american-holocaust

198 AMERICAN HOLOCAUST"cannibal," and although both the more level-headed of Columbus's contemporariesand the consensus of modern scholarship have strenuouslycontradicted the charge, it has stuck as a truism in the Western imagination.9The important point here, however, is not the spuriousness of theclaim that some of the natives ate human flesh, but only that Columbusand those who heard his report readily believed, indeed, needed to believe,that the charge was true. If no dog-headed people had yet actually beenseen, or races without heads and with faces in their chests, or one-leggedfolk, or cyclopes, or other bizarre semi-human beasts, that did not meanthey were not there. But for the time being rumors of some cannibals woulddo.As for the terrestrial paradise Columbus knew to exist, he found it. Atleast he thought he did. It took awhile-six years and three long voyagesbutin the autumn of 1498, while sailing along the coasts of Venezuelaand Colombia and then on north to Honduras, the Admiral noticed (or sohe wrote to his king and queen) that the people he observed were not as"dark" or "extremely black" as he claimed they were in other regions,"but are of very handsome build and whiter than any others I have seenin the Indies .... [and] are more intelligent and have more ability." Atthe same time he observed that he was in the vicinity of towering mountainsand fabulously powerful rivers, including the one that we now knowas the Orinoco, that rushed from the mountains in powerful currents downinto the Gulf of Paria. Recalling no doubt that in some traditional accountsthe earthly paradise had been located atop a high mountain, whichallowed it to survive the great biblical flood, and noting that "Holy Scripturetestifies that Our Lord created the Terrestrial Paradise and planted itin the tree of life, and that a fountain sprang up there, from which flowthe four principal rivers of the world," the logical conclusion could not beignored: "I say that if this river [the Orinoco] does not originate in theTerrestrial Paradise, it comes and flows from a land of infinite size to thesouth, of which we have no knowledge as yet. But I am completely persuadedin my own mind that the Terrestrial Paradise is in the place I havedescribed." 10Indeed, so extraordinary was this insight that it caused Columbus torevise his entire vision of the shape of the earth. "I am compelled," hewrote to his royal patrons, "to come to this view of the world":I have found that it does not have the kind of sphericity described by theauthorities, but that it has the shape of a pear, which is all very round,except at the stem, which is rather prominent, or that it is as if one had avery round ball, on one part of which something like a woman's teat wereplaced, this part with the stem being the uppermost and nearest to the sky.. . . So neither Ptolemy nor the others who wrote about the world had any