American Heroes

by Edmund S. Morgan

  IN THE YEAR 1513 a group of men led by Vasco Núñez de Balboa marched across the Isthmus of Panama and discovered the Pacific Ocean. They had been looking for it—they knew it existed—and, familiar as they were with oceans, they had no difficulty in recognizing it when they saw it. On their way, however, they saw a good many things they had not been looking for and were not familiar with. When they returned to Spain to tell what they had seen, it was not a simple matter to find words for everything.

  For example, they had killed a large and ferocious wild animal. They called it a tiger, although there were no tigers in Spain and none of the men had ever seen one before. Listening to their story was Peter Martyr, member of the King’s Council for the Indies and possessor of an insatiable curiosity about the new land that Spain was uncovering in the west. How, the learned man asked them, did they know that the ferocious animal was a tiger? They answered “that they knewe it by the spottes, fiercenesse, agilitie, and such other markes and tokens whereby auncient writers have described the Tyger.” It was a good answer. Men, confronted with things they do not recognize, turn to the writings of those who have had a wider experience. And in 1513 it was still assumed that the ancient writers had had a wider experience than those who came after them.

  Columbus himself had made the assumption. His discoveries posed for him, as for others, a problem of identification. It seemed to be a question not so much of giving names to new lands as of finding the proper old names, and the same was true of the things that the new lands contained. Cruising through the Caribbean, enchanted by the beauty and variety of what he saw, Columbus assumed that the strange plants and trees were strange only because he was insufficiently versed in the writings of men who did know them. “I am the saddest man in the world,” he wrote, “because I do not recognize them.”

  By 1524, when Gonzalo Fernández de Oviedo, a Spanish royal official, sat down to write about the wonders of the new land, explorers were assuming a more skeptical attitude toward the knowledge that could be gained from the ancients. Oviedo had just returned to Spain from several years in Darien, on the isthmus earlier crossed by Balboa. He, too, had encountered the alleged tiger, but he was not so sure that it was in fact a tiger. “I will not obstinately stand in opinyon,” he said, “whether these beastes bee tygers or Panthers, or of the number of any other such beastes of spotted heare.” It was quite possible, he thought, that this was “sum other newe beaste unknowen to the owlde wryters,” for by 1524 it had become clear that “thys greate parte of the worlde was unknowen to the antiquitie.”

  As the century wore on and the caravels of Spain probed the dimensions of the new land, it gradually expanded into a New World, and the challenge to traditional ideas expanded with it. The Jesuit missionary José de Acosta, sailing to Peru in 1570, still thought it proper to prepare himself by reading what the old writers had said of lands in that latitude, and having read he feared the worst. The heat, they said, would be too great for human life, the sun too hot to bear. But arriving in Peru in what was summer there, the month of March, he found the weather so cold that he welcomed the chance to bask in the sun. “What could I else do then,” he asked, “but laugh at Aristotle’s…Philosophie, seeing that in that place and at that season, whenas all should be scorched with heat, accordinge to his rules, I, and all my companions were a colde?”

  America released Father Acosta from Aristotle’s error, and it almost released him from the Bible, too. A better botanist than Columbus, he recognized that many of the plants and animals of the New World were unique, unlike anything known to the ancients from their experience of Europe, Asia, and Africa. And he asked himself how this could be. How did they get to America and not to Europe? It occurred to him that they might have come into existence there. But if this was the case, he realized, it made the whole story of Noah’s ark a little shaky; “neither was it then necessary to save all sorts of birds and beasts, if others were to be created anew. Moreover, wee could not affirme that the creation of the world was made and finished in sixe days, if there were yet other kinds to make, and specially perfit beasts, and no lesse excellent than those that are knowen unto us.”

  Father Acosta, discerning a few of the consequences of his daring thought, drew back from it, as did everyone else. He concluded at length that the universal deluge had been followed by an immediate dispersal from the ark and that some animals went in one direction and some in another. Thus he preserved Noah and the deluge and left the Bible unassailed as a source of historical knowledge.

  We need not deride Father Acosta’s reluctance to give up the world that he knew from books. Only idiots escape entirely from the world that the past bequeaths. The discovery of America opened a new world, full of new things and new possibilities for those with eyes to see them. And Father Acosta saw many of them. But the New World did not erase the Old. Rather, the Old World for several centuries determined what men saw in the New and what they did with it. What America became after 1492 depended both on what men found there and on what they expected to find, both on what America actually was and on what old writers and old experience led men to think it was or ought to be or could be made to be.

  I cannot attempt here to give an account of what America became or was made to become by the men who invaded the continent after 1492, but I hope to tell a small early part of the story, a first chapter that may stand as an emblem or symbol of the whole. I want to describe Europe’s first encounter with America on the island of Española, known also as Hispaniola and as Haiti. I want to suggest how the ideas that Columbus brought with him shaped the lives of the people of Española, which I believe will also suggest how those ideas were to affect the history of the nearby continents of North and South America.

  DURING THE DECADE before 1492, as Columbus nursed a growing urge to sail west to the Indies, he was studying the old writers to find out what the world and its people were like. He read the Ymago Mundi of Pierre d’Ailly, a French cardinal of the early fifteenth century, the travels of Marco Polo and of Sir John Mandeville, Pliny’s Natural History, and the Historia Rerum Ubique Gestarum of Aeneas Sylvius Piccolomini (Pope Pius II). Columbus was not a scholarly man. He could take a ship where no one had dared go before and bring it back again, but he did so by the dead reckoning of the practical sailor, not by the scholarly methods of celestial navigation. He probably learned to read only after he had grown up. And while he had the genius of simplicity, the nerve to act on a thought, he never shone at the things one learned from books. Yet he studied these books, made hundreds of marginal notations in them, and came out with ideas about the world that were characteristically simple and strong and sometimes wrong, the kind of ideas that the self-educated person gains from independent reading and clings to in defiance of what anyone else tries to tell him.

  The strongest one was a wrong one—namely, that the distance between Europe and the eastern shore of Asia was short. According to Cardinal d’Ailly, Columbus noted, Aristotle and Seneca both thought that the ocean separating Spain from China could be traversed in a few days. And his own erroneous calculations of the small size of the earth led him to a similar conclusion. Although he was familiar enough with the waters of the eastern Atlantic to know that the distance could not be quite as short as the cardinal said, he thought it was much less than most of his own contemporaries supposed. He believed that Spain was closer to China westward than eastward.

  Columbus never abandoned this conviction. And before he set out to prove it by sailing west from Spain, he studied his books to find out all he could about the lands that he would be visiting: China, Japan, and India, the lands known to Europe as the Indies. From Marco Polo, the Venetian who had traveled there two centuries earlier, he learned that the Indies were rich in gold, silver, pearls, jewels, and spices. The Great Khan, whose empire stretched from the Arctic to the Indian Ocean, had displayed to Marco Polo a wealth and majesty that dwarfed the splendors of the courts of Europe. The khan’s family of four thousand retainers dined together
in one great hall from golden dishes; his twelve thousand barons were dressed in cloth of gold with belts of gold. When traveling, he slept in tents that could hold two thousand men and that were wrought with gold and lined with ermine and sable.

  Marco Polo also had things to say about the ordinary people of the Far East. Those in the province of Mangi, where they grew ginger, were averse to war and so had fallen an easy prey to the khan. On Nangama, an island off the coast, described as having “great plentie of spices,” the people were far from averse to war: they were anthropophagi—man-eaters—who devoured their captives. There were, in fact, man-eating people in several of the offshore islands, and in many islands both men and women dressed themselves with only a small scrap of cloth over their genitals. On the island of Discorsia, in spite of the fact that they made fine cotton cloth, the people went entirely naked. In one place there were two islands where men and women were segregated, the women on one island, the men on the other.

  Marco Polo occasionally slipped into fables like this last one, but most of what he had to say about the Indies was the result of actual observation. Sir John Mandeville’s travels, on the other hand, were a hoax—there was no such man—and the places he claimed to have visited in the 1300s were fantastically filled with one-eyed men and one-footed men, dog-faced men, men with two faces, and men with no faces. But the author of the hoax did draw on the reports of enough genuine travelers to make some of his stories plausible, and he also drew on a legend as old as human dreams, the legend of a golden age when men were good. He told of an island where the people lived without malice or guile, without covetousness or lechery or gluttony, wishing for none of the riches of this world. They were not Christians, but they lived by the golden rule. A man who had decided to see the Indies for himself could hardly have failed to be stirred by the thought of finding such a people.

  Columbus learned from books what to expect of the Indies. But besides his expectations of gold and silver and spices, of man-eating monsters and guileless men, he also carried with him some ideas of what he would do about these things when he found them. He surely expected to bring back some of the gold that was supposed to be so plentiful. The spice trade was one of the most lucrative in Europe, and he expected to bring back spices. But what did he propose to do about the people in possession of these treasures?

  Since he did not know that the Tartar dynasty of khans had fallen more than a century before, he probably intended to establish trading relations with countries belonging to the Great Khan. But he also intended to take possession himself of at least some of the lands he encountered. When he set out, he carried with him a commission from the king and queen of Spain, empowering him “to discover and acquire certain islands and mainland in the ocean sea” and to be “Admiral and Viceroy and Governor therein.” If the king and Columbus expected to assume dominion over any of the Indies or other lands en route, they must have had some ideas, not only about the Indies but also about themselves, to warrant the expectation. What had they to offer that would make their dominion welcome? Or if they proposed to impose their rule by force, how could they justify such a step, let alone carry it out? The answer is that they had two things: they had Christianity and they had civilization.

  Christianity has meant many things to many men, and its role in the European conquest and occupation of America was varied. But in 1492 to Columbus there was probably nothing very complicated about it. His simplicity of mind would have reduced it to a matter of corrupt human beings, destined for eternal damnation, redeemed by a merciful savior. Christ saved those who believed in him, and it was the duty of Christians to spread his gospel and thus rescue the heathens from the fate that would otherwise await them.

  Although Christianity was in itself a sufficient justification for dominion, Columbus would also carry civilization to the Indies; and this, too, was a gift that he and his contemporaries considered adequate recompense for anything they might take. When people talked about civilization—or civility, as they usually called it—they seldom specified precisely what they meant. Civility was closely associated with Christianity, but the two were not identical. Whereas Christianity was always accompanied by civility, the Greeks and Romans had had civility without Christianity.

  One way to define civility was by its opposite, barbarism. Originally the word “barbarian” had simply meant “foreigner,” to a Greek someone who was not Greek, to a Roman someone who was not Roman. By the fifteenth or sixteenth century, it meant someone not only foreign but with manners and customs of which civil persons disapproved. North Africa became known as Barbary, a sixteenth-century geographer explained, “because the people be barbarous, not onely in language, but in manners and customs.” Parts of the Indies, from Marco Polo’s description, had to be civil, but other parts were obviously barbarous, for example, the lands where people went naked. Whatever civility meant, it meant clothes.

  But there was a little more to it than that, and there still is. Civil people distinguished themselves by the pains they took to order their lives. They organized their society to produce the elaborate food, clothing, buildings, and other equipment characteristic of their manner of living. They had strong governments to protect property, to protect good persons from evil ones, to protect the manners and customs that differentiated civil people from barbarians. It was conceded that barbarians might have governments of a sort but insufficient to curb their depraved habits or to nurture better ones. The superior clothing, housing, food, and protection that attached to civilization made it seem to the European a gift worth giving to the ill-clothed, ill-housed, and ungoverned barbarians of the world.

  The Europeans’ knowledge of barbarians did not all come from books. They had had contact with nearby Barbary itself and also with the much more barbarous Canary Islands, which they had rediscovered in the fourteenth century. By 1492 the Spaniards had subdued every island but Tenerife to Christianity, civilization, and slavery.

  Slavery was an ancient instrument of civilization, and in the fifteenth century it had been revived as a way to deal with barbarians who refused to accept Christianity and the rule of civilized government. Through slavery they could be made to abandon their bad habits, put on clothes, and reward their instructors with a lifetime of work. The Spanish government frowned on the enslavement of submissive natives, and in the Canaries it was mostly the recalcitrant who became slaves. But not all Europeans, or indeed all Spaniards, discriminated between submissive and nonsubmissive barbarians. Throughout the fifteenth century, as the Portuguese explored the coast of Africa, large numbers of well-clothed sea captains brought civilization to naked savages by carrying them off to the slave markets of Seville and Lisbon.

  Since Columbus had lived in Lisbon and sailed in Portuguese vessels to the Gold Coast of Africa, he was not unfamiliar with barbarians. He had seen for himself that the torrid zone could support human life, clothed as well as unclothed, and he had observed how pleased barbarians were with trinkets on which civilized Europeans set small value, such as the little bells that falconers placed on hawks. Before setting off on his voyage, he laid in a store of hawk’s bells. If the barbarous people he expected to find in the Indies should think civilization and Christianity an insufficient reward for submission to Spain, perhaps hawk’s bells would help.

  Columbus sailed from Palos de la Frontera on Friday the third of August, 1492, reached the Canary Islands six days later, and stayed there for a month to finish outfitting his ships. He left on September 6, and five weeks later, in about the place he expected, he found the Indies. What else could it be but the Indies? There on the shore were the naked people. With hawk’s bells and beads he made their acquaintance and found some of them wearing gold nose plugs. It all added up. He had found the Indies. And not only that. He had found a land over which he would have no difficulty in establishing Spanish dominion, for the people showed him an immediate veneration. He had been there only two days, coasting along the shores of the islands, when he was able to hear the
natives crying in loud voices, “Come and see the men who have come from heaven; bring them food and drink.” If Columbus thought he was able to translate the language in two days’ time, it is not surprising that what he heard in it was what he wanted to hear or that what he saw was what he wanted to see—namely, the Indies, filled with people eager to submit to their new admiral and viceroy.

  Columbus made four voyages to America, during which he succeeded in exploring an astonishingly large area of the Caribbean and a part of the northern coast of South America. Everything he saw fitted his conception of the Indies. Cuba, he believed, was a peninsula on the mainland of China, a part of the province of Mangi; he named the easternmost point of it Cape Alpha et Omega and contemplated the awesome fact that the entire landmass of the world stretched continuously westward between him and Cape St. Vincent in Portugal, the western-most extension of Europe.

  From the moment of his first landfall, Columbus was looking for spices and gold. The reason he was so distraught at not recognizing trees and plants was that he thought that some of them must be valuable spices, which he ought to bring back with him in quantity. But gold was unquestionably more important than spices or even than pearls and precious stones, and Columbus had his heart set on finding gold. “Gold,” he rhapsodized, “is most excellent…and he who possesses it may do what he will in the world, and may so attain as to bring souls to paradise.” At every island the first thing he inquired about was gold, taking heart from every trace of it he found. And at Haiti he found enough to convince him that this was Ophir, the country to which Solomon and Jehosophat had sent for gold and silver. Since its lush vegetation reminded him of Castile, he renamed it Española, the Spanish island, which was later latinized as Hispaniola.

  Española appealed to Columbus from his first glimpse of it. From aboard ship it was possible to make out rich fields waving with grass. There were good harbors, lovely sand beaches, and “trees of a thousand kinds, all laden with fruit, which the admiral believed to be spices and nutmegs, but they were not ripe and he did not recognize them.” The people were shy and fled whenever the caravels approached the shore, but Columbus gave orders “that they should take some, treat them well and make them lose their fear, that some gain might be made, since, considering the beauty of the land, it could not be but that there was gain to be got.” And indeed there was. Although the amount of gold worn by the natives was even less than the amount of clothing, it gradually became apparent that there was gold to be had. One man possessed some that had been pounded into gold leaf. Another appeared with a gold belt. Some produced nuggets for the admiral. Española accordingly became the first European colony in America. Although Columbus had formally taken possession of every island he found, the act was mere ritual until he reached Española. Here he began the European occupation of the New World, and here his European ideas and attitudes began their transformation of land and people.