These are annotations for the fourth chapter of the book Impossible Histories. I’m not saying you need to keep a copy of IH open next to you as you read, but it might make some things clearer?
p. 59
•epigraph: The epigraph here was to be:
Conquerors are a class of men with whom, for most part, the world could well dispense.
§Carlyle, Essay on Burns (1828).
•No one has ever rooted for Pizarro: E. Clerihew Bentley, with his studied understatement, sums Pizarro up in a quatrain (from a 1905 collection of light verse):
The views of Pizarro
Were perhaps a little narrow.
He killed the Caciques
Because (he said) they were sneaks.
A young Aldous Huxley in 1911 wrote something similar in limerick form:
My firm belief is, that Pissarro
Must have been educated at Harro
This alone would suffice
To account for his vice,
And his morals so scroobious and narro.James Jeffrey Roche (in his 1900 collection of light verse) reduces Pizarro to a bad influence on fellow conquistador Francisco Carvajal. A brief excerpt from his poem on Carvajal:
I love a man who does his work
Whate’er it be, as best he can;
Old Carvajal, a perfect Turk
In wickedness, was such a man.…
He followed where Pizarro led,
Nor questioned of the right or wrong,
But “took life easy,” as he said
And fortune as it came along.
I’m not saying, necessarily, that one can browse any turn-of-the century collection of light verse and turn over a quip about Pizarro. I’m just saying that by ca. 1900 or shortly thereafter, Pizarro was so seen as being so bad that it was over-the-top funny.
I probably shouldn’t just go on and on with quotes of people making fun of Pizarro, but let me insert one more. Richard Brinsley Sheridan, in Pizarro (1799)—his most popular but far from his best play—introduces his antihero thus (a monologue by P.’s servant Valverde):
“Ignobly born! in mind and manners rude, ferocious and unpolished, though cool and crafty if occasion need—in youth audacious—ill his first manhood—a licensed pirate—treating men as brutes; the world as booty.”
Valverde asks rhetorically, “By what magic could Pizarro gain your heart?”
(Bentley, Biography for Beginners (Dover, 2014) p. 38; Huxley: Uwe Rasch, “Satire in the Making,” Aldous Huxley Annual vol. 15 (Lit Verlag, 2015) p. 87; Roche, V-A-S-E and Other Bric-a-Brac (E.H. Bacon, 1908) p. 42; Sheridan, Pizarro (Broadview, 2017) p. 77.)
•Lawton B. Evans: Evans’s book, the one that I’m quoting here, has the title, perhaps unfortunately chosen: America First. It purports to offer children (as per the subtitle) One Hundred Stories from Our Own History, although “our own” must be pretty ecumenical to include Pizarro (and also, as it does, Leif Erikson) alongside more American Americans such as George Washington and Daniel Boone…and “the greatest American Indian,” Tecumseh.
“American First” has been a catchphrase used by various politicians at various times, and if we inevitably now associate it with Donald Trump, it will probably be longest remembered as a WWII-era crypto-fascist rallying cry (which, of course, is not Lawton’s fault). “America First” inspired one of Woody Guthrie’s best lyrics, which I cannot resist reproducing below (hear it here):
Hitler wrote to Lindy, said “Do your very worst.”
Lindy started an outfit that he called America First…
And I’m gonna tell you workers, ’fore you cash in your checks:
They say “America First,” but they mean “America Next!”
(Lawton, op. cit., p. 270; Guthrie, “Mister Charles Lindbergh.”)
p. 60
•grade them on the number of people they conquered: I assume we don’t do this just because it’s too difficult. Historians are a lot more certain about the size of Central Asia than about how populous it was ca. 1220.
•a few noncombatants: These were mostly slaves, but a skittish editor balked at my using the word slave here.
p. 62
•or Tiananmen Square: The death tolls:
—St. Petersburg: Hard to say, but prob. ca. 200.
—Vorkuta: 66
—Tiananmen Square: Reports are all over the place, but Jan Wong estimates about 3,000, and she was there, so I’ll go with her number. The Chinese government initially claimed zero, and when that proved hard to swallow amended the number to 323, with the caveat that “many of the victims were soldiers” (i.e. not unarmed protesters); this is undoubtedly false.
Annnnnnnnd what about Kent State? Sure, I am perhaps predisposed to trotting out totalitarian atrocities, but Kent State is an example, too. Some say—and this is certainly the impression you’d get from reading Derf Backderf’s Kent State (Abrams, 2020), to take one example—that after the shooting, students were about to charge the National Guardsmen for an all-out combat, only to be talked down by professor Glenn Frank.
(Vorkuta: Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, The Gulag Archipelago V–VII (Perennial, n.d.) p. 283; Wong: Red China Blues (Doubleday/Anchor, 1996) pp. 277–78.)
p. 65
• imitation stalks of maize, with golden ears: Prescott compares the golden edifices to the fairy tale palaces of the enchanters in the Orlando Furioso (see p. 232 of IH), which I bring up only because I find it interesting when our frame of reference changes; had he lived a hundred years later, Prescott would’ve compared them to “something out of the Arabian Nights.”
(When did our frame of reference switch over? In 1914, crazed German modernist Paul Scheerbart wrote that if people adopted his plans for glass architecture, the world “would be as splendid as the gardens of the Arabian Nights”; so some time before that.)
(Scheerbart, Glass! Love!! Perpetual Motion!!! A Paul Scheerbart Reader (U Chi P, 2014) p. 38.)
•Only the ancient Indus Valley civilization: The illiteracy (or, conversely, potential literacy) of the Indus Civilization is extremely contentious, but I’ve followed Steve Farmer et al.’s “Collapse of the Indus-Script Thesis.” A good opposing viewpoint is Asko Parpola’s “Is the Indus Script Indeed Not a Writing System?” (Warning: Links open PDFs, which is always annoying, but in this case worth it, because they’re interesting PDFs.)
p. 66
•Because 1524 was before the civil war: The initial “because” is only there because copy editors have a bizarre superstition against starting a sentence with a number.
p. 67
•Never split the empire: “On the death of Clovis his four sons divided his empire. Jealousies and rivalries broke out among them ; war and murder disgrace this period of history.” (Jonathan Duncan, The Dukes of Normandy from the Times of Rollo to the Expulsion of King John (Joseph Rickerby, 1832) p. 3.) From less well-attested history, in the medieval Persian epic Shahnameh, Fereydun splits his empire between his three sons, and two sons conspire to kill the third (whose region is conveniently located in between theirs). There’s also King Lear. Just lots of examples, is what I’m getting at!
p. 68
•epigraph: The epigraph here was to be:
Man, as we see him developed in history, is indeed a ruin, but the ruin of a once noble fabric. When we think of what man might be, in all generous affections, and then think of what man is, it is enough to cause one to weep tears of blood.
§John S.C. Abbot, Ferdinand De Soto, the Discoverer of the Mississippi (1873).
p.72
•wanted to kill him: Cf. 1 Samuel 18:17b.
p. 74
• Albanians invested in Ponzi schemes: According to a Vice article I once read, the pyramid’s collapse led directly to Albania being taken over by organized crime. (Monty Reed, “The Inside Story of Europe's First Narco-State”.)
