| I. | Reinterpreting the Encounter |
| II. | Exploration, Conquest, Exploitation, Colonization |
Just in time for the five hundredth anniversary of Columbus's voyages to the Americas, historians have abandoned the rhetoric of discovery -- or, at least, brought it under severe control. No longer do we say that Columbus and the other European explorers "discovered" America. Rather, the European voyagers encountered Indian peoples and cultures who had been present in the Americas for hundreds or even thousands of years.
As John Noble Wilford has pointed out, the quincentenary of Columbus's voyages differed profoundly from the quadricentenary of 1892 and the tercentenary of 1792 -- both of which emphasized the unalloyed benefits of the "discovery of America" and the bravery and modernity of Columbus's thought and enterprise. In part, of course, the 1892 omission of Indian peoples from the commemoration of Columbus, except as anthropological curiosities, stemmed from the series of Indian wars that ranked with the War of 1812, the Mexican War, and the Civil War as determinants of American foreign and military policy. The Indians were conquered foes, perceived as being somewhere on the spectrum between brave enemies and savage primitives. To accord them equal billing with the great Christopher Columbus was, to their way of thinking, ridiculous.
The shift from the emphases of the quadricentenary to those of the quincentenary reflects the dramatic transformation in twentieth-century American views of the Indians (see essay I) -- of their status as indigenous peoples, of the dignity and worth of t heir cultures, of the plausibility and validity of their ideas about the proper relationships between human beings and the natural world, and of the sufferings they endured at the hands of white explorers, settlers, and conquerors. It also reflects two other factors:
(ii) the problems posed by the conflict between defenders of Western culture and attackers of "cultural imperialism."
Nonetheless, although this conceptual shift may look to some like "political correctness," it makes good sense. It recognizes that what we used to call the "Discovery of America" was really a "first contact" (of the sort beloved by fans of science fiction on) between two sets of civilizations and cultures. (Indeed, European colonists in North America would not have survived without the aid of the Indian peoples who greeted and befriended them and taught them what crops to cultivate, what game to hunt, and how to build shelters.) This first contact, however, was not governed by the "prime directive" of noninterference familiar to devotees of Star Trek. Most European explorers, conquerors, colonizers, and missionaries felt few compunctions about interfering with indigenous cultures -- by deliberate force (as with Francisco Pisarro's 1531-1533 conquest of the Inca empire in Peru), by a combination of force and accident (as with Hernando Cortes's unsuccessful 1518 assault on the Aztec empire in Mexico, which h exposed the Aztec to smallpox that devastated the population and made Cortes's 1521 attack a success), or by accident (95 percent of the Maya people of Mexico succumbed to diseases contracted due to contact with Europeans).
There were some beneficial results of contact, however; Europeans introduced new technologies, crops, and domestic animals to the Americas, and Indian peoples absorbed these innovations into their own cultures and economies. And, even though Spanish authorities insisted on supplanting (often by forcible conversion) indigenous religions with Roman Catholocism, the Roman Catholic clergy soon emerged as powerful advocates for justice for native peoples. Ultimately, however, Europeans received the great majority of the benefits of American colonization.
How do we tell the story of this period? The best way is to synthesize an array of older and newer historical and pedagogical methods.
There are two areas of special concern in studying the period of contact:
This chronology is still worth giving to students -- as long as we tell them why they need it and why they will find it useful. In essence, we can demonstrate the utility of chronology by illustrating how it provides (i) a basic framework on which they can hang additional ideas and information, and (ii) context, background, and useful juxtapositions that enable them to make historical connections and begin learning how to interpret history for themselves. If we explain the utility and necessity of abs orbing the chronology, they will not approach it as just another arid, useless set of dates, names, and events. (This point is true across the whole sweep of American history -- not just in this period.)
For example, there remains considerable value in the traditional juxtaposition of the history of English exploration and discovery in the Americas with the ideas and achievements of the Renaissance in England. At the same time, however, we should not fall into the hoary cliche that the Spanish were a backward-looking people in decline, merely because Spanish culture in the Renaissance does not resonate with modern American culture in the ways that English Renaissance culture does.
(ii) Rather than just treating the succession of European voyages, settlements, and colonies as a kind of proto-Amtrak timetable, we and our students must grapple with the spectrum of goals, purposes, and methods followed by the various European nations -- including their competition with one another.
To offer a few broad generalizations for each exploring and colonizing European nation (keeping in mind William Blake's warning, as quoted by Axtell -- "To generalize is to be an idiot"):
As James Axtell points out, the old, powerful "Black Legend" that purported to describe the Spanish explorations, conquests, and colonial enterprises is largely a caricature. Under the terms of this legend, the Spanish colonists were conquistadores (conquerors ) -- brutal men, interested only in loot, pillage, rape, and murder, who left a trail of savage destruction wherever they went. Even though many of the early Spanish conquistadores were interested only in gold and gems and were ruthless in their methods, emphasis on brutality and greed does not explain how the Spanish created a colonial empire in Latin America that lasted for more than two centuries (longer, indeed, than the British Empire lasted in that part of North America that we now know as the United States). The "Black Legend" has some basis, notably in the work of the Spanish priest and former conquistador Bartolome de Las Casas, who intended his impassioned histories to persuade the Spanish monarchs to restrain the excesses of the exped expeditions of exploration, conquest, and conversion they had authorized. But, as Axtell notes, the "Black Legend" is also largely an artifact of nineteenth-century Protestant Americans of English or Anglo-Saxon ancestry who were convinced that Catholic lands and peoples were tyrannous, lazy, cruel, and semi-barbarous. It has thus obscured the stability, cultural achievements (including the founding of universities in Mexico older than any in North America), and occasional benificence of the Spanish colonies.
It also should be noted here that slavery (in particular, African slavery, because enslaving Indians proved unsuccessful) was introduced to the Americas by the Portuguese and the Spanish -- over a century before the first Africans arrived in Virginia (in 1619). In part, the European slave traders joined a slave trade that was several centuries old, beginning with west Africans' selling slaves to Mediterranean traders in the eighth century. Apparently, the small but continuous traffic in slaves, in which the Portuguese were the leading European practitioners, exploded in the fifteenth century when the Portuguese applied slavery to the cultivation of sugar cane, first in their Atlantic island colonies and then in Latin America. The Spanish quickly followed owed suit, to be succeeded in the seventeenth century by the Dutch and in the eighteenth century by the English.
(b) The French also came to the Americas for wealth and power, but their methods were different. They did not seek to conquer the regions they explored and laid claim to -- only to repel the competing claims of rival powers like Spain and England and to establish a foothold for themselves in the American continents (a pattern followed as well by the Dutch and the Swedish, who sought to establish colonies as international economic bases, rather than as permanent settlements). The traditional view is that, because the French did not engage in a full-scale colonizing enterprise like that of the English, they missed a priceless opportunity. To be sure, that statement itself is based on a huge network of unarticulated assumptions about how a European nation ion "should" look upon the "opportunities" presented by the Americas.
(c) The English were laggards in the race for the Americas, but, because they ultimately changed their understanding of the nature and purpose of colonies, the English colonies eventually were among the most successful in the Americas. At first, English explorers sought the same kinds of benefits that animated the Spanish, Portuguese, and French enterprises -- discovery of gold, jewels, and other valuable goods for trade and commerce. Gradually, the English shifted their emphasis to include the plant planting of self-maintaining colonies that, due to the structure of English government, politics, and political theory, acquired a measure of self-governance. As a result, traditional accounts of the English explorations and colonizations are remarkably benign, emphasizing the ideas that the founders of the colonies planted "seeds of democracy" in the "New World."
By the close of this period, the Europeans had only the most dim and uncertain ideas of how the new societies they had planted in the Americas would develop. The "voyages of discovery and exploration" set the stage for a reconceptualization of the European world. No longer would Europeans be limited to the European continent -- they would now occupy the land on both sides of the Atlantic Ocean, creating what later scholars would call the Atlantic civilization. The development of the American component of that civilization is traced in essay III.