Civilizations: Culture, Ambition, and the Transformation of Nature

Chapter Sixteen

REFLOATING ATLANTIS

THE MAKING OF ATLANTIC

CIVILIZATION

Cultural Transmission from Europe

to America and Back

—PLATO,Timaeus,24 E–25 D, trans. R. G. Bury
(London,1929), p.43

After a lecture I once gave in Boston on Spaniards’ treatment of the indigenous-peoples of their empire,¹the mayor rose from the audience to ask me whether I thought English behavior towards the Irish was not worse. The strength of the Irish legacy in Boston is one of the many signs that make you feel, wherever you go in New England, that you are on the shore of a pond, and that the same cultures that you left behind on one side of it have spread to the other with remarkably little change, and remarkably little loss of identity, along the way. Here, as I write these lines, in Providence, Rhode Island, the only resident foreign consul is Portuguese; I live around the corner from a bakery where I buy sweet bread for breakfast or pasteis de Tentugal for tea. A nearby parking lot is marked with the sign “Do Not Park Here Unless You Are Portuguese.” Ancestral homes, ancestral grievances are easily recalled.

Similar patches of Irishness and Portuguese identity bloom here and there all along this coast, mirroring home and looking back across the ocean. They are surrounded with other peoples’ transatlantic reminiscences and continuities. In some ways, New England conforms to the description of a seaboard civilization given above—a narrow, sea-soaked coast with a culture shaped by maritime outreach—but it is more than that, it is part of a civilization of two seaboards which face each other.

Small communities span the Atlantic. So does a sense of belonging to a single-civilization. When people nowadays speak of “Western civilization,” they mean, essentially, an Atlantic community comprising parts of Western Europe and much or most of the Americas. The creation of this ocean-spanning world has been a curious departure in the history of civilization. When other civilizations transcended their environments of origin, they did so bit by bit, advancing across contiguous areas or narrow seas, rolling over land, or leaping between islands or emporia. Even the extraordinary and precocious history of the Indian Ocean conforms to this pattern, because it happened in an ocean which, unlike others, can be crossed by hopping between harbors or shadowing the coasts: explorers who found quick ways across it knew where they were going. The projection of people, habits, tastes, ways of life, and a sense of belonging across the breadth of an ocean like the Atlantic—the shores of which are not mutually accessibleexcept by a long journey by open sea or air—was strictly unprecedented when it began.

To master an oceanic environment, you have to penetrate the secrets of its winds and currents. Throughout the age of sail—that is, for almost the whole of history—geography had absolute power to determine what man could do at sea; by comparison, culture, ideas, individual genius or charisma, economic forces, and all the other motors of history meant little. In most of our explanations of what has happened in history there is too much hot air and not enough wind.

The Atlantic is dominated by a trade-wind system: that is, by a regular pattern-of prevailing winds which blow in the same direction regardless of the season.-From around the northwestern corner of Africa, all year round, trade winds curl across the ocean to within a few degrees above the equator, and lead on to the lands around the Caribbean; in the summer, these winds spring even farther north and can be felt fairly constantly on the southwestern shores of the Iberian Peninsula. Thanks to the northeast trade winds, the maritime communities around the mouths of the Tagus and the Guadalquivir had privileged access, by comparison with other parts of maritime Europe, to much of the rest of the world. The prodigious reach of the Spanish and Portuguese empires in the age of sail was in part the result of this good fortune. In the Southern Hemisphere, the same pattern is roughly mirrored, by winds which link the latitudes of southern Africa to Brazil. Like the northeast trades, these winds become more directly easterly, swinging as they approach the equator. Between the two systems, around or just north of the equator, are the almost windless latitudes called the Doldrums. Beyond the latitudes of the trade winds, in both hemispheres, westerlies blow. In the Southern Hemisphere, they are remarkably strong and constant.

There are three big exceptions to the regularity of the pattern. In the crook of Africa’s elbow, inside the Gulf of Guinea, a monsoonlike effect sucks wind in towards the Sahara for much of the year, turning the underside of the West African bulge into a dangerous lee shore. In the northern belt of westerlies, a corridor of brief spring easterlies in the latitudes of the British Isles helps explain why British imperialism was able to seize much of maritime North America in the age of sail. In the Far North, beyond the British Isles, the westerlies are less unremitting, and a clockwise system of currents, dominated by the Irminger Current, leads west from Scandinavia, below the Arctic Circle; this makes an intelligible context for the Norse navigations to the Faroes, Iceland, Greenland, and parts of North America. Other currents could be exploited by navigators anxious to use the wind system to best advantage. For voyagers from Europe to the Caribbean, for example, the Gulf Stream—discovered in 1513 by a Spanish explorer in search of the “fountain of youth”²—links the westward route of the northeast trades to the homebound westerlies. Along the coast of South america,the Brazil Current leads south across the face of the southeast trades, diminishing the hazards of navigation along a lee shore.

Considered as a whole, the wind system resembles a code of interlocking ciphers. Once part of it was cracked, by a concentrated spell of tenacious exploring in the 1490 s, the solution of the rest followed rapidly. The preliminary effort, however, was long and laborious, because early explorers, with their vision limited to small patches of the ocean dominated by apparently unremitting winds, were like codebreakers denied a sufficient sample to work with. Only the long accumulation of information and experience could make a breakthrough possible. Even then a sudden and almost visionary inspiration was necessary to unlock the system and start the rapid phase of decipherment.

The Atlantic is broad, but it was only crossed because it was imagined as narrow. A narrow Atlantic was an article of faith with the man who effectively began the ocean-spanning process: Christopher Columbus. Like most of what went on in his mind, it was an irrational or suprarational faith—a triumph of wishful thinking—but it gave him the confidence to attempt a transnavigation that had defeated previous endeavors. His role, though unique, belongs, of course, in a web of intersecting contexts. The most conspicuous, the most startling of these was the most immediate, the inauguration of the great Western European achievement of the 1490 s. This breakthrough justifies its reputation as one of the great defining moments in the history of the world; even though the formation and supremacy of Atlantic civilization have been brief and, perhaps, short-lived episodes of our past, the present is unimaginable without them—and therefore without the voyages of the early transatlantic voyagers who created the framework of routes around which the Atlantic world took shape. A sudden leap forward traversed the ocean and opened routes of access towards much of the world—in particular, towards zones of enormous commercial and imperial potential in America and Asia. This event and its background demand a moment’s examination. Their importance in the history of civilizations is fundamental; and, in spite or because of the vast amount that has been written about them, they are still imperfectly understood.

The great Atlantic breakthrough can be identified precisely with three voyages-(if we leave out suppositious earlier journeys for which the evidence is nonexistent or inadequate). The first was Columbus’s Atlantic crossing of 1493 , which established viable, exploitable routes across the Central Atlantic and back—routes which would hardly be bettered throughout the rest of the age of sail. (I relegate Columbus’s earlier crossing, in 1492 , to a place of secondary importance, because the outward route discovered on that occasion was unsatisfactory and was never tried again.) The second critical voyage was John Cabot’s from Bristol to Newfoundland and back in 1497 , which created an open-sea approach to North America, using the easterly winds available in a brief season of spring variables: this route was of little short-term value but ultimately proved to be an avenue to an enormously influential imperial terrain, and to the most exploitable of the “new Europes” created across the world by early-modern colonizing movements. Finally, Vasco da Gama’s first voyage to India discovered a route across the path of the Southeastern Atlantic trade winds to meet the westerlies of the Far South. Little in the subsequent history of the world can be properly understood except in this context, peculiar to the 1490 s, of the power of projection of Western European seafaring.

The effect of the three voyages in combination was to crack the code of the Atlantic wind-system. Instead of an obstacle to the expansion of European peoples along its seaboard, the ocean became a means of access to previously unimaginable empires and trades. The European West was thrust beyond its historic confines. Cabot’s contribution was relatively small: filling in a marginal but useful fragment of the wind code. Columbus’s served to link the shores of the Atlantic forever, but on its own it reached no further; at the time, it was something of a disappointment, for the rich trade of Asia had eluded Columbus. Vasco unpicked the locks of the South Atlantic—the patterns of the southeast trades and the roaring forties that sweep across the South Atlantic to the Indian Ocean and, ultimately, the Pacific. In the long run, his proved to be the discovery with the widest consequences, for the southeast trades provided ways to South America and Asia, while the westerlies of the Far South really did put a girdle round the earth; they squeezed and shaped parts of some of the world’s most lucrative trade routes for the rest of the age of sail.

In the short term, the breakthrough of the 1490 s made Atlantic civilization possible: navigators now knew the routes of reliable, regular communication between the western shores of the Old World and the eastern shores of the New. The Atlantic, which had been a barrier for the whole of recorded history, now became a link.

This seems an astonishing transformation after such a long period of underachievement by maritime communities on the ocean’s shores. It is best appreciated against the background of the almost ungraspably longue duree of a story left unfinished in Chapter Twelve above (page 299 ). By about a thousand years ago, penetration first by Roman culture and conquerors, then—slowly but thoroughly—by Christianity, turned Europe’s Atlantic arc into the outer rim of what historians call Latin Christendom: the successor civilization of Greece and Rome, distinguished by the use of Latin as the universal language of learning and ritual, and by the practice of Christianity according to traditions preserved at Rome. It was a glorious civilization, which produced many of the works of art and learning most highly valued in Western Europe to this day. But it had nowhere else to go.

It occupied the outer edge of world maps of the time. Scholars in Persia or China, confident in the superiority of their own civilized traditions, thought Christendom hardly worth a mention in their studies of the world.³Efforts to expand east and south from Latin Christendom—to landward, into Eastern Europe, or via the Mediterranean into Asia and Africa—made some progress but were generally repulsed or compelled to retreat by plagues and great freezes.⁴To the north and west, along most of the exposed coast, only a narrow stretch of ocean could be explored by navigators pressed by the prevailing westerlies. Some communities developed local and regional maritime cultures and, in particular cases, fairly impressive deep-sea fisheries; these were schools of experience from which the explorers of the 1490 s drew ships and crews. Exceptionally, forays far into the ocean were made by the Norse navigators and colonists of the high Middle Ages, and by the explorers and settlers of Eastern Atlantic archipelagoes in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. Taking advantage of Far Northern currents which lead across the ocean, seafarers from Scandinavia and Ireland opened up Iceland to colonization in the ninth century, and Greenland in the eleventh. Until the mid-fourteenth century, Icelanders made voyages as far as the North American mainland. The remotest of these precarious links were severed, however, when the Greenland colony was wiped out (see page 53 ).

Meanwhile, when the continuous history of the recorded exploration of the Atlantic began, in the late thirteenth century, none of Europe’s Atlantic Seaboard peoples took a leading part in it. The European discovery of the Atlantic was an enterprise launched from deep in the Mediterranean, chiefly by Genoese and Majorcan navigators, who unstoppered their sea by forcing their way, against the race of the current, through the Strait of Gibraltar. From there, some turned to exploit the familiar commerce of the North; others turned south into waters unsailed—as far as we know—for centuries, towards the African Atlantic and the islands of the Madeira group and the Canaries. Along this route, the Vivaldi brothers of Genoa—the earliest participants known by name—departed in 1291 to seek “the regions of India by way of the ocean,” thus anticipating, by two centuries, the very terms of Columbus’s project. They were never heard of again but helped to inspire voyages in their wake which made the Canary Islands “as well known” to Petrarch—so he claimed in the 1330 s—“as France.”⁵

With sporadic intensity in the course of the fourteenth century, this continuing sequence of voyages became focused on a search for the sources of the Saharan gold trade. The exiguous documents reveal glimpses of shadowy, fascinating characters of whom one would love to know more: Lanzarotto Malocello, from Genoa, who before 1339 built a tower on the island still called Lanzarote in his honor; Guillem Safont, a Majorcan seaman whose claim for wages, filed in an Aragonese court, is the only source of our knowledge of a voyage of 1342 ; Luis de la Cerda, the dispossessed scion of the Castilian royal house whom Pope Clement VI named “Prince of Fortune,” with the right to conquera realm for himself in the Canaries, in 1344 ; Jaume Ferrer, the Majorcan who perished somewhere around Cape Juby in 1346 while seeking “the river of gold”; and the Franciscan missionaries of the bishopric of Telde in Gran Canaria in the late fourteenth century—and the natives who massacred them.⁶

In the course of return voyages against the wind, navigators who had absolutely no means of keeping track of their longitude increasingly made huge deep-sea detours in search of westerlies that would take them home. This risky enterprise was rewarded with the discovery of the Azores—a mid-ocean archipelago, more than seven hundred miles from the nearest other land. All but two islands of the group appear recognizably on marine charts of not later than the 1380 s. This was a stage undervalued in existing literature, but of enormous significance: open-sea voyages of a length unprecedented in European experience were now being undertaken; from the 1430 s, when Portuguese way stations, sown with wheat or stocked with wild sheep, were established on the Azores, they became something like routine.⁷

Still, a genuine Atlantic civilization—one which spanned the ocean and used the Atlantic as its main highway of communication—was impossible until regular, reliable transoceanic links were forged. For the purpose of finding a useful way across the ocean, the most fruitful area of exploration lay in the path of the northeast trade winds. To cross the entire breadth of the trade-wind corridor, however, was a daunting enterprise. No one knew for sure how broad it was or what lay beyond it. The intriguing space was left blank on maps, or spotted with speculative islands, or filled, in geographers’ imaginations, with lands of classical legend: the Antipodes, an unknown continent, theoretically inferred, which would restore symmetry to an unacceptably disorderly planet by reproducing its configurations on the “dark side” of the earth; or the garden of the Hesperides of one of the labors of Hercules; or a refloated Atlantis in one form or another.⁸

Several attempts were made during the fifteenth century to explore Atlantic space, but most doomed themselves to failure by setting out in the belt of westerly winds, presumably because explorers were keen to be sure of a guaranteed route of return. You can still follow the tiny gains in the slowly unfolding record on rare maps and stray documents. In 1427 , an otherwise unknown voyage by a Portuguese pilot called Diogo de Silves was recorded on a map; this precious record was almost blotted out when George Sand, during one of her winters of dalliance with Chopin, inspected the map and spilled ink over it. Silves established for the first time the approximate relationship of the islands of the Azores to one another, enhancing the safety of sailors in his wake.⁹Shortly after the turn of the mid-century, the westernmost islands of that archipelago were reached. Over the next three decades, voyages of exploration farther into the Atlantic were often commissioned by the Portuguese crown, but none is known to have made any further progress—perhaps because, if they set out at all, they all departed from the Azores, where the westerlies beat them back tobase. Only an observer of unusual powers could have detected in these tentative efforts the background of the breakthrough of the 1490 s. In some ways, it was like falling over a threshold: there was no need for a particular innovation, because the savoir-faire and practical experience of European sailors simply accumulated bit by bit until the makers of the Atlantic breakthrough found themselves stumbling on the far side of a critical gap. Certainly the Atlantic breakthrough was preceded by a long period of unspectacular change, in which, little by little, navigators got ever farther out to sea.

The Western European maritime initiative is usually misrepresented as unique. In reality, for unknown reasons, the fifteenth century was an era of worldwide interest in maritime empire-seeking. China’s in the Indian Ocean is the best-known case. Between 1405 and 1433 , the formidable flag-showing expeditions of Admiral Cheng Ho reached Jiddah and Zanzibar, and made genuinely imperial interventions on the edges of the Indian Ocean. The first voyage carried 27 ,870 men in sixty-two of the largest junks ever built, with 225 support vessels. The last sailed 12 ,618 miles. They extirpated a pirate kingdom in Srivijaya, erected a puppet state in Malacca, dethroned and installed kings in Sri Lanka, and, in Sumatra, overthrew a chief who refused to pay tribute to China. “The countries beyond the horizon and from the ends of the earth have become subjects,” the admiral declared.¹⁰Meanwhile, the Ottoman Turks were gradually building up the sea power which made them, by the end of the century, potentially world-class maritime imperialists who conquered the eastern Mediterranean, invaded the Indian Ocean, and raided Spanish shipping for intelligence about the New World. If early colonial legends can be trusted, even the Inca, under their most wide-conquering ruler, Tupac Inca Yupanqui, launched expeditions on the Pacific on balsa-wood rafts towards supposed “Isles of Gold.”¹¹

Even Russia began to expand by sea in the 1430 s—the last decade of Cheng Ho’s efforts and the period of Portugal’s most intense endeavors in the Canary Islands. The evidence is painted onto the surface of an icon, now in an art gallery in Moscow but once a treasure of a monastery on an island in the White Sea. It shows monks adoring the Virgin on an island adorned with a gleaming monastery, with tapering domes, a golden sanctuary, and turrets like candles. The glamour of the scene must be the product of pious imaginations, for the island in reality is bare and impoverished and, for most of the year, surrounded by ice.

Pictures of episodes from the monastery’s foundation legend of the 1430 s, about a century before the icon was made, frame the painter’s vision of the Virgin adored. The first monks row to the island. The indigenous fisherfolk are expelled by “young radiant figures” with whips. When the abbot, Savaatii, hears of it, he gives thanks to God. Merchants visit; when they drop the sacred host the holy monk Zosima gives them, it is protected by flames. When the monks rescue shipwreck victims, who are dying in a cave on a nearby island, Zosima andSavaatii appear miraculously, teetering on icebergs, to drive back the pack ice. Zosima experiences a vision of a “floating church,” which the building of an island monastery fulfills. In defiance of the barren environment, angels supply the community with bread, oil, and salt. Zosima’s predecessors as abbots leave because they cannot endure harsh conditions. Zosima calmly drives out the devils who tempt him.¹²All the ingredients of a typical story of fifteenth-century seaborne imperialism are here: the more-than-worldly inspiration; the heroic voyage into a perilous environment; the ruthless treatment of the natives; the struggle to adapt and to found a viable economy; the quick input of commercial interests; the achievement of viability by perseverance.

None of these initiatives, however, came to very much. Chinese naval activitywas aborted after Cheng Ho’s last voyage, probably as a result of the triumph at court of Confucian Mandarins, who hated imperialism and despised trade.¹³The Inca, if they did begin an overseas enterprise, lacked the traditions, and therefore the technology, to pursue it. The Ottoman enterprise was stoppered by straits: in every direction—in the central Mediterranean, the Persian Gulf, and the Red Sea—access to the oceans was through narrow channels easily controlled by enemies. Overwhelmingly and inevitably, in the face of icebound seas, most of Russia’s fifteenth-century expansion was landward.

These frustrations help to explain Western Europe’s advantage. To start worldwide ventures, it was vital to be in the right place. In the age of sail, maritime route-finding depended on access to favorable winds and currents. Navigators from the Indian and Western Pacific Oceans would not have found conditions auspicious for long-range navigation outside the zone of monsoons, even had they wished to do so. The only navigable route eastwards across the Pacific was an effective dead-end until trading posts developed on the West Coast of America in colonial times. The ways out of the Indian Ocean to the south were laborious and dangerous and led, as far as was known, only to unrewarding destinations. Along the shores of maritime Asia and East Africa, the world’s bestequipped seafaring peoples had no incentive to seek trading partners elsewhere. The most adventurous long-range navigators in the world, the Polynesians, were condemned by their location to sail into the wind; they had probably reached the limits of the expansion possible with the technology at their disposal by the end of the first millenniumA.D. Their remotest outposts of settlement, in Hawaii, Easter Island, and New Zealand, were too remote to keep in touch with and, when first reported by European visitors in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, had already accumulated hundreds of years’ worth of cultural divergence from the lands of provenance of their settlers.

The Atlantic, by contrast, was a highway to the rest of the world. From the northwest edges of the ocean, its wind systems provided easy access to the great windborne thoroughfares that cross the world. Atlantic winds lead naturally to those of other oceans. Except for certain Maghribi communities ofern Africa, which remained surprisingly indifferent to long-range seaward enterprise in the critical period, no other Atlantic-side peoples enjoyed a position near the outward path of the northeast trades, and none had the maritime technology and traditions which Western Europeans were able to exploit. Why did the Maghribis not join or pre-empt the European enterprise?

Traditionally, their maritime potential has been underestimated. Because the ocean was a cauldron of the imagination, in which fantastic tales were set, imaginary evocations displaced real experience in most of the literature of the time; the imaginative stimulus of the ocean meant that fantastic literature crowded out matter-of-fact writings in surviving Maghribi work from the Middle Ages. Al-Idrisi, the court geographer of Roger II of Sicily, established a tradition which most subsequent writers have followed. “No one knows,” he wrote, “what lies beyond the sea . . . because of the hardships which impede navigation: the depth of the darkness, the height of the waves, the frequency of tempests, the multiplicity of monsters, and the violence of the winds. . . . No navigator dare cross it or penetrate the open sea. They stick to the coasts.”¹⁴Yet, if high-seas exploration was rarely attempted, it was not for want of suitable ships, men, or spirit. Rather, the very intensity of coastal activity inhibited ventures farther afield; there was so much trade, migration, and naval warfare that the shipping stock was always fully employed and, as in the Indian Ocean, there was little incentive to develop new opportunities.¹⁵

None of the communities occupying other Atlantic shores were interested in rivaling the Western European enterprise. The trading peoples of the circum-Caribbean region did not develop means of long-range navigation by sea; the commercial vocation of cities and kingdoms in West Africa was oriented towards river traffic and cabotage.¹⁶Yet the problem with which we started remains: the advantages of an Atlantic-side position had always been available to the maritime communities of Western Europe. If position was decisive, why was the Westerners’ worldwide maritime enterprise so long delayed?

The Technological Strand

One commonly espoused theory to explain the Atlantic breakthrough is that it was triggered by technology. Something new—according to this theory—in late-fifteenth-century Europe extended the range of navigation: ship design, perhaps, or efficient handling techniques or means of navigation. This is false, because the technology which took the explorers of the 1490 s across the ocean had been available for centuries. Technical developments in shipbuilding, directionfinding, and the stowage of provisions were never arrested in the Middle Ages. Progress, however, in these respects proceeded as if by titration, drip by drip, and cannot be said to have exceeded a critical depth by the time of the Atlanticbreakthrough. The shipwright’s, for instance, was a numinous craft, sanctified by the sacred images in which ships were associated in the pictorial imaginations of the time: the ark of salvation, the storm-tossed barque, and the ship of fools. Much of our knowledge of medieval shipyards comes from pictures of Noah.¹⁷In a context so steeped in tradition, dramatic innovations are rare; improvements accumulated in the late Middle Ages, but only by very slow, incremental stages. The first of two big, unspectacular changes which dominated the late Middle Ages was the gradual adoption of frame-first construction methods, which spread from the northern shores across the whole of Europe. They were adopted for reasons of economy in the shipyards rather than of efficiency at sea: planks could be laid end to end, without wasting wood, and tacked to the frame, without heavy expenditure of nails, and the expensively skilled craftsmen who formerly constructed hulls plank by plank were superseded by cheap labor. The second sea-change was the inexorable growth in the complexity and flexibility of rigging. This was of great utility, but was too gradual to help explain the phenomenon of the 1490 s. The ships of Columbus, Cabot, and Vasco were no different, in any material respect, from those available for most of the previous hundred years (although Portuguese coastal navigation in the African Atlantic benefited from developments in ship design earlier in the century).¹⁸The explorations of the crucial decade all relied on the modest miracles of highmedieval technology: the heavily square-rigged vessel built on a skeleton frame; the compass; and primitive celestial navigation. The only genuinely recent improvements that mattered were in casks for water and food; these were essential, especially for Vasco da Gama’s ships, which had to spend three times as long on the open sea as those of Columbus. They were probably produced by trial and error during the long Portuguese experience of open-sea journeys on the return leg from West African slave-getting and gold-hunting ventures.¹⁹It would, however, be a silly exaggeration to class improvements in water kegs as a world-shaking technological revolution.

Advice from a treatise of about 1190 represents an early stage of the European-reception of the navigator’s most rudimentary tool: when the moon and stars are in darkness, Guyot de Provins explained, all the sailor need do is place, inside a straw floating in a basin of water, a pin well rubbed “with an ugly brown stone that draws iron to itself, for the point of this floating needle will always turn to the north.” The compass was made serviceable in the thirteenth century by being balanced on a point, so that it could rotate freely against a scale of 360 degrees, usually divided between sixteen compass points. Other tools for navigators were gradually and imperfectly absorbed in the course of the Middle Ages, but their reception tended to be delayed and their impact diminished by the natural conservatism of a traditional craft. Mariners’ astrolabes, for instance, which enabled navigators to calculate latitude from the height of the sun or the Pole Star above the horizon, were already available in Western Europe by the earlytwelfth century, and written tables prepared to accompany them are known in references and surviving examples from the thirteenth century onwards. Few ships, however, ever carried them. Tables for determining latitude according to the hours of sunlight were easier to use but demanded more accurate timekeeping than most mariners could manage with the means at their disposal: hourglasses turned by ships’ boys, or laborious observation of the passage of the guard stars around Polaris.²⁰For suitably seasoned captains—and none other would venture on the open sea—the naked eye was still the best instrument of navigation in the late fifteenth century.²¹

The marine chart was another technical innovation which might have been marginally useful in exploration. From the thirteenth century onwards, compilers of navigational manuals distilled the vicarious experience of practical seafarers into sailing directions which could genuinely assist a navigator without much prior local knowledge. The earliest surviving example is the portolan of a course between Acre and Venice of the early thirteenth century. About the middle of the same century, the compasso di navigare provided the earliest surviving compendium of sailing directions for the Mediterranean as a whole, linking the coasts, port by port, from Cape St. Vincent clockwise to Safi. “Portolan charts” began to present similar information in graphic form at about the same period. The earliest clear reference is to the chart which accompanied St. Louis on his crusade to Tunis in 1270 , and which his Genoese technicians unfolded before him when the king demanded to know whether he was near Sardinia. As early as 1228 , however, the Catalan merchant Pere Martell demonstrated their prospective route to his fellow conquerors of Majorca, as if with a chart spread before him.²²Marine charts were not intended for explorers but were not, perhaps, completely useless for exploration. They were a means of recording and communicating discoveries and accumulating information on which new initiatives could be based. Their use was, however, obviously, limited. It could not assist the makers of the breakthrough of the 1490 s, because they were genuinely heading into the unknown. Columbus had a chart on his first Atlantic crossing, but its representation of the ocean was necessarily speculative and, as it turned out, highly misleading.²³Except, perhaps, in the case of water casks, no new technology played any part in extending the reach of European seafaring. Nor, at the material time, did seaboard Europeans have any technical advantages in shipbuilding or navigation compared with the maritime cultures of Asia.²⁴

The Power of Culture

When aware of the insufficiency of an explanation based on technology, inquirers often turn to the assumption that responsibility lies with supposed peculiarities of Western European culture. Culture is part of an unholy trinity—culture,chaos, and cock-up—which roam through our versions of history, substituting for traditional theories of causation. It has the power to explain everything and nothing. The Atlantic breakthrough is part of a huge phenomenon: the “rise of the West,” “the European miracle”—the elevation of Western societies to preeminence in the modern history of the world. Thanks to the displacement of traditional concentrations of power and sources of initiative, the former centers, such as China, India, and Islam, became peripheral, and the former peripheries, in Western Europe and the New World, became central. Capitalism, imperialism, modern science, industrialization, individualism, democracy—all the great world-shaping initiatives of recent history— are supposed, in various ways, to be peculiar inventions of societies founded in or from Europe. In part, this is because counterinitiatives from elsewhere have not yet been given due attention. In part, however, it is simply true. It is tempting, therefore, to attribute the Atlantic breakthrough, with all its consequences, to something special about the culture of Western Europe.

Most of the cultural features commonly adduced are unhelpful, either because they were not unique to Europe, or because they were not specially concentrated in the maritime regions of Western Europe from where the Atlantic breakthrough was projected, or because they were not around at the right time, or because they are phony. The political advantages of a competitive state system were shared with Southeast Asia. As a religion conducive to commerce, Christianity was equaled or excelled by Jainism (see page 340 ), some Buddhist traditions (see page 000 ), Islam, and Judaism, among others. The tradition of scientific curiosity and empirical method was at least as strong in Islam and China, though it is true that a distinctive scientific culture did become discernible later in Europe and in parts of the Americas settled from Europe.²⁵

Missionary zeal is a widespread vice or virtue, and—though most of our histories ignore the fact—Islam and Buddhism both experienced extraordinary expansion into new territories and among new congregations, at the same time as Christianity, in what we think of as the late Middle Ages and the earlymodern period.²⁶Imperialism and aggression are not exclusively white men’s excesses: the European empires of the modern world, and their successors in areas settled from Europe, were made in an expanding world, full of emulous competitors.

Nevertheless, a peculiar culture of exploration and adventure did exist in Western Europe at the relevant time. By its nature, such a culture can only be constructed over a long period and can never be specific to a period as concentrated as that of the Atlantic breakthrough of the 1490 s; but I believe it may have been at or near its height at about that time. In late-medieval Western Christendom, explorers were steeped in the idealization of adventure. Many of them shared or strove to embody the great aristocratic ethos of the late Middle Ages, the “code” of chivalry, which shaped everything done by elites—or those whoaspired to join them—in Western Europe.²⁷Their ships were gaily caparisoned steeds, and they rode the waves like jennets. Their role models were the footloose princes who won themselves kingdoms by deeds of derring-do in popular romances of chivalry—the “pulp fiction” of the time—which often had a seaborne setting: figures like the medieval “Brutus,” who, when Troy was lost, found a realm in Albion, or Prince Amadis of Gaul, who battled giants and won an enchanted island, or Prince Turian, who found his fortune aboard a ship and his love across an ocean.²⁸Columbus, whose life’s trajectory startlingly resembled the plot of a chivalric romance of the sea, probably had such role models in mind. He arrogated to himself the prize for sighting land on his first Atlantic crossing less, perhaps, out of naked greed than because his journey, though unprecedented in fact, had a precedent in literature. In a Spanish version of the medieval Alexander romance, Alexander makes his own discovery of Asia by sea and, the poet emphasizes, was first, before all his seamen, to see it.²⁹Despite the maddening reticence that makes Vasco da Gama so unapproachable, we can be sure that he took seriously his own chivalric obligations as a knight successively of the Orders of Santiago and of Christ. Cabot has left even fewer sources than Vasco with which to construct his mental world, but the Bristol from which he launched the voyage was familiar with the English romances of seaborne chivalry of the time, including the Gesta Arthuri , which ascribed to the mythic king the conquests, among others, of Greenland and the North Pole. Henry VII, that staid monarch with a businessman’s reputation, was not unsusceptible to such romance himself, and called his heir Arthur after Britain’s Charlemagne, the once-and-future king who would return to redeem his claims.³⁰This messianic touch links the chivalric tradition with the millenarian sentiments rife in the courts where Columbus and Vasco da Gama were commissioned.

Ferdinand the Catholic allowed himself to be represented in a tradition—strong for generations at the Aragonese court—which depicted the king as the “last world emperor” prophesied since the twelfth century; Dom Manuel of Portugal was susceptible to a similar kind of millenarian language, which made him responsive to the idea of a Jerusalem crusade via the Indian Ocean.³¹

Although it is mischievous to accuse other cultures of hostility or indifferenceto trade and seafaring, the cult of seaborne chivalry did have the effect of ennobling, in Europe, activities which elsewhere had a derogating drag on rank or a depressant effect on social mobility. Landlubbers’ complacency induced contempt for the maritime life among elites that did not read maritime romantic fiction. The Chinese naval effort of the early fifteenth century was undermined by Mandarin opposition which reflected the priorities of a landlubber class. In fifteenth-century Malacca, Muslim traders were permitted to use titles of nobility and Hindu merchants granted the lesser, Sanskrit-derived style of nina; but they could not attain the highest ranks.³²Rulers in that region had hands permanently sullied with traffic, but none dared style himself, like thePortuguese king, “Lord of Commerce and Navigation.” It would be a mistake, however, to suppose that maritime Asia was hobbled by prejudices, or that her potential long-range trades and empires were lamed and limited by cultural deficiencies. On the contrary, many Asian states were run by sultans and Samorins with something like entrepreneurial flair; the suitability of traditional societies in the region to be homes of empires and springboards of capitalism is demonstrated by the eventful mercantile and imperial histories of so many of them.

The Tyranny of the Timing

Commercial incentives rarely arise in a context of complacency, and in any long-haul race it is best to come from behind. The Atlantic breakthrough of the 1490 s resembled the efforts of developing societies today, desperately drilling for offshore resources. A comparable Indian Ocean breakthrough is hard to imagine, precisely because Indian Ocean trade was so rich. It fully absorbed the available shipping and adequately repaid the efforts of those who engaged in it. To cross the belt of storms that shields the ocean approaches on the south, and to round Africa, or to try to cross the Pacific to find new trades, would have been a pointless waste and risk; for the relatively impoverished economy of Western Europe, however, a comparable effort was worthwhile. That may be the simple reason why Vasco da Gama appeared in Calicut, before an Indian or Arab or Chinese or Indonesian merchant “discovered” Europe by sea, despite the superior equipment and longer tradition enjoyed by the seafarers of the East. It was not because of any superiority on the Europeans’ part but, on the contrary, because of the urgings of a kind of inferiority: laggards have to catch up. In pursuit of the kind of advice Lazarillo de Tormes got from his mother, the relatively poor reach out to the relatively rich in the hope that something will rub off.³³

Still, capital was needed for far-flung commercial enterprises of the sort which took the voyagers of the 1490 s to remote oceans and continents by previously unknown routes. In this connection, an explanation arises which helps to fix the breakthrough in time. The feature of the 1490 s which best explains the extraordinary achievements of the decade—the one thing about it which is universally agreed—is that it was preceded by a remarkably remunerative decade for investors in Atlantic voyages. The deputies of the Portuguese representative assembly of 1481 – 82 extolled the Wirtschaftswunde of Madeira and Porto Santo, claiming that, in the single year 1480 , “twenty forecastle ships and forty or fifty others loaded cargoes chiefly of sugar, without counting other goods and other ships which went to the said islands . . . for the nobility and richness of the merchandise of great value which they have and harvest in the said islands.”³⁴In 1482 , the Fort of S„o Jorge da Mina was erected near the mouth of the River Benya to consolidate the diversion of gold traffic into Portuguese hands; theAfrican trade was centralized in the Casa da Mina, beneath the royal palace in Lisbon. The laborious and costly Castilian Atlantic enterprise, the conquest of the Canary Islands, began to yield profits as islands were pacified and turned to sugar production. The first mill was opened on Gran Canaria in 1484 , the year of the official completion of the conquest, at Gaete; another soon followed at Guíar; the rapid development of the industry thereafter suggests the success of these ventures.³⁵Finally, on the route sailed by Cabot, there is good reason to believe that exploration of the North Atlantic was bringing growing benefits to Bristol in the 1480 s. After a period when, owing to a Danish royal prohibition on trade with Iceland, Northern goods had disappeared from port records, the trade in whaling products and walrus ivory recovered in Bristol in the 1480 s. The fact that salt was carried in enormous quantities on an explicitly exploratory voyage of 1481 suggests that rich fisheries had been discovered—perhaps even the Newfoundland banks were being fished from Bristol at this time.³⁶Money was available for further exploration, even in the cash-strapped economy of Western Europe in the 1490 s, because the returns of the 1480 s had been so encouraging.

When the Atlantic breakthrough came, it yielded commercial and imperial-consequences which are universally acknowledged in general terms and furiously debated in detail. In the very long term, however, its scientific significance may be judged to have been of greater importance. European primacy in science cannot explain the breakthrough; rather, the breakthrough happened in part in consequence of it. Considered from the perspective of the history of science, voyages like those of Columbus and Vasco were experiments on a vast scale, which converted geographical hypothesis into knowledge. Columbus’s servility before old texts, combined with the paradoxical delight he displayed whenever he was able to correct them from experience, mark him at once as one of the last torchbearers of medieval cosmography, who carried their lights on the shoulders of their predecessors, and one of the first beacons of the Scientific Revolution, whose glow was kindled from within by their preference for experiment over authority. Vasco da Gama’s voyage was preceded by tentative experiments: the rounding of the Cape of Good Hope by Bartolomeu Dias in 1488 , the Portuguese intelligence-gathering mission into the Indian Ocean via the Red Sea in 1487 – 90 . Like the voyages of Columbus and Cabot, it was part of an enterprise stimulated by questions raised by humanist geography in the course of the fifteenth century: How big was the world? How wide was the Atlantic? Was the Indian Ocean landlocked, as a tradition of ancient geography claimed? The extent of the explorers’ place in economic and political history is a matter of dispute; their findings, however, instantly and incontrovertibly became part of a scientific world-picture—an agreed map of the world and its resources. Previous civilizations derived their images of what the planet is like from dogmas of cosmology, from inductive reasoning, from revelation, from inherited tradition, orfrom the elaboration of theory. We owe today’s vision largely to the practical contributions of the empirical observers whom we call explorers.

Atlantic Civilization in Black and White:
The Imperial Phase

As a result of the sudden achievements of the 1490 s, Atlantic-side Europe was able to reach across the ocean by way of conquest, colonization, and trade. By the late eighteenth century, four major Atlantic-spanning empires were in place: Spanish, Portuguese, French, and British. A glance at the map of majority languages in the Americas today shows how deeply rooted these empires became. On a smaller scale, Netherlanders, Danes, Germans, Swedes, Scots, and Courlanders played a part in initiating transoceanic imperialism; gradually, colonists came from deeper inside Western Europe, too.

The first consequence was the creation of a single Atlantic civilization which spanned both shores of the ocean. In the seventeenth century, this inchoate civilization came to embrace North as well as Central and South America, and Africa as well as Europe. The first permanent Atlantic-side colony in North America was the Spanish fort of San Agustín in Florida, today Anglicized as Saint Augustine, and occupied continuously from 1567 . But it was a strictly military presence: a garrison which clung to the coast and kept to short-term service. Moreover, San Agustín was part of the Caribbean world it protected, fending off French interlopers along the homeward route to Spain, which led from Santo Domingo or Havana, northwards with the Florida current, to link up with the Gulf Stream and the westerly winds. The framework of Atlantic civilization was not complete until English colonies began to flourish farther north and to develop direct links across the northern corridor of the ocean. The Spanish empire in America was, of all the European intrusions in the hemisphere in the early-modern period, incomparably the biggest, most spectacular, and most thoroughgoing in effecting environmental transformations. But for a case study of how Atlantic civilization happened, an English colony will make a more representative example.

The Mayflower has become an American icon, evoking the heroic age of colonization in every mind; but the first enduring settlement in what is now the United States was in Virginia, not Massachusetts, and the cosmic observers would assign pride of place, in this part of their exhibits, to the voyage of the ships which took the first settlers there in 1607 : the Godspeed , the Susan Constant , and the Discovery . Virginia became in almost every respect a textbook case of how Atlantic civilization was created: by costly adjustment to a new environment;by ruthlessness masked with hypocrisy; by fragile relations between races, which started equivocally and became bloody and exploitative; by demographic disaster and the tenacious, unprincipled, and revolutionary responses it evoked—including a new economy, based on new crops and a new agronomy, with a new labor force.

The ships’ complements were authorized by the king of England, to “begin their said first plantation and seat of their first abode and habitation at any place on the coast of Virginia.” The place had been chosen less for its suitability than in the hope that no possible rival would bother to fight for it. In the promotional slogan coined in 1609 by the expedition’s PR man, Robert Johnson, deadly swamps and laborious forest made a potential new Britain—“Nova Britannia . . . offering most excellent fruits by planting in Virginia.”³⁷Self-deception painted an alluring picture of “a good land and, if the Lord love us, he will bring our people to it and give it us for a possession . . . most sweet and wholesome, much warmer than England, and very agreeable to our natures.”³⁸Where every prospect pleased, only man was likely to be vile. Johnson warned:

There are valleys and plains streaming with sweet springs, like veins in a natural body; there are hills and mountains making a sensible proffer of hidden treasure, never yet searched. . . . There is assured hope of gain . . . but look it not be chief in your thoughts . . . that bitter root of greedy gain be not so settled in our hearts, that being in a golden dream, if it fall not out presently to our expectations, we slink away with discontent and draw our purses from the charge.³⁹

Among all the awkward facts the propaganda minimized, one was particularly-irksome. For this Eden already had its own Adam. The native inhabitants were classified according to the colonists’ convenience, in any way fit for dispossession: first as ideally exploitable beings, then, almost in the same breath, as brutish victims unworthy of human rights.

It is inhabited with wild and savage people . . . like herds of deer in a forest. They have no law but nature . . . yet . . . they are generally very loving and gentle and do entertain and relieve our people with great kindness. . . . And as for supplanting the savages, we have no such intent . . . unless as unbridled beasts they procure it to themselves.⁴⁰

To an unprejudiced eye, the natives were by no means irredeemably barbaric. On the contrary, they had the rudiments Europeans reckoned as essential to civilization: built dwellings and towns. The confederacy in which they lived was recognizable as a sovereign state, with the same legitimacy as the white men’s realms of Europe; their ruler was evidently hedged with divinity:

The great emperor at this time amongst them we commonly call Powhatan . . . the greatness and bounds of whose empire by reason of his powerfulness, and ambition in his youth, hath larger limits than ever had any of his predecessors in former times. . . . He is a goodly old man, not yet shrinking, though well beaten with many cold and stormy winters, in which he hath been patient of many necessities and attempts of fortune, to make his name and family great, he is supposed to be a little less than eighty years old. . . . And sure it is to be wondered at, how such a barbarous and uncivill prince should take unto him . . . a form and ostentation of such majesty as he expresseth, which oftentimes strikes awe and sufficient wonder into our people, presenting themselves before him, but such is (I believe) the impression of the divine nature, and howsoever these (as other) heathens forsaken by the true light, have not that portion of knowing the blessed Christian spirit, yet I am persuaded there is an infused kind of divineness, and extraordinary (appointed that it shall be so by the king of kings) to such who are his immediate instruments on earth. The “subjects at his feet . . . present whatsoever he commandeth, and at the least frown of his brow, the greatest will tremble.”⁴¹

The laws and customs of Christendom at the time offered no good grounds to make war on these people. The English home government’s advice to colonists was larded with cant, but you could feel its rough edges under the slick language:

If you find it convenient, we think it reasonable you first remove from [the natives] . . . their . . . priests by a surprise of them all and detaining them prisoners, for they are so wrapped up in the fog and misery of their iniquity and so terrified with their continual tyranny, chained under the bond of death unto the devil, that while they live among them to poison and infect their minds, you shall never make any great progres in this glorious work, nor have any peace or concur with them. And in case of necessity or conveniency, we pronounce it not cruelty nor breach of charity to deal sharply with them and proceed even unto death.⁴²

The model the English had in mind was obvious: they intended to imitate Cortes’s conquest of Mexico. As for the Indians’ ruler, their instructions ran, “If you find it not best to make him your prisoner yet you must make him your tributary.” At first, however, they were impeded by their own incompetence and the unfamiliarity of the environment. Few of them had any useful skills in planting and building, and dependence on Indian charity was their only means of stayingalive. “The Indians did daily relieve us,” as they admitted, “with . . . such corn and flesh as they could spare.” Their hosts were consciously forbearing. “We can plant anywhere,” they were reported as saying, “ . . . and we know that you cannot live if you lack our harvest and that relief we bring you.”⁴³

This was no way to go about a conquest. Nor, in the long run, could it sustain-an enduring colony. The policy of peace was already collapsing—torn apart by the mutual resentment of the English and their hosts—when a character in the tradition of Cortes took command of the settlers and inaugurated a new approach: aggressive, ruthless, and uncompromising. Captain John Smith was the first great American tough guy, a self-important tyrant whose real personality—bloody, bold, and resolute—has been coated with sugar crust by a cloying Disney myth. He claimed to be able to charm goods and girls out of the Indians. But his real means of making them feed the colony was terror.

As one of his many critics among his fellow-colonists put it,

. . . the command from England was so straight not to offend them . . . till well it chanced they meddled with Captain Smith, who without further deliberation gave them such an encounter as some he hunted up and down the Isle, some he so terrified with whipping, beating and imprisonment . . . it brought them in such fear and obedience, as his very name would sufficiently affright them.⁴⁴Smith was frank about the mutual brutality into which his relations with the Indians degenerated, and had violent scenes incorporated into the cartouches of a map illustrating his conquests.

He tried similar tactics on colonists who disobeyed him. “Seeing how the authority resteth wholly in myself,” he decreed, “you must obey this for a law, that he that will not work shall not eat, except by sickness he be disabled. For the labours of thirty or forty honest and industrious men shall not be consumed to maintain 150 idle varlets.”⁴⁵

Discerning contemporaries knew Captain John Smith for a Munchausen—a fantasist who lied his way into esteem and who wrote self-aggrandizing, incredibly romantic books in praise of his own adventures. The claim that Pocahontas loved him becomes unbelievable when one reads his own accounts of his sexual prowess in the Turkish sultan’s harem. He inspired a series of satires “upon the incomparably valiant Captain Jones,” who

Like a disease both sexes smites

For he wounds ladies, too, as well as Knights:

He was so trim a youth the Queen of No-land

Thought him some Princely Shaver come from Poland

And so he prov’d indeed for by God’s duds

He most unkindly left her in the Sudds. . . .

To wind all up, Fame’s Trump his deeds doth tell,

Although a sow-gelder’s would do’t as well.⁴⁶

During a spell spent as the prisoner of Powhatan’s Indians, Smith, it was claimed, “so . . . enchanted those poor souls . . . in demonstrating unto them the roundness of the world, the course of the moon and stars, the cause of the day and night, the largeness of the seas . . . as they esteemed him an oracle.”⁴⁷There may have been some truth in this account (though it is suspiciously like a claim Columbus made about himself): since their first contact with English interlopers in the previous century, Virginian Indians had indeed been fascinated by astronomical gadgets. But the self-portrayal of a sagacious hero, establishing superiority over his enemies by intellectual prowess, is an age-old literary device and has to be taken with a pinch of salt. It was part of the legend Smith wrote or had written for himself. The fact that he shone out among the first Virginians shows only what a sorry lot they were. He was appointed to the council because he was one of the few among them with relevant military experience; he had served as a soldier of fortune in Ottoman lands.

When he was disabled in an accident and forced to return to England, his fellow colonists rejoiced. So did the Indians. “The Salvages [sic] no sooner understood Smith was gone, but they all revolted, and did spoil and murder all they encountered.”⁴⁸The colony was bereft of security, labor, and food.

Now we all felt the want of Captain Smith, yea, his greatest maligners could then curse his loss. Now for corn, provision and contribution from the Savages, we had nothing but mortal wounds with clubs and arrows. As for our hogs, hens, goats, sheep, horse or what lived, our commanders and officers did daily consume them; some small proportions (sometimes) we tasted, till all was devoured. The swords, arrows, pieces or any thing we traded to the Savages, whose bloody fingers were so imbrued in our bloods, that what by their cruelty, our governor’s indiscretion and the loss of our ships, of 500 , within six months after there remained not many more than sixty most miserable poor creatures. It were too vile to say what we endured; but the occasion was only our own, for want of providence, industry and government, and not the barrenness and defect of the country, as is generally supposed. New arrivals from England in May 1610

found the palisadoes torn down, the ports open, the gates from off the hinge and empty houses (which own death had taken from them) rentup and burnt. . . . And the Indians killed as fast without, if our men stirred but beyond the bounds of the blockhouse as famine and pestilence did within.⁴⁹

Smith’s interlude had served as a temporary expedient. The real savior of the colony was an enterprising heavy smoker called John Rolfe. Dissatisfied with the unpleasant weed the Virginian Indians smoked, he hit on the idea of transplanting Spanish tobacco seed from the Caribbean in 1611 . It worked. In 1617 , twenty thousand pounds of tobacco were harvested. In 1622 , it was reported, “all this Summer little was done, but securing themselves and planting tobacco, which passes there as current Silver, and by the oft turning and winding it, some grow rich, but many poore.”⁵⁰That year, sixty thousand pounds were grown, despite the recurrence of war with the Indians.⁵¹By 1627 , Virginia produced half a million pounds of tobacco, and fifteen million by 1669 .

Tobacco made the colony viable, but the environment still killed the Englishmen who came to live there: out of fifteen thousand arrivals from 1607 to 1622 , only two thousand survived. The Indians’ numbers were “thinned” by wars with the colonists and the depredations of the unfamiliar diseases introduced from Europe. In the long run, the labor supply could only be assured by importing slaves from Africa. There were already African slaves in the colony even before the first mention of an incoming shipment in 1619 , when a Dutch manofwar “sold us twenty niggers.” Among or alongside lists of white servants in the next couple of decades, slaves appear in the colony’s records, often without a name or a date of arrival. These omissions are important, as they distinguish the slaves from the servants, the term of whose bondage was calculated according to length of service. Numbers remained small until the 1660 s, because of the steady supply of poor migrants from England, who could do the work and who cost something under half the price of an African slave. Reliance on the exploitation of poor whites was cost-effective, because mortality rates among newcomers of every hue were high: investing in four servants rather than two slaves spread the risk. Forty-five thousand laborers arrived between 1650 and 1674 . At the latter date there were probably fewer than three thousand African slaves in all of Virginia. Thereafter, however, the proportions began to be reversed.⁵²

Free blacks quickly began to play a part in Virginian society—but these were usually freed slaves, not servants who had served out their bondage. “

Antonio the Negro,” sold as a slave in 1621 , survived to become the freedman Anthony Johnson in 1650 , with a freed slave wife, slaves of his own, and 250 acres of land. Francis Payne bought his freedom with 1 , 650 pounds of tobacco.⁵³Other slaves declined the white man’s freedom and escaped to create mini-Africas in the woods. In 1672 , bands of these “maroons” excited fears of rebellion so great that whites were licensed and encouraged by law to hunt them down and kill them on sight. In 1676 , the colony was convulsed by a poor farmers’ rebellion,amid fears of a slave revolt in alliance with Dutch invaders. In 1691 , a black guerrilla called Mingoe led a band of followers in the thefts of food and guns.⁵⁴

The World the Slaves Made

In consequence, patches of Virginia more closely resembled a “new Africa” than a “new Europe.” Across the New World as a whole, the Atlantic civilization which took shape in the seventeenth century was genuinely, comprehensively Atlantic—transplanted from the ocean’s African shore at least as much as from Europe’s. Though it was shipped in European bottoms, most of the people who constituted it—the human content of this civilization—came from Africa.

South of Virginia, as far as southern Brazil, stretched a predominantly black world, which by the beginning of the eighteenth century was perceived as “another Guinea.”⁵⁵The other broad features of the Virginia pattern also recurred on most of Atlantic-side America, including the Caribbean islands, south to the edges of Brazil’s Serra do Mar: new crops for export on a large scale, and plantation-systems. Reliance on African slaves was everywhere a consequence. Black preponderance in numbers among transatlantic colonists was enormous: more than 70 percent, on average, of migrants shipped between 1580 and 1820 were black.⁵⁶Indeed, among all the migrations facilitated for the first time on a large scale in the period by the development of oceanic communications, the biggest single transfer of population was from Africa to the Americas. Moreover, in much of Atlantic-side America, the culture Africans brought with them was overwhelmingly African, lightly affected, if at all, by the presence of European masters or neighbors, who left religions, languages, and forms of society untouched.⁵⁷

In this period, most slave communities in America did not reproduce naturally, for reasons which are still little understood, but which surely were in part the consequence of the inhuman treatment to which slaves were subjected. The Anglican priest Morgan Godwyn, “the Negro’s advocate,” denounced excesses he witnessed in Virginia and Barbados in the 1660 s and 1670 s: the planters saw Africans as beasts of burden; they obstructed evangelization, for Christian slaves had, by custom, to be freed after five years;⁵⁸they kept them hungry and effectively massacred infants by preventing mothers from suckling them. Punishments included flogging, ear-cropping, and castration.⁵⁹The Jesuit prophet and court preacher Antonio de Vieira, who had a mulatto grandmother, compared the sufferings of slaves in Brazil to Christ’s time on the cross; but his well-intentioned advice enjoined patience, not liberation—except in the mind:

Christ was mistreated in every way and so are you. Of irons, prisons, lashings, wounds, and ignominious names your imitation is made,which along with patience will win you the rewards of the martyr. . . . When you serve your masters, do not serve them as one who serves men but as one who serves God. Because then you will not serve as captives but as free men, and you will obey not as slaves but as sons.⁶⁰

The rules drawn up for the guidance of a sugar-plantation overseer in 1663 recommended, for the punishment of ill-behaved slaves,

. . . not to beat them with a stick, nor to pelt them with stones and tiles, but, when a slave deserves it, to tie him to a cart and flog him. After being well flogged, he should be pricked with a sharp razor or knife, and the wounds rubbed with salt, lemon juice and urine, after which he should be put in chains for some days.

At the end of the century, a Jesuit moralist listed the slave-owners’ obligations. It was an implicit indictment of the way slaves were really treated: undernourishment, overwork, sexual abuse which gave owners “the kind of possession of his slaves which Lucifer enjoys over his devils,” clothing inadequate to the point of indecency, excessive and unjust punishments, neglect of the sick.⁶¹The land was known as a purgatory for whites but a hell for blacks.⁶²According to an Italian Capuchin who visited Bahia in 1682 , slaves were “reckoned to live long if they hold out seven years.”⁶³ In a little-known, chillingly matter-of-fact account of West Indian diseases written in 1764 , we learn treatments for yaws (copious spitting and the application of verdigris and “corrosive sublimate”) and the incidence of ankle ulcers among “runaway negroes, and those who are nastily lazy, or who eat dirt, a perversion . . . not confined . . . to the females.”⁶⁴

Constant new imports were therefore required just to maintain labor levels. By the end of the seventeenth century, more than 1 . 5 million African slaves reached the New World. The numbers shipped out of Africa were somewhat larger, for the voyage across the Atlantic was fatal to many, at least on the longer passages. The slaves came—in varying degrees at different times—from Atlantic-side Africa, especially the West African bulge, the Congo, and Angola. Overwhelmingly, they were obtained by African vendors in the course of war and raiding, which reached many hundreds of miles into the interior. Despite the breadth of the catchment area, the export of manpower must have affected the societies targeted by the slavers. The effects are much disputed among historians, but that they were generally dire is a useful commonsense assumption. For a time, the Angolan region seems to have developed a marked excess of females over males. On the fringe of African trading-states, some areas may have been depopulated. The slave market encouraged wars between African nations for human booty and encouraged raptor kingdoms in Africa. In Dahomey, thepaths of the king’s palace were paved with human bones. In the interior of Angola, virago queens challenged the cannibal kingdom of Lunda in competition for captives. Parts of Western Africa suffered depopulation. Meanwhile, slave ports multiplied all around the Atlantic as the trade grew.

On long routes, slaves died in their hundreds: because they could be bought cheaply and sold dear, shippers were willing to waste cargo and throw the corpses overboard.⁶⁵In 1820 , a French slaver on the Atlantic kept his slaves in barrels so that he could toss them overboard at the approach of a slave-trade patrol vessel. When mutinous slaves were executed aboard the Kentucky in 1844 , their legs were first chopped off “to save the irons”; according to participants, “all kinds of sport were made of the business.”⁶⁶In 1781 , the master of the Zong drowned 133 sick slaves, because if they had died naturally the owners’ loss would not be covered by insurance: “the case of slaves,” it was thought, “was the same as if horses had been thrown overboard.”⁶⁷

At their destinations, despite wastage en route, the slaves were usually the great majority of the colonial population: forty-five thousand blacks to eight thousand other people in all categories, for instance, in Jamaica in 1700 . Lima, the most Spanish city in Peru, had over ten thousand blacks in a total population of 25 ,454 , according to a census of 1614 . By the end of the seventeenth century, Africans were the biggest element in the population of parts of Mexico and coastal Peru and wherever plantation economies grew up. Most of these regions were on or near the ocean coast: English North America from Virginia southwards, the West Indies, as well as some coastal areas of Mexico, Central America, Venezuela, and the sugar lands of Guyana and Brazil. The most unmitigatedly African areas were maroon statelets—rebel republics or bandit kingdoms founded by runaway slaves. At Esmeralda, in Colombia, the maroon kingdom had a treaty with the Spanish crown dating from 1599 . In Surinam, the first maroon community arose in 1663 , when Portuguese Jews sent their slaves into the back country to avoid paying the head tax due on them.⁶⁸In Palmares, in the hinterland of Pernambuco, an effectively independent black kingdom survived from the turn of the century until 1694 : at its height, under King Zumbi, it could mobilize a royal guard over five thousand men strong.⁶⁹

The culture of Palmares was hybrid: part African, part Portuguese. What most impressed visitors was the efficiency with which it was governed and the dignity with which its institutions were endowed. The king had a palace, according to a Jesuit report,

. . . and houses for his family and the service of all the guards and officials normally found in the house of a king. And he is treated with all ceremony due to a king and all the honors of a ruler. Those who find themselves in his presence fall to their knees in sign of recognitionand in deference to his excellence. They call him “Majesty” and their obedience is wonderful.⁷⁰

The black elite of Palmares were rich enough to buy slaves of their own and plenty of guns, with which they beat off Portuguese attempts at reconquest. Their capital, Macaco, developed a reputation for invincibility. Even after his death and the crushing of his kingdom, Zumbi continued to inspire black insurrections—a phantom king, a shade of Africa.

The cultures of most slave communities were pluralistic, because they typically comprised different peoples from different parts of Africa. But, whether on plantations or in maroon enclaves, they were always African cultures, little affected by white influence. Evangelization was enjoined by the authorities in Catholic countries. In Brazil, for instance, slaves had to be allowed to attend mass and were obliged to have their children baptized. In practice, however, regulations of this sort were evaded by owners, who usually preferred to keep their property out of the relatively humane hands of the clergy. Slaves bound for Brazil were loaded on ships with the words, “Know that you are now children of God. You are leaving for the lands of the Portuguese, where you will learn the substance of the Holy Faith. Think no more of your native lands, and eat no dogs, horses or rats. Be happy.”⁷¹

That was as close to Christian instruction as many of them came. Entertainments were tribal music and dance. From 1681 , at the feast of Our Lady of the Rosary, papal regulations allowed slave communities of Congolese origin in Brazil to elect a “king” and “queen” of their festivities to preside over songs and dances of their own devising.⁷²Food—the basic ingredient of any culture—was cooked and shared as it had been on the other side of the Atlantic. Oracular methods of justice often prevailed, or, especially in English colonies, the administration of justice was devolved by slave-owners to the slaves’ own “ governors” or elected “kings.”⁷³Personal adornment, marriage customs, and naming practices were continued from African origins in “a near-pure African civilisation.”⁷⁴The practice of baptism and the role of godparent provided a framework within which ritual kinship could be perpetuated and tribal or national links preserved in the slaves’ new homes. Spiritual solace was provided by spirit mediums. The weird syncretism of black religions still practiced to this day on the beaches of Rio or Bahia at night, when the spirits replace the tourists, represent appropriations of a few Christian images by forms of “voodoo” directly transmitted from Africa.⁷⁵

Beyond the plantation world, blacks gradually became an ethnic minority, composed of domestic servants, concubines, freedmen in unpopular occupations, or—if they came from the right part of Africa—technicians in mining industries. Paradoxically, the fewer they were in relation to other colonists andnatives, the easier for them to integrate or introduce offspring into the white and mixed-race elites. Under the Spanish and Portuguese crowns, at least, the descendants of free blacks enjoyed equality with whites before the law. Spectacular cases of the exploitation of these rights include Dom Henrique Dias and Dom Jo„o Fernandes Vieira, ennobled for their services in Brazil’s “War of Divine Liberty” against Dutch invaders from 1644 to 1654 . Generally, however, administrative discrimination and knee-jerk racism kept them repressed. A lady attending an auction felt blacks had no more concern at being sold than cows or sheep. Market forces made mere commodities of them.

Yet, at every stage of its history, the slave trade mocked economic laws, for, had those laws prevailed, the trade would never have happened. Slavery ought to have been eliminated by inefficiencies; it was part of a world of unfree labor typical of premodern economies.⁷⁶Except at moments of shortage, caused by wars or political interference, the shippers made profits only by luck. A few made fortunes in “a lottery” with many losers.⁷⁷The business was sustained in part by the related traffic which surrounded it: for Africa, strong drink, gimcrack muskets, gaudy textiles, and cheap truck; and for Europe, the plantation produce which pampered polite taste. The imperatives of empire demanded the trade. Without slaves, most New World colonies were unworkable: in some cases, there was no alternative, because native labor had been depleted by the mass raptors of uncontrollable disease. Would-be breeders of slaves experimented with black baby-farms in America, and Southern planters in the United States could defy the ban on trade because they managed to create the conditions in which slaves became a self-reproducing caste. Most plantation owners, however, abused their slaves so badly that they could not reproduce in sufficient numbers. For most of its history, the trade was the only means of replenishment.

It was supplied from specialist slave-harbor waterfronts and barracoons. Jim Bowie, the hero of the Alamo, earned a fortune by smuggling slaves, and a bounty for denouncing his accomplice; Elizabeth “Mammy” Skelton diversified from slaves into peanuts on the Nuñez and Pongas Rivers around 1840 ; her neighbor, “Mongo John” Ormond, a former ship’s mate, had five or six thousand slaves on his coffee plantation and “warehouses full of gunpowder, palm oil, alcohol and gold”; Father Demanet of Goree, “under cover of founding a sisterhood of the Sacre Coeur, had at his disposal the prettiest mulattoes of the region”; the harbor of Whydah was reckoned by merchants “one of the most delicious countries in the universe,” but for the malaria and yellow fever.⁷⁸

Above all, the trade was sustained by its universal usefulness—except to the slaves. The African societies which supplied it with captives were ruled by war chiefs and military aristocracies who depended on war. Faced with abolitionists’ demands, King Gelele of Dahomey told Sir Richard Burton, “If I cannot sell my captives taken in war, I must kill them, and surely the English would not likethat?” In their way, the habits of life and thought, as well as the needs, of European customers were equally implicated, not because they were savage—though some of them were—but precisely because of the nature of their civilization.⁷⁹A classical model of life informed their attitudes. If ancient Greece and Rome had been built by slaves, why not a new, equally virtuous modern world? The founder of Portuguese Angola believed that the abundance of slaves would enable him to excel antiquity.⁸⁰Finally, racism played a part in sustaining slavery—but only a small part. Scientific racism developed late. Until after abolition, most authorities on moral philosophy favored the common ancestry and moral equality of all human beings—though there were exceptions, like Edward Long in his History of Jamaica of 1774 , who assumed that blacks were inferior by virtue of supposedly racial characteristics, including “their bestial or fetid smell,” most marked in the “most stupid” specimens.⁸¹

Only the prospect of abolition could make the slave trade securely profitable. It caused a flurry of demand which helped to make the last two decades of the eighteenth century the slavers’ boom time. As abolition began to take effect, it drove up prices and made the fortune, for instance, of Pedro Blanco of Cadiz, “the Rothschild of slavery,” who in the 1830 s employed a lawyer, five accountants, two cashiers, ten copyists, and a harem of fifty black girls. As abolition progressed, moreover, slaves’ conditions got worse: more confined, more risky, more exposed to the vices of the criminals into whose hands the business got devolved. The liberated hardly fared better than the enslaved—abandoned, typically, on a quarter-acre plot in Sierra Leone, with a loincloth, a cooking pot, and a spade provided by the British government. Thousands of sailors died on patrol—most of them British—in pursuit of a noble ideal; but their efforts helped to make the trade more abominable.

A million and a half Europeans had migrated to the Americas by the end of the eighteenth century; in the same period, more than four times as many Africans had been transported to serve them, and some parts of the Atlantic world in the eighteenth century resembled African colonies. Kinglets in sixteenth-century Ecuador wore golden nose-ornaments, borrowed from indigenous tradition, as signs of authority. On seventeenth-century haciendas, African overseers ruled Indian peons. In eighteenth-century Jamaica, the British authorities left the regulation of black society to benches of elders and the secret sorcery of obeah men. Nineteenth-century Haiti became a black “empire” in ironic simulation of white imperialism. Everywhere they were taken, as partners and victims of European invaders, blacks played a vital part in the making of Atlantic civilization.⁸²

Yet we have almost forgotten—or almost obliterated—this part of our past. In the nineteenth century and much of the twentieth, the nature of Atlantic civilization narrowed. The New World became a reflection and extension of Europe, for four reasons: abolition of the slave trade; acculturation of the blackslaves in a society dominated by white values; the decisive shift of the demographic balance of the Americas caused by huge accessions of white settlers in the nineteenth century; and, above all, the fact that the constituent environment of Atlantic civilization—the ocean—was traversible only by technologies which Europeans could control. Only in consequence of these changes could Atlantic civilization become “Western civilization,” which is another name for a white civilization of Western European origin.

It would be comforting to record that the abolition of the slave trade was unaffected by economics, and represented a rare triumph for morality. Genuine philanthropists struggled for it, but their successes were the result of changed circumstances, not changed hearts. Quakers were in the forefront of the moral campaigns, but some of them went on slaving. The Enlightenment posited the “noble Negro,” but “some merchants thought they had satisfied their consciences when they christened their ships the Liberte, the ca-Ira, and the Jean-Jacques.”⁸³The moral issues were by no means clear, and apologists for the trade could claim to be rescuing Africans from worse tyrannies at home.

Most abolitionist literature was feeble, mawkish, and unconvincing. One of the more effective works appeared in 1788 , by the self-educated Ann Yearsley, who aroused guilt at “ideas of justice and humanity confined to one race of men.” But a good deal of the interest of slavery for the English reading public was prurient. Anecdotes abound of the sort told in “the first American novel,” Jonathan Corncob , about the hero’s erotic encounter with a pretty mulatto. “‘If massa,’ said she, ‘want ee chamberpot, he will put he hand out of bed; if he want me, he will puttee out he foot.’” The volume of black writings is disappointing—few free of self-pity or religious cant. Mary Prince wrote the most convincing account of her experiences in slavery: her frustrations of spirit are exposed without artifice; the horror is honed by simplicity. But her work appeared too late to influence opinion, and her allegations of cruelty were discredited in a libel case. The pleas of James Ramsay, “the Las Casas of Jamaica,” make so many concessions to the slavers’ viewpoint as to leave freedom undefended. The author of Amazing Grace , who was once a slave-shipper, was more concerned about the moral effects on the slavers than the predicament of the slaves.⁸⁴

Since slavery has been practiced in almost every known society, it could not just be assumed to be immoral or irrational. Modern revulsion from it is, in historical perspective, so unusual that it demands explanation. Existing literature offers three accounts. First, emancipation was the product of enlightened progress, which enabled humanitarians to expose iniquities invisible to their ancestors. Second, slave economics were replaced by capitalism, which found other, more productive ways to exploit labor. Finally, the slaves made their own freedom: recalcitrance and rebellion forced the white master-classes to abandon an unsustainable system. The untidy truth is that freedom, when it came, was the long-term result of slow-grinding forces: the bloody toll of slave resistance,the depredations of disease, the exploitation of new labor sources, the industrialization of some of the slaves’ traditional work, the glut of plantation labor brought on by the panic buying which abolitionists’ threats induced. It is not even clear what early abolitionists found morally repugnant about slavery: they let other forms of exploitation, including coolie abuse, sweatshops, and convict labor succeed it. They made the trade worse for a while by driving up prices. The enforcement of emancipation crippled economies, wrecked societies, and left whole coffles of slaves dead in their chains. The slave trade was succeeded by new forms of oppression. Some traders switched to the even more profitable traffic in coolies, whose sufferings became the new focus of imperial philanthropy.⁸⁵

In the long run, Americans throughout the hemisphere proved better at maintaining their traditional cultures and keeping in touch with their societies of origin if they were white. That is not surprising: whites set standards and controlled communications. Blacks were not, of course, the only victims. On the one hand, the making of Atlantic civilization was an inglorious process, which destroyed indigenous civilizations and cultures as it went—some deliberately annihilated, some driven out of viable environments by newcomers, others wrecked by the deadly impact of European diseases to which they had no natural resistance. But, considered from another point of view, it was a tremendous achievement, which transplanted ways of life and thought across the ocean and transformed parts of the environment of the New World—where the invaders built cities, raised livestock, and planted new crops—into distorted images of the old one.

Of course, no transplantation of societies on the transatlantic scale was possible-without enormous discontinuities, exciting new initiatives, radical new departures. Some of these were chosen by colonists who aspired to a fresh start, who were escaping from something they hated in the society of home: usually religious persecution or restricted social opportunity or poverty or, in a surprisingly large number of cases, an unwanted wife. Other transmutations were the work of the environment. For there genuinely is a “frontier effect” which sets in whenever people move to new lands, a culture gap between center and periphery.⁸⁶Partly it is a result of a generation gap, for the pioneer avant-garde is always relatively young in aggregate. Partly it is the consequence of the need to adjust ways of life or political habits to the demands of an unfamiliar climate. Feudalism does not work where labor is short. Despotism is unenforceable where distances are vast and communications poor. Collaboration is inescapable where nature is hostile.

It is not surprising, therefore, that the New World moiety of Atlantic civilization should rapidly have developed features which made it look different from its metropolitan models: more democratic in some cases, or more pluralistic in religion; more mixed racially in others, or more dependent on slavery oron indigenous food; more bureaucratic or etatiste where metropolitan governments succeeded in establishing effective counterweights to local power; and even more aristocratic where, for example, haciendas trapped peons in effective servitude, or where early colonists established tyrannous dynasties and exclusivist social registers.⁸⁷

The gap in political culture which opened across the Atlantic is well known in the North American case. It is less often appreciated that it was paralleled, with startling differences, in Spanish America. The overseas empire acquired by Castile became a type of “modern” statehood. Here, where time and distance armored the colonies against peninsular control, the crown was jealous of its power. Hereditary offices were few; elected ones were of little account; justice was the preserve of royally appointed bureaucrats; ecclesiastical patronage was in the king’s hands. The administration aspired to regulate the most minute details of the lives of its subjects in Manila and Michoacan, down to the weight of the burdens that native laborers were allowed to carry and the identity of individuals allowed to wear swords in the street. With the exception of a few estates of broadly “feudal” character and some ecclesiastical “peculiars” where the rights of the crown were effectively farmed out to religious orders, the overseas empire was run, with all the distortions and inefficiencies that derived from the intractability of time and space, from Madrid. The effect was paradoxical: local identity was nourished. “Creole patriotism” rewrote the history of America to make its achievements rival those of the Old World; creole savants revised the natural history of their hemisphere as a superior environment, propitious for virtue.

Despite the conscious distancing from home which drove colonists across the Atlantic—despite, too, the new political cultures they evolved, the new identities they embraced—a single Atlantic-spanning civilization really did take shape in the early-modern era. Communities driven or drawn far from Europe kept up some of the old ways with astonishing tenacity. They renamed places to remind them of the old country.⁸⁸They copied the architecture they left behind, sometimes using local materials or local artisans, which give it an engagingly different look; though, when Philip Harrington—a sea captain who kept Vitruvius Britannicus in his locker—built a Grecian temple in Newport, Rhode Island, in 1764 , he cleverly made the wood resemble stone.⁸⁹They transplanted crops from their places of origin, in preference to local varieties that perform better or yield more nourishment.⁹⁰They reconstructed features of the societies they labored to escape: religious persecution, social intolerance, the excluding urge. Calvinists in seventeenth-century Massachusetts drove Quakers and Baptists into remoter states. Foot soldiers and picaroons from sixteenth-century Spain set themselves up as lords in sixteenth-century Antigua or Bogota, with coats of arms over their doors and Indian tributaries whom they inaccurately called their vassals.⁹¹Secular and spiritual conquistadores strove for an American utopia without Jews or heretics.⁹²

Perhaps the most conspicuous proof that the civilization they helped to found or transmit was truly an Atlantic civilization lies in their cities—those old indices of civilization, according to conventional checklists. In colonial cities, the citzens’ self-image is embodied. The streets laid out, the buildings erected in the early centuries of the European presence in America were based on classical Greek and Roman models, which were at the height of their esteem in Western Europe during the period of the colonization and settlement of the New World. It is impossible not to admire the spirit which built—say—Mexico City at a height of seventy-five hundred feet on the ruins of the old Aztec capital of Tenochtitlan, or constructed the magnificence of Antigua under the volcanoes of the Guatemalan highlands, or laid out Philadelphia in the depths of the wilderness to embody in combination the principles of classical town-planning and brotherly love.