The Great Divide

by Peter Watson

  The place of the native American in the great scheme of things was always likely to be the overriding issue. In America itself, by the nineteenth century, many people had direct experience of Indians and this tended to make them more passionate in whatever views they held. In his Ancient Society, 1875, based on an earlier lecture, ‘Ethnical Periods’, Lewis H. Morgan, the early anthropologist, introduced another level of scepticism into some of the early Spanish chronicles, and concluded that the Aztecs were in the middle stage of barbarism (he envisaged three phases: savagery, barbarism, civilisation), concluding that this made it impossible for the Aztecs to have had an empire in the true sense of that word – they had been in a simple confederacy of tribes at the time of the Conquest. Aided by research from Adolph F. Bandelier, the Aztec achievement was rendered both more realistic and smaller, and the Spanish achievement more impressive, presented as they were, at the time of the Conquest, with perpetual warfare between the Aztecs and their neighbours.54

  FISH WITH LEGS, LIONS WITH FINS

  The place of animals and plants attracted attention, too, and they were interesting philosophically and theologically but also commercially, plants especially. As for animals, understanding was hampered for a while by the inaccuracy of the early reports and an abiding interest in ‘monsters’ (fish with legs, iguanas with wings, ‘lions’ – i.e., pumas – with fins, pigs with navels on their backs). Some travellers claimed to find elephants in Mexico, and unicorns in Argentina. Other early accounts fastened on the armadillo (‘an armoured horse’ that, according to some accounts, did not eat) and the large herds of llama, the guanaco and vicuña in Peru, the latter’s wool being regarded as of better quality than that of merino sheep in Spain.55

  Animal remedies were another early interest (snake-skin as an aphrodisiac; an infusion of opossum tail as a cough medicine, or a laxative, or as an aid in childbirth; pounded porcupine spines as a cure for kidney stones). Not unreasonably, attempts were made to fit the new animals into existing taxonomies (the manatee was called an ‘ox-fish’), as several writers saw themselves as a ‘Pliny of the New World’. People did note that none of the large animals in the New World were found in the outlying Caribbean islands, which suggested therefore that they had not been brought there by previous travellers, that perhaps they were the result of a separate Creation.56

  Because many of the more educated people who visited the New World early on were clerics a major concern was the religious significance of the natural world that was found there. Juan Eusebio Nieremberg, a Spaniard of German descent, considered the possibility that there was a category of creation that was intermediate between animals and plants. Athanius Kircher, a Jesuit polymath, devoted no little time to a consideration of where the newly discovered animals would have been accommodated in Noah’s Ark. His answer was that animals can metamorphose into other forms and that the creatures which passed from Europe to the New World had degenerated, and to such a degree that it was very difficult to work out which was descended from which ‘parent’. Others thought that the different climate of the Americas had produced different animal forms.57

  But in general, as time went by, and as more scientists looked at the improving range of illustrations and descriptions, and even began dissecting specimens, either in America, or those examples which had been brought back, it was realised that there were fewer differences between the animals on the two continents than at first appeared. Clerics and others tried to fit New World animals into the Great Chain of Being (the dominant taxonomy before Darwin), and here some American animals fitted nicely, filling gaps for example between the monkeys and other species. Gradually it was realised that the animals of the New World had no marvellous, mysterious powers, that in fact, as Miguel de Asúa says, ‘there was hardly anything new about them.’58 This was a sensible enough conclusion that ought to have had more impact than it did. Scientifically, following von Humboldt, the continent became more fully understood and, following Darwin, more easily assimilable into general thought patterns. By the time of World War One, when America came to Europe’s rescue, the polemic was dead.

  ‘THE INDIANS DIE EASILY’

  Or not quite. By the twentieth century, science was beginning to take over from the grand theorists, this approach being associated first and foremost with the name of the German, Eduard Seler, whose careful, cautious commentaries on the main Native codices ‘set standards of meticulous research that have not been surpassed’.59 Seler was so cautious that he never wrote a general work of synthesis on Mesoamerica but he did point out continent-wide patterns and many Old World/ New World analogies. In particular, he debunked any idea of Old World influence on the New and pictured the Aztecs as capable of complex astronomy and mathematics, sculpture, poetic imagination and self-expression. Not surprisingly, he was very popular in Mexico.

  Mexico in any case was going through a particularly nationalistic phase just then, owing to the Mexican Revolution of 1910–1917, but in addition to that a number of discoveries in the early decades of the twentieth century also drew attention to ancient American civilisations. These discoveries included Machu Picchu (Inca) in 1911, Chavín de Huántar (Chavín) in 1919, La Venta (Olmec) in 1925, and San Lorenzo (Olmec) in 1945.

  And if the scientific approach to the character of the New World was on the rise, this only meant that there were fresh areas to disagree about. After World War Two, as more and more became known about pre-Columbian civilisations, scholars became divided into Mayanists and Olmequistas, according to which civilisation they regarded as preeminent. Another – at times ferocious – area of dispute erupted over the population of the New World at the time of the Conquest. Indeed, according to William M. Denevan, this has become ‘one of the great debates in history’.60 There are (at least) two reasons why this figure should matter. Population size is a perhaps crude but easily understandable criterion by which to assess how successful a civilisation was or is – a reflection of what surplus of food it managed or manages to produce, so allowing more and more members of its society to break away from subsistence and engage in the ‘higher’ activities which comprise civilisation. And second, since we know the population of the Americas with a fair degree of accuracy for the later sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, the figure in 1492 gives us some idea of how many Native Americans were wiped out by the colonialists, either through warfare or disease.

  Not only have the population figures been a source of deep disagreement but a knock-on effect of that has been a no less fierce debate as to whether epidemics spread widely and rapidly, or much less so. This has contemporary relevance because an accurate assessment of figures needs to take account of how quickly populations revive after catastrophes, catastrophes of the kind that can easily recur.

  So far as pre-Conquest America is concerned, while there has been deep disagreement between those who favour a low population figure and those who prefer a higher one, the recent trend seems to be towards acceptance of higher figures. Any reader interested in the arguments is referred to The Native Population of the Americas in 1492, edited by William M. Denevan, first published in 1976 but updated for the five-hundredth anniversary of 1492 and republished in 1992. These are not the only estimates of recent years, as Denevan makes clear, some reaching in excess of 100 million. But his 1992 figure of 53.9 million is, perhaps, the one most scholars would now accept. Equally important, and just a shade less contentious, is the figure for by how much the aboriginal population of the Americas was reduced in the years following European contact, be it by war, starvation, or disease. This decline was massive but not uniform. Denevan says he found ‘hundreds’ of reports of rapid decline, single epidemics reducing villages by half and more with many tribes ‘completely wiped out’ in a few decades. William McNeill goes so far as to say that disease, chiefly smallpox, was a factor in why the New World was so easily conquered by the Europeans. Because of this, the Spaniards thought that ‘The Indians die easily’.61 Besides smallpox, the major killers were measles
, whooping cough, chicken pox, bubonic plague, typhus, malaria, diphtheria, amoebic dysentery, influenza and a variety of helminthic infections. Diseases already present in the New World before 1492 included infectious hepatitis, encephalitis, polio, syphilis, Chagas’ disease and yellow fever.

  Some resistance was acquired by the seventeenth century but by then other matters had taken a toll, beyond disease, such as military action, malnutrition, starvation and the reduction of some cultural groups to a level at which traditional marriage pools were inadequate to provide eligible mates.62 The slave ships from Africa also appear to have imported malaria, another blow.63 As Denevan concludes, the discovery of America ‘was followed by the greatest demographic disaster in the history of the world’ and, unlike earlier crises, the Indian population recovered only slowly. The full extent of New World devastation may be seen from demographer Henry Dobyns’ 1966 study which found that, in 1650, more than 150 years after the Conquest, the population of the Americas south of the United States which, according to him, had been between 80 million and 108 million in 1492, was now only 4 million, a decline of between 95 and 97.3 per cent. For once with statistics, the numbers need no elaboration.

  Russell Thornton, in his American Indian Holocaust and Survival: A Population History Since 1492, adds to this picture by comparing the population of Native Americans in 1492 (his figure being 72+ million) with those in various parts of the Old World in 1500: Italy, ~10 million; Portugal, 1.25 million; Spain, 6.5–10 million; British Isles, 5 million; France, 15 million; Netherlands, <1 million. Overall, there were, in 1500, seven times as many non-Americans in the world as ‘native Indians’.

  But he makes the point that numbers are not the whole picture. Estimates of the life expectancy of certain New World populations, and certain non-Americans, show that life expectancy was not so very different in the two hemispheres, but there are grounds for thinking, says Thornton, that the peoples of the Western Hemisphere were remarkably free of the serious diseases that afflicted Europeans. Several early European travellers to the New World observed the Indians to be of ‘lusty and healthfull bodies’, free of ‘Feavers, Pleurisies . . . Agues . . . Consumptions . . . Apoplexies, Dropsies, Gouts . . . Pox, Measels, or the like’ and to ‘spinne out the threed of their days’ to three-score, four-score and ‘some a hundred yeares’.64 William McNeill, in Peoples and Plagues, agreed. Many human infections, he points out, are derived from domesticated mammals (cattle share fifty diseases with humans, sheep and goats forty-six, the horse thirty-five), while the only domesticated mammals of similar size in the Americas – llamas and alpacas – live high in the cold Andes, where infections do not thrive, and in small herds, which cannot sustain disease chains. Maize and potatoes – unique to the Americas before 1492 – contain more calories than Old World cereals except rice.65

  Native Indians did suffer from bacillary and amoebic dysentery, viral influenza and pneumonia, trypanosomiasis, non-venereal syphilis, pellagra and salmonella and other forms of food poisoning. But there is now little doubt, according to Thornton, that they were in better shape in regard to disease than Europeans and the reason is interesting.

  The possibility is strong that, in migrating across Beringia, the inhospitably cold, harsh climate was a ‘germ filter’ whereby infectious diseases present in any human migrants were screened out. In hook-worm, for example, neither the eggs nor the larvae can survive in soil temperature below ~59°. Furthermore, since the migrants existed in only small groups, their populations were also not large or dense enough to enable disease chains to develop.66

  Not all diseases appeared straight away. For instance, Dobyns says that smallpox epidemics occurred in 1520–24, measles in 1531–33, influenza in 1559, typhus in 1586 and diphtheria not until 1601–1602. But the effect was still devastating, reducing the Native population by, in some cases, as we have seen, 97 per cent, and dwarfing the numbers killed in the forty-plus ‘Indian wars’.67

  One final figure that Thornton gives shows how much Indian life-ways were changed by the advent of Europeans: the population of buffalo fell from 60 million in 1492 to 40 million in 1800,to 14 million in 1870 and to one million five years later, when the buffalo stood in the way of the opening up of the Great Plains.68

  No one was more acerbic in his condemnation of the European invaders than Kirkpatrick Sale, in The Conquest of Paradise.69 For Sale, Columbus was a deceitful (and self-deceiving) opportunist, and Europe ‘a civilisation that had lost its bearings, with failing soil and famine, epidemics and disease the order of the day’. Humanism had put the Christian Church in crisis, nationalism was on the rise and intimacy, sacredness and reverence had ‘all but vanished’. Columbus wasn’t the discoverer of America anyway, because at least twenty other fifteenth-century voyages had sighted or put ashore in the New World. Nor did Columbus care about nature – ‘it was treasure he wanted’. The Tainos were not nearly as backward as he assumed from their dress. Their houses were more spacious and cleaner than the ‘crowded and slovenly hovels’ of south European peasantry and their crops and diet superior in yields than anything known in Europe at the time. The idea of the fierce and cannibalistic Caribs was ‘merely a bogey’.70

  Warming to his theme, Sale claimed there was no real intellectual explosion in Europe after the discovery, that the Indians were perplexed by the ‘emotional coldness’ of the Europeans and that the savage brutality of the Spanish was matched by that of the English who imposed the plantation on the north, a miniature of the Old World society.71

  Sticking to his title, he argued that native Indian agricultural techniques, though less ‘advanced’ than European ones, were actually better suited to the American environment and ecologically more sound, as was proved, he said, by figures which showed that, within a few decades of the Conquest, 140 animal and bird species became extinct, and 200 plants, including 17 varieties of grizzly bears, seven forms of bat, cougars, auks and wolves. This all contrasted badly with the careful hunting protocols of the indigenous peoples who limited slaughter and understood the dangers of overkilling. In other words, for Sale pre-Columbian North America ‘was a prelapsarian Eden of astonishing plenitude.’72

  Other scholars also collected Native American accounts of the invasion and Conquest, which underlined the brutality of the Spaniards alongside the hospitality shown by many of the indigenous peoples. Their hunting had been so spoiled, they noted, that their custom of offering animal skins to others when renewing treaties, could no longer be maintained, an important point of honour extirpated.73 Everywhere, they were in want of deer. And they were equally upset when the invaders put out their Council Fire, not knowing how much it meant to them. After the Spanish invasion, quipus, like Mesoamerican books, were proscribed and burned as ‘soguillas’ that preserved the memory of pagan ritual and dogma.74 In Peru, the Spanish also spent years trying to locate and destroy the ancestor mummies. Friar Diego de Landa admitted that he and others had found ‘a great number’ of Mayan books ‘and because they contained nothing but superstition and the devil’s falsehoods, we burned them all, which upset [the Mayas] most grievously and caused them great pain’.75

  Second to the brutality came the deceit, which rankled badly with the indigenous races, as did the newcomers’ practice of eating cattle and pigs. The Aztec thought whoever ate such animals would turn into them. There were mixed feelings about children of mixed races: some kept it secret, others were proud of it. The Indians had their own language for the invaders – the frontiersmen were called ‘the long knives’ – and they could be dismissive: the North American Indians saw themselves as made of red clay, the white people as from white sand.76

  At the same time these authors did not overlook the resilience of some aspects of Native American culture – for example, there were in 1992 twelve million people in the Andes still speaking the language of the Incas, and six million speakers of Maya, more or less the number of French-speakers in Canada.77

  The dispute is an unedifying narrative, out of
which very few people come well and which seems to prove that humans love nothing so much as taking sides. The sacrificial and self-sacrificial violence identified in this book still has the power to shock. But now, seen against the history of the differences between the two hemispheres, we have a much clearer understanding of why these practices developed. Pre-Columbian America was not quite the paradise some writers have described it as. Nonetheless, it remains an unparalleled demographic tragedy that such wholly different societies, with a wholly different psychology, were so ruthlessly annihilated.

  •Appendix 2 •

  FROM 100,000 KIN GROUPS TO 190 SOVEREIGN STATES: SOME PATTERNS IN CULTURAL EVOLUTION

  This appendix, which explores the similarities between the civilisations of the Old World and the New, is available online at:

  www.harpercollins.com/books/greatdivide

  INDEX

  The pagination of this electronic edition does not match the edition from which it was created. To locate a specific passage, please use your ebook reader’s search tools.

  Aaron, 341

  Abel, 44, 349

  Abelard, Peter, 452

  Abraham, 26, 340, 343

  abstract thinking, 366, 369, 379

  Abu-Lughod, Janet, 460

  Abzu, 262

  acacia, 204

  Acapulco, 95

  Acari Valley, 381, 382

  Acha 2 site, 250

  Achuara, 312

  Acosta, Fray José de, 56, 99, 526, 528, 531–2

  Acropolis, 363