A CRIMINAL HISTORY OF MANKIND

he remained convinced that he was a misunderstood saint. He died, exhausted and embittered, at
the age of fifty-five.
Absurdly enough Columbus was quite unaware that he had discovered a new land; he thought he
had landed in Asia. It was an Italian scholar named Pietro Martire who made a calculation based on
the size of the earth (which Eratosthenes had worked out) and realised that Columbus had found an
unknown continent - which he christened the New World. Another explorer, Amerigo Vespucci,
who crossed the Atlantic soon after Columbus, gave his name to the new continent: America. On a
map of 1507, ‘America’ was shown as a curiously shaped island about a quarter the size of Africa.
Many of these early explorers lost their lives. John Cabot, who explored the coast of north
America, vanished with his whole fleet somewhere in the Atlantic; Ponce de Leon, who discovered
Florida, was killed by an Indian arrow; Vasco Nunez de Balboa, who crossed Panama and saw the
Pacific, survived hostile Indians to be executed by a governor sent out from Spain; Juan Dia de
Solis was killed by hostile natives after discovering the River Plate; and Fernando Magellan, who is
credited with the first circumnavigation of the globe, never actually completed the two-year voyage
(1519-21); he tried to convert the natives of the Philippines to Christianity by pointing guns at them
and was killed.
Most of the rest of this story of the opening of America is a saga of trickery, bad faith and cruelty.
In 1519, the governor of Hispaniola sent Hernando Cortez to explore inland. By a curious
coincidence, Cortez landed on the coast of Central America at a spot where the Indians expected
certain mysterious ‘white gods’ to return. The legend said that fair-skinned men had landed in the
remote past, brought a knowledge of science and engineering, and gone away promising to return.
The natives of Mexico - called Aztecs - mistook the Spanish for the benevolent white gods. Cortez
had an additional advantage: the natives had never seen horses, and they thought that the horse and
rider were one entitity. So the Spaniards, with less than five hundred men, were able to advance to
the Aztec capital, Tenochtitlan. The king, Montezuma, received them with courtesy and treated
them well. When they saw rooms filled with gold treasures, they decided to seize them for Spain.
The king was taken and held captive; Cortez, in effect, became king. But while he was away from
the capital, the people rose up in revolt, killed Montezuma and drove out the Spaniards; Cortez had
to retake the city with heavy artillery. There was a bloodbath and widespread destruction; then
Cortez set out to systematically destroy the power of the Aztecs all over Mexico. Within three years
of his landing, the Aztec Empire had been destroyed.
The conquest of Peru by Francisco Pizarro followed much the same pattern. Like Magellan, Pizarro
was financed by the emperor Charles V. In 1532, with a mere hundred and eighty men and twentyseven
horses, he marched south from Panama. The Incas, led by their king Atahualpa, came to meet
him with an army. Pizarro invited the king to a friendly conference, and the king arrived - unarmed
- with a large retinue of noblemen. At a signal, they were attacked by the Spaniards, who killed
hundreds. The Indians agreed to ransom Atahualpa with a roomful of gold, and the Spaniards
watched it being carried in - more than five million pounds worth. Then the king was strangled.
The catastrophe seemed to have paralysed the will of the Incas, and they made no real resistance
when the Spaniards occupied their capital, Cuzco. The Inca Empire was destroyed as easily as that
of the Aztecs. But the Spaniards quarrelled amongst themselves about the spoils, and Pizarro was
eventually murdered by plotters.
In the ninety-nine years between the time Henry the Navigator’s caravel braved the Boiling Sea and
the day Pizarro’s men murdered Atahualpa, the world had changed more than in any preceding