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The World in 1492 |
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by Marvin Lunenfeld |
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1 Marvin Lunenfeld, in 1492: Discovery, Invasion, Encounter (Lexington, Massachusetts, 1991) |
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Though I anticipated much of Lunenfeld’s approach to explaining The World in 1492, in some ways, it was rather interesting. Most obvious were his elaborate attempts to extol the myriad achievements of non-European civilizations, while simultaneously depicting the Europeans as hapless dolts who literally stumbled across every technological advance they encountered. Step aside diffusionists, for this is revisionism at its best!
Most interesting was his illustration of the importance of wheat, rice and corn as agricultural staples, explaining that such things as the differences in their respective rate of depletion of soil nutrients, need for irrigation, yield per acre, and labor intensiveness, had much to do with the formation and success of sedentary societies: rice played a huge part in the kingdom of China, just as it plays a significant role in the People’s Republic of China today (those citizens of Hong Kong and Macao are indeed most fortunate to have been absorbed by their comrades on the mainland – no recall elections to worry about in that part of the Old World).
Corn was and still is the staple upon which many descendants of aboriginal Americans depend for sustenance – today it is subsidized by the federal government of our neighbor to the South, Mexico, to ensure that its poor may survive to toil another day - those who have not yet found their way northward, to the land of licenses and economic opportunity.
Wheat was and still is the grain to be milled into flour for bread, the white stones the Chinese observed being ingested by the Portuguese when they landed at Macao. Of all three grains mentioned, wheat was the one that required the highest ratio of labor-to-yield, and carried the greatest risk of crop failure: it would only follow, then, that the Europeans and their equally daft progeny would cling to their seeds of wheat forevermore. Today, the United States is the world’s largest exporter of wheat and has the smallest number of farmers per capita of any nation in the world, Old or New. |
Less surprising was Lunenfeld’s account of the state of marine navigation in 1492. That the Arabs had acquired navigational instruments before the Europeans is noteworthy, but it must be remembered that their use of such instruments was wholly dependent upon their knowledge of geometrical astronomy, the brainchild of those great western (and – Perish the thought! – very much European) thinkers, the Greeks.
Beyond that, the knowledge that the Chinese, the Indians, and the Arabs had navigated the Indian Ocean or the South China Sea was no great surprise. They would have learned to do so in much the same way that lesser sailors of the Mediterranean backwater learned to sail the Atlantic – by coasting the continent. Moreover, offshore islands abound in the Indian Ocean, much more so than in the Atlantic, greatly facilitating transoceanic exploration as far as China.
The Vikings happened upon North America much the same way, island-hopping across the North Sea from Norway to Iceland to Greenland and thence to Newfoundland. The Carib were able to negotiate the Antilles island chain in their canoes, perhaps stopping at a neighboring island just long enough to lunch on their fellow Carib before getting underway again. Without doubt those having the most temerity would have been the Polynesians who, without charts or navigational aids, navigated 2,000 miles across the Pacific to settle on the islands of present-day Hawaii. It is also worth considering that celestial navigation was widely practiced during days of old. The Greeks had studied and named the constellations long before the astrolabe or the sextant was invented. The Benefits of New World Technology Their vision not yet impaired by cathode rays, their hearing unaffected by enhanced digital sound waves and their mental capacity not yet diminished by MTV, the soldiers and sailors of old were capable of performing physical and mental feats that we today can scarcely imagine. |
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Contributed by Richard Wible |
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