Barry Lopez - The Rediscovery of North America

NONFICTION

Horizon (2019)
About This Life: Journeys on the Threshold of Memory (1998)
Apologia (1998)
The Rediscovery of North America (1990)
Crossing Open Ground (1988)
Arctic Dreams: Imagination and Desire in a Northern Landscape (1986)
Of Wolves and Men (1978)

FICTION

Outside (2014)
with engravings by Barry Moser
Resistance (2004)
with monoprints by Alan Magee
Light Action in the Caribbean (2000)
Lessons from the Wolverine (1997)
with illustrations by Tom Pohrt
Field Notes: The Grace Note of the Canyon Wren (1994)
Crow and Weasel (1990)
with illustrations by Tom Pohrt
Winter Count (1981)
River Notes: The Dance of Herons (1979)
Giving Birth to Thunder, Sleeping with His Daughter: Coyote Builds North America (1978)
Desert Notes: Reflections in the Eye of a Raven (1976)

ANTHOLOGY

Vintage Lopez (2004)

This book was originally presented as the
Thomas D. Clark Lectures for 1990.

FIRST VINTAGE BOOKS EDITION, SEPTEMBER 1992

Copyright 1990 by Barry Holstun Lopez

All rights reserved. Published in the United States by Vintage Books, a division of Penguin Random House, LLC, New York, and distributed in Canada by Penguin Random House Canada Limited, Toronto. Originally published in hardcover by the University Press of Kentucky in 1990.

Vintage and colophon are registered trademarks of Penguin Random House LLC.

The author would like to express his appreciation to Robley Wilson for his help with the manuscript.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Lopez, Barry Holstun, 19452020
The rediscovery of North America/Barry Lopez.
1st Vintage Books ed.
p. cm.
Originally published: Lexington: University Press
of Kentucky, 1990.
eISBN: 978-0-307-80646-8
1. North America Description and Travel 1981- 2. Man
Influence on nature North America. 3. America
Discovery and exploration Spanish Influence. I. Title
E27.5.L67 1992
970 dc20 92-50087

Vintage Books Trade Paperback9780679740995

Ebook ISBN9780307806468

rh_3.1_c0_r1

Dedicated to the memory of
Rachel Carson

(19071964)

A FEW HOURS after midnight on the morning of October twelfth in the Julian calendar of the Westor October twenty-second, according to the modern Gregorian calendarJuan Rodriguez Bermeo, a lookout aboard the caravel Pinta, spotted the coast of either San Salvador Island or Samana Cay in the Bahamas and shouted his exclamation into the darkness. It was the eighteenth year of the reign of Ferdinand and Isabella of Castile, and these mariners were their emissaries.

Cristoforo Colomboor Christopher Dove as it would be in Englishcommander of the fleet of three ships, gave orders to take in sail, and to lay closehauled five miles off shore awaiting the rise of the sun. The seas were rolling. Strong winds tore at the crests of the waves. A gibbous moon was setting in a clear sky.

As they awaited dawn, Columbus let it be known that he had earlier seen a light on the island, a few hours before midnight. The ships were making about ten knots when Bermeo cried out. By his claim the commander would had to have seen the light at a distance of more than thirty miles over the curve of the Earth. Columbus thereby took for himself the lifetime pension promised the first man to sight land.

Of Seor Bermeo history has little more to say. It was rumored that he converted to Islam and died fighting alongside the Moors, who had that year of 1492 lost their final stronghold in Spain, in the same year Jews were evicted from the country by royal edict.

We do not know what Columbus and his men envisioned when they came ashore on Samana Cay or San Salvador, the island the local Arawak people called Guanahan, in a chain the Spanish were to call the Lucayas. But we know that in those first few hours a process began we now call an incursion. In the name of distant and abstract powers, the Spanish began an appropriation of the place, a seizure of its people, its elements, whatever could be carried off.

What followed for decades upon this discovery were the acts of criminalsmurder, rape, theft, kidnapping, vandalism, child molestation, acts of cruelty, torture, and humiliation. Bartolom de las Casas, who arrived in Hispaniola in 1502 and later became a priest, was an eyewitness to what he called the obdurate and dreadful temper of the Spanish, which attended [their] unlimited and closefisted avarice, their vicious search for wealth. One day, in front of Las Casas, the Spanish dismembered, beheaded or raped three thousand people. Such inhumanities and barbarisms were committed in my sight, he says, as no age can parallel The Spanish cut off the legs of children who ran from them. They poured people full of boiling soap. They made bets as to who, with one sweep of his sword, could cut a person in half. They loosed dogs that devoured an Indian like a hog, at first sight, in less than a moment. They used nursing infants for dog food.

It was a continuous recreational slaughter, practiced by men who felt slights to their personages, imagined insults to their religion, or felt thwarted in their search for gold or sexual congress.

These words of Las Casasswho said I resolve silently to pass over, lest I should terrify the reader with the horror, a more graphic recounting of these incidentswere written at Valencia in 1542 at the request of historians, to display to the world the enormities, etc., [that] the Spaniards committed in America to their eternal ignominy. Las Casas writes in the opening pages of this treatise, I earnestly beg and desire all men to be persuaded that this summary was not published upon any private design, sinister ends or affection in favor of or prejudice of any particular nation, but for the public emolument and advantage of all true Christians and moral men throughout the world.

I SINGLE OUT these episodes of depravity not so much to indict the Spanish as to make two points. First, this incursion, this harmful road into the New World, quickly became a ruthless, angry search for wealth. It set a tone in the Americas. The quest for personal possessions was to be, from the outset, a series of raids, irresponsible and criminal, a spree, in which an end to itthe slaves, the timber, the pearls, the fur, the precious ores, and, later, arable land, coal, oil, and iron orewas never visible, in which an end to it had no meaning.