Europeans became aware of the Americas in the late fifteenth century, and during the sixteenth century a number of people wrote histories of the newly discovered lands and their peoples. Some of the writers had never been to the Americas and based their books on documents and on interviews with explorers, soldiers, missionaries, and others who had returned to Europe. There were also some who wrote from personal experience with the new lands. A few of these early histories are briefly described below.
One of the earliest, and most influential, books about the Americas is De orbe novo decades (Of the new world) written by Peter Martyr d’Anghera (1457-1526) and published in Spain in 1516. The Spanish King Charles V appointed Martyr, who had never been to the Americas, as the first official chronicler of the New World. Writing in Latin, Martyr grouped his accounts into sets of ten chapters or reports called decades. In her book Sacred Gifts, Profane Pleasures: A History of Tobacco and Chocolate in the Atlantic World, Marcy Norton writes:
“His prestigious position allowed him unparalleled access to manuscript reports of New World expeditions and personal interviews with returnees. Martyr saw in America a mirror that reflected Europe’s flaws, among them short-sighted materialism, decay, and corruption. The Antilles that rise from his pages is a lost Eden, peopled by noble savages, deprived of the light of Christianity but blessed with pure souls ripe for conversion.”
Marcy Norton also reports:
“Martyr described Indian culture from the comfort, safety, and security of his position in Madrid, a distant vantage point from which it was easy to relay exotic detail of foreign peoples within a story intended to comment on European shortcomings and excite pride in the new discoveries.”
In 1530, a new edition of Peter Martyr d’Anghera’s De orbe novo decades (Of the new world) was published posthumously. The new edition told of the conquest of Mexico. Marcy Norton writes:
“Viewing the discoveries through the lens of fifteenth-century Italian humanism, Martyr found Mexico reminiscent of an overdeveloped, sophisticated Rome inhabited by decadent pagans, with cultural achievements that superseded Europe’s though handicapped by its idolatrous ways. Martyr introduced chocolate in the context of the almost incomprehensible luxuries of Moctezuma’s court—flowing gold and ‘1,500 garments of Gossampine cotton.’”
(Gossampine cotton is a thin, sheer fabric.) Marcy Norton also writes:
“If he didn’t invent the now-familiar noble savage, Martyr contributed greatly to the vision of ‘naked men’ uncorrupted by insatiable greed and desire for vain luxuries, the perfect negative of degenerate, overdressed civilized men with their useless ‘heaps of gold.’”
In 1536, the royal chronicler of the Indies, Gonzalo Fernández de Oviedo y Valdés (1478-1557), published La historia general de las Indias (The general history of the Indies). The work was published at his own expense. Oviedo had participated in the Spanish colonization of the West Indies. In 1514, he had been appointed as the supervisor of gold smelting at Santo Domingo. When he returned to Spain in 1523, he was appointed historian of the West Indies.
Marcy Norton writes:
“He declared the native population so innately perverse that they would never embrace the Catholic faith. Oviedo asserted that the indigenous inhabitants’ unusual ‘thick’ skulls were proof of their ‘bestial understanding.’”
Oviedo also describes many of the native animals of the Indies and introduces his readers to such things as hammocks, barbecues, pineapples, and tobacco.
In 1550, King Charles called together a group of leading theologians and scholars in Valladolid to determine the criteria by which a just war could be waged against Native Americans. Bartolomé de Las Casas (1484-1566) presented the idea that Christianity should be spread by kindness and example rather than by the sword. This was not a popular concept, and the Spanish authorities suppressed the detailed defense of the humanity of Native Americans prepared by Las Casas.
In 1554, Francisco López de Gómara (1511-1559), one of the greatest enemies of Bartolomé de Las Casas, published his Historia general de las Indias (General History of the Indians.) According to historian Lee Huddleston, in Origins of the American Indians: European Concepts, 1492-1729:
“The author despised the Indians and filled his volume with outrageous characterizations of them.”
López described Indians as the worst people God ever made and felt that they should be enslaved because they did not deserve liberty. López de Gómara had never been to America.
With regard to tobacco, López described Native American religious leaders as “priests of the devil” who “take in the smoke through the noses” which enabled them to “leave their senses and see a thousand visions.”
In 1565, Girolamo Benzoni (1519-1570), a Milanese merchant, published his Historia del mundo nuovo (History of the New World) in Venice. The book was based on his 15 years in the Americas and provided descriptions of Spanish cruelty to American Indians. The book also described many aspects of Native culture, including foods, dances, and building methods. The book proved to be popular, going through eleven editions between 1565 and 1727. The book contributed to Spain’s negative reputation in the Americas.
In 1565, Nicolas Monardes (1493-1588) published Dos libros, El uno trata de todas las cosas que traen de nuestras Indias Occidentales que sirven al uso de medicina (translation: Two books, Book one contains those things brought from our West Indies that are useful in medicine). The book was published in three parts: 1565, 1569, and 1574. Marcy Norton writes:
“He was the first humanist-trained university doctor to systematically consider materia medica, a dramatic reversal of the hostility humanist-inclined botanists and physicians had shown to New World substances until that point. Going further, Mondardes advanced the claim that the West Indies has usurped the role of the East Indies as the world’s singular source of pharmacopoeia.”
Marcy Norton also writes:
“The medical profession provided him with a conceptual framework and vocabulary based on classical authors, yet the dominant intellectual currents of his field resisted the incorporation of American species into European apothecaries.”
The European medical view at this time focused on four essential properties—hot, cold, wet, dry—which, within the human body, corresponded to the four humors—blood, yellow bile, black bile, phlegm. Marcy Norton writes:
“He considered twenty-four different medicinals in this first edition, including copal, liquidambar, balsam, guaiacum, ‘China root,’ sarsaparilla, chili peppers, Cassia fistula, and mechoacan—to which he gave the most emphasis.”
Menardes did not travel to the Americas but relied on informants, including soldiers, merchants, and others, who brought back information and specimens.
In 1571, Nicolas Monardes published the third part of his Historia medicinal de las cosas que se traen de nuestras Indias Occidentales. In this work, he continued his discussion of American medicinal remedies and an extensive study of tobacco.
Menardes felt that tobacco had many medical uses, and he outlined 20 curative uses for tobacco, including stomachaches, gas, parasites, children’s breathing problems, rheumatism, swelling, bloating, poisonings, various skin diseases, uterine ailments, and toothaches, His book also included a section on using tobacco to cure animals. Marcy Norton writes:
“Monardes did more, however, than describe tobacco’s properties when ingested or applied to the body. He also gave an explanation for why tobacco did what it did.”
Within the European framework of the four essential properties, tobacco provided heat. Marcy Norton writes:
“He explained that the therapies worked because the heat of tobacco would dissolve the surplus cold humors that caused congestion and discomfort in the head and chest.”
Because tobacco is used in Native American pagan ceremonies, many Europeans associate it with the Christian Devil. Marcy Norton writes:
“Lurking just below the surface of Monardes’s discussion of tobacco was the question of whether Europeans who embraced the American herb became the pagan, potentially diabolically inspired, idolaters whom they emulated.”
Monardes makes it clear that while tobacco is used in pagan ceremonies, tobacco itself is innocent. Menardes writes:
“As the devil is a deceiver, and has knowledge of the properties of herbs, he showed them the virtue of this one, so that with it he could see those imagined things, and the fantasies they represented, and through them he deceived them.”
Many Europeans at this time associated tobacco with the Christian Devil. Marcy Norton writes:
“In this scheme, tobacco itself did not cause demonic delusions, but rather put its users into a drunken state of altered consciousness that allowed the devil to place ‘fantasies and illusions’ in their minds.”.
Marcy Norton also writes:
“With this explanation of tobacco’s psychotropic effects, he appropriated and intervened in a contemporary debate about the balance of natural and supernatural forces and the power of the devil.”
Thomas Hariot’s A Briefe and True Report of the New Found Land of Virginia, which evaluated the economic potential of Virginia, was published in 1588. Thomas Hariot (ca. 1540-1621; also spelled Herriot), was an English mathematician, astronomer, linguist, and experimental scientist. In 1580, Hariot had been hired by Walter Raleigh (also spelled Ralegh) as a mathematics tutor and become Raleigh’s primary assistant in planning the English colonies in North Carolina. In the Americas, he learned the Algonquian language from two Virginia Indians.
In her chapter in North American Exploration. Volume 1: A New World Disclosed, historian Karen Ordahl Kupperman writes:
“Hariot, with his command of the language, gave a fully rounded picture of Indian life, religion, government, and social structure. He was sensitive to the changes being wrought in that life by the coming of Europeans; he reported the Indians’ agonized bewilderment over the disease that killed so many of them.”
In her book On Savage Shores: How Indigenous Americans Discovered Europe, Caroline Dodds Pennock writes:
“It seems that behind every successful invader or writer of this period is an Indigenous collaborator. For these men were not working alone but surrounded by Native people, men and women whose labour—whether given freely or not—should not be forgotten.”
Caroline Dodds Pennock reports:
“While in Ralegh’s household, Hariot met with two Algonquian-speaking men—Manteo and Wanchese—who had been brought to England by the 1584 expedition Ralegh funded to scope out the possibilities for settlement in the Americas.”
From these men, he had learned Algonquian and invented a phonetic alphabet. Caroline Dodds Pennock writes:
“This text is not the product of European research, a white man’s hard work of observation: this was a collaboration between Manteo and Hariot (and perhaps also Wanchese).”
The 1590 edition of A Briefe and True Report of the New Found Land of Virginia, published by Theodor de Bry, included etchings based on the maps produced by artist John White and Thomas Hariot and by White’s watercolors of Indian life.
The Europeans, firm in their belief that all people descended from Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden, attempted to explain the presence of Indians in a land far away from where the Garden of Eden was supposed to have existed. In 1590, Spanish Jesuit missionary José de Acosta (1539-1600), in his Historia natural y moral de las Indias postulated that American Indians arrived in the New World by walking across a land bridge from Asia. He suggested that this migration may have taken place 2,000 years prior to the arrival of the Spanish.This reason was not based on Indian oral tradition or on any “hard” evidence. In his book Bones, Boats, and Bison: Archeology and the First Colonization of Western North America, anthropologist James Dixon writes:
“The reason he held this premise was that he believed that the human species had originated in the Old World based on the teachings of the Bible.”
According to historian José Rabasa, in his book Inventing America: Spanish Historiography and the Formation of Eurocentralism:
“But Acosta also faces the task of explaining how the descendants of Noah became the idolatrous barbarians of the New World. For this he provides a theory of their degeneration to a state of savagery and a posterior reinvention of culture under the tutelage of Satan.”
In 1592, Theodor de Bry (1528-1598) published a multivolume work America, which became the standard reference work on the Americas. The work was illustrated with engravings based on drawings by Jacques Lemoyne. In his chapter in The Changing Presentation of the American Indian: Museums and Native Cultures, Evan Maurer reports that:
“…the depictions of Native Americans in de Bry’s America are based on late-Renaissance models, which were themselves inspired by the much-admired classicism of Greece and Rome. These images were among the earliest ‘neoclassical’ portrayals of the American Indian in the romantic guise of ‘the noble savage.’”
Theodor de Bry, a Protestant, had been forced to flee from his native Spanish-controlled Netherlands by the Inquisition and settled in Germany.
Over the next few centuries, Europeans will continue to produce various histories of the Americas, some based on personal experience, some based on biblical interpretations, some based on documentary evidence and interviews. The sixteenth-century histories provided the basic patterns of the histories of the later centuries.
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