1491
Charles C Mann
Vintage Books, 2011.
ISBN 978-1-4000-3205-1; 553 pages.
Kevin Baldeosingh
What were the Americas like before the arrival of Christopher Columbus in 1492?
If you only did History up to Form Five, then you probably have a lot of wrong information and, if you did History at the tertiary level, you probably have even more.
For example, even the number of people living in what is now South and North America and the Caribbean islands has been disputed for the past 30 years and, despite new findings in archaeology and ecology and genetics, the issue is not really settled yet. But this book by journalist Charles C Mann provides an excellent overview of the various arguments and the best probable estimates.
“One way to sum up the new scholarship is to say that it has begun, at least, to fill in one of the biggest blanks in history: the Western hemisphere before 1492,” he writes. “It was, in the current view, a thriving, stunningly diverse place, a tumult of languages, trade, and culture, a region where tens of millions of people loved and hated and worshipped as people do everywhere. Much of this world vanished after Columbus, swept away by disease and subjugation.”
This particular event—the arrival of Columbus—is, directly and otherwise, the centre of many of the controversies about the state of the Americas before 1492. There is no doubt that most of the inhabitants died after the arrival of the Europeans, starting with Herman Cortes’ invasion of Mexico. But the propaganda infects the historical account by making it appear as though the Spaniards immediately set about slaughtering the natives. In fact, although more than 90 per cent of the Americas’ inhabitants died, the main cause was disease.
Mann writes: “Time and time again Europeans described the People of the First Light as strikingly healthy specimens. Eating an incredibly nutritious diet, working hard but not broken by toil, the people of New England were taller and more robust than those who wanted to move in...because famine and epidemic disease had been rare in the Dawnland, its inhabitants had none of the pox scars and rickety limbs common on the other side of the Atlantic.”
But it was this very health which caused the Amerindians to die in such vast numbers: never having been exposed to diseases like the Europeans, their immune systems simply had no resistance to the Old World viruses. Smallpox was the main killer, and the Spaniards were not happy about it. This, however, was only because they were not pleased that the labour force they had enslaved so quickly died out.
Mann notes that estimates of the percentages of the dead affect the calculations of the population of the New World before the Europeans arrived. He points out that the estimates made by the first colonists were done after this initial arrival, which led to two mistaken perceptions – one, that the post-disease populations represented an average; and, two, since the survivors were from rural areas, urbanisation was an exception rather than a rule.
In fact, the new research suggests that the New World population may have been as high as 40 million (rather the lowball estimate of six million) and it is now established that two of the world’s first civilisations (as measured by writing systems and mathematical knowledge and construction techniques) were located here —the Olmec in Mexico and another in Peru discovered only in the 21st century.
Even if this were not the case, the contribution of the New World societies to the modern world remains important: for, even in secondary school, you may have learned that they gave the world maize, tomatoes, all the squashes, many of the beans and, most importantly for doubles eaters, peppers.