american-holocaust

46 AMERICAN HOLOCAUSTAlthough, as we shall see, the early Europeans appreciated the peopleof the Andes a good deal less than they did those people's engineeringaccomplishments, later visitors came to agree with the Spanish historianJose de Acosta who, after spending many years in Peru, wrote in 1590:"Surely the Greeks and the Romans, if they had known the Republics ofthe Mexicans and the Incas, would have greatly esteemed their laws andgovernments." The more "profound and diligent" among the Europeanswho have lived in this country, wrote Acosta, have now come to "marvelat the order and reason that existed among [the native peoples]." 80The life of the mind in the Inca-controlled Andes is beyond the scopeor range of this brief survey, but like all the thousands of pre-Columbiancultures in the Americas it was deeply embedded both in the wonders andthe cyclical rhythms of the surrounding natural world and in cultural affectionfor the unending string of genealogical forebears and descendantswho had lived and who would live on indefinitely (or so it was thought)in these marvelous mountains and valleys and plains. As one recent analysisof Inca thought and philosophy puts it:The relationships Andeans perceived between life and death, and betweenhumankind and the natural environment, were . . . profoundly different fromSpanish and Christian equivalents. The land surrounding one told the storyof one's first ancestors as much as it told one's own story and the story ofthose yet to come. It was right that the familiar dead were seen walkingthrough the fields they had once cultivated, thus sharing them with both theliving and with the original ancestors who had raised the first crops in thevery same fields. Death was thus the great leveler not because, as in Christianthought, it reduced all human beings to equality in relation to each otherand before God. Rather, death was a leveler because by means of it humanswere reintegrated into a network of parents and offspring that embraced theentire natural order. 81To the east of the Inca homeland, down from the majestic peaks of theAndes, are the dense jungles of the Amazon, followed by the Brazilianhighlands, and then the pampas of present-day Argentina-together, wellover four million square miles of earth, an area larger than that of theUnited States today. Within this land the world's largest river rushes throughthe world's greatest forest-and within that forest lived peoples so numerousand so exotic to the first Western visitors that the Europeans seemedunable to decide whether they had stumbled onto the legendary TerrestrialParadise or an evil confederacy of demons, or maybe both.Disappointed that there were no great cities in this boundless part oftheir New World, the earliest travelers let their imaginations run riot. Therewas evidence, some of them claimed, that the Apostle Saint Thomas hadvisited Brazil and preached to the natives a millennium and a half ago; ifyou looked carefully enough, it was said, you still could see his footprints