Flashes of Panic

Last night we went to see Elizabeth: The Golden Age, a sequel to the 1998 movie (how often do movies wait nine years for their sequels?) which deals with, among other things, the early stages of English exploration of North America. Sir Walter Raleigh blows in to court to seek funding for his colonization of North America (a quest one of his nephews would continue quite near where I grew up) and proposes to name the entire region “Virginia, for our Virgin Queen.” Elizabeth smirks a bit and ripostes, “If I am to marry, will you rename it Conjugia?”

Raleigh paints a picture of a “New World” largely peopled by savages without kings of their own, tempting Elizabeth to reach for empire, but he was speaking with his own agenda. On the trip to and from Stuttgart, I chewed through Charles Mann’s 1491, which promises in its subtitle “New revelations of the Americas before Columbus.” One of these “revelations” is that some recent estimates place the population density of America before Columbus significantly higher than that of Europe, at least in some sections of South and Central America, a picture somewhat different from Raleigh’s. Even the area around present-day Boston had, 100 years before the Pilgrims arrived, a dense enough population that the various groups often tried to push others away to gain more space for themselves.

Mann seems to find his subtitle problematic, and admits that many of the “revelations” he delivers date back to the 1960s or earlier. But, he points out, many high school and college texts are still being printed which paint a portrait of the Americas prior to 1492 which is now under attack, if not flat out wrong. The picture of pre-Columbian America which most of us are taught today was created by the dominant (Western) culture out of ignorance, mis-reading of the evidence, and attempts to avoid the realities of their own effects on the continent. The picture of the Americas as thinly populated, for example, largely ignores the horrific epidemics of illnesses common in Europe but unheard of in America, which killed (depending on whose reports you believe) as many as nineteen in every twenty Indians before the Europeans were able to get established on the continent, let alone take a census.

Mann tries to steer clear of accusations, finger-pointing, and blame-assigning. He picks out a few scholars who he considers responsible for the mischaracterization of entire continents, but generally finds them mistaken rather than malicious. More than anything else, he prefers to put some kind of scale on the kind of cultures we (a collective, global “we”) have lost in the collision of continents five hundred years ago, and the result is actually quite fascinating.

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