1493_ Uncovering the New World Columbus Created - Charles C. Mann [218]
1 Huge numbers have watched the opening hour of the miniseries Roots, in which U.S. slavers raid villages in the Gambia. In fact, such forays were rare. African states didn’t like trespassers, especially when the trespassers were slaving companies trying to cut them out of the supply chain—and the captives were their own subjects.
2 Less touching from today’s perspective were Núñez de Balboa’s actions in Quarequa’s village. In it he had found forty members of Quarequa’s family and court dressed as women. The story is that he had them torn apart by dogs (one of whom, supposedly, was the dog in his barrel). Other villagers then pointed out more transvestites and persuaded him to kill them, too. The sequence of events is hard to credit as presented. Although Panamanian native groups were reputedly tolerant of homosexuals, their presence in big, cohesive groups is unlikely. One can speculate that the Spaniards mistook some form of courtly attire for women’s clothing. In the political vacuum caused by Quarequa’s death, the courtiers’ enemies may have used this misapprehension to get the Spaniards to eliminate rivals.
3 Santa María la Antigua del Darién is often said to be the first permanent European settlement on the mainland. “Permanent” is a stretch; the colonists abandoned it after 9 years. About 170 years later, Scotland tried to establish a colony just a few miles away, with results that I described in Chapter 3.
4 They were not spared racial discrimination, of course. The ex-maroons were free to be treated just the same—just as badly, that is—as other free citizens of African descent.
5 Sephardic Jews were prominent landowners and slaveholders in Suriname. Elsewhere in the Americas, though, they were not especially important slaveowners.
CODA
Currents of Life
10
In Bulalacao
FRACTURED CEREBRATION
In the Philippines, children learn a folk song called “Bahay Kubo”—the title refers to the single-room house made of palm leaves that was long traditional on the islands. Built on stilts to avoid flooding, open to the cooling breeze, the bahay kubo was surrounded by a generous plot of fruits and vegetables. Sitting on the high doorstep, householders could luxuriate in the sights and smells of their family garden. Like “Home on the Range,” “Bahay Kubo” nostalgically evokes the values of those simpler, perhaps better days before cell phones and computers, stock-market gyrations and stressed-out commutes—except that unlike “Home on the Range,” which celebrates the beauties of unmarked wilderness, “Bahay Kubo” extols an entirely humanized landscape.
Bahay kubo, kanit mandi, the children sing (in Tagalog, the islands’ main language). Ang halaman doon, ay sari-sari. Even though my palm-leaf house is small, it has many different plants. And the song continues by enumerating the contents of an idealized Filipino garden:
Jícama and eggplant, winged bean and peanut,
String bean, lima bean, hyacinth bean,
Winter melon, sponge gourd, wax gourd and winter squash,
And there is also radish, mustard,
Onion, tomato, garlic, and ginger!
And all around are sesame seeds.
The botanists in Manila who told me about this song chuckled as they wrote down the lyrics. Every single one of these age-old traditional garden plants, they said, is in fact an introduced species, native to Africa, the Americas, or East Asia. Like my own tomato patch, the garden extolled in “Bahay Kubo” is an exotic modern object. Far from being an exemplar of age-old custom, it is a polyglot, cosmopolitan, thoroughly contemporary artifact.
The botanists told me this in the local office of Conservation International, an environmental-activism organization based outside Washington, D.C. The office halls and doors were covered with wanted-style posters and flyers proclaiming