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Motecuhzoma, according to many scholarly texts, believed that Cortés was the god-hero Quetzalcoatl returning home, in fulfillment of a prophecy. What historian Barbara Tuchman called the emperor’s “wooden-headedness, in the special variety of religious mania” is often said to be why he didn’t order his army to wipe out the Spaniards immediately. But the anthropologist Matthew Restall has noted that none of the conquistadors’ writings mention this supposed apotheosis, not even Cortés’s lengthy memos to the Spanish king, which go into detail about every other wonderful thing he did. Instead the Quetzalcoatl story first appears decades later. True, the Mexica apparently did call the Spaniards teteo, a term referring both to gods and to powerful, privileged people. The ambiguity captures the indigenous attitude toward the hairy, oddly dressed strangers on their shores: recognition that their presence was important, plus a willingness to believe that such unusual people might have qualities unlike those of ordinary men and women.

Similarly, groups like the Wampanoag, Narragansett, and Haudenosaunee in eastern North America also thought at first that Europeans might have supernatural qualities. But this was because Indians north and south regarded Europeans as human beings exactly like themselves. In their view of the world, certain men and women, given the right circumstances, could wield more-than-human powers. If the Wampanoag and Mexica had shamans who could magically inflict sickness, why couldn’t the British? (The Europeans, who themselves believed that people could become witches and magically spread disease, were hardly going to argue.)

As a rule, Indians were theologically prepared for the existence of Europeans. In Choctaw lore, for example, the Creator breathed life into not one but many primeval pairs of human beings scattered all over the earth. It could not have been terribly surprising to Choctaw thinkers that the descendants of one pair should show up in the territory of another. Similarly, the Zuni took the existence of Spaniards in stride, though not their actions. To the Zuni, whose accounts of their origins and early history are as minutely annotated as those in the Hebrew Bible, all humankind arose from a small band that faded into existence in a small, dark, womb-like lower world. The sun took pity on these bewildered souls, gave them maize to eat, and distributed them across the surface of the earth. The encounter with Europeans was thus a meeting of long-separated cousins.

Contact with Indians caused Europeans considerably more consternation. Columbus went to his grave convinced that he had landed on the shores of Asia, near India. The inhabitants of this previously unseen land were therefore Asians—hence the unfortunate name “Indians.” As his successors discovered that the Americas were not part of Asia, Indians became a dire anthropogonical problem. According to Genesis, all human beings and animals perished in the Flood except those on Noah’s ark, which landed “upon the mountains of Ararat,” thought to be in eastern Turkey. How, then, was it possible for humans and animals to have crossed the immense Pacific? Did the existence of Indians negate the Bible, and Christianity with it?

Among the first to grapple directly with this question was the Jesuit educator José de Acosta, who spent a quarter century in New Spain. Any explanation of Indians’ origins, he wrote in 1590, “cannot contradict Holy Writ, which clearly teaches that all men descend from Adam.” Because Adam had lived in the Middle East, Acosta was “forced” to conclude “that the men of the Indies traveled there from Europe or Asia.” For this to be possible, the Americas and Asia “must join somewhere.”

If this is true, as indeed it appears to me to be,…we would have to say that they crossed not by sailing on the sea, but by walking on land. And they followed this way quite unthinkingly, changing places and lands little by little,