(^532) NOTES
ships of more than ten sails, big enough to carry a thousand men. The biggest, run-
ning to about 450 feet, were lake vessels, which "moved through the water with great
stability and made the passengers feel as if they were on dry land"—Levathes, When
China Ruled the Seas, p. 81. Of course, lake water is not the ocean sea.
- Needham gives the number of vessels as seventy-three.
- The above relies especially on Levathes, When China Ruled the Seas, pp. 73 ff.
- Huang, China, pp. 155-57.
- Levathes, When China Ruled the Seas, pp. 174-75.
- Levathes emphasizes the link of indifference to trade to Confucian doctrine on the
one hand, imperial legitimacy on the other. To seek trade was to admit that China
needed something from elsewhere, and "the mere expression of need was unworthy
of the dragon throne"—When China Ruled the Seas, p. 180.
CHAPTER 7- Wealth of Nations, Book IV, ch. 7, Part I: "Such in reality is the absurd confidence
which almost all men have in their own good fortune, that wherever there is the least
probability of success, too great a share of it is apt to go to them [projects of mining]
of its own accord." - Cf. Fernandez-Armesto, Millennium, pp. 211-20, on Aztec pride in their military
success. - Stuart, The Mighty Aztecs, p. 73. Bartolomé de Las Casas, that great defender of
Indian rights, came eventually to praise, not their rites, but the devotion that infused
them. "One could argue convincingly," he wrote in his Apologia, "on the basis that
God ordered Abraham to sacrifice his only son Isaac, that God does not entirely hate
human sacrifice." And further: "... in religiosity, [the Aztecs] surpassed all other na-
tions, because the most religious nations are those that offer their own children in sac-
rifice for the good of their people." Cited in Todorov, La conquête de l'Amérique, pp.
194, 196. - On the intellectual pains of anthropology (ethnology) as a discipline torn be-
tween "universal values" and "cultural relativism"—should we criticize another culture
from some higher ground?—see Fluehr-Lobban, "Cultural Relativism and Human
Rights." - This kind of tu quoque exculpation goes back to Las Casas at least—Todorov, La
conquête de l'Amérique, p. 194. - Sahlins, "Cosmologies of Capitalism," p. 19, n. 24, citing George Macartney's
journal of his embassy to China in 1793. Poor Macartney: he sought by his own dig-
nified conduct to convince the Chinese that the British were civilized. But all his ef-
forts to preserve his dignity, that is, to establish his parity with his hosts, only convinced
them that he had much to learn before he could be accounted civilized. - From the chronicler Pedro Aguado, as cited in Gomez, L'invention, p. 171. Cf.
Smith, Wealth of Nations, Book IV, ch. 7, Part 2. - Kirkpatrick, Les conquistadors espagnols, p. 147.
- Fernandez-Armesto, Millennium, p. 224.
- Bernand, The Incas, p. 28.
- Diamond, Guns, Germs, and Steel, p. 80.
- The demographic history of the Amerindians has been a subject of controversy and
imagination. Estimates of the pre-Columbian population of the Americas vary from 13
million according to A. Rosenblatt, Lapoblacion de America (1971) to 100 million by
the Berkeley school. Cf. Woodrow Borah, Sherburne Cook, L. B. Simpson, Essays in
Population History (1971). The latter would strike most scholars as wildly hyperbolic,
and a figure between 50 and 70 million, the great majority in the corn-eating areas of
Mexico and Peru, now seems more reasonable. Part of this is ideological: to magnify