HOW THE EARLY NORTH AMERICANS LIVED
This map shows the various ways in which the native tribes of North America supported themselves before the arrival of European civilization. The Native Americans survived largely on the resources available in their immediate surroundings. Note, for example, the reliance on the products of the sea of the tribes along the northern coastlines of the continent, and the way in which tribes in relatively inhospitable climates in the North—where agriculture was difficult—relied on hunting large game. Most Native Americans were farmers. • What different kinds of farming would have emerged in the very different climates of the agricultural regions shown on this map?
The agricultural societies of the Northeast were more mobile. Farming techniques there were designed to exploit the land quickly rather than to develop permanent settlements. Many of the tribes living east of the Mississippi River were linked together loosely by common linguistic roots. The largest of these language groups consisted of the Algonquian tribes, who lived along the Atlantic seaboard from Canada to Virginia; the Iroquois Confederacy, which was centered in what is now upstate New York; and
the Muskogean tribes, which consisted of the tribes in the southernmost regions of the eastern seaboard.
Most tribes were matrilineal societies, meaning that family association and clan member- ship flowed through the mother’s heritage. In contrast, in Europe ancestral descent followed paternal lines. All tribes assigned women the majority of work to care for children, prepare meals, and gather certain foods. But the allocation of other tasks varied from one society to another. In the case of the Hopi, women and men shared cultural authority. Women assumed leadership roles in the household, economy, and social system; men tended to predominate in religion and politics. Yet women reserved the power to negate or renegoti- ate trade or land deals forged by men if they deemed them unjust or imbalanced.
EUROPE LOOKS WESTWARD
Europeans were almost entirely unaware of the existence of the Americas before the fifteenth century. A few early wanderers—Leif Eriksson, an eleventh-century Norse seaman, and others— had glimpsed parts of the eastern Atlantic on their voyages. But even if their discoveries had become common knowledge (and they did not), there would have been little incentive for others to follow. Europe in the Middle Ages (roughly a.d. 500–1500) was too weak, divided, and decentralized to inspire many great ventures. By the end of the fifteenth century, however, conditions in Europe had changed and the incentive for overseas exploration had grown.
Commerce and Sea Travel Two important social changes encouraged Europeans to look toward new lands. The first was the significant growth in Europe’s population in the fifteenth century. The Black Death, a catastrophic epidemic of the bubonic plague that began in Constantinople in 1347, had killed more than a third of the people on the Continent (according to some estimates). But a century and a half later, the population had rebounded. With that growth came a reawak- ening of commerce. A new merchant class was emerging to meet the rising demand for goods from abroad. As trade increased, and as advances in navigation made long- distance sea travel more feasible, interest in expanding trade grew even more quickly. The second change was the emergence of new governments that were more united and powerful than the feeble political entities of the feudal past. In the western areas of Europe in particular, strong new monarchs were eager to enhance the commercial development of their nations.
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PUEBLO VILLAGE OF THE SOUTHWEST
THE COLLISION OF CULTURES • 7
Above all, Europeans who craved commercial glory had dreamed of trade with the East. It was not a new dream. In the early fourteenth century, Marco Polo and other adventurers had returned from Asia bearing exotic spices, cloths, and dyes and even more exotic tales. Yet for two centuries, that trade had been limited by the difficulties of the long overland journey to the Asian courts. But in the fourteenth century, talk of finding a faster, safer sea route to East Asia began.
The Portuguese were the preeminent maritime power in the fifteenth century, largely because of Prince Henry the Navigator, who devoted much of his life to the promotion of exploration. In 1486, after Henry’s death, the Portuguese explorer Bartholomeu Dias rounded the southern tip of Africa (the Cape of Good Hope). In 1497–1498, Vasco da Gama proceeded all the way around the cape to India. But the Spanish, not the Portuguese, were the first to encounter the New World, the term Europeans applied to the ancient lands previously unknown to them.
Christopher Columbus Christopher Columbus was born and reared in Genoa, Italy. He spent his early seafaring years in the service of the Portuguese, stoking his ambitions of undertaking a great voyage of discovery. By the time he was a young man, he believed he could reach East Asia by sailing west, across the Atlantic, rather than east, around Africa. Columbus thought the world was far smaller than it actually is. He also was convinced that the Asian continent extended farther eastward than it actually does. Most important, he did not realize that anything lay to the west between Europe and the lands of Asia.
Columbus failed to enlist the leaders of Portugal to back his plan, so he turned instead to Spain. The marriage of Spain’s two most powerful regional rulers, Ferdinand of Aragon and Isabella of Castile, had produced the strongest and most ambitious monarchy in Europe. Columbus appealed to Queen Isabella for support for his proposed westward voyage, and in 1492, she agreed. Commanding ninety men and three ships—the Niña, the Pinta, and the Santa María—Columbus left Spain in August 1492 and sailed west into the Atlantic. Ten weeks later, he sighted land and assumed he had reached an island off Asia. In fact, he had landed in the Bahamas. When he pushed on and encountered Cuba, he assumed he had reached Japan. He returned to Spain, bringing with him several captured native people as evidence of his achievement. (He called the indigenous people “Indians” because he believed they were from the East Indies in the Pacific.)
But Columbus did not, of course, bring back news of the great khan’s court in China or any samples of the fabled wealth of the Indies. And so a year later he tried again, only this time with a much larger expedition. As before, he headed into the Caribbean, discov- ering several other islands and leaving a small and short-lived colony on Hispaniola. On a third voyage, in 1498, he finally reached the mainland and cruised along the northern coast of South America. He then realized, for the first time, that he had encountered not a part of Asia but a separate continent.
Columbus ended his life in obscurity. Ultimately, he was even unable to give his name to the land he had revealed to the Europeans. That distinction went instead to a Florentine merchant, Amerigo Vespucci, who wrote a series of vivid descriptions of the lands he visited on a later expedition to the New World and helped popularize the idea that the Americas were new continents.
Partly as a result of Columbus’s initiative, Spain began to devote greater resources and energy to maritime exploration. In 1513, the Spaniard Vasco de Balboa crossed the Isthmus of Panama and became the first known European to gaze westward upon the great ocean