Empires of the Word - Nicholas Ostler [187]
Hernando de Soto led an expedition through Florida and the North American south-east in the mid-sixteenth century, finding a thick population of Indians, clustered in small cities, on the Mississippi river near modern Memphis. In 1682, when the area was next visited by white men (this time French), it was deserted.
The diseases travelled faster than the spearheads of Spanish conquest: smallpox arrived in Peru in 1525, Francisco Pizarro in 1532. It had already killed Huayna Capac, the Inca, and many of his relations, and precipitated the dynastic struggle that the Spaniards were to turn to their own advantage. Thereafter, as everywhere, further epidemics, of typhus, influenza, diphtheria and measles as well as more smallpox, ravaged the population.
The Spanish were not notably humane conquerors, but they had no interest in genocide. From the first days in Hispaniola, they had hoped to exploit the labour of the natives, and for this alone they were dismayed at the sudden and disastrous collapse in their numbers. Yet everywhere, the fact that the previous population was melting away would have materially aided the long-term spread of the conquerors’ language, changing the balance in numbers by subtracting predominantly from the speaker communities of the indigenous languages.
From the perspective of the world, with full benefit of hindsight, three aspects of the Spanish advance into the New World stand out as quite new to history.
One is that this was the first direct confrontation of races of human beings from quite separate lineages, divided by tens of thousands of years of independent development. The last common ancestor of Christopher Columbus and Guacanagarí, the first king he encountered on Hispaniola, could not have lived less than two thousand generations before, a period over twenty times longer than the time elapsed since the birth of Christ. That common ancestor would have lived in Africa, and so the two men’s lineages had to extend all round the world before they could meet. From that moment onward, contacts would no longer be restricted by this intrinsic linearity in the human settlement of the world: nation would speak unto nation, from anywhere to anywhere.
This aspect was fundamental to the special catastrophe that, as we have seen, hit the American population. It turned out that the long millennia of development that had culminated in America and Spain had given the European lineage an attribute that acted like a secret weapon: resistance to a variety of diseases which, since they were endemic, were likely to spread to any other population with which they were in contact. This, far more than the technical superiority in arms which meant they could win battles against overwhelming numbers, eliminated swathes of the native population before they had any chance to adapt culturally, or rally in the long term. It is this biological factor, above all, which explains why the majority population in the Hispanic countries of America nowadays is everywhere mestizo.
The second unprecedented aspect of the Spanish advance is that this was the first conquest of a foreign continent by seaborne invasion. Maritime empires had certainly been a feature of the ancient and medieval Mediterranean (Athens, Carthage and Venice stand out), and in the first millennium AD Indians had projected their civilisation across the Bay of Bengal, though without apparent military intent. Only eighty years before the Spanish founded their empire, China’s Admiral Zheng-He had cruised the Indian Ocean, exacting tribute from Sri Lanka, and demonstrating that China was capable of reaching the eastern coasts of Africa, if it so chose. But no previous empire had been gained or maintained through the control of