NOTES^531
bodies lying about and yet the defenders starved. But that might simply mean that can-
nibalism had ritual aspects that did not allow the eating of otherwise dead people. Cf.
the Hebrew food ban of dead animals (that is, not ritually slaughtered), even though
kosher.
- Maybury-Lewis, "Societies on the Brink," p. 56.
- Todorov, La conquête de l'Amérique, p. 150.
- On the "Black Legend," it is instructive to read Stern, Peru's Indian Peoples, pp.
xli-xlii. Stern, who has a pressing urge to be politically correct, recognizes the misdeeds
of the Spanish but concedes to the apologist position by alluding to "simplification"
and "anti-Hispanic prejudice." He also points to "an equally brutal history of racial vi-
olence and exploitation by other European colonizers." Then a word of criticism: he
laments that the anti-Legend thesis "reduces the Conquest to a story of European vil-
lains and heroes." What about the Amerindians and their responses? he asks. It is no
longer acceptable among ethnologists to portray native populations as helpless victims;
as Stern says, they were not "mere objects upon which evil is enacted." Fair enough,
but what about the Amerindians? As we shall see below, they perpetrated their own
cruelties; they imposed their own imperialisms. Imperialism is not the monopoly of Eu-
ropeans or Westerners. The orthodoxy of Latin American history prefers to pass over
that part of the story. The whole business is a minefield of traps for moral judgment.
Latin American historians face the further dilemma that they often descend from both
victims and victimizers. Where, then, should their sympathies go?
CHAPTER 6
- On the psychological and physical significance of Bojador, see Randies, "La sig-
nification."
- Quoted in Huyghe, Coureurs d'épices, p. 121.
- On the special navigational problems of the South Atiantic, see Landes, "Finding
the Point at Sea," in Andrewes, ed., The Quest for Longitude; and Seed, Ceremonies of
Possession, ch. 4: "A New Sky and New Stars." This latter is a superb treatment of the
scientific basis for Portuguese oceanic navigation and discovery.
- Zacut was the author of the Almanach Perpetuum (1478), which worked out the
position of the sun for each day at each latitude. This work, intended for astronomers,
was simplified and converted into a table for use at sea by his co-religionist John Viz-
inho—Jones, Sail the Indian Sea, pp. 37-38.
- The above is taken from the valuable article of Godinho, "Rôle du Portugal," pp.
81-83.
- Introduction to his Tratado im defensam da carta de marear, cited in Seed, Cer-
emonies of Possession, p. 126.
- Cf. the splendid discussion in Needham, "China, Europe, and the Seas Between,"
paper originally presented to the International Congress of Maritime History, Beirut,
1966, and republished in Needham, Clerks and Craftsmen, pp. 40-70. But the largest
treatment of these voyages, rich and fascinating in its detail and broad in its coverage,
is the recent book of Louise Levathes, When China Ruled the Seas.
- "By Sung times, Chinese junks had become very much more sophisticated. They
were built with iron nails, and waterproofed with the oil of the t'ung tree, a superb nat-
ural preservative. Their equipment included watertight bulkheads, buoyancy chambers,
bamboo fenders at the waterline, floating anchors to hold them steady during storms,
axial rudders in place of steering oars, outrigger and leeboard devices, oars for use in
calm weather, scoops for taking samples off the sea floor, sounding lines for deter-
mining the depth, compasses for navigation, and small rockets propelled by gunpow-
der for self-defence"—Elvin, Pattern of the Chinese Past, p. 137. This tradition
continued under the Mongol dynasty: Khubilai Khan (Marco Polo's emperor) had
