The Importance of Being Covered
Nakedness was not a trivial consideration: it was construed in the beginning as a sign of edenic innocence. Columbus, for example, was initially enraptured.18 “They go naked as the day they were born,” he wrote, “the women as well as the men.” And: “We Christians said they were remarkably beautiful, the men as well as the women.” And: “This beauty was moral as well as physical…. They are the most pleasant and peaceful people in the world.”
Along with beauty went innocence. “The Admiral said he could not believe that a man could have ever beheld people so good of heart, so generous and timid, because they all gave away everything they had to us Christians and ran to give us whatever they had as soon as they saw us.” And: “In exchange for anything you give them, no matter how trifling, they immediately give you all their possessions.” And: “They do not covet other people’s property…. Whatever you ask for that belongs to them, they never refuse. On the contrary, they ask you to help yourself, and show so much love that you give them your heart.” And: “They are very gentle and know nothing of evil. They know nothing of killing one another.”19
But such an idyllic image could not long survive the test of experience. In particular, one thing these generous people were not ready to give away, and that was their women. And that was the one thing that, after months at sea, these horny Spaniards wanted above all, more even than gold. Also, the same innocents who were ready to give freely of their possessions assumed the Spanish would do the same. So they took, which the Spanish defined as theft. The very Columbus who had waxed rhapsodic on arrival soon repented himself of his credulity and offered some practical advice to his men: “During your voyage to Cibao, if an Indian steals anything at all, you must punish him by cutting off his nose and his hands, because these are the parts of the body that they cannot hide.”
So now the noble savage had become the savage, pure and simple. What else could he be? No one could live up to scriptural myths in the presence of some of the most ruthless rogues ever let loose on unsuspecting victims. Pascal Bruckner argues persuasively that the Indian was “condemned from the very beginning because he had been declared perfect.” This new, and for the white man far more congenial, image was reinforced, moreover, by other aspects of Indian culture—in particular their alleged recourse to cannibalism. Some scholars would deny the existence of such practice, at least for the Indians of the Caribbean. (There would seem to be no doubt of it in Mexico or Central America.) How credible such denials are is hard to say; it is, after all, very hard to prove a negative, but it is clear that anthropologists are sometimes motivated here by a need to see the European-Amerindian encounter in black and white, with all the wickedness on one side and only virtue on the other.20
Sometimes the defense is indirect. The social anthropologist David Maybury-Lewis cites as representative and influential in this regard a work by Hans Staden, True History and Description of the Land of the Savage, Naked and Ugly Maneating Peoples of the New World of America (1557), and goes on to say that the Tupinamba Indians, who had held Staden captive, “regularly and ritually ate their prisoners.” “It was considered,” he goes on, “a heroic death. A captive warrior, who in some cases might have been living with his captors for years and might have even raised a family there, was led out and clubbed to death in a ceremonial duel, after which the entire community ate him to partake of his heroic essence.”21
Maybury-Lewis further notes that the same Tupinamba were horrified by the cruelty of Europeans, as evinced by the routine use of torture in trial and punishment and the practice of slavery; and then goes on to deplore the one-sidedness of European judgments and policy. But of course it is very hard for any of us “to see ourselves as others see us.” Relativism—the power of sympathy—becomes us and is a particular virtue of ethnological scholarship. But one must not expect to find it generally. In sixteenth-century Europe, it was confined to a few clerics, whose arguments were best appreciated when recollected in tranquility.
History and Legend
The tale of Spanish misdeeds and crimes in the conquest of the Americas is so appalling that it has been a source of retrospective embarrassment and mortification. What kind of people were these, who could perpetrate so much cruelty and treachery? The answer, as outlined above, lay in social selection and history. On the one hand, the kind of adventures that lay ahead in the New World attracted the most daring, hungry, knavish members of Spanish society, many of them blackguards who thought little of their own lives and even less of those of others. On the other, the Spanish historical experience, the protracted war against enemies without (the reconquista) and within (the persecution of religious difference), could not but promote ends over means and extinguish sentiments of decency and humanity. To which Tzvetan Todorov would add the factor of distance: the Spanish were operating far from home and exercising their power and wrath on strangers, on an Other defined as subhuman and hence outside or beneath the rules that governed comportment even against an enemy. In such circumstances, anything goes; nothing is forbidden. So they competed in imagining and doing evil, which thus fairly exploded in collective frenzies. Todorov adds: “The ‘barbarity’ of the Spanish has nothing atavistic or animal about it; it is perfectly human and announces the arrival of modern times.”22
Unhappy the day that brought together this monumental amorality and the opportunity of conquest, that placed much weaker peoples in the merciless hands of greedy, angry, unpredictably cruel men.
In the effort to mitigate, if not excuse, this record of evil, apologists, many of them descendants of these conquistadors, have followed two lines of argument. One is to discredit the charges by labeling them as myth or exaggeration. Hence recourse to the term leyenda negra (black legend): black, thus by implication excessive (is anything ever completely black?); and legend rather than history. The aim is to dismiss rather than disprove, because disproof is impossible. (The same tactic and the same terminology have been employed to discredit the argument that Spanish intolerance and religious fanaticism at home, culminating in the obsession with racial purity [limpieza de sangre], and the pursuit of heresy even into the solitude of dreams, crippled the nation’s capacity for inquiry and learning. Here, too, it is easier to dismiss bad news than to rebut.)
The second approach is to point out the misdeeds of other colonizers, in particular the Anglo-Saxon, Protestant Nordamericanos, whose strategy of conquest was different and whose victims were fewer, but whose capacity for cruelty and hypocrisy was supposedly similar. * As though the misdeeds of others excused one’s own crimes. This line of argument is not unrelated to subsequent issues of power and the politics of imperialism. For many Latin American historians and ideologues, it has been vital to emphasize the wickedness of the gringos who came to dominate the Americas. Better, then, to lay the misfortunes of the Amerindian populations at their door, if only by implication.23
6
Eastward Ho!
Of all the great Events that have happened in the World of late Ages, those which concern the Voyages and Discoveries, made by the Europeans in the fifteenth and sixteenth Centuries, do justly challenge the Preference…. In the Merit and Glory of these In 1537, Pedro Portugueze, without all Controversy are intitled to the first and principal Share…it must be confessed, that they first set on Foot the Navigation of the Ocean, and put it into the Heads of other Nations, to go on the Discovery of distant Regions.
Other Nations were so far from being as early as the Portugueze in Attempts of this Kind, that these latter had been carrying on their Enterprizes, near fourscore Years, before any of their Neighbours seem to have thought of foreign Discoveries…the several Events showed, that the Designs were the Results of solid Reasoning, and formed on the most rational Grounds.
—THOMAS ASTLEY, Voyages ana” Travels
Like the Spanish, the Portuguese began by island-hopping. Down the western coast of Africa, aiming at an end run around the Muslims into the Indian Ocean. The
first reaches were easy. Southing, their sails swelled with the trade winds. But that meant trouble getting back to Lisbon. It was a stroke of genius not to beat their way upwind but rather to swing out west and north and return via the Azores.
The same but different beyond the Canaries. Now southing proved difficult, as winds and currents turned contrary. The trouble began around Cape Bojador (27 N.), symbolic boundary between creation and chaos, where struggling waters made the sea seem to boil. A decade of probes (1424-34) turned back at this invisible barrier.1
But still the Portuguese pressed on, voyage after voyage, league after league. At first they thought that no one lived along that arid coast; but then they encountered a few natives, took some prisoners, learned of slavery, saw new opportunities for profit. For profit was the heart of the matter: as Prince Henry’s biographer-hagiographer Zurara put it, “…it is evident that [no sailor or merchant] would want to go to a place where he did not stand to make money.”2
The South Atlantic is like no other ocean. On the African side it is not bordered by a convenient continental shelf; currents and winds run against southing ships, and the coastline is dreary-arid. Once one gets past the Cape Verdes, moreover, one finds little in the way of harbor and refreshment between Guinea and the Cape. Time-honored techniques of coasting, then, highly effective in the North Atlantic, Mediterranean, Indian Ocean, and China seas, do not work here. This is high-seas navigation.3 (See Maps 1,2, and 3.)
OCEAN CURRENTS AROUND THE WORLD
These currents, along with prevailing winds, dictated shipping routes in the Age of Sail.
PREVAILING WINDS AROUND THE WORLD, JANUARY PATTERN
Calms and doldrums are found where countervailing winds meet.
To be avoided.
PREVAILING WINDS, JUNE PATTERN
Here the earlier experience of the Portuguese in using the trade winds to ease their return home from the islands paid off, but in a different direction. After decades of beating and tacking their way south, they filled their sails and took the audacious step of swinging well out to the west, clear across the ocean to Brazil, before turning back to the southeast. This added hundreds of leagues to the route and meant weeks, even months out of sight of land; but the effect was to shorten the voyage and give them clear sailing around the point of Africa into friendlier seas.
One must not think of this as luck. The Portuguese could do this because they had learned to find the latitude. In the North Atlantic, sailors had always read their location north-south by the height of the Pole star. As they approached the equator, however, the Pole star stood too low in the sky, and they had to rely on the sun for guidance. Here the problem was complicated by the changing position of the sun in the sky: in European summer, it stood farther north, hence higher; in winter, farther south. This variance in position, known as declination, had to be taken into account in reading the sun’s altitude as the measure of latitude. Here Iberia’s position as frontier and bridge between civilizations paid off. In the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, Arab and Jewish astronomers there (the key figure was Abraham Zacut) prepared convenient tables of solar declination for the use of navigators.4
Once one could find the latitude, both at sea and on land, one had the key to the oceans; for now one could know position north-south; and if one also knew the latitude of the destination, one could get there by sailing to and then following the parallel. (Occasional problem: should one turn east or west?) The most important information that Bartolomeu Dias brought back from his voyage (1488) was the coordinate of the southern tip of Africa. Knowing that, the Portuguese could find their way there from any part of the South Atlantic.
These explorations had taken the Portuguese the better part of a century. Some of this was the work of the Portuguese crown and its devout, single-minded prince (we are told that he died a virgin) come down to us as Henry the Navigator, who built a marine research station at Sagres on a promontory overlooking the ocean and directed decades of inquiry into the science and technique of steering and sailing on the high seas. Some of it was the work of private shippers and seamen, who saw riches at the end of their bowsprit. All of it depended on improvements in the art of shipbuilding: caravels, longer and sleeker, rather than broad, cargo-bearing cogs; stern rudders; a mix of square and lateen sails; a marriage of Atlantic and Mediterranean techniques. When Dias returned from the southern tip of Africa, he also brought with him ideas that went into the ships (no longer called caravels) used by Vasco da Gama a decade later. Ten years more saw further modifications. Every trip was an experience, an incentive to emendation.
Ocean sailing further depended on instrumentation: the compass for direction; the astrolabe and cross-staff for measuring altitudes of celestial bodies; devices for sighting with back turned to the sun; sandglasses for timing and estimating speed. And, lest we forget, all sailing depended on the tenacity of hard-bitten sailors. These fellows, a strange crowd, had plenty of opportunity to regret signing on. They sickened and often died of scurvy on these endless voyages, nagged Virgin and saints with numberless Hail Mary’s and repetitious litanies, sought to appease the sea with superstitious gestures; and then, feet once more on dry land, wages spent on booze and sex, pockets empty, allowed themselves to be tempted again. That was the way of a seafaring man. (Besides, the crimps were always waiting to pounce.)
The Portuguese strategy, doing by knowing, made good sense. Each trip built on the ones before; each time, they went a little farther; each time they noted their latitude, changed their maps, and left a marker of presence. Psychological barriers made some steps more difficult: thus Cape Bojador; also the Cape of Storms, later renamed of Good Hope (symbolism was important). Gradually, fear yielded to reason and method. The decision to sail west, almost to the coast of South America, before going east was the most inventive and audacious of all, showing tremendous confidence in their ability to find their way. (By comparison, Columbus had a cakewalk.) Better to keep moving than to tack and stand. No wind like a following wind; no sail like a full sail.
The Portuguese push to the Indies is not understandable without taking account of men such as Vasco de Gama, sailor and seaman from childhood, man of hard head and hard measures. We do not know as much about Gama as we should like, but one story of his pre-Indies career tells much about his character. The year was 1492, and Gama was about thirty. A Portuguese caravel carrying gold from El Mina (on the west coast of Africa) had been seized by a French privateer, even though the two countries were at peace. What to do? The Portuguese king’s counselors advised diplomacy: send an emissary to plead for the ship and its gold. King John was not pleased: “I have no desire to see a messenger of mine ill received or made to kick his heels in anterooms. That would be more grievous to me than the loss of the gold.”
So King John sent for Gama, “a man in whom he had confidence, who had seen service in the fleets and in the affairs of the sea.” The sea was Portugal’s great school, and not only in matters of navigation. The next morning Gama and a hastily assembled posse were on the quay at Setubal, where ten French ships were berthed, loading rich merchandise. All of them were seized; their cargoes taken and placed under seal; their men brought ashore. Nothing more was needed. The French shipowners made petition to the king of France. The king of France sent the caravel back and the gold, to the last ounce. And the king of Portugal released the French ships and their cargoes, to the last ell and cask.5
Columbus’s discovery of a new world shocked the Portuguese. Like Sputnik to the Americans. After all, they could have had him and had turned him down. Decades of painful, costly exploration reaching around Africa, and here the Spanish found a new world (or maybe Asia) on the first try. No justice. Time to get going: in July of 1497 a small flotilla of four ships under the command of Vasco da Gama set forth from Lisbon to follow on the aborted initiative of Bartolomeu Dias and, rounding Africa, to find India. The voyage would take them over 27,000 miles and over two years; and only fifty-four of the original crew
of one hundred seventy returned alive.
This costly probe did not prove a commercial success. To da Gama’s astonishment, the merchants he encountered in India were Muslims and had no intention of trading with Christian infidels; what’s more, the glass beads, trinkets, and shirts he had brought with him for barter or sale, though eminently attractive to natives of the Caribbean, were near to worthless in India, which knew the difference between trash and precious things and made far better fabrics than Europe. So da Gama returned more or less empty-handed. The little he did bring back was a prize of war; in his eagerness and desperation, he attacked and captured a small Muslim vessel with a cargo of spices. Not a good precedent: from that point on, the Portuguese would rely on force to establish themselves in the Indian Ocean rather than on market competition.
Much more important, da Gama brought back news—two kinds of news. The first: that Europeans were stronger than the natives; they had better ships and better guns. The second: that although he had not been able to trade, spices aplenty were to be had for prices that promised huge profits. A hundredweight of pepper could be had in Calicut for three ducats. After passing through the hands of a half-dozen intermediaries and paying substantial fees and bribes to kings, sheikhs, and officials along the way, it sold in Venice for 80. Against that kind of gain, what was the cost of outfitting a fleet? And what the value of seamen’s lives?
The Wealth and Poverty of Nations: Why Some Are So Rich and Some So Poor Page 11
