(^76) THE WEALTH AND POVERTY OF NATIONS
the European-Amerindian encounter in black and white, with all the
wickedness on one side and only virtue on the other.^20
Sometimes the defense is indirect. The social anthropologist David
Maybury-Lewis cites as representative and influential in this regard a
work by Hans Staden, True History and Description of the Land of the
Savage, Naked and Ugly Maneating Peoples of the New World of
America (1557), and goes on to say that the Tupinamba Indians,
who had held Staden captive, "regularly and ritually ate their
prisoners." "It was considered," he goes on, "a heroic death. A
captive warrior, who in some cases might have been living with his
captors for years and might have even raised a family there, was led
out and clubbed to death in a ceremonial duel, after which the entire
community ate him to partake of his heroic essence."^21
Maybury-Lewis further notes that the same Tupinamba were
horrified by the cruelty of Europeans, as evinced by the routine use
of torture in trial and punishment and the practice of slavery; and
then goes on to deplore the one-sidedness of European judgments
and policy. But of course it is very hard for any of us "to see
ourselves as others see us." Relativism—the power of sympathy—
becomes us and is a particular virtue of ethnological scholarship. But
one must not expect to find it generally. In sixteenth-century
Europe, it was confined to a few clerics, whose arguments were best
appreciated when recollected in tranquility.
History and Legend
The tale of Spanish misdeeds and crimes in the conquest of the
Americas is so appalling that it has been a source of retrospective
embarrassment and mortification. What kind of people were these,
who could perpetrate so much cruelty and treachery? The answer, as
outlined above, lay in social selection and history. On the one hand,
the kind of adventures that lay ahead in the New World attracted the
most daring, hungry, knavish members of Spanish society, many of
them blackguards who thought litde of their own lives and even less
of those of others. On the other, the Spanish historical experience,
the protracted war against enemies without (the reconquista) and
within (the persecution of religious difference), could not but
nora
(Nora)
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