The Native World, Part One

In the beginning, before the arrival of man, America was a land stretching vast and virgin between the Atlantic and the Pacific. Snow-covered mountain ranges, jungles, deserts, high plateaus and savannas, abounding in strange animals never seen before, were waiting for man. In time — the experts do not agree exactly when– men arrived. Some of them made their way from the steppes of Eastern Asia across the Aleutians and Alaska; others sailed across the sea from Oceania. Even today those Easter Island giants of stone stand guard looking toward their ancestral home.

The Agricultural Revolution had not yet occurred in the Fertile Crescent along the Tigris and Euphrates rivers. Thousands of years would pass before the Egyptian Pharaohs emerged. The arrival of the first Americans lies forever lost in the dawn of mankind’s history. When civilization came to Mesopotamia, Egypt and China, the early Americans were already living isolated and had to develop civilization from scratch. Agriculture and writing were invented without the benefit of the successful discoveries that preceded the Bronze Age in Asia and Europe, such as the invention of the wheel or, the taming of horses, cattle, and sheep.

The first Americans were hunters and fishermen but the descendants of those early settlers were great farmers. Potatoes, tomatoes, avocadoes, yucca, corn and many other farm products are the result their effort through centuries of patient and ingenious improvements. Year after year archeologists have been discovering how America’s civilizations progressed, improving agriculture, metallurgy, mathematics and astronomy. Talented engineers learned how to work stone with amazing precision. Dozens of peoples from the Venezuelan grasslands down to the farthest corners of the Paraguayan Chaco, from the jungles of Northern Peru as far as the island of Marajó, were gradually fostering the growth of the world’s richest forest in the Amazonian basin.

Many of these civilizations have disappeared forever and we will never know what their kings were called, nor will we ever be able to listen to the sound of their language or songs. However, their legacy somehow survives in the ancient ruins left by them all over the continent. Huge Olmec sculptures perhaps representing people of African features, enormous man-made embankments on the Bolivian Beni, Machu Picchu — the impossible city tucked away among the clouds crowning the Andes, thousands of meters above sea level — the cities and pyramids of the Mayas and the Mexica, the large cities and villages of the North American nations which our archeologists are just beginning to explore. The legacy of these peoples is enormous and mysterious. All of these remnants of lost civilizations prompt us to ask: what happened to them? In Europe and Asia, Romans, Greeks, Slavs, Chinese, Egyptians, Persians lived on in one way or another. Despite history’s upheavals some peoples have managed to preserve part of their cultural heritage somehow. What happened in America? Why has so little survived of those ancient cultures?

1492: The Year We Made Contact

To us, Catholics, history is not merely a meaningless series of battles, invasions, dynasties and empires. For us history is the wonderful scenario on which God enacts the creation of man, the fall, the struggle for survival in a hostile world and the redemption of the human race. On this grand stage, God presents to us the drama of creation, using ages, kingdoms, races, continents and an enormous assortment of majestic and impressive things, as is proper to the power of his divine will. History can be viewed as a hidden Gospel which proclaims the Glory of God both in a subtle and magnificent way. Only God can perform such great works in time and space.

The Americas were hidden from the rest of the world up until the arrival of Christopher Columbus — in modern-day Santo Domingo — in October, 1492. There had been previous contacts between Europeans and Americans. In the 12th and 13th centuries Norwegian sailors had already set up trading centers in Greenland, Terranova and Maine. Some of them seem to have explored the shores of North America, reaching as far as present-day Cuba and Florida. Additionally, archeologists have found some pieces of porcelain made in China, which could be evidence of contacts between Asia and America. In any event, contact with peoples overseas seems to have been very rare or infrequent until that morning of October 12, 1492 when the Genoese admiral Christopher Columbus set foot for the first time on Hispaniola Island.

Who was Columbus?

Here, we must digress for a moment to take a look at this man, Christopher Columbus, whose historical figure becomes more and more important as years go by. Cristóforo Colombo, was a native of Genoa, “the proud queen of the sea” as her citizens still call her. This city in northern Italy has been for many centuries home to famous bankers, traders, shipbuilders and sailors. Also, the region under the domain of Genoa, Old Liguria, was once the homeland of Italy’s royal family. Some historians claim that Columbus was a member of a devout Jewish family that had converted to Christianity. That’s what his name seems to indicate. In those days, converts to Judaism used to take some particular names (from trees, birds) to indicate where they were coming from and, therefore, to be able to recognize each other after their conversion. “Columbo” means “dove” in the Genoese dialect, while Cristóforo means “the Christ bearer”. That is also St. Christopher’s name, a very popular saint with Genoese people of all times.

It is quite an amazing coincidence that Columbus should bear in his name the evidence of the Holy Spirit, traditionally represented as a dove and that he should have been entrusted to carry Christ across the Atlantic. Indeed, it is remarkable that his flagship should be the “Santa Maria” thus named after the Mother of God. That ship was bound to remain in the Americas since Columbus ordered to have it dismantled to build a small fort that he called “Santa Trinidad” (Holy Trinity) in honor of God Himself. Symbolically, Columbus brought in Mary, Jesus and the Holy Trinity to America and left them here as a seed for the faith of future generations.

Unforeseen Consequences of the First Contacts

The New World that Columbus opened up to the Europeans had been for many centuries cut off from the Old World. In 1492 Europe was entering the Modern Age, while the Americas were just reaching the Bronze Age. Yet, the clash of these two big blocs had such important implications that even today — five centuries later — there are many things we are just beginning to understand.

Both the Aztec and Inca empires could not have existed without the high numbers of people needed to run such complex societies. There is an obvious difference between the population of the Americas at the time of the discovery and the low population density at the time of the arrival of the European settlers. Cortez and Pizarro conquered very large territories for Spain with small armies of just a few hundred men. Once the natives were subdued, the Spanish crown never needed a standing army to keep the peace. That peace lasted from the early 16th century to the American wars of independence that, for the most part, broke out in the 18th century. Until very recently Historians estimated rather low population figures for all of the Americas around the time of the discovery but that estimation is being challenged now. In all likelihood, we will never know the exact number, but a rough guess puts it at several dozen million, probably in the vicinity of one hundred million. That was approximately the population of Europe at the time.

Not as Savage as the Invaders

In his book “1491”, journalist Charles C. Mann writes:

Before it became the New World, the Western Hemisphere was vastly more populous and sophisticated than has been thought — an altogether more salubrious place to live at the time than, say, Europe. New evidence of both the extent of the population and its agricultural advancement leads to a remarkable conjecture: the Amazon rain forest may be largely a human artifact.

To get an idea of how important the disappeared American civilizations were in the 16th century, we can take a look at the size and functionality of their cities. Tenochtitlan, the capital of the Aztec Empire, had running water and waste water systems. The streets were a model of cleanliness and tidiness maintained by a small force of organized workers. The citizens of Tenochtitlan lived in a much healthier and cleaner environment than did the king of France, who centuries later had the Versailles palace built without a single bathroom. In those years, for that matter, the world’s biggest city was not Rome or Paris or London: it was Tenochtitlan and all over the continent there were — before the arrival of the Europeans — some huge cities. We are just beginning to discover some of those ruins: Cahokia, Calakmul and many others

Available to us are reports by Hernan Cortez, Francisco Pizarro and other explorers who got to see these vast empires in their last days. Many of them were astonished at the grandeur and vitality of these urban centers. Contrary to what is widely believed, the Spanish conquerors did not destroy these cities in order to seize their treasures. While certainly there was sacking and mistreatment, most damage done by Europeans was completely unintentional. Four centuries had to pass before scientists like Jenner and Pasteur created the science of microbiology so that we could understand the invisible forces that swept away America’s indigenous nations.

The French explorer René Robert Sieur De La Salle left us a clue of what happened to some of those huge urban centers. He traveled in 1682 through the same Mississippi area that Hernando De Soto had explored a hundred years before. De Soto had not been able to establish a colony in that part of the world since it was “full of a large number of fenced villages and many well-trained archers”. A century later, La Salle found the ruins of those villages but they were no longer inhabited. The civilizations that had supported them just two generations before had vanished leaving the cities intact. De Soto had a chance to see a few cities like Cahokia from the relative safety of the rafts he used to explore the Mississippi. He saw the cities intact and active, packed with people and heavily guarded. What happened in the years following his visit is one of the saddest chapters in American history.

When Columbus left the island of Hispaniola in 1492, he also left one of his sailors who had fallen ill and died of the pox. In a somewhat disproportionate exchange, one of his returning officers also caught syphilis that was common among the Taino people on that island. Syphilis would reappear in Europe from time to time in the following centuries, killing a few thousands. At this time some even dispute the American origin of syphilis. However the effect of European diseases on the American population was going to be monumentally more devastating than anything that could have affected the Europeans.

In the following years, the pigs that Hernando de Soto had left behind in Georgia, a French sailor suffering from viral hepatitis who was shipwrecked off the Massachusetts shores, and many other sources of infection added to Columbus’ first visit, casting a dark mantle of pestilence and death which — according to some estimations — annihilated a sizable portion of the population. We have some evidence available of how the epidemic diseases spread from the Caribbean progressing in wide waves westward, northward and southward. Here is a brief timetable to help us put the early contacts in perspective.

—1492 Christopher Columbus makes his first contact.

—1510 Diego de Velazquez settles in Cuba.

—1519 Hernan Cortez arrives in Mexico

—1531 Francisco Pizarro reached Cajamarca in Peru

—1540 the last expedition of Hernando De Soto lands in Florida.

—1597 the first English settlers reach the coast of Virginia.

—1620 the Pilgrims reach Plymouth, Massachusetts.

This completes a period of about 130 years. When the English settlers came to Massachusetts they found the coastal aboriginal populations completely decimated by the plague. That was probably viral hepatitis caught from a Frenchman that survived a shipwreck off the coast of Cape Cod and was rescued by the natives.

When Francisco Pizarro reached Cajamarca in Peru in the year of 1531 a pox epidemic had already swept through the Inca empire, killing approximately twenty per cent of the population in a few years. There are strong reasons to believe this was the consequence of the 1492 contact in Hispaniola.

Among the victims were Huayno Capac, the Inca and his heir Ninan Coyuchui. The resulting power vacuum brought about a civil war between Atahualpa and Huaskar — both likely heirs to the throne — adding to the hardships of the population that have barely survived the plague. Just a few days after overcoming his enemies and consolidating the kingdom’s peace, Atahualpa learned about Pizarro’s landing. By December of 1531 the Incas no longer ruled their vast empire. The end came rapidly to those civilizations that had thrived in South America for so many centuries. At their height they ruled from Ecuador to the south of Chile, from the Peruvian shores on the Pacific to the edge of the great Amazonian basin in what is now Bolivia and Brazil.

Had it not been for the diseases, which weakened all of the American societies without exception, the conquest of America would have been as impossible as the full conquest of China or Japan. History would have been entirely different. The Spanish, French and English who would eventually settle down in America, could do so because the native societies had been undermined by successive waves of smallpox, diphtheria, influenza, and other maladies, some of which still exist today. These facts seem to indicate that the original population of the Americas was indeed much higher before the discovery. It was the European diseases that decimated the aboriginal population. As the Europeans began to arrive in earnest — about a century after the first contact — they found a nearly empty continent. Yet, that was not the way it was before the discovery.

In December, 1531 — at the same time Pizarro consolidated his conquest of Peru — at the other end of the American continent, the bishop of Mexico got a surprising report: The Virgin Mary had appeared to a modest native called Juan Diego Cuauhtlatoatzin on Tepeyac hill near Tenochtitlan. A series of remarkable miracles confirmed the apparition. This miracle was followed by thousands of conversions among the natives and about nine million American Christians were received into the Church in the years to follow. The conversions cover the territories extending between California and the shores of the Gulf of Mexico. Thus began the evangelization of America guided by Mary of Nazareth.

We will leave this account here to take up this narrative from a new angle tomorrow, in Part Two.