At this meeting we talked about the native American Indians and their origins.It is believed that from about 60,000 years, waves of settlers started coming from Siberia across the Bering Straits into Alaska and then down the continent to Cape Horn, and each new wave destroyed ,or displaced and moved on the existing tribes.
In 1492 Columbus sailed west from Spain to try and find a short cut to India, but instead found Hispaniola and the vast American continent. Not realising his mistake, he started calling all the natives “Indians” and all future explorers did the same. Even when they realised their error no one wanted to admit that they had made a mistake.
As the Europeans moved around this vast continent they left a trail of devastation and despair among the Indians as European diseases ( such as smallpox, cholera, influenza and measles), together with forced labour on plantations and in mines, and segregation of sexes for working purposes destroyed whole communities and left thousands dead.
Indeed nobody knows for sure how many people lived in Hispaniola when Columbus arrived, but half a century later they had all been wiped out .
The male natives considered farming and milling to be women’s work ,and settlements the opposite of their mobile life - style ,so many men refused to work on the plantations, and they fled, revolted or committed suicide . So from the 1550s in ever increasing numbers, black slaves were brought in from Africa to replace them.
The Spanish and Portuguese colonised all of South America between them and had many boundary disputes until the Pope stepped in and divided it up between them, so Portugal had Brazil and Spain the rest.
However by 1620 Portugal’s only colony was Brazil as she had lost all the others to Britain, France and Holland .
Before Columbus “discovered” America only Captains and Officers had a bunk to sleep in at night, however Columbus first saw Native American Indians using hammocks in the new world and later they were adopted for use at sea by ordinary crew members.
The famous explorer Amerigo Vespucci voyaged down the coast of Brazil, Uruguay and Argentina. His reactions to this wonderful “land of milk and honey” in his book about the trip, which was translated into several languages, so impressed the cartographers that they named the new world continent “America” after him.
The Spanish settlers were lesser nobility. Though often poorly educated, even illiterate, these lesser nobles had a place in a rigid Spanish caste system far above that of the common labourer and peasant. They were too grand for manual labour, fiercely proud, contemptuous of their inferiors, and ambitious for military glory and personal wealth. It was from their ranks that many of the new warlords came, most famously Hernan Cortes and in Central and South America they became important.
The Spanish and Portuguese settlers found that Africans were much stronger and hardier than the local Indians, and more resistant to Western diseases. Also in Africa they had farmed tropical crops with iron tools and had mined, processed and refined gold and silver.
In 1492 the native Americans did not have horses, cattle, sheep, goats, pigs, sugar cane, iron and other hard metals, cash currency or shops ,just bartering. Aztecs did not have doors or wheels. Native Americans used bone for arrow heads.
They grew cotton, tobacco, potatoes, chocolate beans and the much prized Brazilwood from Brazil.
Before 1492 the natives of Central, South and North America had a highly organised society structure, with some tribes always on the move like Stone Age Farmers, whilst others lived settled lives in well organised settlements and town. Indeed the Aztec capital of Tenochtitlan was larger than any contemporary city on the continent of Europe, with causeways, wide streets, great houses of red brick. The inhabitants were elegant, with cotton cloaks for men and women. Their craftsmanship was of a high order and their decorated tapestries depicting parrots, pheasants, hummingbirds and the such like were of a very high standard. But all this changed for ever with the arrival of the white man ,who crushed and destroyed all these civilisations, without regret, for their own personal gain and changed the continent for ever.
The next meeting will be on Monday 15th March and the subject will be Bonnie Prince Charlie.
Michael Page.
