The Human Story

by James C. Davis

  Victoria set out for home. No one on her wanted to return the way they came and face that fearsome South American strait again. So her captain, Juan Sebastián de Elcano, set his course to westward, hoping to get through the Asian seas that hostile Portugal controlled, around the tip of Africa, and sail from there to Spain. The other ship, the Trinidad, required repairs and left the Spice Islands later. Unlike Elcano, her captain had decided to sail east, back to South America. But after many troubles Trinidad returned to the Spice Islands and was captured by the Portuguese. Then a storm destroyed the ship.

  Of the fleet of five that had sailed from Spain only Victoria now survived. She was badly rotted after years at sea, and was sailing in south Asian waters patrolled by hostile Portuguese. Elcano managed to elude the Portuguese, and he got to Africa, sailed around the Cape, and started up the western coast. Suffering from hunger and disease, his men and he at last arrived at the Cape Verde Islands, off what is now Senegal. The islands were Portuguese, but at the greatest risk they stopped and traded some of their cloves for rice. But then they had to flee, and they left behind them thirteen men, who were captured by the Portuguese.

  In September 1522, Victoria arrived in Spain, three years after she had left it. Eighteen weary, hungry Europeans, all that were left of nearly 250, and four Malays they had hired on, staggered onto land. They were “weaker than men have ever been before.”

  And here’s the sequel to this dreadful, splendid voyage around the earth: when the cargo of Victoria was sold, it paid the voyage’s total cost. (Cloves were costly; men were cheap.) Magellan’s name was given to the strait in which the expedition suffered for so long. The thirteen men abandoned on Cape Verde were released, and four sailors from the Trinidad, captured in the Spice Islands, also got back to Spain. In the years that followed, many men who had survived the voyage no doubt went to sea again. Elcano, captain of Victoria, was honored by King Charles, who added to his coat of arms a globe, and the words “You were the first to encircle me.” He later died on a Pacific crossing. Victoria, which had sailed around the earth, should have been preserved and honored. Instead, her owners patched her up and sent her to the New World twice. Returning from the second voyage, Victoria and all aboard her sank.

  Magellan’s famous voyage did not result in Spanish rule of the Spice Islands. (He was wrong in any case; they lay within the half of the world that the treaty assigned to Portugal.) Just the same, his journey taught important lessons. Earth is bigger than the scholars had believed, and a colossal ocean stretched from the Americas to Asia. Columbus had been right in thinking one could get from Europe to Asia by sailing west, but the journey was too long. The voyage’s most important consequence was this: humans now knew more about the people of the other clusters, and how to reach them.

  LONG AFTER THE Magellan voyage, the peoples of Eurasia, Africa, and the Americas still were unaware that earth held two more continents. Australia and Antarctica lay so far south of customary routes of trade that ships had never happened on them, and fog and ice packs shielded Antarctica from view.

  In the 1600s, Australia’s isolation neared an end. Ships of other nations had replaced the Portuguese on the Africa-Asia trade route, and some Dutch sea captains found a southern route to Indonesia. From the southern tip of Africa they sailed straight east, and at the proper moment they veered north, caught a breeze, and raced right up to Indonesia. However, if they turned too late they might smash against a giant mass of land. Having found this hostile place, several captains partially explored it, but they didn’t grasp that they had come upon the west side of a continent. Since it looked unprofitable, they left it pretty much alone.

  A Dutch explorer, Abel Tasman, sailed around most of Australia in the 1640s without ever seeing it. This sounds absurd, but Tasman was only following his sailing orders, and he did prove a negative. Europeans of his time believed that a gigantic “Great South Land” existed below the equator to somehow balance the huge land masses north of it. Tasman’s voyage established that Australia, however big it was, wasn’t big enough to be a part of this mythical place.

  More than a century elapsed before Europeans took another look, and then they did it on Australia’s other side. In 1768 the British navy and Britain’s Royal Society sent a scientific expedition to the south Pacific. In command was “Captain Cook” — James Cook — a farmhand’s son who already had a brilliant Navy record. One of Cook’s assignments was to find that still-alluring Southern Continent. After first exploring the islands of New Zealand, Cook sailed west and reached Australia’s scarcely known eastern coast. Sailing northward he explored along the coast for two thousand miles, surveying as he went. He had to thread his way between the shoreline and the Great Barrier Reef, and once a prong of coral pierced his sturdy ship and nearly sank it.

  As they sailed along the coast, the Europeans sometimes glimpsed the native folk, the Aborigines. As the ship sailed by, the Aborigines would gaze out at it and then look away, dismissing it as too monstrous to be understood. When the sailors came ashore, the Aborigines would often slip away, but sometimes they were shyly friendly. Presents held no interest for them; when given clothes, they accepted, then abandoned them.

  Cook and Joseph Banks, the voyage’s leading scientist, both made notes about the Aborigines. Banks observed how few they were, a sprinkle of humans on an endless land. One tribe they came upon numbered only twenty-one: twelve men, seven women, and a boy and girl. The Aborigines were small and thin, completely nude, and dirty. (Banks wet a finger, rubbed it on a man, and discovered that his skin was chocolate brown.) They slept in huts made out of branches, big enough for four or five. A fire might smolder in the hut, but only to prevent mosquitoes, for they rarely cooked their food. Women did the work, even toting heavy burdens on the march, and the men often beat them.

  Cook found the Aborigines “far from disagreeable…a timorous and inoffensive race, no ways inclinable to cruelty.” He almost envied them. “They may appear to some to be the most wretched people on Earth, but in reality they are far happier than we Europeans…. They live in a tranquility which is not disturbed by the inequality of condition: the earth and the sea of their own accord furnish them with all things necessary for life.”

  Before he sailed away from Australia’s northernmost tip, Cook anchored by a little island and was rowed ashore. Standing where he saw the mainland, he raised the British flag and claimed Australia’s eastern seaboard for King George III.

  AFTER COOK SUBMITTED his report about the voyage, the people of six continents knew of one another. Now the only undiscovered continent was Antarctica, which of course held no humans whatsoever. After he explored Australia, Cook received another mission: to learn what lay at the southern end of earth. Could the Great South Land be there? In the early 1770s he sailed with two ships far, far south of Australia, into frigid waters and “pinching cold.” Icebergs, white and blue, as lofty as the dome of London’s St. Paul’s Cathedral, crunched and toppled all around the ships. The expedition searched and searched for land. At one point, though they didn’t know it, they were less than seventy-five miles from Antarctica, but pack ice blocked them, threatening to crush their wooden ships. They had to sail away.

  Half a century later, several nations, caught up by rivalry and science, raced to learn what lay beyond the ice. In 1820 Russians almost surely were the first to see Antarctica; they sailed around it. Not much later, a team of British scientists set foot upon the continent. In the early 1900s other groups began to venture inland, using sledges, hardy Asian ponies, a balloon, and even an early automobile. In 1911 a Norwegian expedition, using skis and dog teams, reached the South Pole.

  EUROPEANS NOW HAD “found” four continents and a sea route to two others. Is that important? After all, the people they discovered had already known exactly where they were. But the linking of the human clusters would, in the future, help to shape the world.

  Chapter 10

  The New World falls to the Old one.

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nbsp; FOR THE TWO great Indian empires of the Americas, that day was the beginning of the end, that day in 1492 when frightened Indians on a Caribbean island noticed winged monsters nearing, hid behind the trees, and watched as pale-skinned strangers landed on their shore. Of course, those island Indians lived far from the two big Indian civilizations. Just the same, the white-sailed vessels were a dreadful omen for the Aztecs and the Incas. Now, for just a moment, they would enter the main current of world history and then vanish from it.

  IN CHAPTER 1 we guessed at how the New World Indians’ tale began. A handful of Siberians, we said, bearing spears and berry baskets, may have wandered eastward on the tundra plain that then, like a bridge, linked Asia and North America. At the end of the land bridge they found themselves in a continent they had never known of. In the centuries that followed, those Indians’ descendants scattered through that land and the continent below it. In the meantime, glaciers melted, oceans rose, and stormy water cut off North America again. As a result, the Indians were isolated from everybody else on earth.

  Oceans separated the Indians from the Old World for at least ten thousand years. During those millennia, as we have seen, Europeans, Asians, and Africans had learned to raise crops and animals, live in towns and cities, build, write, use metals, make calendars. Meanwhile, just like them, the Indians of the Americas also learned to farm, settled down, and began to live in cities. What is puzzling is that, having no contact with the Old World, they made these changes only some three thousand years later than the Old World people did. Seen against the one to two hundred thousand years that modern humans have been on Earth, three thousand aren’t a lot.

  We simply don’t know why farming began in the New World so soon after it began in the old one. Did the climate of the world suddenly get harsher everywhere at the same time, forcing everyone to quickly find out how to grow food instead of gathering it? Prehistorians have found no proof of this. Did an Old World farmer sail to the New World and teach the Indians how to raise crops and tend cows? That’s unlikely. Perhaps the discoveries of farming, and then of civilization, were just an astounding coincidence.

  If we don’t know why farming began in the Americas when it did, we do know where. It happened in a concentrated region. Think of the two Americas together as an hourglass, broad at the top, broad at the bottom, but narrow in the middle. The area of rapid change was in or just above or just below that narrow middle where the two great masses joined, in what today are Mexico, central America, and a portion of Peru.

  The Indians’ biggest find was how to grow a crop of corn, or maize, which they transformed from a humble weed into a benefactor of humankind. (Prehistorians, digging in ancient Indian shelters, have found remains of husks and kernels that illustrate how corn developed.) Before long the Indians were also raising other noble plants that the rest of the world had never tasted: potatoes, sweet potatoes, peanuts, cocoa, avocados, tomatoes, chili peppers, squash, and string and lima beans. They also raised two not so noble ones: tobacco and the shrubs that yield cocaine.

  After they began to farm, the peasants in the middle region, where the continents joined, had more to eat, and their number rose. They settled down in villages, cleared the land around them, drained the swamps. Some of the villages grew into towns and cities, and they organized as city-states with all the things we cannot do without: politicians, soldiers, priests, and tax collectors.

  Striking proof of how these cities thrived are the remnants of Teotihuacan, which stood not far from where Mexico City sprawls today. While the Roman Empire flourished — but many of the world’s great cities weren’t yet born — 150,000 people lived here. They built two temple pyramids so huge that later migrants to this place supposed that gods or giants made them.

  OF ALL THE ancient peoples, the most accomplished were the Mayas. And yet they flourished in an uninviting place. The northern half of the narrow isthmus that connects the two Americas was and is a tangled jungle, hot and damp, and full of things that bite. But here it was that the Mayas, when they began to farm, settled down. At first they lived in villages, but in time their numbers rose, and many a dusty village became a handsome city. Each of these was built around a square, flanked by palaces and temples. On one side of the square the Mayas usually had a court where they played their popular ball game, and grandstands for the spectators. On another side, a step pyramid would rise, crowned by temples that towered above the nearby jungle.

  Many Mayas lived quite well. We know about the living standard of one Mayan village because of a recent scientific dig on a site below a volcano in what is now El Salvador. This was a village of three hundred Mayas (or near-Mayas, differing a bit in speech). One day 1,500 years ago disaster struck. This happened during summer, as we know because the fruit on nearby trees was ripe.

  It was late afternoon, and the farmers had returned from working in the fields. Some had just begun to eat, dipping fingers in their bowls of cornmeal mush and cherries, and drinking cocoa. Others had already eaten, but as yet they hadn’t washed their bowls or taken out their sleeping mats. Then they heard a roar like thunder and they knew that the volcano was exploding. They fled and saved their lives, but they lost their village, which was buried under sixteen feet of ash.

  As they dug away the ash, archaeologists discovered that these Mayan farmers had not only thatch-roofed houses of their own but a chapel, a village hall and storehouse, a shop for making knives and tools, and a sauna. They wove the cotton they raised into cloth and made their clothes, and lived on vegetables and fruit, shellfish, turkeys, deer, and dogs. The food they didn’t need they doubtless carried to Copán, a Mayan town some sixty miles away, and bartered for volcanic glass (to make their knives) and finely painted pots. In one of the humbler houses in the village archaeologists found over seventy of these handsome pots. These ordinary peasants fared better than most peasants of their time in Europe and Asia, and better than the peasants of El Salvador today.

  The Mayas flourished from about A.D. 250, when Rome ruled one end of Eurasia and China ruled the other, till near the end of Europe’s Dark Ages. Until recently, all we knew of Mayan history came from buildings, paintings, pots, and carvings found in vine-clad ruins in the jungles. But experts now can read the Mayas’ glyphs, the picture-words they carved on buildings.

  This much is clear: The Mayas didn’t have just one united kingdom. On the contrary, they lived in about forty towns or cities. As in ancient Greece, a Mayan kinglet often ruled a single town and the villages around it. Many rulers had engaging names, such as Curl-Nose, Animal Skull, Lady Six Sky, and Smoking Squirrel, and they often fought each another.

  In Bonampak, a Mayan city-state in what today is Mexico, dramatic murals tell what happened when the ruling family had a child. In one, the ruler holds the baby up before the nobles. Trumpets blare, dancers listen for the beat of drums, and revelers prepare to feast on crayfish, carp, and corn. In another, women of the royal family prick their tongues and let their blood drip down on bits of paper, which will then be burned and offered to the gods. In a battle scene the king, with a bleeding enemy’s head suspended from his neck, wages war against his neighbors. The hard-eyed ruler and his warriors seize their captives by the hair and slaughter them to please the gods and thank them for the heir.

  A thousand years ago the Mayan towns and cities fell apart. Long periods of drought may have ruined them. The stuff of civilization — cities, law courts, rituals, business, ball games, paintings — vanished. In many places squatters occupied the buildings for a while, but then the jungle slithered in and hid the palaces and temples. Everything was gone except the Mayan folk themselves, who still were farming in the villages. Only recently have archaeologists pushed away the vines and found the ruins, and tourists come to view them. A tourist who beheld the Mayan ruins in Chiapas, Mexico, asked her guide, a local man, “Where did all the people go?” “She was talking to a Maya,” the guide later told another visitor. “We’re still here. We never left.”

 
; When Europeans reached the New World (as they called it) after 1492, the Mayan cities and some other ancient cultures had expired, but others (as we’ll see) had risen in their places. No one knows how many Indians there were. Different experts have guessed the total number, in the two Americas, at anywhere from 40 to 100 million. (Europe’s population then was roughly 80 million.)

  Among the newly civilized Indians were the able, brutal Aztecs (see Aztec Empire in the map on page 148). They had earlier left their homes in northern Mexico, perhaps because they grew too numerous to survive there. They turned into nomads, dressed in shirts and loincloths made of palm leaf fiber and sandals made of plaited straw, and they wandered southward to the Valley of Mexico. Despite its name, the “valley” is a high plateau encircled by volcanos. Until five hundred years ago the land was mostly forests, lakes, and swampy plains.

  The Aztecs couldn’t find a place to live, because several city-states already held the fertile land around the lakes. So they squatted in several places near the lakes until the rightful owners drove them out. Not only did the owners want to keep their land, they also were repelled by the Aztecs’ brutality, about which many tales survive. According to one story, the ruler of the Culhuá people made the big mistake of granting the Aztecs his daughter as a wife for their chief. When the ruler came to the wedding he discovered that the Aztecs had honored him by sacrificing his daughter to their gods. An Aztec priest was wearing her skin. Understandably, the Culhuá drove away the Aztecs.