Hello Columbus: America Was No Paradise in 1492
1992; Hoover Institution; Issue: 62 Linguagem: Inglês
ISSN
0146-5945
Autores Tópico(s)Latin American history and culture
ResumoColumbus's first voyage to the New World was arguably the single most important event in the emergence of our modern sense that we are all together living on one planet. Yet, as we mark its 500th anniversary, the traditional hero-worship of the Genoese explorer is gone. Most children can count on learning only two things about Columbus in school today: that he was not the first European to reach these shores; and that the history of slavery, oppression, and conquest that followed his explorations makes even his achievements nothing to celebrate. In many ways, a more realistic appraisal of Columbus should be welcome, as historical truths should always be. Over the years, Columbus has been used as an idealized symbol for everything from the Reformation and the emergence of democratic Protestant America to a role model for Catholics and Italian immigrants. Some of these symbolic distortions had a core of truth to them; others were fabricated from whole cloth. Columbus was a brave and skillful navigator, a visionary explorer, and a devoutly religious man, but he should not be facilely linked with the occupations or preoccupations of subsequent ages. Unfortunately, owing to ideological lenses, a more truthful historical picture of Columbus remains absent in many places. The same is true of the image of the indigenous peoples that he found on these shores. As a kind of compensation for centuries of uncritical hero-worship of Columbus, uncritical hero-worship of Amerindians has become a thriving industry as we approach the quincentenary. Where once the Indians played an incidental role in the story of the European colonization, they now generally occupy center stage, in both political and moral terms. It is an exaggeration, but only a slight one, to say that American Indians have become for many people the new heroes and models to be imitated as we contemplate 1492. A Wondrous Mosaic of Peoples Many of us retain an impression from grade school that in spite of the peoples already inhabiting these lands, the Americas basically were available for the daring explorer to take. This is a profound falsehood. Hundreds, perhaps thousands, of different indigenous groups lived here at the time of Columbus's arrival, and historians estimate the total population of the Americas at somewhere between 20 million and 100 million. Even the estimates of pre-Columbian population figures have become heavily politicized, however, with scholars who are particularly critical of Europe often favoring wildly higher figures. High starting points make Indian deaths by disease, warfare, and mistreatment all the greater. David Henige has dubbed this Native American Historical Demography as Expiation. Yet despite their mistreatment by Europeans and devastation by European diseases (large numbers of Indians died as disease passed along trade routes, 80 percent without ever seeing a white man), some Indian groups are more populous today than in 1492. There now are 30 million Indians in Latin America alone, and several times more Iroquois in North America than at first contact. Some Indians roamed in small hunting bands, while others had settled in immense urban complexes that rivaled major European cities both in size and splendor. The conquistador and, later, talented historian of the conquest of Mexico, Bernal Diaz del Castillo, writes of the Aztec capital Tenochtitlan that the Spaniards almost literally could not believe their eyes when they things unseen, nor ever dreamed: We saw temples and oratories shaped like towers and bastions, all shining white, a wonderful thing to behold. And we saw the terraced towers, and along the causeways other towers and chapels that looked like fortresses....We turned our eyes to the great marketplace and the host of people down there who were buying and selling....Among us were soldiers who had been in many parts of the world, at Constantinople, all over Italy, and at Rome; and they said they had never seen a market so well-ordered, so large, and so crowded with people. …
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