (Even the most committed intellectual can’t survive on an unalloyed diet of Jane Austen remakes.) I had never noticed this unprepossessing theater on Second Avenue and Twelfth Street. But then I went inside and saw the surprising, if faded, beauty of the interior, with wonderful multicolored tilework of Moorish design. The popular film occupied the largest theater of this multiplex—the old main hall of the original building. Here, the tilework glowed in a particularly sumptuous pattern. As the film began, and the alien ships hovered over our cities, I looked up at the ceiling and noted the central pattern of dark tiles arranged in an enormous oval—almost exactly, eerily, and (obviously) quite unintentionally, mimicking the flying saucers on the screen. And then I saw the Star of David at the center of the tilework!

  Independence Day had unfolded in the finest surviving memorial to another great institution of my ancestral culture: a Yiddish theater. I hadn’t realized that any building of the old “Yiddish Rialto” on Second Avenue still existed in recognizable form, and I remembered my relatives reminiscing about the quality of a Yiddish King Lear, or the tunefulness of old Yiddish musicals. I later read that I had been visiting the Louis N. Jafee Art Theater, built in 1925, and presenting performances in Yiddish until 1945, with a brief revival between 1961 and 1965. I could only think of a favorite line from Wordsworth: “The sunshine is a glorious birth / But yet I know . . . that there hath p
assed away a glory from the earth.”

  If we regard the details of vibrant diversity as precious and glorious—and not as superfluous baubles upon Platonic essences—then the profession of preservation becomes one of the most noble callings that a person can undertake for a life’s work. I shall not discuss the happy side of preservation—the restoration to vitality of lingering institutions otherwise doomed (though people who follow this calling are doubly blessed). I shall focus instead on what many people may regard as a preeminent exercise in frustration, the ultimate job for stoics, and the incarnation of numerous proverbs best represented by closing the stable door after a horse has permanently bolted: the assiduous collection, and meticulous preservation, of remains—often so few, partial, and pitiful—of people, cultures, species, and places that have permanently disappeared.

  In my profession of natural history, the people charged with preserving such artifacts do their work in museums and carry the title of curator, or head (literally caretaker) of a collection. Curators do not generally enjoy high status (or salary), in large part because we unfairly devalue their activities, including the task of rescue highlighted in this essay. Our disparagement of the preservational role as either ineffably sad or almost risibly impotent (a beak in a drawer instead of ten thousand brilliantly plumed and beautifully singing birds in the bush) strikes me as greatly unfair on several grounds.

  I have never met a curator who would not prefer the happier task of restoring a remnant to vitality. Nearly anyone in this line of work would take a bullet for the last pregnant dodo. But should we not admire the person who, when faced with an overwhelmingly sad reality beyond any personal blame or control, strives valiantly to rescue whatever can be salvaged, rather than retreating to the nearest corner to weep or assign fault?