Since antiquity there had been a shortage of bullion in Europe; there was a permanent and chronic trade imbalance – spices and luxuries flowed into Europe from the East, gold and silver flowed from the West to pay for them. India and China were both sinks for precious metal: it never returned. Spain itself had first been of use to the powers of the eastern Mediterranean in pre-Classical times, as a source of silver and iron ore. Silver was almost more use than gold, for without it economies faltered and slowed. Before the introduction of paper money and letters of credit, transactions had to be made in silver or gold. The search for the Philosopher’s Stone which would transmute base metal into silver or gold, was in reality an expression of frustration at the simple shortage of precious metals to make coin. Some gold flowed in from the mines of Mali in central Africa, but never enough. The hoards of silver which flooded into Europe from South America caused rapid inflation, but they supercharged those embryonic capitalist economies which were actually productive and net export traders, particularly the Netherlands and England. Inca and Aztec treasure flowed into Seville, but did not stay there: it moved to Amsterdam, Bruges and London, where bankers, many of them Jewish or Protestant, were busy inventing the modern world economy. To pay for her interminable wars in Italy and the Low Countries, Spain looted South America: it did her no good at all. Silver still flowed East never to return, via London and Amsterdam – Chinese porcelain, silk, rhubarb (for constipation, a chronic European condition due to poor diet), tea, nutmeg, pepper, and saffron all flowed back. The silver arrived in Spain via a long and insecure route from the slave-operated mines of Peru and Bolivia down by pack mule to the Pacific coast; from there by ship to Panama, sent by mule again across the isthmus to the Caribbean coast; then by protected flotilla to Seville across the Atlantic. The whole process was complicated and dangerous. English, Dutch and French pirates and privateers learnt early on the immense profits to be had from seizing the bullion fleet on the high seas or the isthmus of Panama. If only a navigable river could be found on the Atlantic watershed of South America, which ran down the Andes and into the Plate, then ships could be sent directly to Spain with no transshipment or mule trains, by the much safer southern Atlantic route. And Cabot had found silver in Paraguay. The Guarani Indians he had met had shown him artefacts they had traded or stolen from the Incas on their expeditions across the Chaco. The Guarani valued the metal, and there was always the possibility that there were mines in the country, not mentioned by the Indians for fear of conquest and looting. This delusion lasted right through the colonial period in Paraguay; even the Jesuits, it was rumoured, with their agricultural, theocratic settlements of Christianized Indians known as Reducciones, were masters of great hidden silver mines, ruled by a secretive Jesuit King called El Rey Blanco, The White King. The Jesuits in Paraguay suffered the same fate as the Templars in medieval Europe: they were too successful, became too wealthy, too powerful, and excited the cupidity of the secular authorities.
Men share a marked tendency to believe what they want to believe. Irala set out trying to find a non-existent navigable river which rose in the Andes, and perhaps some non-existent silver mines into the bargain. He found neither, but he did settle Paraguay. At the place where Buenos Aires now stands, his men had been attacked by hostile Indians who resented his demands that they should feed his whole expedition. Several Spaniards were killed and then eaten, Irala thus supplying the Indians with food, rather than vice versa. The depleted party then moved upriver, avoiding what is now Argentina, and making for Guarani territory, where Cabot had been welcomed in a friendly fashion. The Paraguayan Guaranis, a branch of the Tupi-Guarani peoples, had spread down from the coasts of Guiana through Brazil: now they were in trouble. Southern Paraguay was as far as they were to penetrate. They found themselves, a semi-sedentary, relatively sophisticated farming culture, surrounded by hostile hunter-gatherer tribes which resented their intrusion, and the limits that their farming put on their hunting grounds. The Guaranis were attacked all the time, and were barely holding their own when the Spanish arrived. They had food surpluses, and women – both of which the Spanish needed. The Spanish had vastly superior firepower and better military technology than anything ever seen in the region before. The Guarani immediately realized the advantages of a strategic alliance. The Spanish insisted on an attack, a defeat, and a peace, to prove who was master and who was subject. But at the crucial moment in the attack the Guarani sent in their women, and the assault ended as an orgy. There was no more fighting. ‘Every Spaniard has a harem of ten or twenty women. They do no work but lie in hammocks all day, fanned by their female companions, who also give them food to eat and maté to drink. Truly, we have found ourselves in the Paradise of Mahomet,’ one conquistador wrote back to Spain.
Asunción was thus founded, and a Spanish colonial city grew up while Buenos Aires and Montevideo were both vacant building lots with wild Indians in situ. The hostile Indians of the Argentinian plains were all eventually killed by the Spanish; yet the Guarani still thrive and flourish, having long outlasted their Spanish overlords. Their language remains the official language of the country along with Spanish, and their own culture has survived to a degree undreamt of in most other South American countries. In Paraguay, there were always very few Spanish and very many Guarani. The latter ceased to be ‘Indian’ and became ‘Paraguayan’ when they were baptized as Roman Catholics and took Spanish names. Compared to Mexico or Peru, Paraguay attracted relatively few Spanish colonists, for it was soon discovered that there was no real gold or silver, apart from the trinkets from the Andes. Instead, rather a slow, sleepy tropical colony evolved, exporting hides and maté, wood and oranges, after European cattle and citrus fruit had been introduced.
Reared on the romances of Amadis of Gaul, the Spanish recognized in Paraguay an Arcadia, and the country became from the start a locus of fantasy, legend and of intellectual speculation. Perhaps the Guarani were a lost tribe of Jews, which would explain their apparently Semitic features? The Spanish took the Old World with them in their minds when they settled South America: the temples of the Aztecs and Incas were referred to by the conquistadors as mesquitas – that is mosques; and Indians were regularly called moros – that is Moors. Spain had just finished fighting a 700-year war of liberation against the occupying North African Berber-Arab Moors, and this struggle had entered deeply into their souls. Everyone not a pagan, a heretic, a schismatic or a Catholic, they tended to see as a Moor – and an enemy. There was nothing racial in this: Guarani who became Christian Catholics became, in the eyes of the Spanish, full human beings – though this did not stop them from being employed as semi-serf labour, but then so were Christian Spaniards in Spain itself. The recent fashion for multiculturalism in Europe has seen a romanticization of Moorish Spain. In reality it was a slave-state. The fortifications, the palaces, the marvels of Moorish Granada were all built by Christian slaves, captured either by Barbary pirates, or in the wars with Christian Spanish kingdoms. Moorish agricultural settlements were worked by Christian slaves. To be captured by the Moors was to be enslaved. The Christians, likewise, used Moorish slaves – Quien tiene moros, tiene oro went the saying (Who owns Moors, owns gold). The Jews were expelled from Spain at the same time as the Moors by Ferdinand and Isabella because they had played such a large part in the trading of Christian slaves, as well as their being viewed by some Spanish Catholics as infidels and Christ-killers.
Spanish colonial Paraguay was at first very large and mostly unexplored. It was known to the Spanish as ‘The Gigantic Province of the Indies’, and comprised of everything south of Brazil and Peru, that is to say much of present Bolivia, and all Argentina, Uruguay and modern-day Paraguay itself.
The Spanish who settled South America had to grapple with a whole array of complex intellectual problems. Firstly, who were all these peoples, previously quite unknown, that they had discovered? Were they fully human or not, with souls to be saved or damned, or something quite other? If they were men, and it
was established early on by the Papacy that they were, why was there no mention of them in the Bible or the chronicles of Classical antiquity? The medieval mind was largely bound by the confines of biblical and classical knowledge. St Paul had not sent an Epistle to the Aztecs, and these peoples did not appear to be descended from the sons of Noah. Protestant and Catholic Europe still based all its orthodox secular knowledge on Greek and Roman philosophy and law, in particular the twin pillars of Plato and Aristotle, who were duly edited and annotated by scholars from ancient Alexandria to modern Padua, thus providing the explanatory mechanisms of the Renaissance world. It was Plato, in the Timaeos, who came to the aid of the puzzled scholars and theologians: evidently, the peoples of South America had come from the lost continent of Atlantis, which island had originally been populated by all the peoples of the Bible, whites, Semites and sons of Ham. It was no surprise, it was argued, to find these ‘lost’ peoples in South America: they had clearly crossed over from the now sunken Atlantis to the American islands and mainland, and there settled, bred, and forgot their origins. A concise and elegant exposition of this thesis is outlined by Agustin de Zarate in his introduction to The Discovery and Conquest of Peru. Zarate ends his short argument, before starting to describe Peru itself, by quoting Seneca: ‘the age will come, in the ripeness of time, when Ocean will loosen the chain of things and bare new worlds to the stones. Then a huge country will be revealed and Thule will no longer be the last of lands.’ The intriguing question remains, however: where did Seneca, a Roman from Spain, get this startlingly prophetic vision of the discovery of the Americas?
Persistent rumours and unorthodox traditions hold that the Carthaginians, the Tartessians who preceded them in southern Spain and Portugal, as well as the Basques of Galicia, and the Minoans of ancient Crete, all knew about the Americas centuries, perhaps millennia before Columbus. The Basques were said to have fished the Grand Banks off Newfoundland for cod for centuries, but kept it a trade secret. Silver was a motivating draw for the Phoenicians, Tartessians and Carthaginians – they certainly all traded as far as Cornwall for tin, and down the coast of Africa at least as far as Senegal. A cache of Carthaginian coins was found in a cave in the Canary Isles. Persistent stories of sunken Carthaginian trading vessels in South American waters exist, but as yet there is little hard scientific evidence which would convince the skeptic. It is claimed a tablet with Minoan writing was found in a centuries-old North American Indian chief’s burial site. Seneca’s vision, though, was enough to convince the medieval intellectual that the old adage ‘there’s nothing new under the sun’ still held good. The Americas, in their guise as the colony of Atlantis, or perhaps the Islands of the Hesperides where the golden apples in Greek mythology came from, had clearly been known to ‘the divine Plato’, as Zarate calls him, and this fitted into the cosmological orthodoxy accepted by all devout Catholics and many devout Protestants. It is an indication of the pagan Plato’s immense and unquestioned prestige in the late medieval Christian world that Zarate could, with impunity, call him ‘divine’ in a book which had to be passed by the Inquisition, and in an intellectual climate where Judaizing New Christians suspected of holding to Hebrew rituals in Spain were regularly burnt at the stake. The paganism of ancient Greece and Rome was no longer the threat to the Church it had been a millennium before: it had become an ornament to art and completely internalized in the Christian intellectual world view.
Others were not convinced by this convenient Atlantis explanation: they recognized that the discovery of the Americas was probably the most important event which had occurred since the fall of the Roman Empire. Holy Writ and Classical philosophy, twin pillars of all intellectual and moral life in Europe for 1,500 years, were both pessimistic in their essence. According to Christian theology, man was a fallen being, originally created stainless and perfect by God, but who by disobedience had sinned, and so known Evil: this world was a vale of woes which led straight to Hell, unless by the intervention of Christ’s mercy, by which grace was extended to the miserable sinner. Patient abnegation and repentance, good works, faith, hope and charity were prescribed along with prayer, fasting and mortification of the flesh for a wicked mankind, eternally mired in Original Sin. Progress – that modern idea underpinning all notions of improvement – was simply impossible in this climate.
It was little better in Classical antiquity: according to Hesiod’s Theogony man suffered from the Law of Inexorable Decline. In the beginning men had lived in a Golden Age, then a Silver, then Bronze, then Iron. A decline in morals, wisdom and behaviour had resulted in the lamentable falling off of humanity that everyone deplored – and man was getting worse, not better. The late medieval and early Renaissance mind was convinced that things had become so bad that the world would shortly end, destroyed for its sinfulness. The discovery of America coincided with the fall to the Turks of Constantinople, Europe’s last physical link with the late Graeco-Roman world. Although frequently overstated, the movement of Greek scholars westward, the rediscovery of lost or half-forgotten Classical texts, the rise in intellectual independence in the Italian city states, and the questioning of medieval certainties by both theologians bent on reform and secularists and protoscientists intent on either old knowledge lost or new knowledge discovered, led to a new Humanism – man at the centre of the Universe, fit subject for study, not merely moral condemnation. As Georgio de Santillana comments:
The Renaissance looks like an explosion. Between 1450 and 1500 America is discovered, together with the Pacific and South Atlantic oceans; the world is circumnavigated, its real size understood, the Copernican theory denies the common idea of a well-ordered universe with the earth at its centre; the Reformation breaks out in Europe, and 20 million volumes come off the presses to replace handwriting. All this together, and even separately, would have taxed any capacity for adjustment.
(The Age of Adventure – the Renaissance Philosophers)
It quickly became apparent to thoughtful men that the new lands and peoples dicovered so quickly had been completely unknown to the Greeks and Romans, as well as the Biblical Prophets – and even, though it was not wise to mention it aloud, to Jesus or any of his Disciples. It was a whole new hemisphere which Renaissance man had to grapple with on his own, with no help from the past at all. Moses and Joshua offered no more guidance than Plato or Aristotle. The Aztecs were not Moors and their temples were not mosques: European or Asiatic precedents were of no use in America. Modern man had to make of the New World what he could, on his own. Existential loneliness begins with Columbus’s discoveries. These vast new regions, which made Europe seem like a collection of villages, how was the European to understand them?
This dangerous and invigorating realization spread fast through all areas of human endeavour – geography, linguistics, mapmaking, shipbuilding, animal husbandry, agriculture, botany, international politics, medicine, trade, governance, colonization, industry and literature. Nothing could ever be the same again. New things arrived in Europe with startling rapidity – maize and tobacco, turkeys and parakeets, Indians themselves, and a host of other new plants, animals and clothes: the medieval schoolmen could never put the New World back in its bottle again. Optimism, that preternatural modern sin, raised its attractive, its seductive, its inflammatory head. A large new idea grew: reformed, remade, morally improved societies of men could be made in these new worlds, away from the sins and cruelties of the old.
The ancient world and Christendom had both devised Utopias and Arcadias before, but they lacked a plausible geographical locus: now there was America and Oceania. From now onwards writers wishing to satirize or ennoble mankind had a vast geographical territory in which to do so, one that existed in time and space, but about which Europeans still knew very little and from which new miracles appeared every year. Samuel Taylor Coleridge dreamt of founding his Pantisocracy on the banks of the Susquehanna River in North America; Voltaire sent Candide to Paraguay, and after escaping from the Jesuits, his hero made his way to
an Andean country where gold and silver have no value and are used merely for kitchen utensils, and large jewels are employed by children as playthings, but where man is virtuous, kind, and lives in harmony with nature and his fellow man. Swift places his Yahoos on an island off Western Australia. A belief grew up that if man was subject to Original Sin in Europe and the Old World, this was not necessarily the case in the Americas.
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