CHAPTER 1: 1492: The Seven Deadly Sins Tumble out of Europe

The European Conquest of Another World: The Columbian Encounter

STARTING IN 1492, MANY OF THESE LIMITLESS, INNOVATIVE, INDIVIDUALISTIC self-seekers were tumbled out of Europe and set loose on generous, communal, stable and nonaggressive societies. They were tumbled out of their homelands to reveal what was really in their hearts. The sight was not a pretty one.

They had enormous military advantages: cannon, firearms, the horse, the caravel, armor, navigational instruments. In their aggressive, innovative, monotheistic mentalité, they had an added advantage. The Spanish "wore their religion like a sword . . . against all who were not, or who did not rapidly become, Christians." (In many ways they were not Christians themselves, but the conquistadors were not much given to introspection.) The effects were catastrophic. The Aztec population had declined 95 percent seventy-five years after the conquest, and that percentage was typical of other societies! By far the largest losses were to European diseases, for indigenous peoples lacked immun-ity to them. The Pilgrims' friend Squanto was the last survivor of his Patuxet tribe, once numbering two thousand, which was devastated by disease.

We have to be clear in how we describe this catastrophe. As historian James Axtell cogently argues, it was not genocide: the spread of disease, the main killer, was unintentional. No European state tried to destroy Indians as a race. If for no other reason, profit-seeking Europeans found Indians valuable as workers and trading partners. To describe these Europeans as genocidal is to demonize them, to exaggerate their racist violence, to make them safely unlike our modern selves so that we need not confront the darkness in our own souls. Their violence was not a uniquely European problem, for the Iroquois tried to destroy the Huron in 1649.²⁹

That is not to downplay the conquest's horrible reality. On Columbus's second voyage, after he fell sick his Spanish forces lost all self-control: they "went wild, stealing, killing, raping, and torturing natives, trying to force them to divulge the whereabouts of the imagined treasure-houses of gold." Recovered, Columbus systematized the terror by ordering that the hands be cut off any adult Indian who did not bring the Spanish a set quantity of gold. Supposedly in the Aztec capital on a peaceful mission, Cortés's conquistadors suddenly began to massacre Aztecs. Throughout their famous campaign, they killed, destroyed, raped and terrorized with attack dogs, which ate slain Aztecs. Elizabethan English explorers "wished to emulate the conquistadors, by subduing native cities and kingdoms." They used their military superiority to kidnap, steal, rape and murder.³⁰ It was as if the seven deadly sins had escaped Europe, taken to horseback and galloped across the Americas.

With his superior weapons, every European adventurer could now hope to acquire the wealth, booty, women and lordship previously available only to the European elite. He was freed from restraints imposed by king, church or public opinion, now thousands of miles removed. He could "profit beyond the reach of the king." Europe had few constraints on self-interest, but the Englishman or Spaniard away from home was freed even from these.³¹

More than military weakness hindered indigenous peoples in resisting this assault. Their human-centered, traditional, naturalistic, polytheistic, generous worldview weakened them. In 1614-1618, Indians who first encountered English ships off the New England coast took them to be floating islands complete with trees (masts), thunder and lightning (cannon). Others took the English for manitous, spirit beings, who had to be placated. A century earlier, the Aztecs briefly had "the paralyzing belief that the Spaniards [were] gods." They saw the Spaniards' ability to write and to decipher written messages as godlike.

Cortés took advantage of the Aztecs' polytheistic uncertainty as to whether the Spaniards' horses were gods or animals. He secretly buried dead horses at night to encourage a belief that horses were immortal. An English captain magnetized his sword "to cause [the Indians] to imagine some great power in us . . . and for that to love and feare us." Indians felt a paralyzing awe of European objects. They lacked a strengthening belief that their deity was above such material objects.³²

Europeans' belief in one invisible God gave them a temporary advantage. They could never mistakenly venerate objects or take indigenous peoples for gods. They did not fear and obey this invisible God, but they used the doctrine of his invisible nature to free themselves from a limiting veneration of visible objects. They were limited by reverence for neither God nor objects.

Veneration of objects also weakened the natives when Europeans used consumer goods to win their friendship and secure their dependence. Quick to learn the relative worth of goods, they as quickly became dependent on European consumer goods. For them, objects had communal and religious, as well as individual, meanings. Europeans normally did not use objects in self-abnegating worship of God; they used them for self-exalting pleasure. In the process, Europeans created goods that were more appealing and accessible to Indians than their abstract religious ideas. For example, a mirror powerfully appealed to human vanity. Young warriors wore small mirrors around their wrists or on their shoulders and constantly altered their face-paint, hair, necklaces and so on in a "preoccupation with personal fashion."³³

Traditionalism and communalism left them ill-prepared to deal with Europeans' limitless, individualistic innovation. Aztec culture was very ordered, past-oriented and communal: "The individual's future is ruled by the collective past." Believing that history repeats itself in cycles, they consulted the past to determine how to respond to the Spanish, for surely this had happened before.

Improvising was difficult for them. Cortés improvised brilliantly, inventing conquest's goals and means as he went along. Nominally obedient to Christendom's evangelizing mission, he claimed to have come "to extol and preach faith in Christ." To that motive he added "honor and profit," which he admitted was an innovation, for these "seldom fit in the same bag." He threw them all together: "Let us go forth, serving God, honoring our nation, giving growth to our king, and let us become rich ourselves; for the Mexican enterprise is for all these purposes." Means became ends, and ends means, as Cortés's conquistadors used religion "to give themselves courage" for the dangerous, self-seeking conquest.³⁴

Communicating the truth of one invisible God proved much harder than selling mirrors. Commerce and conquest were usually higher priorities than conversion. Yahweh seemed a very abstract idea to people used to gods in nature, and he did not appeal to their human vanity. In 1605, the English briefly left one Owen Griffin among the Abenaki. The Abenaki laughed at this "Igrismannak" when he denied worshiping moon, sun or stars--though he lifted his hands toward heaven. Indigenous peoples could not easily comprehend the concept of sin either, since their morality derived from human social needs, not from divine command.³⁵

Missionary work was frustrating for the Spanish, French and English. Spanish efforts were greatly hindered by the legacy of their forcible expulsion of Muslims from the Iberian peninsula and their forced conversion of Jews there. That left a "confusion between conquest and Christianization." Conversion was involuntary. Before proceeding, a Spanish conqueror had to read to natives the infamous Requerimiento. It grandly announced Christianity's and the pope's worldwide supremacy and Pope Alexander VI's grant of most of the Americas to Spain. They had to obey the Catholic Church and the Spanish king. If they refused, the document threatened them with war, slavery, loss of property and imminent destruction. As Bartolomé de Las Casas, an early Spanish missionary and defender of the Indians, wrote, this made "mockery of truth and justice and [was] a great insult to our Christian faith and the piety and charity of Jesus Christ." It was more like Simon Peter cutting off the ear of the high priest's servant. Thus Spanish Franciscans burned Pueblo religious materials, whipped nonbelieving Pueblos and required daily attendance at Mass for baptized Pueblos. Not surprisingly, the Pueblo externally acquiesced to Christianity while maintaining the old religion within their small groups.³⁶

The French were more understanding of indigenous cultures and more cynical about papal decrees. Hearing of Pope Alexander VI's decree, King Francis I of France exclaimed, "I would be pleased to see the clause in Adam's testament that excludes me from a share in the globe." French missions were led by the Jesuits, who adapted Christianity to appeal to receptive elements in each indigenous culture. They achieved great success with the Huron, for example, but their pragmatic approach led to many Huron converting for pragmatic reasons: to keep family ties with prior converts, to obey dreams about being baptized or to obtain preferential treatment from French traders.³⁷ The Huron were shrewd too.

Puritan missions produced fewer converts in New England. Products of the Protestant Reformation, Puritans concentrated too obsessively on their argument with Catholicism to be very missions-minded. They were reverse images of the Jesuits--intolerant of everything in indigenous culture lest it recontaminate their own Christianity. They focused on their own survival. Despite their demand that converts make a total cultural change, they convinced a surprising number of Massachusets and Wampanoags to break with their past and become "praying Indians."³⁸