by Peter Watson
The same was true of the Americas. Apart from the Bering Strait, it too was surrounded by vast oceans and had few animals and plants that could be domesticated. The Americas had a relatively small area of Mediterranean climate, meaning a smaller variety of annuals, and its north–south orientation meant that farming practices spread relatively slowly. As compared with Eurasia, for example, which had thirty-three species of large-seeded grasses, the Americas had only eleven. Of the animal species that have been domesticated, Eurasia has thirteen (out of seventy-two species of mammal available), whereas the Americas have just two (out of a total of twenty-four species of mammal). As a result the New World was ‘held back’. Writing was invented in Mesopotamia before 3000 BC but in Mesoamerica not until 600 BC. Pottery was invented in the fertile crescent and China about 8000 BC but in Mesoamerica not until 1250 BC. Chiefdoms arose in the fertile crescent around 5500 BC and but not in Mesoamerica until around 1000 BC.2
Diamond’s account, though it has been criticised for being speculative, which it undoubtedly is, does if accepted bring a measure of closure to one area of human thought, showing why different peoples had reached different stages of development by 1500 AD.
The discovery of America was important intellectually for Europeans because the new lands and peoples challenged traditional ideas about geography, history, theology, even about the nature of man.3 Insofar as America proved to be a source of supply for goods for which there was a demand in Europe, it had an economic and therefore a political significance. ‘It is a striking fact,’ wrote the Parisian lawyer Étienne Pasquier, in the early 1560s, ‘that our classical authors had no knowledge of all this America, which we call New Lands.’4 ‘This America’ was not only outside the range of Europe’s experience but was beyond expectation. Africa and Asia, though distant and unfamiliar for most people, had always been known about. America was entirely unexpected and this helps explain why Europe was so slow in adjusting to the news.
Adjustment is the key word. There was, to begin with, and as John Elliott reminds us, plenty of excitement provoked by the news of Columbus’ landfall. ‘Raise your spirits…Hear about the new discovery!’ wrote the Italian humanist Peter Martyr in a letter to the archbishop of Granada on 13 September 1493. Christopher Columbus, he reported, ‘has returned safe and sound. He says that he has found marvellous things, and he has produced gold as proof of the existence of mines in those regions.’5 Martyr then explained that Columbus had found men who were ‘gentle savages’, ‘who went around naked, and lived content with what nature had given them. They had kings; they fought among each other with staves and bows and arrows; although they were naked, they competed for power, and they married. They worshipped the celestial bodies, but the exact nature of their religious beliefs was unknown.’6
Some measure of the initial impact of Columbus’ discoveries can be had from the fact that his first letter was printed nine times in 1493, and reached twenty editions by the end of the century.7 The Frenchman Louis Le Roy wrote ‘Do not believe that there exists anything more honourable…than the invention of the printing press and the discovery of the new world; two things which I always thought could be compared, not only to antiquity but to immortality.’8 In 1552, in his General History of the Indies, Francisco López de Gómara (not always a reliable chronicler) provided the most famous verdict on 1492: ‘The greatest event since the creation of the world (excluding the incarnation and death of Him who created it) is the discovery of the Indies.’9
Yet John Elliott rightly warns us that there was another side, that many sixteenth-century writers had a problem seeing Columbus’ achievement in its proper historical perspective. For example, when Columbus died in Valladolid, the city chronicle failed to mention his passing.10 Only slowly did Columbus begin to attract the status of a hero. A number of Italian poems were written about him but not until a hundred years after his death, and it was not until 1614 that he featured as the hero of a Spanish drama–this was Lopede Vega’s El Nuevo Mundo descubierto por Cristóbal Colón.11
To begin with, interest in the New World was confined to the gold that might be found there and the availability of vast numbers of new souls for conversion to the Christian faith. Generally speaking, however, book readers were more interested in the Turks and in Asia than in America.12 As late as the last two or three decades of the sixteenth century, the world was still thought of as having the layout laid down in the classical cosmographies of Strabo and Ptolemy. (Columbus appears to have used a version published by Aeneas Sylvius in the 1480s.13) In some senses the Renaissance itself was to blame: thanks to the humanists, antiquity was revered rather than the new.14
The men who first travelled to the New World were soldiers, clerics, merchants and officials trained in law and to them fell the initial task of observing what they saw. One effect was that the physical landscape of the Americas was ignored at the expense of detailed descriptions of the native inhabitants.15 Columbus himself, when he first set eyes on the inhabitants of the Indies, was somewhat disappointed to find that they were not in any way ‘monstrous or physically abnormal’.16 He noted how ‘poor’ they were.17 At the same time they were neither Negroes nor Moors, the races most familiar to medieval Christendom. How then did they fit into the biblical account?18 Was the New World Eden perhaps, or Paradise? Early accounts all dwelt on the innocence, simplicity, fertility and abundance of the natives, who went around naked without any apparent feelings of shame.19 This was a view especially seductive to religious figures and to humanists. Angered and despairing at the state of the European church, members of the religious orders saw in the New World a chance to found afresh the primitive church of the Apostles in a continent uncorrupted by the vices of European civilisation.
In 1607, Gregorio García, a Spanish Dominican, published a wide-ranging survey of the many theories that had been conceived to explain the origins of the ‘Indians’ of America. Sixteenth-century Europeans believed in ‘a designed world’ into which America must be incorporated. But that still left a lot to be explained. García advocated that man’s knowledge ‘of any given fact’ derived from one of four sources. Two of these–divine faith, as revealed through the scriptures, and ciencia, which explained a phenomenon by its cause–were infallible. The origin of the American Indians was a problem because the matter was not discussed in the scriptures, ‘and the problem too recent to have allowed the amassing of any corpus of convincing authority’.20
If the problem of fitting the New World into the scheme of history as outlined in the scriptures was the most intractable of matters, explorers and missionaries alike found that, if evangelisation were to proceed, some understanding of the customs and traditions of the native peoples was required. Thus began their often-elaborate inquiries into Indian history, land tenure and inheritance laws, in a sense the beginning of applied anthropology.21 The early missionaries, fortified by a naïve belief in the natural goodness of man, assumed that native minds were ‘simple, meek, vulnerable and virtuous’ or, in the words of Bartolomé de las Casas, tablas rasas, blank slates, ‘on which the true faith could easily be inscribed’.22 The missionaries were to be disappointed. In his History of the Indies of the New Spain (1581), the Dominican fray Diego Durán argued that the Indian mind could not be changed or corrected ‘unless we are informed about all the kinds of religion which they practiced…And therefore a great mistake was made by those who, with much zeal but little prudence, burnt and destroyed at the beginning all their ancient pictures. This left us so much in the dark that they can practice idolatry before our very eyes.’ Such a view became the justification for the detailed surveys of pre-conquest history, religion and society undertaken by clerics in the later sixteenth century.23 The Spanish Crown was intimately involved and in the process introduced the questionnaire, bombarding their officials in the Indies with this new tool of government.24 The most famous were those drafted in the 1570s at the behest of the president of the Council of the Indies, Juan de Ovando. This was a time w
hen the urge to classify was beginning to grow in every field of knowledge, and knowledge about America was part of the trend.25 In 1565, Nicolás Monardes, a doctor from Seville, wrote his famous study of the medicinal plants of America, which appeared in John Frampton’s English translation of 1577 under the title of Joyfull Newes out of the New Founde Worlde.26 In 1571, Philip II sent an expedition to America under the leadership of the Spanish naturalist and physician Dr Francisco Hernández, to collect botanical specimens in a systematic way (but also to assess the capacity of the Indians to be converted).27 In the same year, the Spanish Crown created a new post, that of ‘Cosmographer and Official Chronicler of the Indies’, though there was a political as well as a scientific reason for this initiative. The political motive was to provide a detailed account of Spanish achievements in the New World, to counteract foreign criticisms, and at the same time it was felt that the science was necessary to reduce the widespread ignorance of the councillors of the Indies about the territory they had responsibility for.28
But it was not until 1590, a full century after Columbus’ discovery, with the publication in Spanish of José de Acosta’s great Natural and Moral History of the Indies, that the integration of the New World into the framework of Old World thought was finally cemented.29 This synthesis was itself the crowning achievement of a century of intellectual transformation, in which three very different aspects of the New World were incorporated into the European mind-set. There was first the American landmass, as a totally unexpected addition to the natural world.30 There was the American Indian, who had to be incorporated into the European/Christian understanding of humanity. And there was America as an entity in time, whose very existence transformed Europe’s understanding of the historical process.31 All this was, first and foremost, a challenge to classical learning.32 According to the Bible, and to experience, there were three landmasses in the world–Europe, Asia and Africa–and to change this idea was as fundamental a break with tradition as the idea that there wasn’t a torrid zone in the southern hemisphere. Moreover, the Bering Strait was not discovered until 1728. Until then it was not clear whether America formed part of Asia or not. When, in 1535, Jacques Cartier encountered rapids in the St Lawrence river above the site of what would become Montreal, he named them Sault La Chine, the Chinese Rapids. A century later, in 1634, Jean Nicolet, a French adventurer, was sent west to investigate rumours of a great inland sea, which led to Asia. When he reached lake Michigan and saw ahead of him the cliffs of Green bay he thought he had reached China and put on a robe of Chinese silk in their honour.33 Classical learning was of no use either for interpreting the discoveries of the New World. How could it, if the great authors of antiquity were entirely unaware of the landmass? Time and again, the discoveries of the New World proved the superiority of personal observation over traditional authority. This too was a major mind shift.34
One of the most powerful–if implicit–ideas at the time of the discovery of America was the dual classification of mankind, whereby peoples were judged in accordance with their religious affiliation (Judaeo-Christian, or pagan) or their degree of civility or barbarity.35 Inevitably, this had to be modified in the sixteenth century. As to the Indians’ civility, this appears largely to have depended upon whether or not the observers had actually seen one. Anyone with prolonged contact with the native American was much less likely to maintain the idea of the innocent primitive.36 Dr Chanca, who accompanied Columbus on his second voyage, observed the Indians of Hispaniola eating roots, snakes and spiders and concluded: ‘It seems to me that their bestiality is greater than that of any beast in the world.’ This paradox–whether or not the Indian was a beast or an innocent–was one of the main issues in the early literature of discovery and settlement. If the Indian was not a man then he had no capacity for faith. In Sublimis Deus, his bull of 1537, Paul III had this in mind when he declared that ‘the Indians are true men’. Christians defined man by his ability to receive divine grace. The classical definition of man, on the other hand, was as a rational being. After Sublimis Deus, most Christians accepted that the native peoples of America could be classified as human on both grounds.37
Just how rational the Indians were was, however, open to doubt. Fernández de Oviedo (who had an abiding interest in the epics of chivalry from the Middle Ages) was convinced the Indians were an inferior form of being, ‘naturally idle and inclined to vice’.38 He discovered signs of their inferiority, he thought, in the size and thickness of their skulls, which he felt implied a deformation in a part of the body associated with a man’s rational powers.39 Fray Tomás de Mercado, in the 1560s, classified Negroes and Indians likewise as ‘barbarians’ because ‘they are never moved by reason, but only by passion’. It was not far from there to the notorious theory of ‘natural slavery’. This too was a major issue of the time. Pagans in the sixteenth century were divided into two, the ‘vincibly ignorant’ (Jews and Muslims, who had heard the true word, and turned away from it), and the ‘invincibly ignorant’, those like the Indians who had never had the opportunity to hear the word of God, and therefore couldn’t be blamed. This soon became corrupted, however, as people like the Scottish theologian John Mair argued that some people were by nature slaves, and some by nature free.40 In 1512 King Ferdinand of Spain summoned a junta to discuss the legitimacy of employing native labour. Such documentation as has survived shows that many at the time argued that the Indians were barbarians and therefore natural slaves. But this was ‘qualified slavery’, as Anthony Pagden describes it. The Spanish had a convention, the encomienda, under which the Indians, in return for hard labour, would learn through Spanish example how to live ‘like men’.41 This was refined still further around 1530, by what came to be known as the ‘School of Salamanca’, a group of theologians that included Francisco Vitoria and Luis de Molina. They developed the view that if the Indians were not natural slaves then they were ‘nature’s children’, a less developed form of humanity. In his treatise De Indis, Vitoria argued that American Indians were a third species of animal between man and monkey, ‘created by God for the better service of man’.42
Not everyone shared these views, however, and others, more sympathetic to the Indian, sought signs of his talent. The most accurate account of this clash of civilisations, on either side, says Ronald Wright, was written by some Aztecs for Friar Bernardino de Sahagú nin the 1550s, and is now known as Book 12 of the Florentine Codex. The authors were anonymous, possibly to shield them from the Inquisition. However, the very search for these signs of Indian virtue and talent, says John Elliott, helped to shape the sixteenth-century idea of what constituted a civilised man. Bartolomé de las Casas, for instance, pointed out that God works through nature, and on these grounds alone Indians were God’s creatures and therefore available to receive the faith. He drew attention to Mexican architecture–‘the very ancient vaulted and primitive-like buildings’–as ‘no small index of their prudence and good polity’. This was roundly rejected by Ginés de Sepúlveda, who pointed out that bees and spiders produced artefacts that no man could emulate.43 But there were many other aspects of Indian social and political life which impressed European observers. ‘There is,’ wrote Vitoria in the 1530s, ‘a certain method in their affairs, for they have polities which are orderly arranged and they have definite marriage and magistrates and overlords, laws, and workshops, and a system of exchange, all of which call for the use of reason; and they also have a kind of religion.’44
This was more important than it might seem. Rationality, especially the ability to live in society, was held to be the criterion of civility. But if this could happen outside Christianity, what happened to the age-old distinction between Christian and barbarian? ‘Inevitably it began to be blurred, and its significance as a divisive force to decline.’45 Las Casas took the surprisingly modern view that all men have a place in an historical scale which is the same for everyone and that those near the bottom of this scale are simply ‘younger’ than those further up. In other words, he
was groping towards a cultural evolutionary view of man and society.
Even when it didn’t produce startlingly new ideas, the discovery of America forced Europeans back on themselves, causing them to confront ideas and problems which existed inside their own cultural traditions. For example, the veneration for classical antiquity meant that they were aware of other civilisations which had different values and attitudes to their own and in many ways had been superior. In fact, it was the existence and success of pagan antiquity which underpinned the two most notable treatises of the sixteenth century which attempted to incorporate America within a unified vision of history.
The first of these, Bartolomé de las Casas’ massive Apologética Historia, was written during the 1550s, never published in his lifetime and not rediscovered until the twentieth century. It was written in anger and in response to Sepúlveda’s savage polemic against the Indians, Democrates Secundus, in which he compared Indians to monkeys.46 In fact, the two men staged a famous debate in Valladolid, in August or September 1550, Las Casas arguing that the Indian was an entirely rational individual, fully equipped to govern himself and therefore fit to receive the gospel.47 Using Aristotle as his guide, Las Casas examined the Indian from the physical and the moral standpoint, which marks his essay as perhaps the first exercise in comparative cultural anthropology. The political, social and religious arrangements of the Greeks, Romans and Egyptians, ancient Gauls and ancient Britons, were examined alongside those of the Aztecs and the Incas.48 According to Las Casas, the New World peoples did not suffer by this comparison. He paid proper due to the quality of Aztec, Inca and Mayan art and observed their ability to assimilate European ideas and practices that they found useful.
