Empires Apart
Page 4
Whatever the truth about Vespucci the name America stuck, and Spanish adventurers followed rapidly in the wake of Columbus and his comrades. With just a few men the early conquistadors destroyed the vast empires of the Incas and Aztecs with amazing speed, slaughtering thousands in their pursuit of gold. As their name implies these conquistadors set out to conquer. Their ideology was no secret: to them the New World offered people to subjugate, gold to loot and land to steal. In 1533, the year Ivan the Terrible came to the throne, Pizarro completed the conquest of the Inca empire. By the time the first Romanov ascended the Russian throne eighty years later permanent Spanish, French and English settlements on the North American mainland were established in Florida, Quebec and Virginia.
The passage west did not, as Columbus had promised, provide a back door through which to strike at Islam, but the Spanish took equal exception to the religious customs of their native opponents. The Inca priests had a particularly nasty way of dealing with those who displeased them. The unfortunates were taken, possibly after being drugged, to altars high above the congregation. There the high priests slashed their chests and pulled out the still beating hearts to appease the Inca gods. The Spanish were shocked by such barbarism. Spanish priests preferred to torture those who displeased them, then tie them to a stake, surround it with logs and set the unfortunates ablaze. This, they believed, would appease the Spanish god. To their victims there was probably little to choose between the two forms of execution, but to history one is human sacrifice, the most unforgivable of abominations, while the other is the Spanish Inquisition, an unfortunate example of religious fundamentalism.
Not only do historical facts look different when viewed through different prisms, but new ‘facts’ can suddenly appear. As with tracing the origins of Russia to southern France, the discovery of America has been subject to countless bizarre theories. Irish monks almost certainly reached Iceland before the Vikings, but the story of St Brendan sailing his leather boat right across the Atlantic is pure fiction, as is another fable used later to support British claims to North America: the tale of Prince Madoc.
At Fort Morgan on Mobile Bay, Alabama, there is a plaque erected by the Virginia Cavalier Chapter of the Daughters of the American Revolution. It commemorates the landing on the shores of Mobile Bay in 1170 of Madoc ab Owain Gwynedd, a Welsh prince driven from his homeland by the advancing Normans. The story goes that Madoc and his people first travelled inland and built a fort at Lookout Mountain, near DeSoto Falls, Alabama, which, it is claimed, has proved to be virtually identical to Madoc’s original home at Dolwyddelan castle in Gwynedd. Over succeeding centuries Madoc’s descendants multiplied but were pushed north by various native tribes. Later European explorers reported numerous stories of bearded white Indians speaking a Welsh-like language, and some claimed to have found them. As late as 1841 George Catlin published a learned treatise, Letters and Notes on the Manners, Customs and Condition of the North American Indians, which devoted sixteen of its fifty-eight chapters to the Mandans of the Missouri river, whose physical characteristics and language, Catlin claimed, proved them to be the lost tribe of Madoc. Unfortunately, shortly after Catlin left them smallpox arrived, and the Mandans became extinct.
The story of the Welsh prince is almost certainly a sixteenth-century invention designed to bolster the territorial claims of the Welsh Tudors who wore the English crown. Such fables about who discovered America are matched by similarly improbable stories about what they found when they got there.
Before Columbus
When the Europeans arrived there were throughout the Americas a huge variety of peoples and customs. The first Americans crossed over from Siberia and moved south to populate the whole landmass. The question of when this happened has been the subject of much debate. To a layman the question seems fairly academic, but the way answers to this question have changed says much about the ideology of history. Today the debate is grounded in hard scientific fact, but for most of America’s history the debate was conducted in a very different way. Rather as Russian historians were determined to prove that their nation’s greatness owed nothing to non-Slavs like Rurik, American historians and scientists were determined to prove that nothing of any value predated the arrival of the white man.
Nowadays there are broadly two strands of thought. One is based on differing interpretations of scientific evidence. The other is the large body of American thought usually labelled ‘creationism’, in some manifestations of which God is thought to have woken up one day in the relatively recent past and populated the Americas with natives ready for the white man to come and civilise. Little more than a century ago a third strand was the most widely accepted in educated circles. It called itself scientific, and the science it espoused was the opposite of creationism: evolutionism.
The guiding principle of the evolutionists was ‘survival of the fittest’, and it became an article of faith with American scientists and historians that given the ‘primitive’ nature of the natives that greeted the arrival of the first European settlers they must have been less evolved than the white man. It was argued, therefore, that they could have been there only a few thousand years; this explained why they had developed neither the moral values necessary for a civilised life nor the scientific understanding necessary to properly exploit the resources of nature. Well into the twentieth century the curator of physical anthropology at the Smithsonian Museum was insisting that the antiquity of the ‘Indian … cannot be very great’.
Then in 1927 a team of archaeologists in New Mexico found a stone spear point embedded in the ribs of an ice age bison. Since then more finds along with improved radiocarbon dating and DNA analysis show that the first nomads trekked down from the Bering Strait at least 23,000 years ago and perhaps as much as 40,000 years ago. It hardly matters exactly when the trek started, the important point is that it was a long time ago; and indeed there may have been various waves of immigrants. Not surprisingly, then, the newcomers had evolved in radically different ways as they moved south. Rather than facing tribes of more or less similar ‘Indians’, the Europeans were arriving in a land populated by people as different from each other as Romans and Russians. There were at least 375 native languages being spoken in North America when the Europeans arrived. Differences of language, culture, political sophistication, technology and religion were massive. Combined with the enormous distances that separated the various groups, there was one thing of which the European invaders could be certain: there was absolutely no chance of the ‘natives’ uniting.
The main civilisations in the Americas were in central and South America, but early explorers found massive earthworks covering hundreds of square miles in Ohio; 12 foot high walls enclosed perfect circles, squares and octagons, many of them fifty times the size of a football pitch. They have now largely been destroyed by the advances of ‘civilisation’, but archaeologists have still managed to find below the earthen structures thousands of amazingly beautiful artefacts: copper head-dresses in the shape of deer antlers, human hands crafted in mica, shells from the Gulf of Mexico and obsidian from the Rocky mountains. They also found evidence that the Hopewell people who lived there had taught themselves to grow crops from seed, something that early Europeans copied from the Middle East. Or had the Hopewell also learnt from the Middle East?
Again, early American scientists were unwilling to believe that the savages their forefathers wiped out could have produced such enormous monuments. Numerous theories were propounded to explain their origins; perhaps visiting Phoenicians or even the lost tribe of Israel. Eventually the Smithsonian assembled a team of experts and, after ten years of study, concluded that all the fanciful theories were false. The Hopewell Mounds had been constructed by the ancestors of the ‘Indians’ whom the early settlers had encountered when they arrived. While east and west were battling each other at Châlons, the Hopewell people were knapping flint blades, working copper from the shores of Lake Superior and crafting jewellery from bears’ teeth.
In the middle of the eleventh century, as Kievan Rus was reaching its peak, Cahokia itself flourished on the eastern side of the Mississippi. Experts believe the city was a little smaller than the London that William the Conqueror was about to take, or twice its size, or somewhere in between. Its suburbs stretched across the river into what is St Louis today. Cahokia was the capital of a people known as the Mississippian culture. Their buildings were constructed of wood and earth, so, unlike the stone Mayan cities of the same period, little now remains of their complicated architecture and great plazas other than hundreds of mounds dotting the flood plains of the Mississippi. One pyramid-shaped ruin, now known as Monks Mound, covers 15 acres and stretches 100 feet high in stepped terraces: the largest pre-Columbian construction north of Mexico. Nearby is a grand 40-acre plaza and artificial lakes, the largest covering 17 acres. This was not the work of a few primitive nomads living in wigwams.
It is ironic that Americans in their hundreds of thousands visit the pre-Columbian remains of Mexico, but in their own country such remains are obliterated by freeways and shopping malls.
The more intriguing issue, however, is what happened to the inhabitants of Chaco and Cahokia? There were certainly no mighty empires awaiting the first whites to explore North America. Cahokia seems to have lasted little more than a century. At almost exactly the same time as the Mongols were razing the cities of Russia, many of Cahokia’s houses were torn down and huge wooden defences were erected, city walls with bastions every 65 feet. The defences did not work. Thousands of arrowheads testify to a vicious battle, thought to have been a peasant insurrection against the wealthy city-dwellers, after which the city was abandoned.
When in 1539 Hernando de Soto, fresh from helping to destroy the Inca empire in Peru, undertook a barbarous three-year trek through the American south-east, the enormous territory the Spaniards called Florida, he found mound-building tribes whose chiefs lived in relative luxury in homes perched above the surrounding countryside. Undoubtedly these were the remnants of the Mississippians. Ethnographers have also found traces of Mississippian culture in tribes as far away as the Osage and Winnebago on the edge of the Great Plains.
Historians were intent not only on showing that the continent’s original inhabitants were primitive savages but also that there were not many of them, and that Europeans had ‘settled’ rather than ‘conquered’, rather as Jewish ‘settlers’ occupy the land from which Palestinians have been evicted in more recent times. Nobody knows how many people were living north of the Rio Grande when the first whites arrived. Until fairly recently the number quoted was usually around a million. As archaeological finds continued to increase it became apparent that there had been far more natives than first thought. Henry Dobyns, a respected anthropologist, suggested 18 million. As the debate continued the numbers came down again, but estimates still range from 2 million up to 10 million.
One factor in particular underlies the earlier view that there were hardly any Native Americans in occupation when the whites arrived: when the settlers started moving west they found a largely ‘empty’ land. The reason for that, however, is not that there had been no natives but that the native population had already collapsed. European colonisers may have been slow to move beyond their initial settlements; European diseases were not. Almost entirely by accident the first European settlers had perpetrated the world’s most successful example of biological warfare.
The Scramble for America
Community after community faced extinction with the coming of the white man. A typical case, chronicled in detail by early French missionaries and explorers, was the Huron in southern Canada. Within twenty years of Samuel de Champlain first setting eyes on the Huron, diseases from the trading posts further east were destroying them. Measles struck in 1634, causing blindness and in some cases death. In 1636 it was the turn of influenza, followed the next year by scarlet fever. Then in 1638 came the worst plague of all, smallpox. In five years between a half and two thirds of the entire Huron population died.
The primary reason that Europeans were able to impose themselves so much more successfully on America than on Africa was the balance of biological power. The natives of America had been completely isolated from the rest of the world for millennia. They had no immunity to western diseases and no diseases of their own to give to their invaders, other than syphilis. Africans had not only been exposed to European and Asian traders but they also had a fearful armoury of tropical diseases with which to retaliate. The result was that Africans retained an overwhelming numerical superiority, which American natives lost within a few years of the arrival of the white man.
Columbus had shown that a promised land existed. All anyone had to do was point their ship west; the New World could not be missed. The Spanish and Portuguese grabbed South and Central America and the larger Caribbean islands. They also sent a few expeditions north in search of gold. Coronado reached as far as Kansas in 1540, murdering any natives who got in his way: on one occasion he had a hundred captured warriors burnt at the stake to strike terror into anyone stupid enough to oppose the onward march of European civilisation. The French went further north, seeking furs and fish in Canada.
The English first came to the Americas not to settle but to steal, not to trade but to terrorise. The early history of England and the New World is a history of organised crime, although rather than using terms like ‘mobster’ or ‘gangster’ British historians have preferred the more romantic ‘pirate’ or ‘buccaneer’ or even ‘privateer’, as if to imply that armed robbery is acceptable if cloaked in the mantle of private enterprise. (Another term used in some accounts transforms ruthless killers into cuddly pets, as men like the murderous Hawkins are described charmingly as ‘sea dogs’). With the exception of west country fishermen the primary objective of the first English mariners venturing westward was to find someone who had already made money there and to take it away. English pirates raided not just the Spanish galleons heading home with their looted gold but anyone with something worth taking. Pirates like Sir John Perrot, Peter Easton (known as the pirate admiral) and Henry Mainwaring attacked the Portuguese, Basque and French fishing fleets that had descended on the immense shoals of cod off Newfoundland. Pirate expeditions were expensive to organise and needed the support, implicit or explicit, of the crown. Pirate captains were not petty criminals escaping to easier pickings in the sun. Henry Mainwaring, for example, was an Oxford graduate and member of the bar. After succeeding as a Newfoundland pirate he returned to England and became Chancellor of Ireland, before dying as an exile in France having chosen the wrong side in the English Civil War.
When the time came to attempt their own settlements many of these pirates played prominent roles. Hawkins was an early advocate of settlement in Virginia. The pirate David Kirke, who had captured a fleet of eighteen French ships in the Gulf of St Lawrence and even raided Quebec, was a prime mover in the creation of the Scottish colony of Nova Scotia. Piracy was to remain a feature of colonial life for many years to come. English settlements in Newfoundland (of which David Kirke was eventually made governor) and Labrador were subject to pirate raids well into the eighteenth century, with French, Dutch and later American pirates finding easy pickings in even the hardiest outposts.
The most successful mobster of all was the Welshman Henry Morgan, whose gang, protected by the Governor of Jamaica, devastated Spanish ports in the Caribbean and Central America. Morgan became one of the wealthiest men in Jamaica, diversifying into legitimate businesses such as sugar plantations. Much of Morgan’s life is shrouded in the myths of time, but one
story is certainly true. In 1670, with thirty-six ships and a gang of nearly 2,000 men, he attacked the city of Panama, burning it to the ground. On the way back he deserted his men and absconded with most of the loot. This did not make him universally popular, especially as at the time of the raid England and Spain had just signed a peace agreement. Charles II responded to Spanish protests by recalling the governor and ordering the destruction of the buccaneers. Morgan was arrested and transported to London, but spread so much money around that he returned to Jamaica with a knighthood and was made deputy governor.
Although to the Spanish, and to pirates of all nations, the Americas were seen primarily as an opportunity to get rich quick, to many Europeans the new land offered more than plunder. It offered the opportunity for colonisation, somewhere to dispatch surplus populations who would simultaneously become markets for the products of Europe and supply products the home countries could not economically produce themselves. It also offered the possibility of religious freedom. There is a myth that America was created by doughty puritans whose Protestant work ethic formed the philosophical bedrock upon which the wealth and power of the United States was to be built. Like most myths there is an element of truth here. The first European settlers in North America since the Vikings were religious refugees who were confident that their Protestant commitment to prayer and hard work would enable them to create a promised land in the New World.