l8o FOLLOW THE WHALE 



people of the North American continent as either running about in 

 dense forests with bows and arrows, or whooping it up on the vast 

 buffalo plains of the West. Only recently have we started to re- 

 appraise our ideas of the red man, Amerindian, or "Indian," as he 

 has so inaccurately been called, but this is proving to be a hard task 

 in view of the malicious propaganda that has been disseminated re- 

 garding these people for nigh on two centuries. 



The red man, before the coming of the Europeans, was probably 

 better integrated with his environment than any other group of 

 human beings known during historic times. He was, nonetheless, 

 at the time of his discovery, still living in the Stone Age and, how- 

 ever fine his individual qualities or those of his race may have been, 

 he simply could not survive the impact of the expanding west 

 European culture with its two thousand years of experience of the 

 Iron Age. Though there are said to be more "Indians" in North 

 America today than there were at the time the Mayflower sailed, 

 we must face the very obvious fact that the red man has "gone un- 

 der" and has been, and still is being, absorbed into our own much 

 vaster and technically more complex culture at an ever-increasing 

 tempo. 



Nevertheless, the red man's culture, though primitive, was also 

 an ancient one, and it had achieved much more than the early chron- 

 iclers admit or would give us to suppose. The indigenous North 

 American was not just a stupid savage, any more than was his Cen- 

 tral or South American cousin. It is still not appreciated that the 

 Aztecs of Mexico and the Incas of the Andes, though lacking such 

 basic things as the wheel and, in the latter case, even writing, had 

 nonetheless developed cultures that were in some respects far in 

 advance of that of the Spanish Europeans who conquered and de- 

 stroyed their civilizations. For instance, they gave us almost all our 

 most valuable plant products — potatoes, tobacco, rubber, tomatoes, 

 corn, cacao hence chocolate, quinine, cocaine, and dozens of beans 

 and other vegetables. In fact, had their conquerors not been fired 

 with a vicious and proselytizing religious mania, and had they not 

 owned horses, and been able to grow beards, both of which greatly 

 awed the natives, they never would have taken over those empires. 

 The North Americans, while altogether less well organized than 

 the Aztecs and Incas, still possessed a great wealth of traditional 



