The Conquest of Paradise

The Conquest of Paradise: Christopher Columbus and the Columbian Legacy, by Kirkpatrick Sale

Kirkpatrick Sale’s monograph The Conquest of Paradise tells the Columbus story as the conquest of noble, peace-loving peoples that live in harmony with the environment by a brutal, savage, medieval Europe of which Christopher Columbus is a product. Because of the horrible effects of the black plague, and the European cultural tendency to war against the environment instead of coexist with it, Sale speculates that Europeans had been hardened towards death and killing, and enamored with property and personal wealth, to such an extent that mutual understanding between Native Americans and Europeans was practically impossible. Sale argues that Columbus was not seeking a route to the Far East, but rather that he intended his mission to be one of discovery and conquest. The fact that Columbus and Europe dominated the Amerinds is an ecological one. Disease, which Europe had coped with in the Black Plague, decimated the island populations upon which Columbus landed. Sale paints the Amerinds as peoples who lived in perfect harmony with the environment, while Europeans are depicted as a people who are at war with nature.

It seems that Sale wants to depict the Indians as “noble savages,” a simple folk innocent and at peace with their environment. He tends to ignore the fact that great Native American civilizations had existed and declined prior to the arrival of Columbus to the New World. In addition, Sale neglects to mention that even Amerinds warred with one another (something that is mentioned many times in the diario). It would seem that Sale’s involvement in the Green Party, and other ecological organizations, predisposes him to see the lifestyle of “noble savages” as superior to that of the conquering Columbian hordes. We are almost told outright that the world would be a better place today had the expansion of European culture, first implemented by Columbus, not taken place. In Sale’s conclusion, it becomes apparent that at the very least, Conquest of Paradise is history with a strong didactic twist.

PUBLISHER: New York: Alfred A. Knopf, Inc., 1990.