Meetings and Beginnings There is a tendency to view the European settlement of North America, and the corresponding decimation of many tribes and cultures, as sudden and inevitable. It was neither. How, then, did Indians go from being the lords of the continent-controlling all its shores, all the interior, having mastered its climates and terrain and even the inevitable conflict with other tribes-to the scattered remnants present in 1891? Although the northern Atlantic littoral had been reached and lightly explored by Leif Eriksson (Eriksson the Lucky) in the eleventh century, it wasn''t until Christopher Columbus landed in the Bahamas on October 12, 1492, that the age of exploration (and eventually settlement) of the New World truly began. And that is where the story of America usually begins. Like many origin myths, the idea that everything began in 1492 when Columbus sailed the ocean blue is a fiction. So, too, are the received notions about why he came: his journey wasn''t motivated by ideology or by the desire to prove that the earth was round. Columbus''s journey to North America was a mission that would resemble the worst kind of marriage: he came for money and ended up in court. In many ways, his journey began with the Ottomans and with the rise of a mercantile class-early monopolists, if you will.

Prior to 1453, the Silk Road that led from Europe through the Middle East and the subcontinent to China was protected, known, and stable enough to facilitate a robust trade in silk and spices between Asia and Europe. Since at least 3000 bce, spices had been traded from east to west via coastal routes, and, later, by sea routes. Cinnamon, nutmeg, ebony, silk, obsidian, and all manner of goods moved from east to west, while gold, silver, and gems moved from west to east. A host of other things followed along those routes: religions, populations, knowledge, philosophy, genes, and disease. The relationships that evolved, from antiquity through the Middle Ages, while not necessarily equitable and certainly not always peaceful, weren''t only, or even primarily, exploitive. When the Ottoman Turks conquered Constantinople in 1453, however, the ensuing regime change dismantled that network. The powers in Venice, Genoa, Barcelona, and Lisbon needed new ways to get the goods to which they were accustomed into Europe. Specifically, they needed a cheaper way than traveling through the politically unstable Mediterranean waters and the increasingly risky overland routes across the Arabian Peninsula.

Political unrest was widespread, as were piracy and violence. Making matters worse were Iberian civil wars and a kind of economic headlock imposed on European royal power by feudal mercantilism. Spain wasn''t exactly Spain until the end of the fifteenth century; it was a collection of competing states including Portugal, Castile, Granada, and Navarre, united through conquest and the marriage of Isabella and Ferdinand. The Spanish crown in particular had depleted its resources in punitive wars against other Iberian countries and against the Moors, who were finally expelled from Spain in the late 1400s. Though driven from Spain, the Moors were still a force in the Mediterranean, and they effectively choked off trade to Spain''s courts. (The effects were dramatic; for example, by 1503 pepper traded through the Mediterranean cost 80 percent more than pepper that came from the New World). Merchants, long denied standing and opportunity in their home countries in favor of royal companies, had in the meantime developed their own foreign trade networks, and they became rich, in some cases richer than the crown. Then, as now, power followed money; European monarchies were losing their grip.

What the Portuguese and Spanish (and later the English) crowns needed were royal charters and royal commerce: a way to create central banks as a means of consolidating power, and state-sponsored businesses to fill royal coffers. And although it had long been thought possible, it wasn''t until the mid-fifteenth century that it became practical and necessary to try to sail west in order to reach the East. Columbus was a hired gun. The Spanish crown needed someone to advance its interests. Like a gun, Columbus, as a representative of power, quickly became an agent of violence. Michele da Cuneo, a lifelong friend of Columbus''s who came along on the second voyage, is indicative of the scope of violence the expedition entailed: While I was in the boat, I captured a very beautiful Carib woman, whom the said Lord Admiral gave to me. When I had taken her to my cabin she was naked-as was their custom. I was filled with a desire to take my pleasure with her and attempted to satisfy my desire.

She was unwilling, and so treated me with her nails that I wished I had never begun. But-to cut a long story short-I then took a piece of rope and whipped her soundly, and she let forth such incredible screams that you would not have believed your ears. Eventually we came to such terms, I assure you, that you would have thought that she had been brought up in a school for whores. In 1495, Columbus shipped 550 Indians in four ships back to Spain for sale. More than two hundred died en route, and their bodies were cast into the sea. By 1499, Columbus was regularly shipping Indians back to Spain, where they were sold in Andalusian markets. While he was funneling Native families into slavery and breaking them apart, his own brothers-Bartholomew and Diego (Giacomo)-joined him in his exploits in the New World. Ferdinand and Isabella were reluctant to allow him to continue slaving, even though slavery was alive and well and widespread in Spain at the time.

Muslims who remained after 1492 were sold, as were any "''enemies of the Catholic church and of the crown'' who had been taken in a ''good'' or ''just'' war." Isabella and Ferdinand needed to know if Indian captives met these definitions (although slavers and profiteers and functionaries almost always found a way to make most of their captives fit administratively). The monarchs told Columbus to stop slaving until they figured out what to do. They appointed a committee of lawyers and religious leaders to help them. It took five years for them to reach a decision, during which time Columbus kept slaving and exploring. He was so insistent and pressured the crown so relentlessly while it deliberated that Isabella, exasperated, exclaimed, "Who is this Columbus who dares give out my vassals as slaves?" But eventually he realized it would be more profitable to keep Indians in the New World in slavery than to send them back to Spanish markets. Columbus wrote that he "would have sent many Indians to Castile, and they would have been sold, and they would have become instructed in our Holy Faith and our customs, and then they would have returned to their lands to teach the others," but the Indians stayed in the Caribbean because "the Indians of Espa-ola were and are the greatest wealth of the island, because they are the ones who dig, and harvest, and collect the bread and other supplies, and gather the gold from the mines, and do all the work of men and beasts alike." In short, while Columbus found gold and silver and other natural resources, the indigenous lives and bodies were the greatest natural resource he came upon.

Schisms emerged. When Columbus returned on his third voyage in 1498, he was greeted by an insurrection at Hispaniola. The colonists claimed he had misled them about the opportunities to be found there. Columbus had some of them hanged for insubordination. Others returned to Spain, where they brought a case against him in the Spanish court. Columbus also ran afoul of the Church for his reluctance to baptize many Native peoples because he preferred to leave them, according to church doctrine, "soulless," which meant that they were free to be enslaved. In 1500 he was removed as governor of Hispaniola and brought to Spain in chains to face charges of cruelty and mismanagement. Not until 2006 did documents surface in Spain that detailed the extent of Columbus''s tyranny and depravity.

The governor who replaced him, Francisco de Bobadilla, tasked by the crown with fact-finding on the Columbus brothers'' rule, deposed twenty-three people, some supporters, some enemies. All had the same tale to tell: the brothers had used torture and mutilation as a means of control. A man convicted of stealing corn had his ears and nose cut off and was sold into slavery; a woman who suggested Columbus was of low birth was paraded naked through the streets and later had her tongue cut out; Natives who rose up against the brutalities of colonial rule were dismembered alive and had their torsos paraded through the streets. Columbus was somewhat rehabilitated in the eyes of the crown, and he was allowed to return to the Caribbean on a fourth voyage in 1502 with strict instructions not to stop at Hispaniola. But he was ever the same. Things were so bad during his fourth voyage that Columbus was stranded on Jamaica for the better part of a year after sustaining damage in a storm; Nicol++s de Ovando y C++ceres, the governor of Hispaniola, who detested Columbus, refused to help him. When aid from Spain finally arrived in June 1504, Columbus returned there for good, never having set foot on the mainland of North America. Starting in the 1490s and over the next twenty years, John Cabot would reach Atlantic Canada, Jo&lsa"o Fernandes Lavrador would map Labrador, and the Corte-Real brothers would explore the region as well.

Juan Ponce de Le--n would found Caparra on what is now Puerto Rico, and Hern++n CortZs would conquer Mexico with the help of the Tlaxcalans, as more than forty thousand renegade Inca subjects would aid Francisco Pizarro with his efforts farther south. And through the end of the century, a wave of exploration and many attempts at colonization w.