On Nangama, an island off the coast, described as having "great plentie of spices," the people were far from averse to war: they were anthropophagi-man-eaters-who devoured their captives. Those in the province of Mangi, where they grew ginger, were averse to war and so had fallen an easy prey to the khan. Polo also had things to say about the ordinary people of the Far East. The Great Khan, whose empire stretched from the Arctic to the Indian Ocean, had displayed to Polo a wealth and majesty that dwarfed the splendors of the courts of Europe. From Marco Polo he learned that the Indies were rich in gold, silver, pearls, jewels and spices. And before he set out to prove it by sailing west from Spain, he studied his books to find out all he could about the lands that he would be visiting. Columbus never abandoned this conviction. The strongest one was a wrong one-namely, that the distance between Europe and the eastern shore of Asia was short, indeed, that Spain was closer to China westward than eastward. Yet he studied these books, made hundreds of marginal notations in them and came out with ideas about the world that were characteristically simple and strong and sometimes wrong, the kind of ideas that the self-educated person gains from independent reading and clings to in defiance of what anyone else tries to tell him. He read the Ymago Mundi of Pierre d'Ailly, a French cardinal who wrote in the early 15th century, the travels of Marco Polo and of Sir John Mandeville, Pliny's Natural History and the Historia Rerum Ubique Gestarum of Aeneas Sylvius Piccolomini (Pope Pius II). What America became after 1492 depended both on what men found there and on what they expected to find, both on what America actually was and on what old writers and old experience led men to think it was, or ought to be or could be made to be.ĭuring the decade before 1492, as Columbus nursed a growing urge to sail west to the Indies-as the lands of China, Japan and India were then known in Europe-he was studying the old writers to find out what the world and its people were like. Rather, the Old World determined what men saw in the New and what they did with it. The discovery of America opened a new world, full of new things and new possibilities for those with eyes to see them. Only idiots escape entirely from the world that the past bequeaths. We need not deride Columbus' reluctance to give up the world that he knew from books. "I am the saddest man in the world," he wrote, "because I do not recognize them." Cruising through the Caribbean, enchanted by the beauty and variety of what he saw, Columbus assumed that the strange plants and trees were strange only because he was insufficiently versed in the writings of men who did know them. It seemed to be a question not so much of giving names to new lands as of finding the proper old names, and the same was true of the things that the new lands contained. His discoveries posed for him, as for others, a problem of identification. And in 1513 it was still assumed that the ancient writers had had a wider experience than those who came after them.Ĭolumbus himself had made that assumption. Men, confronted with things they do not recognize, turn to the writings of those who have had a wider experience. How, the learned man asked them, did they know that the ferocious animal was a tiger? They answered "that they knewe it by the spottes, fiercenesse, agilitie, and such other markes and tokens whereby auncient writers have described the Tyger." It was a good answer. Listening to their story was Peter Martyr, member of the King's Council of the Indies and possessor of an insatiable curiosity about the new land that Spain was uncovering in the west. They called it a tiger, although there were no tigers in Spain and none of the men had ever seen one before. When they returned to Spain to tell what they had seen, it was not a simple matter to find words for everything.įor example, they had killed a large and ferocious wild animal. On their way, however, they saw a good many things they had not been looking for and were not familiar with. They had been looking for it-they knew it existed-and, familiar as they were with oceans, they had no difficulty in recognizing it when they saw it. In the year 1513, a group of men led by Vasco Núñez de Balboa marched across the Isthmus of Panama and discovered the Pacific Ocean.
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