THE GREAT VOYAGES 57
Gómara, fi lled with imperialist pride, had no doubts
on that score. In 1552 he wrote, “The greatest
event since the creation of the world (excluding the
incarnation of Him who created it) is the discovery
of the Indies.” But the radical Italian philosopher
Giordano Bruno, who was burned for heresy in
1600, strongly dissented, assailing Columbus as
one of those “audacious navigators” who only “dis-
turbed the peace of others... increased the vices
of nations, spread fresh follies by violence, and...
taught men a new art and means of tyranny and
assassination among themselves.”
Until recently, however, few Europeans and
Americans questioned the splendor and value of Co-
lumbus’s achievement. In the nineteenth century
his voyages came to be viewed as a harbinger and
cause of the great movement of Western economic
expansion and global domination that was then un-
der way. Celebrations of Columbus were especially
exuberant in the United States, where a mystic link
was seen between that event and the spectacular
rise of the great republic of the West. In this period
Columbus was transformed into an almost mythic
hero, a larger-than-life fi gure who overcame all the
obstacles placed in his path by prejudiced and igno-
rant adversaries to complete his providential task.
Until well into the twentieth century, this view
of the “Discovery” as an event that should inspire
unalloyed pride and satisfaction was rarely chal-
lenged. Only the immense political and economic
changes caused by World War II and the antico-
lonial revolutions unleashed by the confl ict led to
a new way of looking at the “Discovery” and its
repercussions. That new frame of reference is com-
monly known as “The Vision of the Vanquished,”
because it takes as its point of departure the impact
of Columbus’s voyages not on Europe but on the
peoples and cultures of the Americas. Awareness of
the ethnocentric, Eurocentric connotations of the
termdiscovery has even led many scholars to replace
it with the more neutral term encounter (encuentro
in Spanish). America, after all, was not an empty
continent when the fi rst Europeans arrived; its true
“discoverers” were the people who had crossed over
from Asia by way of the Bering Strait many thou-
sands of years before. But the word encounter, with
its suggestion of a peaceful meeting of peoples and
cultures, hardly fi ts the grim reality of the European
invasion of indigenous America, so we shall con-
tinue to use discovery, for lack of a better word.
“The Vision of the Vanquished” initiated a
more balanced assessment of the discovery of
America and its consequences. For the native peo-
ples of America, the Discovery and its sequel of the
Conquest were an unmitigated disaster. The com-
bination of new diseases to which they had no ac-
quired immunity, their brutal exploitation, and the
resulting social disorganization and loss of will to
live led to perhaps the greatest demographic catas-
trophe in recorded history, with an estimated loss
of between 90 and 95 percent of the native popula-
tion between 1492 and 1575.
The Discovery and the Conquest also cut short
the independent development of brilliant civiliza-
tions like the Aztec and Inca empires, which, many
scholars believe, had not exhausted their possibili-
ties for further cultural advance and fl owering. Fi-
nally, the Discovery initiated a process of ecological
devastation in the New World through the introduc-
tion of European animals, plants, and agricultural
practices that transformed long-stable ecosystems.
Columbus began the process on Hispaniola by in-
troducing the extensive Spanish system of farming
with plows and cattle ranching, producing rapid
soil erosion and deforestation. The process begun
by Columbus continues to this day, as evidenced
by the rapid destruction of Latin America’s rain for-
ests. This too is part of the “Columbian legacy.”
The impact of the Discovery on Europe and its
long-term development was much more positive.
That impact, as noted long ago by Adam Smith and
Karl Marx, is clearest in the realm of economics.
Historians may debate the impact of American pre-
cious metals on Europe’s sixteenth-century “price
revolution” or the contribution of the slave trade
to the “primitive accumulation” of capital in Eu-
rope. It is beyond dispute, however, that the com-
bination of these and other events fl owing from the
discovery of America gave an immense stimulus to
Europe’s economic modernization and the rise of
capitalism, which in turn hastened and facilitated
its domination of the rest of the globe.
The intellectual impact of the Discovery on
Europe is more diffi cult to measure, but it seems
indisputable that the expansion of geographic ho-
rizons produced by the discovery of America was