Early America: Noble or Savage?

...It is the logical extension of Northern Mists, Sauer's 1968 study of "the faring out to sea" from Atlantic Europe during the Middle Ages...

...Most of the main actors in Sauer's detailed narrative are familiar: the Cabots, Cabeza de Vaca, Verrazzano, Cartier, Coronado, De Soto, Gilbert, and Raleigh...

...Pearce notes that though reporters frequently encountered Indians as farmers, they insisted into the 1800s on viewing them as hunters, thus perpetuating the image of savagery...

...Since Jones, Nash and Pearce focused on how Europe perceived America, they scanned literary sources for significant meaning rather than for facts...

...Recent archeological evidence, summarized for the layman by Wilhelm G. Sol-heim in National Geographic (March 1971), has vindicated Sauer's hypothesis...

...Reviewed by Joseph E. Illick Professor of History, San Francisco State College Carl O. Sauer's long career as a geographer (he began publishing in 1915) has been distinguished by solid scholarship and, occasionally, by controversial speculation...

...The sources Sauer draws upon are neither new nor inaccessible...

...Instead of pointing to the continuing mystery of the New World environment, he focuses on the accumulation of knowledge about it...

...their exploits may provoke memories of early schooldays, when derring-do excited admiration for the conquerors rather than pity for the natives...

...To the contrary, from Florida to the St...

...But Sauer's emphasis is novel...

...The motives of the invaders are equally familiar: the search for a western passage, for precious metals, for national acquisitions and personal honor, always with divine sanction...

...But later reports of the terrors of nature and the treachery of the Indians when provoked, not to mention the brutality of Europeans in pursuit of wealth, produced a strong counterimage, perhaps no more rational than its opposite...

...One reviewer of that book crowed over Sauer's theory that "if one sought...

...Yet even uninterpreted details are categorized and classified, in terms of the rp- iical difference between farming-civilized and hunting-savage societies...

...The staples of maize, beans and squash were superior to European imports and were adopted by the white colonists in the 17th century...

...In Wilderness and the American Mind (1967), Roderick Nash points out that an antipathy toward nature nurtured by the Judeo-Christian tradition marked Western culture, and "the settlement of the New World offered abundant opportunity for the expression of this sentiment...

...Sixteenth-Century North America is a less speculative piece of work, though it does raise questions concerning the perspective of current historical scholarship...

...As for the aboriginal population, it was not found to be a shifting, nomadic people...

...R. H. Pearce's Savagism and Civilization (1953) opens with a declaration: "The Renaissance Englishmen who became Americans were sustained by an idea of order...

...Lawrence farmers worked the soil skillfully enough to harvest twice a year where the climate would permit...

...to design a completely untenable theory of agricultural origins and dispersal, it would be difficult to improve on it...

...they are published primary materials in Spanish, Portuguese, French, and English??for example, Richard Hak-luyt's multivolume The Principal Navigations, Voyages, Traffiques & Discoveries of the English Nation (1589...

...Not only do the accounts of explorers "agree that eastern Indians lived well and at ease in a generous land which they used competently and without spoiling it," Sauer writes, but the "Europeans were received everywhere with hospitality, except where the natives had reason to fear ill...

...The cultural geographer's fascination with hard fact, nurtured by his constant attention to the materials that give character to an area, is a healthy reminder that the humanist's man-centered world is bounded not only by perception but by the physical confines of life...

...A typical statement by Pearce, concerning the narrative of an explorer, illustrates the approach: "The details are set down carefully enough for use by twentieth-century ethnologists, and most often go uninterpreted...

...He finds that the "Atlantic coast was fairly well described in the visits of the century" and that even "its vegetation was familiar in its major elements...

...Admittedly, the emphasis of these books is more on the Old World than on the New, more on inherited ideology than unencumbered observation...

...The first image of the New World was bright: Tales of extraordinary riches and imaginative depictions of natives as Renaissance "gods and goddesses, warriors and nymphs" fell on willing ears...

...In his new book he reconstructs conditions as they were in the New World immediately before the arrival of the Europeans, as well as the beginnings of change brought about by the intruders...

...In O Strange New World (1964), Howard Mumford Jones observes that reports from America must be considered in the context of the melancholy pervading 16th-century Europe, causing men to turn "for relief, for imaginative escape, into dream worlds of other cultures...

...Sauer's focus is on American conditions, not European ideas, and his method is to gather explicit evidence about the place and its people...

...Coming to the New World to form a more perfect society than they had left behind, the Indian became for them an embodiment of savagery to which civilized men must not succumb...

...Sauer hypothesized that the Neolithic Revolution began not in the Fertile Crescent of the Near East but in Southeast Asia, from which place knowledge of plant cultivation was dispersed...

...Other recent studies of the European encounter with America have focused on reports of an exotic or desolate wilderness populated by savages...

...Twenty years ago, for instance, the appearance of his Agricultural Origins and Dispersals: The Domestication of Animals and Foodstuffs caused a great stir in the academic world...