Understanding Tomorrow's News Through History
"The Conquest of Paradise: Christopher Columbus and the Columbian Legacy"
By Kirkpatrick Sale, 453 pages, $14.00 in paperback, (Plume Books, New York 1991).
Last year's Columbus Quincentennial was a major bust. The Bush administration and others who would celebrate Western Civilization's great triumph were shamed into a more subdued observance when they couldn't find enough credible historians to praise the consequences of the day that Taino villagers discovered Christopher Columbus trespassing on their beach. Likewise, the planned protests were also fairly small, as most Americans were more concemed with the next five weeks' paychecks than the past five centuries' abuses. It's what might have been expected in a country that seems to have little or no sense of history.
Yet some good work that was produced for the occasion got ignored in last fall's collective ho-hum. A year after the party that wasn't, Kirkpatrick Sale's "The Conquest of Paradise" is still a goodie, both as an entertaining read and an aid to the understanding of human affairs.
Sale is a co-founder of the New York Green Party and active with PEN, the international writers' human rights group. He established his reputation as a big-league journalist with The New York Times, and includes among his prior works a 1973 history of SDS, the definitive tale of the most important 1960s radical group. He took seven years to research and write "The Conquest of Paradise."
This is not just a revisionist history of the obscure Genoese sailor who led the vanguard of European world conquest. Although it does indeed reexamine the facts and scrutinize the sources and methods of prior Columbus biographers, the book"s real strength lies in its broad view of the cultures that contacted one another at the end of the 15th century.
It is an ecological tale, of Europeans who thought of nature as a wild enemy to be subdued, who poured from their pestilential medieval towns and eroded farms into a new world ripe for exploitation, and of indigenous people, mostly living in equilibrium with their surroundings at a high standard of living. Sale gives not only a litany of the invaders' intended cruelties, but also a biological account of epidemic waves which traveled faster than the settlers' advance, of peoples whose lack of immunities to old world diseases often killed them off before they ever saw a white face. "The Conquest of Paradise" details disastrous exchanges, like smallpox for syphilis, the plough for the digging stick, liquor for tobacco. It tells a story of ecocide, of deforestation, of ruined fisheries and mass extinctions.
At a deeper level, Sale teaches a timeless lesson about that kind of thinking by which one inappropriately characterizes the unfamiliar in terms of what is thought familiar. When Virginia's English conquerers sat before a gathering of men and women, they thought they were dealing with a king attended by his male advisors and female concubines. Actually they were co-equal tribal elders, men and women, a kind of political entity unknown in Europe, who joined to hear the white men. It conjures up images from Reagan's brain, in which Central American rebels against landowning oligarchies were confused with stalinoid Kremlin cliques. It reminds one of simplifications by which discrimination against "women and other minorities" is decried and distinctions among the situations of the female majority and racial minorities, or among such disparate groups as African-Americans, Lakotas and immigrants from China, are ignored.
On another plane. Sale dissects the impact of the Americas on Western scholarship, most masterfully when he traces the origins of the "Noble Savage" and "Bestial Savage" stereotypes. Making brief mention of erroneous Marxist notions about indigenous societies, "The Conquest of Paradise" nevertheless enlightens anybody who seeks a radical critique of the ideas behind capitalism.
"The Conquest of Paradise" sets intellectual standards toward which today's activists ought to strive. Which is not to say that it is the least bit pedantic. Quite the contrary. Kirkpatrick Sale has shown how a work of history can be both profound and entertaining. Yet for all of its stylistic brilliance, this book's main mportance is its content. If you want to understand tomorrow's news, read 'The Conquest of Paradise" today.