Don't Know Much About Mythology - Kenneth C. Davis [189]
ANCIENT PEOPLE, NEW WORLDS
O, wonder!
How many goodly creatures are there here!
How beauteous mankind is! O brave new world
That has such people in’t!
—WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE, The Tempest (act V, scene 1)
F
or centuries, Africa, the Americas, Australia, and the Pacific islands existed in mysterious solitude, lands completely set apart from the “known” world by vast oceans, jungles, deserts, and wide expanses. Africa’s existence had been acknowledged since ancient times, but it was largely impenetrable due to its forbidding geography. The Americas, which occupy 28 percent of the world’s landmass, spread from the frozen north of one hemisphere to the “bottom of the earth” in the other. Australia and many thousands of islands in the Pacific were beyond the imaginings of the Western world. Yet all of these places were home to ancient peoples, with long-standing societies, myths, religions, and traditions well insulated from foreign influences. That all changed forever after the fifteenth century. In the European “Age of Discovery,” Portuguese sailors opened up Africa as they made their way to Asia by sea. Christopher Columbus soon followed the Portuguese lead, spurred on by a desire to find still faster routes to the gold, jade, silks, and spicy taste sensations desired by a European palate weary of salted venison. Sailing under the Spanish flag, Columbus set out in 1492 on the first of four voyages that unlocked territories undreamed of and gave Spain the lead in penetrating and then plundering the “New World,” first in the Caribbean, then in both South and North America. Spain’s dominance in the Americas was soon challenged by the English, French, Dutch, and other Europeans—each staking a claim in the names of their kings and their God to large chunks of land already occupied by tens of millions of people. In the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, the “discovery” extended to the Pacific islands, where the “Aborigines” of Australia and other natives of the Pacific would meet a similar fate. Millions of these people would be collectively enslaved, converted, displaced, and almost entirely wiped out, along with much of their mythic legacy.
So the story of these “new worlds” is a story of both beginnings and endings. For the Europeans, it was an extraordinary period of empire-building, colonization, and subjugation. But for the people they “discovered,” it was the end of cherished traditions. Africa was teeming with cultures, religions, and gods when the Portuguese arrived eager to baptize the “heathens” they found on Africa’s West Coast and along the Congo River. But the zealous Portuguese quickly learned that Arabs had already “discovered” much of Africa and begun to import Islam. In time, Africa would become a battleground in the centuries-old conflict between Christianity and Islam, with native myth and belief caught in the deadly crossfire.
The situation was similar in the Americas, where, prior to the European arrival, a stunning array of cultures and civilizations had flourished, from the “Halls of Montezuma” and Mayan pyramids of Central America to the lofty Andean cities of the Incas. Presumably the descendants of the people who wandered from Siberia to the Americas during the waning of the last great Ice Age, the inhabitants of the Americas ranged from the natives of the Arctic region to the tribes of the American Northeast, to the settled farmers of the Southeast, and down to the monumental civilizations of Mexico, Central America, and Peru. But the gods and legends of the Americas, like those of Africa, would soon come crashing headlong before Europe’s Christian soldiers, with devastating results for the natives of America. The same scenario would play out in Australia. Home to hundreds of thousands of Aborigines, Australia