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By Root 1952 0

for instance, Pocahontas likely did save his life, although little of the rest of the legend embodied in the Disney cartoon is true. The girl’s name, for instance, was actually Mataoka—pocahontas, a teasing nickname, meant something like “little hellion.” Mataoka was a priestess-in-training—a kind of pniese- to-be—in the central town of the Powhatan alliance, a powerful confederacy in tidewater Virginia. Aged about twelve, she may have protected Smith, but not, as he wrote, by interceding when he was a captive and about to be executed in 1607. In fact, the “execution” was probably a ritual staged by Wahunsenacawh, head of the Powhatan alliance, to establish his authority over Smith by making him a member of the group; if Mataoka interceded, she was simply playing her assigned role in the ritual. The incident in which she may have saved Smith’s life occurred a year later, when she warned the English that Wahunsenacawh, who had tired of them, was about to attack. In the Disney version, Smith returns to England after a bad colonist shoots him in the shoulder. In truth, he did leave Virginia in 1609 for medical treatment, but only because he somehow blew up a bag of gunpowder while wearing it around his neck.

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*6 Gorges may have met Tisquantum before. In 1605 the adventurer George Weymouth abducted five Indians, conning three into boarding his ship voluntarily and seizing the other two by the hair. According to Gorges’s memoirs, Tisquantum was one of the five. He stayed with Gorges for nine years, after which he went to New England with John Smith. If this is correct, Tisquantum had barely come home before being kidnapped again. Historians tend to discount Gorges’s tale, partly because his memoirs, dictated late in life, mix up details, and partly because the notion that Tisquantum was abducted twice just seems incredible.

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*7 Runa Simi (Quechua, to the Spanish) is the language of all Inka names, including “Inka.” I use the standard Runa Simi romanization, which means that I do not use the Spanish “Inca.”

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*8 The Inka sovereign had the title of “Inka”—he was the Inka—but he could also include “Inka” in his name. In addition, Inka elites changed their names as they went through their lives. Each Inka was thus known by several names, any of which might include “Inka.”

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*9 Because of their obsession with gold, the conquistadors are often dismissed as “gold crazy.” In fact they were not so much gold crazy as status crazy. Like Hernán Cortés, who conquered Mexico, Pizarro was born into the lower fringes of the nobility and hoped by his exploits to earn titles, offices, and pensions from the Spanish crown. To obtain these royal favors, their expeditions had to bring something back for the king. Given the difficulty and expense of transportation, precious metals—“nonperishable, divisible, and compact,” as historian Matthew Restall notes—were almost the only goods that they could plausibly ship to Europe. Inka gold and silver thus represented to the Spaniards the intoxicating prospect of social betterment.

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*10 Just one major disease, syphilis, is believed to have spread the other way, from the Americas to Europe, though this has long been controversial. See Appendix C, “The Syphilis Exception.”

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*11 Because the point is persistently misunderstood, it bears repeating that Indians’ relative genetic homogeneity does not imply genetic inferiority. Even a champion of Indians like historian Francis Jennings got this wrong: “The Europeans’ capacity to resist certain diseases,” he wrote in his polemical Invasion of America, “made them superior, in the pure Darwinian sense, to the Indians.” No: Spaniards simply represented a wider genetic array. Asserting their superiority is like saying that the motley mob at a football game is somehow intrinsically superior to the closely related attendees of a family reunion.

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*12 In 2004 two U.S. anthropologists and a Venezuelan medical researcher proposed that Native American