Our own asymmetrical imaginative anachronisms

From American Heroes by Edmund S. Morgan, page 5.

During the decade before 1492, as Columbus nursed a growing urge to sail west to the Indies, he was studying the old writers to find out what the world and its people were like. He read the Ymago Mundi of Pierre d'Ailly, a French cardinal of the early fifteenth century, the travels of Marco Polo and of Sir John Mandeville, Pliny's Natural History, and the Historia Rerum Ubique Gestarum of Aeneas Sylvius Piccolomini (Pope Pius II). Columbus was not a scholarly man. He could take a ship where no one had dared go before and bring it back again, but he did so by the dead reckoning of the practical sailor, not by the scholarly methods of celestial navigation. He probably learned to read only after he had grown up. And while he had the genius of simplicity, the nerve to act on a thought, he never shone at the things one learned from books. Yet he studied these books, made hundreds of marginal notations in them, and came out with ideas about the world that were characteristically simple and strong and sometimes wrong, the kind of ideas that the self-educated person gains from independent reading and clings to in defiance of what anyone else tries to tell him.

The strongest one was a wrong one—namely, that the distance between Europe and the eastern shore of Asia was short.
According to Cardinal d'Ailly, Columbus noted, Aristotle and Seneca both thought that the ocean separating Spain from China could be traversed in a few days. And his own erroneous calculations of the small size of the earth led him to a similar conclusion. Although he was familiar enough with the waters of the eastern Atlantic to know that the distance could not be quite as short as the cardinal said, he thought it was much less than most of his own contemporaries supposed. He believed that Spain was closer to China westward than eastward.

Columbus never abandoned this conviction. And before he set out to prove it by sailing west from Spain, he studied his books to find out all he could about the lands that he would be visiting: China, Japan, and India, the lands known to Europe as the Indies. From Marco Polo, the Venetian who had traveled there two centuries earlier, he learned that the Indies were rich in gold, silver, pearls, jewels, and spices. The Great Khan, whose empire stretched from the Arctic to the Indian Ocean, had displayed to Marco Polo a wealth and majesty that dwarfed the splendors of the courts of Europe. The khan's family of four thousand retainers dined together in one great hall from golden dishes; his twelve thousand barons were dressed in cloth of gold with belts o gold. When traveling, he slept in tents that could hold two thousand men and that were wrought with gold and lined with ermine and sable.

In yesterday's post, I spoke of how difficult it is for us to put ourselves into the position of knowing only what they knew and how strongly what they saw was shaped by what they expected to see.

This is another example of that failure as we think about past events, constrained by our own imaginative anachronisms. We know how things turned out and therefore we ignore what they imagined to be true.

It is a common indictment today to rain abuse upon Columbus as a mass murderer. This doubly misses the mark. Granted that he was cruel to a degree incomprehensible today but fully in accord with modern thought of the fifteenth century.

But the charge of mass murder is sustained by two false assumptions. The first is that the undeniable cruelty of Columbus (and other Europeans) was the cause of the collapse and near extermination of Native American populations. Yes, there was enslavement, battles, murders and massacres which can be rightly condemned as incompatible with modern mores.

Mass murders and massacres were not what caused the collapse. 99% of Native American deaths were caused by disease, diseases so lethal and so recurring that whole peoples and all institutions collapsed. But that was a function of exposure to one another between two ancient, and long isolated, populations. Such lethality was not unknown in the Old World. From Justinian's Plague (15-20% extermination of existing populations) to the Black Death (30-60% death rate), as modernity of transportation established exchanges between long isolated populations of Eurasia, so too was there mass die-offs as virgin populations confronted diseases for which they had no immunity.

The charge that Columbus caused the collapse of Native American populations has no basis other than our own imaginative anachronisms. The germ theory of disease was centuries in the future of Columbus. There was no way for anyone to understand why the die-offs occurred other than a casual sense of correlation.

The second reason that the accusation misses the mark is in the above quoted passages. We know that Columbus and the other Spaniards of the first century of exploration encountered populations at different stages of socio-political complexity and that those of lesser complexity, such as the Arawak, had no capacity to effectively resist Spanish intrusions.

We know that there was immense disparity between the socio-political and technological complexity of the Spaniards and the populations they actually encountered. But as the passages above indicate, that is not what they expected to encounter. Columbus, and for the first decade or two, the Spaniards in general, expected and thought they were going to encounter and be dealing with an advanced civilization, a civilization equal, if different, to their own.

We tell ourselves today a story informed by an almost willful incapacity to cast ourselves back to the world as it was known then. We see, and assign blame for, an extinction of New World populations. The reality was that Columbus anticipated, and his behaviors and actions were shaped by a belief that he was encountering a powerful and even superior civilization and that the population collapse was something he neither could have foreseen or done anything about.

Even today, with all our sophisticated science, communication, organization, material sophistication and logistical capability to deploy resources, we struggle to constrain outbreaks of deadly diseases, such as Ebola or Zika or Avian Influenza or SARS, about which we have pre-existing knowledge and some reasonable level of understanding. We are successful because of all that accumulated knowledge and technology and organizational capability, but it is often a close-run thing.