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many later chroniclers, that hostile Caribbean islanders were clearly cannibals (a term that as a result became synonymous with ‘eaters of human flesh’).† Never substantiated, this may have been a hangover from the traditions of European travellers’ tales about the ends of the earth; Herodotus said that beyond the Scythians lived the flesh-eating Androphagi; and Strabo had retailed the same story about the Scythians themselves, and even the Irish.1 But the European mariners may have been misinterpreting—to fit with more conventional horror—the first evidence they were finding of the true, but for then still truly inconceivable, indigenous practices of human sacrifice.

Most directly for our purposes, the Spanish incomprehension can be seen in the linguists that Columbus had chosen to bring in the hope of easing communication: Luis de Torres, who knew Hebrew, Aramaic (’Chaldaean’) and some Arabic, and Rodrigo de Jérez, who had perhaps visited some of the Portuguese colonies in Guinea. Although he may rationally have believed he could run into Arab traders when he reached China, his choice is eloquent of the sheer ignorance of what the rest of the world was like linguistically, when the only alien that even an educated Spaniard was likely to meet was a Moor or a Jew.* And indeed Spaniards went on calling the spiritual centres of the Americans ‘mosques’: for example, in a letter to his king in 1520, Cortés wrote, of a city in Mexico that had never seen a Muslim: ‘And I assure your Majesty that I counted from a mosque some 430 towers in the said city, all of them belonging to mosques.’2

The incomprehension of the extent of the new horizons now opening up was of course not confined to the Spaniards. Seeing themselves quite explicitly as emissaries of Christendom in these new realms, they turned to the Pope—Alexander VI, conveniently a Spaniard—to validate their title to the territories. It was a situation familiar to us from the modern rush for patents in the uncharted areas of information technology and genetics. In 1493 the Pope, after granting Spain sovereignty over Columbus’s discoveries on his first voyage, went on to award it title to all territories more than a hundred leagues west of the Azores and Cape Verde Islands, approximately longitude 30°W, explicitly all the way to India. If it had become established, this would have given Spain rights to all the Americas. But no one could know this, a year after Columbus’s first voyage. The Portuguese were at this stage the only major competitors and were duly concerned about the Pope’s dispensation, above all in order to guarantee their routes through the Atlantic to Africa and beyond. They succeeded in negotiating with the Spaniards to have the north-south demarcation line moved 270 leagues farther west, effectively to longitude 45°, and this notional limit was agreed in the Treaty of Tordesillas in 1494. It was never clearly identified in practice, and corresponds to no modern boundary—Brazil, for example, extends inland all the way to longitude 74°W, and even on the coast as far as 50°—but it did serve as a convenient rule of thumb, giving Portugal a prior claim to Brazil, whose south-eastern coast was first visited by both Spanish and Portuguese ships in 1500, but inhibiting its interest in the Amazon until 1637.

On the American side, the shock of incomprehension was registered more brutally, by a devastating loss of population. It is impossible to estimate safely the numbers living in the Americas before European contact. Estimates vary between 13 million and 180 million. But everywhere there is evidence of a massive fall in the early years after the Europeans arrived. First of all, the Spaniards complained of depopulation in the first islands they colonised, Cuba and Hispaniola, and the figures bear them out: a census of Hispaniola in 1496 gave a figure of 1.1 million, but just eighteen years later the repartimiento of 1514 listed 22,000. Mexico witnessed a series of epidemics, beginning with the Spanish visit to their capital Tenochtitlán, which carried off most of