A Footnote to Columbus Day

A look back on what a confident civilization sounds like.

I mentioned my second "Liberal Fragility" article the other day that I have been reading through the astonishing correspondence between Leo Strauss and Alexandre Kojeve. There was a short postscript in one of Strauss's letters that read, "Have you ever read Prescott's Conquest of Mexico and Conquest of Peru? A story more fabulous than any fairy-tale."

I had never heard of William H. Prescott, and immediately went down the rabbit hole. And by chance, I stumbled across an old edition of Prescott's Conquest of Peru in, of all unlikely places, the English-language section of a used bookstore in Akureyri, Iceland.

Prescott wrote in the 1840s in the grand, capacious, and authoritative narrative style of Macaulay (or, in the 20th century, Churchill), and as such his work today would be deemed "politically incorrect," or worse. An editor’s introduction to the 1963 edition I found begins, “W.H. Prescott belonged to a race of which it is, perhaps, no exaggeration to say in the twentieth century that there is a probability of its becoming, in course of time, as completely extinct as that of the Aztecs or the Incas. I refer, of course, to the great race of stylist historians.” I’d say that probability turned out to be exactly 1.0.

Consider, for example, Prescott’s discussion of Columbus and his importance in The Conquest of Peru:

The object of the great navigator was still the discovery of a route to India, but by the west instead of the east. He had no expectation of meeting with a continent in his way; and, after repeated voyages, he remained in his original error, dying, as is well known, in the conviction that it was the eastern shore of Asia that he had reached. It was the same object which directed the nautical enterprises of those who followed the Admiral’s track [a reference to the Portugese explorer Diaz]; and the discovery of a strait into the Indian Ocean was the burden of every order from the government, and the design of many an expedition to different points of the new continent, which seemed to stretch its leviathan length along from one pole to the other. The discovery of an Indian passage is the true key to the maritime movements of the fifteenth and first half of the sixteenth centuries. It was the great leading idea that gave character to the enterprise of the age.

It is not easy at this time to comprehend the impulse to Europe by the discovery of America. It was not the gradual acquisition of some border territory, a province, or a kingdom that had been gained, but a New World that was now thrown open to the European. The races of animals, the mineral treasures, the vegetable forms, and the varied aspects of nature, man in different phases of civilisation, filled the mind with entirely new sets of ideas, that changed the habitual current of thought and stimulated it to indefinite conjecture. The eagerness to explore the wonderful secrets of the new hemisphere became so active, that the principal cities of Spain were, in a manner, depopulated, as emigrants thronged one after another to take their chances upon the deep. It was a world of romance that was thrown open; for, whatever might be the luck of the adventurer, his reports on his return were tinged with a colouring of romance that stimulated still higher the sensitive fancies of his countrymen, and nourished the chimerical sentiments of an age of chivalry.

That is the voice of a confident civilization.  And, it could be asked, isn’t he describing the Europeans flocking to the New World as migrants? (And of course we do know that the Puritan pilgrims to New England were seeking asylum from persecution. . .) Why are some migrants better than other migrants?

Prescott does not shrink from reporting the conquest of the indigenous peoples:

The simple natives, with their defenceless bodies and rude weapons, were no match for the European warrior armed to the teeth in mail. The odds were as great as those found in any legend of chivalry, where the lance of the good knight overturned hundreds as a touch. The perils that lay in the discoverer’s path, and the sufferings he had to sustain, were scarcely inferior to those that beset the knight-errant. Hunger and thirst and fatigue, the deadly effluvia of the morass, with its swarms of venomous insects, the cold of mountain snows and the scorching sun of the tropics, these were the lot of every cavalier who came to seek his fortunes in the New World.

To listen to Kamala Harris and the rest of the woke mob on Columbus Day, though, you’d think the indigenous peoples were the only ones who died miserably during the age of European exploration and conquest. But as Prescott makes clear here and elsewhere, the mortality rate among the many expeditions and waves of colonial settlement were very high, too.

P.S. Prescott includes a footnote that shows his wide learning, from Seneca the Younger’s Medea, where he predicts the New World. He cites the passage in Latin, of course, but does not provide the translation. Prescott: “Seneca’s well-known prediction, in his Medea, is, perhaps, the most remarkable random prophecy on record. For it is not a simple extension of the boundaries of the known parts of the globe that is so confidently announced, but the existence of a New World across the waters, to be revealed incoming ages.”

Venient annis saecula seris, quibus Oceanus vincula rerum laxet, et ingens pateat tellus, Tethysque novos detegat orbes nec sit terris ultima Thule.

[Which translates to: “There will come an epoch late in time, when Ocean will loosen the bonds of the world, and the earth lie open in its vastness, when Tethys will disclose new worlds, and Thule not be the farthest of lands.”