Four studies in scarlet
William Fiennes
RIVERS OF BLOOD, RIVERS OF GOLD by Mark Cocker Cape, £20, pp. 416 When stout Cortes marched on Tenochtitlan in November 1519, the popu- lation of the Mexican capital was greater than that of Paris and London combined, Tenochtitlan was a city of 108 districts, built on the surface of a lake. It boasted public steambaths, a network of ceramic pipes feeding sweet-water fountains, agri- cultural innovations such as the irrigated floating gardens called chinampas, and a system of education far in advance of any European equivalent. At the centre of the city was a plaza holding 78 civic buildings, temples and palaces. Its residents were renowned for their expertise in botany, medicine, metallurgy and the decorative arts. Within 18 months, the Spanish new- comers had reduced this great metropolis to a platform of rubble. For conquistadores, greedy for gold and emboldened by mili- tant Christianity, fighting Mesoamericans was a low-risk business. There may have been only 500 Spanish soldiers, but they had crossbows, arquebuses, breastplates, culverins, chainmail, falconets and solid- tilted Toledo swords — all the Old World potency of sharpened steel. They had mag- nificent Barb-Arab horses. They had blood- thirsty mastiffs and wolfhounds. And they had the secret microbial weaponry that would prove devastating not only to the Mexicans but to so many tribal societies around the world: smallpox, typhus, measles, influenza, whooping cough, mumps.
The Spanish conquest of the Mexicans is the first of four historical portraits that make up Mark Cocker's Rivers of Blood, Rivers of Gold. Each of these portraits is a case study of the European treatment of tribal peoples. This treatment, Cocker argues, `could be said to represent the greatest, most persistent act of human destructiveness ever recorded'. His statis- tics are persuasive. More than 11 million indigenous Americans lost their lives in the 18 years following the Spanish invasion. Australia's aborigines slumped from a pre- colonial total of at least a million to a mere 30,000 in the 1930s. The native American population of North America fell from eight million to 800,000 by the end of the 19th century. Whenever they encountered European pioneers, tribal societies could expect one thing: rapid demographic col- lapse of more than 90 per cent.
But the Europeans were greeted as gods. Columbus reported that the Arawaks char- acterised his men as 'the people from the sky'. The Mexican emperor Moctezuma imagined Cortes to be the incarnation of the Mexican culture god Quetzalcoatl. In 19th-century Australia, aborigines believed the pale Europeans to be the returned ghosts of their deceased kin. Such delu- sions reinforced the European assumption that tribal people were subhuman. As late as 1902, a member of the Commonwealth parliament in Australia felt able to announce, 'There is no scientific evidence that the aborigine is a human being at all.'
Rivers of Blood, Rivers of Gold is accessi- ble revisionist history drawn entirely from secondary sources rather than from origi- nal documentary research. The book is dense with fact, and sometimes glutted with peripheral information. Cocker describes the white American campaign against the Apaches of New Mexico and Arizona in the 1870s and 1880s, and nomi- nates Geronimo, the Apache warrior said to have slept beneath a blanket made from the scalps of murdered white women, as the outstanding figure of the period. He describes how, at the turn of this century, the Nama and Herero tribes of South-West Africa were brought close to extinction by German forces under the command of the casually genocidal Adrian von Trotha.
The purpose of Cocker's case histories is to show that such atrocities were not anomalies, but the way of things. His four portraits suggest that holocaust is a stan- dard human mode. When British settlers first encourntered Tasmanian aboriginals at Risdon in 1804, Lieutenant William Moore immediately opened fire, wishing, as he himself put it, 'to see the Niggers run'. At that time, the aboriginal popula- tion was about 3-4,000. By 1871, there was only one full-blooded Tasmanian aborigi- nal left alive, a diminutive, grey-haired woman in her sixties called Tuganini. She died in May 1876. Her body was exhumed. The Royal Society of Tasmania strung her bones together on wires, then hung out the skeleton on public display.
Previous page
