CHAPTER ONE
CHAPTER ONE
IN THE BEGINNING . . .
America must have been a huge disappointment, indeed, to most of the early European explorers and adventurers. These men came to the Indies of Admiral Colon for one purpose, and one purpose only – to get rich on the gold and silver and precious stones – not to mention the spices, which were literally as good as gold in their day. Everyone knew that such treasures were to be had in abundance in the Indies, and the European soldiers of fortune meant to acquire them by whatever means should prove expedient.
But there were to be dozens of disastrous voyages before it finally dawned on the minds of some that these Indies of Admiral Colon might not be the Orient at all. Apparently this was a New World, and entirely unknown continent, whose existence had not been suspected even by the wisest and most learned scientists back home. And it had meanwhile become obvious, too, that in this New World there was a most disheartening lack of empires to conquer.
Yet, if their explorations in the Americas had proven to be so disappointing to many of the conquistadors, they had opened to them a world every bit as mysterious and exotic as anything the real Indies might have had to offer. The men who risked their lives in the precarious Atlantic crossings of the 16th century, found waiting for them at the end of their voyage an immense continent of majestic size and stark extremes, a land of incredible natural beauty and wonders, of seemingly endless forests and stretches of utter desolation. These early explorers encountered an America few white men would ever be able to experience. They struggled through mountainous regions, their peaks covered by blankets of eternal snow; they suffered through broiling, forbidding desert valleys where no living creature could be imagined to exist; they crossed near-Arctic stretches of boreal forests and howling wilderness, and hacked their way through tropical jungles that overwhelmed them with pungent fragrances and introduced them to some of the deadliest creatures they had ever encountered. Many an early expedition found itself wandering aimlessly across the endless flat prairies, without so much as a tree or a rock to serve as a landmark, only to stand in sudden awe at the rim of some plunging gorge or canyon. They paddled across tranquil forest lakes and were driven helplessly down raging white-water rivers; they relaxed on brilliant white beaches, lapped by gentle waves, and were wrecked against rocky ocean cliffs, eternally pounded by terrifying seas. And nearly everywhere they struggled through dense virgin forests, from the pine barrens of the Eastern coast, through the immense woodlands north and south, to the majestic redwoods of the Far West.
The climate of this New World, too, proved to be as drastic and generally as unpredictable as its landscape. In this land, in fact, Mother Nature seemed intent to spring ever new surprises on the unwary would-be conquerors. The northern woodlands, boreal pine forests, frigid, snow-bound, and all but uninhabitable during the winter months, might turn as sweltering during the summer as were the southern tropics. The broiling desert regions of the Southwest, in turn, would suddenly and inexplicably become transformed into frosty winter wastelands. Terrifying blizzards blanketed mountains and prairies and forests most winters with snowfall of incredible amounts. Tornadoes, a natural calamity so totally alien to Europeans, roared across the plains without warning. Raging hurricanes regularly wreaked their merciless destruction among the tropical islands of the Caribbean, along the Gulf and Atlantic coasts. And everywhere in this wild country, hailstorms, sandstorms, earthquakes, and floods of startling violence taught many of the newcomers a healthy new respect for the powers of nature.
These early white men to America, preoccupied as they were with their frantic search for empires to conquer, never suspected that deep within the rich and fertile soil of this continent lay an unimaginable natural wealth – not only the much sought-after gold and silver, but copper and iron and such future treasures as coal and oil and even platinum. Few of these adventurers would have cared very much had they known that the dark virgin soil of this land would one day yield the enormous crops that would feed the hungry of the world. Yet even these men could not fail to notice the impressive animal and plant life of the American continent, much of it new and unfamiliar to them. There was, first of all, the buffalo, the American bison, which roamed throughout the Western country in herds that stretched from horizon to horizon in a virtual floodtide of millions of animals. In the Far North, they found caribou, moose and elk, and nearly everywhere else the antelopes and deer and the millions of furry creatures whose prized pelts would one day soon disrupt the lives of so many native cultures in America. Pigeons sometimes gathered in flocks so vast that they were said to have blocked out the sun and broke the limbs off the trees on which they decided to roost. The waters everywhere, the lakes and streams, the oceans and inlets along both coasts, all seem to have teemed with life – fish and turtles, oysters and mussels, whales and seals and walrus, sea birds and water fowl. The white men quickly learned to respect the ferocious power of such predators as the grizzly bear and the mountain lion, and rattlesnake and scorpion became familiar bywords of everyday life. Few of the newcomers to this land had ever experienced anything resembling the utter destruction caused by an advancing locust swarm, and most learned through painful personal experience that deadly insects made some sections of the country all but uninhabitable to humans.
Here, too, Europeans encountered for the first time many of the plants and vegetables that have since become indispensable staple items around the world. Corn, the native maize, and the potato, both unknowns in the world outside America before the voyages of Columbus, are now among the world’s most important food items. Squash, peppers, tomatoes, pumpkins, several varieties of beans, the peanut, pineapple, and avocado are among more than eighty plants Europeans brought back home from America. Cacao, for making chocolate, is as native an American product as is cotton, and so is that most dubious, if highly profitable blessing, the tobacco plant.
Nowhere in this immense New World did explorers find so much as a trace of the anticipated Oriental splendor. Yet wherever they arrived, whether it was in the frozen regions to the north, in the deserts, or in the southernmost jungles, everywhere they found the lands already inhabited by people, although a vastly different sort of people than any they had ever encountered. None of these natives were able to explain to the mystified white men just exactly who they were. Nearly all referred to themselves in their own peculiar languages simply as ‘the people.’ What’s more, every tribe, every group, nearly every settlement appeared to speak a unique and distinct language, or at least some dialect of their own. None of these people – with perhaps one notable exception in Central America – had any notions of reading or writing. Their appearances and life styles differed as much as their languages, and none of the tribes seemed to recognize any such concept as a family history that reached back more than a generation or two. None of their many colorful legends provided any clues as to who built the flat-topped pyramids, the carved stone temples, the immense burial mounds, or the massive brick and adobe structures found in various parts of the continent. All that these people seemed to know for certain was that they had been in possession of their hunting grounds ‘since the beginning of time.’ They had inherited these lands from an ancestry many remembered only as the ‘Ancient Ones.’ Centuries more would pass before some of these mysteries began to unravel.
