Empires Apart (5 page)

After landing in the Bahamas in 1492 Columbus turned south and arrived in the Caribbean, where one of his three ships was wrecked. Columbus left the crew of thirty-nine behind on the island of Hispaniola (modern Haiti and the Dominican Republic) to start the first European settlement in the New World since the Vikings. When he returned a year later he discovered that the Taino natives had killed all the settlers. He responded by killing hundreds of natives and sending 550 back to Spain to be sold as slaves, the first New World exports. To Columbus's dismay the slaves were not a commercial success; all those who did not die on the voyage did so soon after arriving in ‘civilisation', falling prey to the sicknesses of the Old World. The fate of the Taino was to be the forerunner of the fate awaiting all the native people of North America. When Columbus arrived in Hispaniola there were at a conservative estimate 300,000 Taino. Sixty years later there were less than five hundred.

Between 1492 and 1504 Columbus made four voyages to the New World, and in 1499 landed on the mainland. That date is important; Amerigo Vespucci, after whom America is named, may have got there first. (As so often even the association of Amerigo and America is disputed; Rodney Broome in his work
Amerike
claims that America is named after the Welshman Richard ap Meryke.)

Columbus's career ended in disgrace as he fell out of favour with the royal court. Even the Spanish crown found his rule over their new possessions unduly brutal, and after his third voyage he was brought back to Spain in chains. He managed one last voyage, and explored the coastline of Central America still convinced that he had reached Asia and was about to encounter the mouth of the Ganges. He died in poverty in Vallodolid, Spain, in 1506 but his voyages did not end there. Nearly forty years later his body was carried across the Atlantic to be buried alongside his son Diego in the cathedral of Santo Domingo, in fulfilment of his
dying wish to be buried in the new world he had discovered. Today tourists can see the urn containing his remains, forty-one bone fragments and a bullet from a youthful wound, in the Columbus Lighthouse, an enormous pyramidal monument that dominates the city. Thousands of miles away in Seville tourists visiting the cathedral can also wonder at what are claimed to be his remains. The Spanish government insists that they brought Columbus's remains back after the Spanish-American War drove them from the Caribbean. In death Columbus appears to have perfected the art of being in two places at once.

Columbus was a genuinely intrepid explorer whose name today is dotted across the globe from Colombia to Colombo to British Columbia (none of which he actually visited), but the name attached to the continents of the New World belongs to someone entirely different. Amerigo Vespucci's life may not be as mythical as Rurik's but his relationship with what is now called America is almost as problematic. The two versions of the travels of the dead Columbus are mirrored on a larger scale in the multiple versions of the life of Vespucci.

Amerigo Vespucci was born in Florence in 1451 where, in version one, his family moved in the same circles as Michelangelo and Savanarola, and he himself went to Spain as the representative of the Medici family. He led three (and in some versions four) voyages to the New World. In 1497 he sailed along the coast of South America, two years before Columbus reached the mainland, and realised that this was not the Indies but a new continent. His scholarly letters excited admiration throughout Europe, and when the German professor of cosmography Martin Waldseemuller wanted a name for the ‘fourth continent' he naturally chose that of the man who had first realised that such a continent existed. Vespucci went on to be appointed chief pilot of Spain and died burdened with honours in Seville in 1512.

Version two describes a very different man. This Vespucci was a wheeler-dealer, a promoter and entrepreneur rather than a great explorer. The sole voyage to the Americas that historians can be certain he made was as part of an expedition led by Alonso de Hojeda, whose name has
passed completely out of history. The other claimed voyages are pure imagination. He claimed to have come within 13° of the south pole and to have reached geographical co-ordinates located in British Columbia on the west coast of Canada, both somewhat improbable. His letters were appreciated more for their description of the sensual proclivities of the natives than for any scholarly value, and naming continents after Vespucci rather than Columbus is a nonsense.

Arguing the merits of the various versions of Vespucci's life is good sport for historians, the majority of whom probably now accept that Vespucci did make a number of voyages and was more than a simple con man. Whether he was the first to reach the American mainland, however, is still doubtful. The strongest candidate for that honour is neither Vespucci nor Columbus but yet another Italian. The Venetian John Cabot, sailing in the service of the English King Henry VII, reached the mainland on 24 June 1497. Like Columbus he was sure he had found the coast of Asia. The following year he sailed west again, confident that he would soon be landing in Japan; he was never seen again.

Although Cabot certainly touched the soil of the New World, even he may not have been the first European since the Vikings to do so. In 1472, twenty years before Columbus, two Scandinavians named Dietrich Pining and Hans Pothorst reached the rich fishing grounds off Newfoundland and may well have stepped ashore on the same coastline that Bjarni Herjolsson the travelling salesman had reached 500 years before. They were searching for a north-west route to Asia, and had they realised what they had stumbled upon, and broadcast their exploits as effectively as Vespucci, the new continent might have been named after the captain of their expedition, a Portuguese mariner named Joäo Vaz Corte Real. At a stroke Americans could have become Realists.

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.

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.