Ideas: A History from Fire to Freud

21

The ‘Indian’ Mind: Ideas in the New World

In many ways, the events of 1492 were as much an end as a beginning. If one accepts the evidence that, some time between 18,000 and 12,000 years ago, early man crossed from Siberia into the Americas, via the Bering Strait, then the epoch between that time and the close of the fifteenth century represents a unique natural experiment, when there were two huge groups of people, on two vast landmasses – what we might call the Old World and the New – entirely separated from one another and developing side-by-side, oblivious to the existence of each other. Such a state of affairs, though it has a great deal of shortcomings as a perfectly designed experiment, ought still to tell us a great deal about what is intrinsic to human nature, and what can be put down to environment. The same goes for ideas: what ideas were shared by the Old World and the New, and what were specific to each? Why was that so?

Equally fundamental is the question: Why was it that the Europeans discovered America rather than the other way around? Why did the Incas, say, not cross the Atlantic from west to east and subdue the Moroccans or Portuguese? This issue has been examined recently by Jared Diamond, a professor of physiology at California Medical School but also an anthropologist who has worked in New Guinea, and who won the Rhône-Poulenc Science Book Prize in 1998 for Guns, Germs and Steel. Examining the evidence, Diamond found that the answer lay in the general layout of the planet, in particular the way the continents are arranged over the surface of the globe. Simply put, the continents of the Americas and Africa have their main axis running north–south, whereas in Eurasia it is east–west. The significance of this is that the diffusion of domesticated animals and plants is much easier from east to west, or west to east, than from north to south, or vice versa, because similar latitudes imply similar geographical and climatic conditions, such as mean temperatures, rainfall or hours of daylight. Diffusion from north to south, or south to north, on the other hand, is correspondingly harder to achieve and this simple geographical fact of life, Diamond says, inhibited the spread of domesticated animals and plants. Thus the distribution of cattle, sheep and goats was much more rapid, and thorough, in Eurasia than it was in either Africa or the Americas. In this way, he argues, the dispersal of farming meant the build-up of greater population densities in Eurasia as opposed to the other continents, and this had two further effects. First, competition between different societies fuelled the evolution of new cultural practices, in particular the development of weapons, which were so important in the conquest of the Americas. The second consequence was the evolution of diseases contracted from (largely domesticated) animals. These diseases could only survive among relatively large populations of humans, and when they were introduced to peoples who had developed no immune systems, such as the Incas or the Aztecs, they devastated them. Thus the global pattern was set, says Diamond. In particular, Africa, which had ‘six million years’ start’ in evolutionary terms compared with other parts of the world, failed to develop because it was isolated by vast oceans on three sides and desert on the north, and had few species of animals or plants that could be domesticated along its north–south axis.¹

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 Lope de 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 when 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 Sahagún in 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.

José de Acosta’s De Procuranda Indorum Salute was written a little later than Las Casas’ treatise, in 1576. His most original contribution, which advanced the understanding of anthropology, was, first, to divide barbarians into three categories, and then to distinguish three kinds of native. At the top, he said, were those who, like the Chinese and Japanese, had stable republics, with laws and law courts, cities and books. Next came those who, like the Mexicans and Peruvians, lacked the art of writing and ‘civil and philosophical knowledge’, but possessed forms of government. Lowest were those who lived ‘without kings, without compacts, without magistrates or republic, and who changed their dwelling-place, or – if they were fixed – had those that resembled the cave of a wild beast.’⁴⁹ Acosta based his work heavily on research, as we would say, which enabled him to distinguish between the Mexica and the Inca, who formed empires and lived in settlements and did not ‘wander about like beasts’, and the Chuncos, the Chiriguanes, the Yscayingos and all the peoples of Brazil who were nomadic and lacked all known forms of civil organisation.⁵⁰ He also thought that the Indians lived in fear of their gods – an important difference, he said, between Christianity and paganism. The fact that Indians had some laws and customs, but that they were deficient or conflicted with Christian practices, showed he said that Satan had beaten Columbus to it in the discovery of the New World.⁵¹

Again, these arguments are more important than they look at first sight. The old theories, that geography and climate were primarily responsible for cultural diversity, were being replaced. A new issue was migration. ‘If the inhabitants of America were indeed descendants of Noah, as orthodox thought insisted that they must be, it was clear that they must have forgotten the social virtues in the course of their wanderings. Acosta, who held that they came to the New World overland from Asia, believed that they had turned into hunters during their migration. Then, by degrees, some of them collected together in certain regions of America, recovered the habit of social life, and began to constitute polities.’⁵² The importance (and the modernity) of this argument lay in its hypothesis or assumption that there was a sequence of development from barbarism to civility. This further implied that the ancestors of modern Europeans had once been like the fifteenth-and sixteenth-century inhabitants of America. The natives of Florida, according to Las Casas, were still ‘in that first rude state which all other nations were in before there was anyone to teach them . . . We ought to consider what we, and all the other nations of the world were like, before Jesus Christ came to visit us.’⁵³ By the same token, the existence of primitives in the New World appeared to support the Judaeo-Christian idea of time, that it was linear rather than cyclical.⁵⁴

A final element in the discovery of America was the notion that the moderns had achieved something that had not been achieved by antiquity. The idea of a distant golden age was thus undermined, at the same time that the discoveries demonstrated incontrovertibly the value of first-hand experience over inherited tradition. ‘The age which they call golden,’ wrote Jean Bodin, the sixteenth-century French philosopher, ‘if it be compared with ours, would seem but iron . . .’⁵⁵

So much for the European perspective, and the immediate effects of the discovery of America (some longer-term effects are discussed later, in Chapter 28). But, in the realm of ideas, what exactly did the Europeans discover? It took many years – centuries – to answer that question but, in 1986, the D’Arcy McNickle Center for the History of the American Indian, which had been created in 1972 to improve the quality of research and teaching in Indian history, commissioned an inquiry into just this subject, America in 1492, to mark the 500th anniversary of the discovery of the New World in 1992. Much of what follows is based on the findings of that project.⁵⁶

In 1492, there were around 75 million Indians living in the Americas. Figures for what is now the continental United States vary. The D’Arcy McNickle figure is 6 million but Douglas Ubelaker, of the Smithsonian Institution, in the Handbook of North American Indians, says the most accurate estimate is 1,890,000 at an average density of eleven people per 100 square kilometres.⁵⁷ Whichever figure it was, the spread of the Indians was not what it became. The Plains Indians, for example, had as yet no horses – because these were introduced by Europeans. ‘Far from being the stereotype of war-bonneted warriors, they were essentially farmers who planted gardens along the Plains rivers and hunted game on foot.’⁵⁸

Many of the customs of the Indians were very much at variance with what Europeans were used to. The subarctic people, the people we call Eskimos or Inuits, invariably shared meat among other members of the tribe because they believed that animals would be more co-operative with hunters who were themselves generous.⁵⁹ On the Pacific coast the tribes were distinguished by huge totem poles. They used more than a hundred herbs and plants and were familiar with their nutritional and medicinal properties.⁶⁰ They had special lodges, or houses, used for ceremonial purification and for curing illness.⁶¹ Many tribes had gruesome initiation ceremonies, rites of passage by means of which adolescents became adults. Tobacco was widely used for ceremonial purposes – a practice that had devastating consequences for mankind. Then there was the practice of creating kivas – huge underground halls used for ritual and as club-rooms for men. Sometimes the kivas had their walls adorned with ritual paintings, though it was common practice for them to be painted over once the ceremony was finished. Art in America had a different meaning than in Renaissance Europe.

There were, however, many parallels with practices in the Old World. The Indians had evolved the concept of the ‘soul’, though members of some tribes had multiple souls. Likewise, they had evolved marriage and agriculture (strip-farming run by families, slash-and-burn, floodplain farming, terraced fields in the mountainous regions). As in other areas of the world, the women gathered the local plants while the men hunted. Death was surrounded by elaborate ritual and many tribes had discovered how to mummify bodies. In certain places, widows were killed alongside their husbands, recalling a similar practice, suttee, in India. Cooking was advanced (‘barbecue’ is a Taino word), and fasting developed – as in the Old World – in connection with religious observance. A variety of beer existed, brewed from manioc. Obsidian was used and revered as much as in the Old World. There was a form of counting (but see here), taxation and some tribes even had a class of people ‘who could only be described as civil servants’.⁶²

The most obvious difference, in terms of everyday life, was the widespread practice in the Americas of living in ‘longhouses’. Among the Iroquois these houses might be as much as 300 feet long, and were occupied by several families all at the same time, each of whom belonged to the same clan. Men married into these longhouses, which, if all the existing quarters were taken, were simply made even longer. ‘As many as thirty nuclear families, or between one and two hundred people, related by blood and marriage, occupied each dwelling. Traditionally, the centre aisles of the longhouse split the buildings lengthwise. Paired family quarters faced each other, like compartments in a sleeping car, with a shared cooking hearth in the central aisle.’⁶³ Only two wall posts separated each family, which had its own fire that was always smouldering. ‘Family hammocks (a New World word) were hung in a way that also served as a symbolic division of space.’⁶⁴

The Tupinamba, in Brazil, were cannibals. They, together with the Caribs and Cubeos, believed in consubstantiation, and eating human flesh was part of the ritual, important to maintain the survival of the race and ensure the goodwill of ancestral spirits.⁶⁵ No less barbaric, so far as the early explorers were concerned, was the practice of headhunting, carried out by the Mundurucú, who inhabited the dense forests of the Amazon basin. These Mundurucú were feared for their aggressiveness and enforced their will by the gruesome practice of severing the heads of their enemies. However, any warrior who performed this act took on a heavy burden, for it sparked its own ritual that could last up to three years. ‘When a head was taken its preparation was begun immediately. Long before the men’s return to the village, the brains were removed and the teeth knocked out and retained. The head was then parboiled and dried, making the skin like parchment. A cord was strung through the mouth and out of one of the nostrils. The gaping eyes were closed with beeswax. The successful headhunter was considered an awesome hero with sacred status. He had to abstain from everyday activities, including sexual relations with his wife or any other woman. He took a ritual bath in the morning so as to avoid the sight of a woman. Spending most of his days in a hammock in the men’s house, he talked sparingly and only on serious subjects. When he did eat he sat next to his wife but back to back . . . On the anniversary of the “catch” the skin was stripped from the skull, in another elaborate ceremony, and a year later the teeth were strung together and hung in a basket in the hero’s house in a final celebration. After three years of this, the hero resumed his normal station in life.’⁶⁶ In the early years, the amassing of new facts was haphazard. As time passed, however, and scholars followed the merchant-explorers, a more systematic picture began to emerge. We may start with the position in regard to languages. ‘In 1492 as many as two thousand mutually unintelligible languages were spoken in the Western hemisphere. Of these approximately 250 were spoken in north America, some 350 in Mexico and central America, and no fewer than 1,450 in south America.’⁶⁷ Native American languages were no less sophisticated than Old World tongues; they lacked some features but others were more common than in Eurasia. ‘Rare among Indian languages, for instance, was the employment of suffixes on nouns to express such cases as nominative, accusative and dative (as occurs in Latin, for example), or of nominal and pronominal gender references (like the English “he” and “she” or the Spanish “el” and “la”).’⁶⁸ At the same time, many Indian languages distinguish between nouns representing animate and inanimate entities and between objects possessed by definition (such as kin relations and body parts) and those incidentally owned (knives or tools, say). Inevitably, perhaps, there was a good number of sounds unknown in the Old World – in particular, glottal stops (an interruption of breath produced by a sudden closing of the vocal cords, as in the pause between ‘uh’ and ‘oh’ in the English phrase ‘uh-oh’).⁶⁹ Some words lacked vowels and there was too the unfamiliar practice of repeating or doubling a word, or part of a word, so as to alter its meaning. The Washo Indians of North America’s Great Basin, for example, used gusu to mean ‘buffalo’, whereas gususu meant ‘buffalo here and there’.⁷⁰ In other cases, verbs varied according to the validity of the information – for example, whether the information being communicated was personally known to the speaker, was mere gossip, or had occurred in a dream.⁷¹

Other differences seem more fundamental. In Europe, for instance, the main division of language was into nouns and verbs. In contrast, the Hopi of Arizona treated entities of short duration – lightning, say, or a wave or flame – as verbs, while entities that endured longer were nouns.⁷² In Navajo, the English sentence ‘He picks something up’ can be translated in twelve different ways, ‘according to whether the object is round and solid, long and slender, animate, mud-like etc’.⁷³ Metaphor was not so different from European usage (poetry was described as ‘flower songs’, a woman was ‘a skirt’) but the absence of speech was replete with meaning. For example, Apaches observed silence when meeting strangers, during the initial stages of courtship, or with relatives after a long period of separation.⁷⁴ Some tribes had trade languages, never spoken at home but only when merchants engaged in exchange with strangers.

Except in a few celebrated cases, the Indians lacked writing. This meant they had no written histories, philosophies or scriptures to fall back on.⁷⁵ But that did not stop them having religions, a concept of the soul and a number of origin myths, which often involved the sun, the moon and subterranean worlds, which had different layers. Childhood was acknowledged, since puberty and menstruation were marked with rites of passage. Interestingly, in some tribes the puberty rite seemed intended to shake adolescents out of their childish environment. In the case of the Hopi, for example, children were never allowed to see certain religious figures without their elaborate masks, and were encouraged to think of them as spirits. At the ceremony of puberty, however, they were shown the figures behind the masks, as if to warn the newly emergent adult to put away childish beliefs.⁷⁶

The New World religions often had a priestly caste and sometimes ‘Virgins of the Sun’, selected when they were just ten, were chosen for roles ‘that ranged from temple service to sacrificial victims’.⁷⁷ Sacrifice was widespread and could be very bloodthirsty: Pawnee virgins took part in a four-day ceremony before being shot through the heart.⁷⁸ But probably the most fundamental difference in a religious sense was the widespread use of hallucinogens. Here the tribes were led by shamans who had a medico-religious function, as in the Old World. Tribes had chiefs (though some only in times of war), who might serve also as shaman. Certain tribes recognised six types of gender: hyper-men (warriors), men, berdaches (androgynous), amazons, women, and hyper-women (who excelled at, say, female crafts). Berdaches and amazons were sometimes used as mediators in disputes.⁷⁹ The heart, not the brain or face, was considered the essence of a person, and shamans would sing ‘heart songs’ to sick people to cure them.⁸⁰ Many tribes conversed with animals and plants and assumed they were understood.

Native Americans had a very different understanding of the ‘self’ or ‘person’.⁸¹ Basically, they emphasised selflessness because people took their identity from various subgroups in society and had no separate status. People who behaved in a selfish way turned into witches, who were as likely to be men as women.

Babies were born with contributions from father, mother, and spirits. The father contributed hard substances, like bone, and the mother soft ones like flesh and blood. In the Pacific Northwest it was believed that unborn infants inhabited a special place, where they lived like other humans until they sought out parents here on earth. In general, they were not given names until the trauma of birth was over and it was safe to assume the child would live.⁸² Girls were given flower names, whereas boys were named after carnivores. But extra names were added in celebration, to mark a child’s first laugh, or whistle, its first word, or even its first haircut.⁸³ The biggest celebration was reserved for the first occasion when a child fulfilled an economic function, such as collecting berries. On occasion the coming of age of a daughter was marked by the removal of her clitoris. This, it was believed, removed any male aspects of her character.⁸⁴ Men, it was said, did not become fully ‘adult’ until they had grandchildren, a fairly transparent device to keep families together.⁸⁵

Arguably the most important difference between the two hemispheres lay in ideas concerning economics. In the case of the Aztecs and the Incas, the two most prominent civilisations at the time of the conquest, the death of any ruler placed a great strain on the society. The bodies of the emperor and his queen were mummified and deposited in richly ornamented, specially built palaces. Vast numbers of slaves and concubines were sacrificed to be on hand for the emperor in the hereafter. But that wasn’t all. Great estates were appointed to guard the palaces of the dead and to serve the mummies for ever after. This all meant that, at the end of every reign, a huge new drain on the empire’s resources was added to those already existing.⁸⁶ In other words, every new dead king made a wasteful situation worse.⁸⁷ The end result was that labour lost to ‘mummy service’ could only be made up for by the conquest of more people, more land, which was not without risk. One major effect of all this was that the capital necessary to advance individual enterprise never evolved.⁸⁸

There was such a thing as science in the New World, and a primitive technology, but native Americans had few theories about phenomena as the Old World Europeans did. Both peoples thought that the sun went round the world, and was linked with the growing season. The Indians had the same kind of simple machines that Europeans used, similar to the five simple machines of classical Greek mechanics: the wedge, the inclined plane, the lever, the pulley, and the screw. (The advantage of a machine is that it augments the force used on it.) Each of these devices were known to the native Americans, who used them in activities from tree-felling to canoe-building. Yet whereas Europeans by the fifteenth century were searching for ultimate causes, whose outcomes could always be predicted, native Americans preferred to control the forces of nature by means of intimate relationships with the spirits that controlled these forces – achieved through ritual or dreams.⁸⁹ ‘To Europeans the natural world was ruled by laws; to native people, it exercised will . . . The major point at which European and native science diverged was in the matter of experimentation. It would not have occurred to the Hopis to cease their ceremonies to see if the sun would indeed continue north rather than turning in its path.’⁹⁰

Several peoples, such as the Navajo, characterised plants as male and female, depending on size and hardness or softness. This notion was based on analogy with men and women, rather than on the actual sexual organs of the plants themselves. Plant names among the Aztecs, for instance, contained a suffix that indicated whether they were food, medicine, or could be used for clothing or building.⁹¹ In fact, classification of the natural world was often made on a basis very different from European ideas. The Navajos put insects and bats into the same category because of an ancient myth in which these two types of animal had lived together in a previous world.⁹²

For Europeans the stars in the night sky were the basis for astrology but in America the horizon was more important.⁹³ This was a widespread idea and throughout the continent tribes built their temples to align with features on the horizon that coincided with notable celestial events. ‘Casa Rinconada, a large circular kiva in the Chaco Canyon region of northwestern Mexico, has twenty-eight niches spaced equally around the interior of its stone wall. It also has six somewhat larger and irregularly spaced niches below those. At the time of the summer solstice, for four or five times around that date, light from a window placed high on the northeastern side of the kiva shines on one of the six niches.’⁹⁴ But the stars were used by Indians to devise their calendar, in the course of which they conceived their own system of counting. Originally this was a Mayan idea but it was improved upon by the Aztecs.⁹⁵ Calendrical calculations were the main – in fact, the only – use of mathematics among the Mayans, though in the Inca empire mathematical knowledge seems to have been recorded in the quipu.⁹⁶ This was an information storage system contained on a series of strings knotted together. The strings, some of which had dependent strands, were of different colours and these colours and knots were arranged in sequences. The ‘language’ or code of the quipu has never been deciphered but support for the notion that they were some sort of religious record comes from two pieces of woven fabric that have survived. The weaving on both is very intricate: one has ten rows of thirty-six circles and the diagonal arrangement of circles into groups adds up to 365. In the other piece the rectangles add up to twenty-eight. These pieces surely have some sort of calendrical significance.⁹⁷

Some scholars now believe that the sophistication of textiles in Mesoamerica ‘may represent as complex a system of knowledge as metallurgy in Europe’. After battle, cloth was often demanded as tribute, and cotton slings were used in war.⁹⁸ Llamas and alpacas were each domesticated and served both as beasts of burden and as sources of wool. Fabric may even have been more important than ceramics as storage receptacles. ‘The finest garments were made from thread with a diameter of 1/125 of an inch, and some 125 separate shades and tints have been identified in Incan textiles. All of the major weaving techniques known in Europe in 1492 were known to the Incas – tapestry, brocade, gauze, and they also had an additional method, known as interlocking warp.’⁹⁹

Although the New World had not domesticated many animals by 1492, a vast number of plants had been brought under control – including many unknown to Europeans at the time but which have since become familiar: maize, white and sweet potato, cacao, pumpkins, peanuts, avocado, tomato, pineapple, tobacco and chilli peppers. In the Andes there were already 3,000 different varieties of potato.¹⁰⁰ The New World civilisations were well aware of the medicinal use of plants. For example, Aspilia was known to act like an antibiotic, and stoneseed, used by women of the Paiute tribe as a contraceptive, has since been found to inhibit gonadotrophins in mice. The tlepatli, understood in Aztec medicine to be a diuretic and as useful in gangrene treatment, has been found to contain plumbagin, an antibacterial agent, effective against staphylococcus.¹⁰¹ However, native Americans did not have the concept of chemistry, as such. For them, the medicinal power of plants was a spiritual matter.

There was no ‘art’ in the New World, not in the ‘art for art’s sake’ sense, and none of the indigenous languages had a word for art (or religion, come to that).¹⁰² This was because every carved object, say, every song or dance, had an intensely practical purpose and couldn’t be conceived without that purpose. Aztec sculptures were sometimes inscribed on the side that was never seen but that didn’t matter because they had a symbolic meaning which was more important than their appearance. There was, in other words, no aesthetics as such, only function, which gave something its meaning.¹⁰³ For this reason, there was hardly any instrumental music anywhere on the continent, because, in the normal course of events, song, dance and music went together in ritual. It was only in the more developed civilisations of Mesoamerica that professionalisation of the arts occurred. And it was only here that there was a division, as there was in Europe, into the high arts and the folk arts.¹⁰⁴ As a result, it was only in these civilisations that artists enjoyed high prestige – everywhere else all people were believed to have artistic powers to some degree. In the Inca empire certain specialisations, such as silversmiths and tapestry-weavers, were hereditary servants of the government and as such exempt from taxes.¹⁰⁵ To make matters even more complicated, astrology – or magic – came into play. The Aztecs, for example, believed that people born under the sign of xochitl, ‘flower’, were fated to become artisans or entertainers.¹⁰⁶ The function of the artist also overlapped with creation myths. One interesting way these myths differed in the New World is that, instead of imagining that God had created a perfect world, which it was the task of scholars, theologians and artists to understand, the New World natives believed it had been created imperfectly and that it was the job of the artist to improve the world.¹⁰⁷ The Incas believed that the first men had been giants, fashioned from stone. But the Great Lord, Wiracoqa, was unhappy with his work and turned them back to stone – these were the giant statues the Incas worshipped. Then Wiracoqa created a second race of man, the same size as himself (‘in his own image’).¹⁰⁸ Mayan sculptors were not allowed to have sex while carving their works, but they did sprinkle their own blood on their carvings because this was believed to make them holy: as with Renaissance man, these artists were divine. Musical instruments were also divine for the Mayans and the carvers would pray while fashioning them and rub them with alcohol so they would be ‘content, well-tuned and produce fine sound’.¹⁰⁹ Artists did not sign their works, even in those civilisations where they were professional artists, and artists never became famous as in Europe. The only exception was poetry, where poets who belonged to the nobility might be remembered long after their death. Nezahualcoyotl was remembered as ‘the poet king’ but even here it was his status as a king that caused him to achieve fame, as much as his prowess as a poet.¹¹⁰

Such writing systems as existed in the New World were in decline by 1492, and it is unlikely that many of the inscriptions of the classical period (AD 100–900) could still be understood.¹¹¹ Aztec and Mixtec writing was largely pictographic and scribes, in addition to being adept at carving the characters, also had to memorise the oral commentaries that accompanied the texts (oral delivery remained always the dominant form). Such codices as we possess concern the mythic past of the tribe and would have formed the central element in ritual where scribes added their commentaries. Those, of course, have been lost. The Aztecs were also among a few pre-Columbian peoples who consciously collected foreign and ancient art – in particular Olmec objects. This appears to confirm that the Aztecs at least had an interest in the past and perhaps some idea that the Olmec civilisation was the ‘mother culture’ of Mesoamerica.¹¹²

What did the Indians themselves make of the invasion? Some of the Indian nations had sacred books. The best-known of these was the Popul Vuh, a Quiché text that has been described as the equivalent of the Old Testament or the Sanskrit Vedas. Equally interesting, if less known and more apposite to our purpose, is the Annals of the Cakchiquels. This latter nation, like the Quichés, had a system of dual monarchy, a king and vice-king drawn from two royal lineages and known as Ahpo Zotzil and Ahpo Xahil. After the Spanish conquest, survivors of the Xahil family wrote down Cakchiquel history and then added to it, in a form of journal, into the seventeenth century. This account is surprisingly balanced. It describes a holocaust but also praises Spaniards who tried to help the Indians. Among the events described are an outbreak of plague in 1604, when the writer dies and another picks up his pen, an exchange of ambassadors, and genealogies. Similar documents were created by the Mayans, the Books of Chilam Balam, written in the Mayan language but using Spanish letters. These books were deliberately obscure, full of puns and riddles, so that outsiders could not understand them. They were also added to until the nineteenth century: every Mayan town had its own copy and they were expanded locally. The Books of Chilam Balam viewed the invasion as a battle of calendars, or chronologies. The Spanish had brought with them their own brand of time – rather crude to the Mayan way of thinking – and tried to impose it on the indigenous people. So for the Mayans this was the chief battle of ideas, the way the rival religious systems were conceived – as a contest over time.¹¹³

We should briefly consider what the pre-Columbians lacked. The main absence, undoubtedly, was the wheel. This was also the most surprising, in view of the fact that ball games were played everywhere in the Americas and had religious significance. Draft animals were also conspicuous by their absence, as was mentioned at the beginning of this chapter, though the llama was domesticated. Also absent were large sailing vessels, and this may have had something to do with the vast oceans that surrounded the Americas. But it did mean that, alongside the lack of the wheel, native Americans remained more localised, and were much less travelled, than Europeans. Other ideas or inventions missing from pre-Columbian societies were coined money, ethical monotheism, the idea of the experiment and, in general, writing. There were no kilns – and therefore no glazed pottery, and no stringed instruments. Several of these missing elements – draft animals, large sailing vessels, writing, coined money – would all have limited economic development, in particular trade and the accumulation of surpluses. We have already seen that what surpluses were produced were as often as not dissipated in elaborate rituals for the dead and this difference in economic development, together with the lack of ethical monotheism and the absence of experimentation, are perhaps the three most important ways in which the Old World and the New differed.

In the realm of ideas, the discovery of America may have had an effect on the Catholic Counter-Reformation going on at much the same time, in that it robbed the Catholics of some of their most energetic and talented evangelists. By the same token, the Roman church had little say in what went on in America (which was largely ignored in the Council of Trent) and, as John Elliott says, one effect of this was to enhance the authority of the Spanish Crown, ‘both among its own subjects and in its relations with the church’. More than one historian, from contemporary writers to those of our own day, have speculated on whether the ‘enterprise of the Indies’ siphoned off the more radical population, increasing authoritarianism and conservatism among those who remained.

The discoveries in America certainly had an economic impact, which in turn produced a revolution in ideas. Between 1521 and 1544, for example, the mines in the Habsburg territories produced four times as much silver as the whole of America. But between 1545 and the late 1550s these figures were reversed, and resulted in a decisive shift in economic power in those years, with the centre of economic gravity moving away from Germany and the Netherlands to the Iberian peninsula.¹¹⁴ John Elliott says that, in the last half of the sixteenth century, ‘it is . . . legitimate to speak of an Atlantic economy’.¹¹⁵ The political impact meant that Spain was on the rise, but so was Europe overall as against her traditional enemy – Islam. (It was only now that the Muslim world began to show any curiosity about the historical reasons for the rise of Spanish power.¹¹⁶)

The rise of Spain, and the reasons for it, naturally attracted attention elsewhere, and it is true to say that from this moment dates the realisation that sea power would be of the greatest importance in the politics of the future, that Spain’s power could be checked by interrupting the gold and silver on its way to Europe and that, in a world divided by religion – Protestant and Catholic – the New World was the next battleground. In a sense, global politics began then.¹¹⁷

The developing battle for America exacerbated the growing nationalism of the sixteenth century and ‘Black Legends’ grew up, in regard to the Spanish in particular and their alleged atrocities (on one estimate they had massacred 20 million Indians).¹¹⁸ But in any case, more and more Spaniards came to doubt the value of the Indies, and there emerged in Spain what has been called an ‘anti-bullionist sentiment’, which was suspicious of the moral consequences of sudden riches. The rival view was that true riches lay in trade, agriculture and industry, where wealth was truly earned and productively used.¹¹⁹

But the scramble for America did lead in time to the rudiments of international law. The continent itself was just too large for one country to control all of it, and the Spanish rejection of papal authority in the opening-up of the New World had a knock-on effect on attitudes to authority in general. Many people, as we have seen, thought that the Indians were entirely capable of governing themselves and that their freedom and autonomy should be respected. In the middle of the sixteenth century, Alfonso de Castro argued that the oceans could not be the preserve of any one nation, and with this as background Hugo Grotius, a Dutch jurist and statesman, developed his theoretical structure for the conduct of international relations. The New World thus became part of Europe’s emerging structure of states and the agreements between them. It is fair to say that the conquest of America hastened and perhaps crystallised the awareness of the links between resources, geography, population and trade patterns as a guide to international power.

Earl J. Hamilton, in a famous essay, ‘American treasure and the rise of capitalism’, examined various factors that might have accounted for the phenomenon – the rise of nation states, war, the rise of Protestantism – and concluded that the discovery of America, and in particular of American silver, was the prime driving force behind European capital formation. ‘No other period in history has witnessed so great a proportional increase in the production of the precious metals as occurred in the wake of the Mexican and Peruvian conquests.’¹²⁰ This is, in effect, a final element in the rise of Europe, consolidating earlier changes discussed in Chapter 15. The argument was built on and expanded by the Texan historian Walter Prescott Webb, who argued in The Great Frontier (1953) that the discovery of America ‘decisively altered the ratio between the three factors of population, land and capital in such a way as to create boom conditions’.¹²¹ In 1500 the population density of Europe was, he said, roughly speaking twenty-seven people per square mile. The discovery of America opened up an additional twenty million square miles which wasn’t finally filled until around 1900. Webb concluded therefore that the years 1500–1900 were unique in history, ‘the period in which the Great Frontier of America shapes and transforms Western civilisation’. As Europe moved once more to cities, the opening up of the frontier provided an opposing dynamic.¹²²

In the Middle Ages a measure of stability had been achieved between the coinages of Christendom and the Islamic world, one producing silver, the other gold. But the discovery of America upset this balance: between 1500 and 1650 approximately 180 tons of gold were sent to Europe and 16,000 tons of silver. This produced a revolution in prices, which began in Spain and then spread, encouraging capital formation for those who were part of the new enterprise but pushing up prices fivefold in the sixteenth century, sparking inflation, social unrest and social change. Here too there were grounds for worry about the ‘morally harmful effects of wealth’.¹²³ Garcilaso de la Vega was just one who was not convinced by the influx of precious metals. At the beginning of the seventeenth century, he wrote that ‘this flood of riches has done more harm than good, since wealth commonly produced vice rather than virtue, inclining its possessors to pride, ambition, gluttony and voluptuousness . . . [My] conclusion is that the riches of the New World, properly understood, have not increased the volume of useful things necessary for human life, such as food and clothing, but have made them scarcer and rendered men effeminate in their power of understanding and in their bodies, dress, and customs, and that they lived more happily and were more feared by the rest of the world with what they had formerly.’¹²⁴ Earl Hamilton flatly disagreed, arguing that capitalism was consolidated by the lag between the rise in prices and the rise in wages. This is not a debate that is anywhere near settled – the issue is complex and there are holes in most of the theories, but there can be little doubt that the opening-up of America contained great opportunities for vast fortunes to be made and that social inequalities in wealth sharpened markedly in Europe at this time.

A final factor was population. The catastrophic decline in the Indian population, partly because of Spanish cruelty, partly because of imported disease, affected the labour supply, while some 200,000 Spaniards may have emigrated to America during the sixteenth century. It seems likely that they were above average in intelligence, ability and energy, so that they may well have produced a deleterious effect on the genetic quality of the population left in Spain (but then again monies would have been remitted home by a good proportion of these emigrants).

The impact of the discovery of America on Europe, and the rest of the world, has still not been fully assessed and perhaps it never can be, because it was so profound, far-reaching and, as Montaigne put it, ‘topsyturvying’. But it would not be long before the sensible words of Garcilaso took over: ‘There is only one world,’ he wrote, ‘and although we speak of the Old World and the New, this is because the latter was lately discovered by us, and not because there are two.’¹²⁵