How the West Won: The Neglected Story of the Triumph of Modernity (36 page)

Next, Columbus explored the coast of Cuba and then the north coast of Hispaniola (“New Spain,” now Haiti and the Dominican Republic). Here, too, the inhabitants went naked. Columbus also was surprised that the Indians he encountered lacked metal weapons, and anything else made of metal except for golden trinkets. He wrote in his journal: “A thousand would not stand before three of our men.… I believe that with the force I have with me I could subjugate the whole island, which I believe to be larger than Portugal, and the population double.”
³⁴

The
Santa María
ran aground off the coast of Hispaniola and had to be abandoned. With an unneeded crew, Columbus reached an agreement with the local chief and left behind thirty-nine men to form a settlement he named La Navidad (Christmas—the day the ship ran aground). After kidnapping about a dozen natives, Columbus headed back for Spain. Seven or eight of the captured Indians survived the voyage and became a local sensation—they were baptized and then accompanied Columbus back on his second voyage.

On October 12, 1493, Columbus sailed again, this time with seventeen ships and 1,200 men, including crew members, some soldiers
(including a cavalry troop of twenty lancers), and a large company of colonists. His fleet soon arrived in what we now know as the Lesser Antilles. After touching shore at Dominica, Columbus turned northwest to Guadeloupe, where he made a shocking discovery. As Samuel Eliot Morison described it, “In the course of their wanderings, the searching Spaniards learned a good deal about the manners and customs of the Caribs, the tribe from which the word ‘cannibal’ is derived [as is the word
Caribbean
]. In huts deserted by the natives they found human limbs and cuts of human flesh partly consumed, as well as emasculated boys who were being fattened to provide the main dish for a feast.”
³⁵

In these politically correct times, many deny that the Caribs (or any other native people) were cannibals, claiming that Columbus and his companions made it all up.
³⁶
I will refute this nonsense in detail at the end of the chapter 11. Here it is sufficient to note that the Caribs themselves were colonialists, having invaded the islands from the Orinoco River area of South America in the thirteenth century; they dined not on one another but on the less ferocious tribes over whom they ruled.

Columbus and his men sailed to St. Croix, where they had a brief skirmish with Caribs, and then on to Hispaniola. There Columbus discovered the fate of his colony, La Navidad. After he had left, the Spaniards at La Navidad became a marauding gang roaming the island in search of gold and women. The local natives (not Caribs) soon had had enough and ambushed Columbus’s men, killing them all—these Spanish colonists were sailors, not soldiers. Since what little building had been done at La Navidad lay in ruins, Columbus founded a new settlement a few miles away, naming it Isabela (with only one
l
even though the queen’s name had two). Soon after that, he returned to Spain.

Columbus made two more voyages to the New World, steadfastly denying, of course, that it was other than the Indies. The last voyage was a disaster. Columbus and his men were shipwrecked and marooned on Jamaica for nearly a year—the new Spanish governor of Hispaniola hated Columbus and refused to come to his aid. Help eventually arrived and Columbus was able to return to Spain. There he died on May 20, 1506. By then Spanish fleets were making regular voyages to the Caribbean. Little more than a decade later, Hernán Cortés invaded Mexico. Colonization of the New World was well under way.

It is worth noting that the Columbus story illustrates the importance of political disunity for European progress. Had all of Europe been ruled
by an emperor, one rejection would have meant that Columbus would never have sailed west
³⁷
—just as the Emperor of China beached Zheng He’s fleet and halted all further voyaging only fifty years before Columbus set sail (as seen in chapter 2). Instead, Columbus was able to make his case to several courts, and competition among them seems to have influenced Queen Isabella to change her mind. Clearly, too, competition continued to play a major role in sustaining Europe’s Atlantic explorations.

Cabot’s “Rediscovery”

Giovanni Caboto (1450–1499) was an Italian with a checkered past, whose voyages were of little significance until they were used as the basis for English claims to North America. A native of Venice, he probably engaged in maritime trade with the Muslims and also seems to have been involved in construction. He fled Venice in 1488 as a debtor and settled in Valencia, where he appears to have bid on a project to improve the harbor. From there he went to Seville and began a construction project involving a stone bridge, but it was canceled. It was then that Caboto began seeking support for an Atlantic voyage. Refused funding, he went to England in 1495.

It is uncertain whether John Cabot, as he now was known, based his plans on Columbus’s voyages or had arrived at them independently before Columbus sailed. In any event, he found King Henry VII, who had too late offered to back Columbus, willing to listen to his scheme to sail a more northern (and therefore shorter) route to the Indies. But the king gave him only a letter of patent. Financial support came from merchants in Bristol. In 1496 Cabot set sail in one small ship but, it is believed, soon turned back. The next year he sailed again with one ship and a crew of about eighteen. Almost nothing is known of the voyage except that Cabot seems to have reached the New World somewhere around Newfoundland—in effect rediscovering the Viking Vinland. Cabot went ashore once, going inland only about two hundred yards. He seems to have followed the coast south for a few hundred miles before turning back to England. Going to see the king, Cabot was awarded
£
10 and a lifetime pension of
£
20 per year.
³⁸

In 1498 Cabot finally had enough backing for a substantial effort and set forth with five ships. The fate of this fleet is in doubt. Many believe it
simply disappeared, probably sunk in a storm. We do know that in that year, payment of Cabot’s pension ceased, suggesting official acknowledgment of his having been lost at sea.
³⁹
But a few historians have accepted claims made by the late Alwyn Ruddock of the University of London, who said she had found several obscure documents suggesting that Cabot returned to England in 1500 after two years of explorations down the North American coast that went as far south as the Caribbean. For many years Ruddock was believed to be working on a book based on her discovery, but she died in 2005 with it still unpublished, leaving instructions that all her files be destroyed.
⁴⁰
Even if Ruddock’s claims were valid, Cabot’s voyages mattered little except as evidence that once launched, voyages to the New World rapidly escalated.

America

As the sixteenth century began, Europeans continued to believe that the voyages to the West had reached the Indies, even if they had not yet found a mainland resembling China. Then came voyages by the superb navigator and cartographer Amerigo Vespucci. During two (or possibly four) voyages from about 1499 through, perhaps, 1504, Vespucci sailed so far down the coast of South America that he realized this was no group of islands off the coast of China but a huge new continent. After his last voyage, King Ferdinand appointed Vespucci as chief navigator of Spain, responsible for authorizing and planning voyages to the New World. Vespucci also publicized his conclusions about a new continent and sketches of the coast he had sailed along, which led the great mapmaker Martin Waldseemüller to name this new continent America on the world map he published in 1507. Had Columbus hit either of the continents rather than arriving in the Caribbean, and had he been willing to draw the proper conclusion, the New World might have been named Columbia.

Hinge Point

The three decades from 1490 through 1520 changed the world. In 1490 no one knew there were two huge continents located only about 3,500
miles west of Europe. By the end of 1520, Ferdinand Magellan’s expedition, financed by Charles V of Spain, had reached the Pacific on its voyage around the globe.

The Age of Discovery ushered in conquest and colonization—and the dawn of modernity.

Part IV

The Dawn of Modernity (1500–1750)

11

New World Conquests and Colonies

T
he Age of Discovery involved much more for Europeans than reaching India and finding the New World. Of equally great importance was their discovery of the extraordinary military superiority they held over the rest of the world. A few Portuguese ships repeatedly sank huge Muslim fleets in the Indian Ocean, and the Portuguese needed only small forces to overawe Eastern rulers. And in the New World, tiny bands of Spanish conquistadors prevailed against incredible odds. It was surely to be expected that Europeans would use their advantages over other societies to exploit them, especially given the enormous riches involved.

Initially the Spanish were the major colonial presence in the New World (with the Portuguese controlling Brazil), but other Europeans soon took up New World colonizing as well—the French, English, and Dutch.

Nearly at once, New World colonialism resulted in the resumption of slavery by Europeans. Before it ended, millions of enslaved Africans were transported across the Atlantic, huge numbers of them dying during the voyage. This did not, however, introduce slavery into the Western Hemisphere: in pre-Columbian times indigenous societies widely practiced slavery, from the Incas in the south to the Indians of the Pacific Northwest.

Of course, Western colonialism had other dreadful consequences: scores of native cultures were smashed and millions of people perished,
mostly from diseases to which they lacked immunity. This story is sad enough without the immense amount of misrepresentation, exaggeration, and plain foolishness that has been added during the past century.

The Spanish Conquests

The first successful European colony in the New World was Columbus’s La Isabela on Hispaniola, which was quickly inhabited by 1,300 men. Soon the Spanish settlers at La Isabela were joined by African slaves—in 1574 a census of Hispaniola’s nonindigenous population revealed 1,000 Spaniards and 12,000 African slaves.
¹
This was typical of the extractive Spanish model of colonization—small numbers of Spaniards (mostly soldiers and administrators) ruling large numbers of indigenous people and slaves, with the primary aim of sending valuable exports (including as much gold and silver as possible) to Spain. This model of Spanish colonialism is discussed at length in chapter 12.

Of course, only a small amount of the wealth Spain extracted from the New World came from the Caribbean. Most of it came from Spain’s continental conquests—especially Mexico and Peru.

Cortés and the Conquest of Mexico

In 1519 Hernán Cortés invaded Mexico with six hundred men, fifteen of them mounted. Opposing him were tens of thousands of well-disciplined and organized Aztec warriors. Against these odds, how did the Spanish prevail? Two factors were involved.

The first was vastly superior military technology and training. Man for man the Spanish conquistadors were the class of Europe in this era. While all European armies had adopted cannons, the Spanish had eagerly adopted firearms sooner than anyone else. As early as 1503 Spanish infantry armed with arquebuses overwhelmed a French army that outnumbered them by four to one but was without individual firearms. The same result was obtained against the Swiss in 1522.
²
Little wonder that, as the scholar Keith Windschuttle observed, the conquistadors “found Aztec weapons [made of wood and stone] so inconsequential that they abandoned their own heavy metal armour in favor of quilted cotton.”
³
And, just as the French and Swiss troops had been in Europe, the Aztecs were mowed down by the hundreds by volleys the Spanish arquebusiers
fired from upward of a hundred yards.
⁴
In addition, the conquistadors had brought fifteen cannons with them to Mexico, and these “shredded wave after wave” of Aztecs, according to Victor Davis Hanson.
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