Apropos denne posten forleden kan det passe å grave fram ting fra mitt rikholdige arkiv – nærmere bestemt følgende notater fra september 2005:
Hvordan gikk det til at europeerne klarte å kolonisere Amerika? Svaret på det spørsmålet blir gjerne besvart med europeernes teknologiske overtak. Indianerne blir på sin side skildret som enkle naturbarn, uten greie på utvikling av avanserte redskaper eller våpenteknologi. Men er dette riktig?
I drøyt 20 år har historikere – som har gjort den tidlige fasen av kontakten mellom europeere og indianere til sitt spesiale – faktisk hevdet det motsatte: I mange henseender hadde indianerne et teknologisk overtak på europeerne.
En som hevder dette synet (som for øvrig vinner stadig mer anseelse i akademiske kretser – men ennå ikke kan sies å ha nådd samme status i Hvermannsens bevissthet) er Charles C. Mann. Mann har skrevet boken ”1491: New Revelations of the Americas Before Columbus”.
I september 2005 skrev han en kronikk i The Boston Globe, hvor han redegjør for noen av disse poengene. Og retter søkelyset mot myten om indianerens teknologiske underlegenhet. Han skriver:
The Wampanoag confederation, which occupied coastal Massachusetts, was bigger and more numerous than the Plymouth colony, and jealous of its territory. Why would it let these foreigners, whom the Indians must have regarded as thieves and interlopers, occupy a valuable piece of coastal real estate? For that matter, why did Indians permit any of the first European colonies–all of which were poor, fractious, and ill-prepared–in North America?
When I asked one of the authentically costumed, ”living history” workers at the reconstructed village why the Indians hadn’t driven away the Pilgrims, she told me that the Wampanoag wanted European goods, especially metal items like cook pots, hatchets, and guns. Her explanation precisely reflected the Pilgrims’ view. After the Wampanoag signed an alliance with the colony, Edward Winslow, a future Plymouth governor, wrote that the Indians were lured by superior European technology–especially European guns, ”for our peeces [guns] are terrible unto them.”
In my American history classes such stories recurred time and time again. Although European colonies were feeble at the outset, the teachers explained, they eventually triumphed over the natives because of their better technology. This explanation is still common today.
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Contemporary research suggests, though, that this picture is too simple.
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Europeans(…) were impressed by what they saw in Native American hands. Specialists have argued this for a couple of decades, but this view of history has made few inroads outside academic journals and conference reports. To the first European visitors, the encounter with Indians was much more like a meeting of equals than is commonly taught today.
Consider a single, small example: Indian moccasins. Much more comfortable and waterproof than stiff, moldering English boots, moccasins were often given by Indians to colonists when the latter had to walk for long distances.
Indian birch-bark canoes, to take another example, were faster and more maneuverable than any small European boat. In 1605 three laughing Indians in a canoe literally paddled circles around the lumbering dory paddled by traveler George Weymouth and seven other men.
Skriver Mann. Men det var ett område europeerne hadde teknologisk overtak på:
Bigger European ships with sails were obviously better for long-distance travel along the shore.
Men det varte ikke så lenge:
Indians got hold of them through trade and shipwreck, and trained themselves to be excellent sailors. By the time of the Pilgrims, a rising proportion of the shipping traffic along the New England coast was of indigenous origin and the English were fearful, Harvard historian Joyce E. Chaplin has argued, ”that Indians might get the upper hand.”
Også innenfor jordbruk hadde indianerne et forsprang, noe man jo kunne forvente av dem – siden de hadde generasjoners kunnskap om lokale vekster og jordsmonn.
Men det er mer å si om indianernes teknologiske kunnskap – på et mer hardtslående felt:
Even the Europeans’ purported superiority in military technology was evanescent. The ”peeces” that Winslow thought the Wampanoag wanted, for example, were less than they seemed. To be sure, Indians were disconcerted by their first experiences with European guns: the explosion and smoke, the lack of a visible projectile. But the natives quickly learned that 16th-century matchlocks were fired by shoving a flaming fuse into an open pan of gunpowder, a process that took two or three minutes for every shot. In any case, most of the colonists were such dreadful shots, from lack of practice, that their muskets were little more than noisemakers.
By contrast, Indian longbows were fearsomely fast and precise–”far better than the average musket of the Plymouth colonists in rapidity and accuracy of fire,” according to the noted arms scholar Harold L. Peterson. Wielded by people who had practiced archery since childhood, they could shoot 10 arrows a minute and were accurate up to 200 yards.
Jeg har tidligere skrevet om overgangen fra buer til gevær i europeisk setting; i denne posten. Men europeerne i Amerika kunne ikke utnytte sluttpoenget jeg peker på. De var rett og slett for få.
Og det er mer å si om indianernes piler. Noe som vil overraske deg:
To the dismay of colonists at Jamestown in 1607, a Powhatan Indian sank an arrow a foot deep into a target the Europeans thought impervious to an arrow shot–”which was strange,” Jamestown council president George Percy observed, ”being that a Pistoll could not pierce it.”
Similar stories played out across the hemisphere.
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To make boats, Andean cultures wove together reeds rather than cutting up trees into planks and nailing them together. Although smaller than big European ships, these vessels were not puddle-muddlers; Europeans first encountered the Inca in the form of an Inca ship sailing near the equator, 300 miles from its home port, under a load of fine cotton sails. It had a crew of 20 and was easily the size of a Spanish caravel.
Andean textiles were woven with great precision–elites’ garments could have a thread count of 500 per inch–and structured in elaborate layers. Soldierly armor was made from sculpted, quilted cloth that was almost as effective at shielding the body as European armor and much lighter. After trying it, the conquistadors ditched their steel breastplates and helmets wholesale and dressed like Inca infantry.
Du verden! Men med tanke på alt dette – la oss vende tilbake til åpningsspørsmålet: Hvordan gikk det til at europeerne klarte å kolonisere Amerika? Ikke kunne de skilte med numerisk overtall. Og – som vi har sett – forestillingen om teknologisk overtak er en myte. Så hva var årsaken? Mann skriver:
Pedro Pizarro, Francisco’s nephew and page, survived enough bloody battles with the Inca to be under no illusions about indigenous technology. In his memoirs, he attributed the Spanish victory not to overwhelming European technology but to overwhelming European diseases. A few years before Pizarro arrived, smallpox–introduced from Europe via Mexico–swept the Inca realm, killing the emperor, his chosen heir, much of the court and the military leadership, and as many as one out of three inhabitants of the empire. The vacancy at the top led to a ruinous, multi-year civil war that killed thousands more. ”[Had the emperor] been alive when we Spaniards entered this land,” Pedro remarked, ”it would have been impossible for us to win it…. And likewise, had the land not been divided by the [smallpox-induced civil] wars, we would not have been able to enter or win the land.” Germs, not guns or steel, conquered the Inca.
The same held true in the Northeast–the region wasn’t conquered so much as infected. By the time of the Pilgrims, Europeans had been visiting New England for a century. Thickly populated and heavily armed, Indian villages had welcomed the trade but fended off permanent settlement. In 1616 a French ship wrecked off Cape Cod. Indians captured the few survivors and distributed them into different villages. At least one sailor had a disease, perhaps viral hepatitis, which he bequeathed to his captors. The results were devastating. Indians ”died on heapes, as they lay in their houses,” the English trader Thomas Morton wrote. Death rates in coastal New England reached 95 percent. Among the victims were the great majority of Wampanoag.
Tusenvis av år i isolasjon fra resten av klodens virusutvekslinger hadde rett og slett gjort indianerne ekstremt sårbare for fremmede sykdomstyper. Resultatet av kontakten mellom europeere og indianere var gitt på forhånd. Selv uten europeiske maktambisjoner ville epidemier og massedød blitt resultatet. Dette er forklaringen på europeernes suksess.
Men ennå lever myten om de teknologisk enkle urinnvånerne – til Manns frustrasjon:
Although statements like Morton’s are scattered throughout colonial accounts, most historians did not take note of them until 30 years ago, and they still have not percolated into high-school lesson plans. Part of the reason for the holdup, no doubt, is due to the disciplinary boundaries that long kept historians of politics and historians of science apart. But another part, one assumes, is simple ethnocentrism, an intellectual vice in every society. Europeans and their descendants have long assumed that cultures were behind the intellectual eight ball if they didn’t do things Europeans were good at. But this view may only be the luxury of those whose triumphs were ensured by microorganisms that they neither understood nor controlled.
