This show starts against the romantic tropical backdrop of South America
and features swashbuckling daredevils, buried treasure, jungle adventures,
brilliant color, philosophy, art, war, music,
science, travel, and a megalomaniac evil.
Oh, and I forgot to mention,
also religion, major disasters, and international skullduggery.
The usual humdrum run-of-the-mill history story.
And what's it about?
It's about how history sometimes behaves
just like your friendly local cinema.
It sometimes does reruns.
You know, an old idea with a new twist.
And when that happens,
you find yourself with a definite sense of deja vu.
If you take a look at one of those old
black-and-white adventure movies,
you see how we Westerners used to think
that, in going out and grabbing bits of the world,
we were actually doing all the people
we happened to be taking over a favor.
And since we hardly bothered to learn their languages,
most of what they got up to
just seemed like so much jungle mumbo jumbo.
So when the 16th-century Spanish conquistadors
got up the South American jungle,
without the help of subtitles or language courses,
they tended to take much the same view
of the locals they came across.
As far as they were concerned, well,
the only good South American Indian was either dead,
converted to Christianity, worked till he dropped,
or best of all, sitting on top of a pile of gold and silver
to which he invited you to help yourself,
which kind of sums up what happened in Peru
when Pizarro moved in on the Incas.
Of course, it was all worked out back home before they left.
I mean, even if Columbus had gone back home to Europe
without a clear idea of what he really stumbled across,
it was better to have things properly planned
for the conquest of whatever it might turn out to be, you know?
So the Pope drew an imaginary line...
that one...
on an imaginary map of an imaginary world.
And if you were Spanish,
everything west of this line was yours.
What a pleasant surprise that turned out to be.
In 1531, fortunately for Pizarro,
as he and his men advanced up the jungle,
this plan for taking over Inca real estate
met virtually no resistance,
because, after a while,
there was virtually nobody around to resist,
thanks to a devastating disease
the Spaniards happened to be carrying at the time called smallpox
to which the natives had no immunity
and which conveniently reduced the local population
of 30 million to 3 million.
With a little prodding from Rome,
Jesuit missionaries destroyed thousands of primitive temples
and idols and other such religious paraphernalia
and replaced them with this European equivalent.
They moved people out of their villages
and into security compounds "for their own good"
and then baptized them, as many as 1,500 a day.
They opened colleges and churches
to train Indians for the priesthood.
That way, you could baptize more locals.
And once baptized,
you were legally obliged to do what the Spaniards told you.
Neat trick, eh?
From about 1550, there was an all-out effort
to make the settlers arriving from Spain
feel really at home in the New World
with posh accommodation
in specially built imitation Spanish towns,
like Santo Domingo on the island of Hispaniola.
I mean, if you didn't remind yourself
that you were out on the edge of the known world,
you would've sworn you were in downtown Madrid
if you came around a corner and bumped into this, eh?
It's the palace of the governor of Hispaniola
who was the son of Christopher Columbus.
Come and take a look.
This would've been like sleeping in your own bed back in Spain.
Classic Spanish dining room.
Spanish food of course,
cooked in a traditional Spanish kitchen.
I wonder if they put the windows up here
to hide the fact that out there was the middle of nowhere.
Of course, those who might have been tempted
to hightail it back to home and mother
when nostalgia for the old country got the better of them
probably gave it second thoughts...
given the death penalty for trying it.
So by and large, the settlers settled in considerable comfort,
most of them in the gold and silver export business,
by now pouring billions into the Spanish treasury.
Great news for the government back home in Spain.
I mean, you can't be too rich, can you?
Unfortunately for Spain,
what you're looking at now
is where most of that Inca money ended up,
not in Spain, but Belgium,
here in Antwerp,
with all these beautiful Renaissance palaces
that pull the tourists in
built with South American money.
Just thinking about the way a place like this looks,
I wonder if it's true that a place has a particular character.
I mean, Roman ruins, Paris boulevards,
Viennese baroque,
Renaissance palaces.
Because for one brief moment in the past,
the place suddenly got loads of cash
and spent all the money on improving the environment,
knocking down the mishmash that had been there before,
and doing the whole place up
in the same posh style in fashion at the time
on the basis of, if you've got it, flaunt it.
This is why Antwerp attracted money in the first place,
because of what you could buy here,
which was just about anything from just about anywhere.
Now, I expect you're already noticing
the one word missing from this little showcase
is the word "Spanish. "
See, all those settlers out in South America
with all that Inca money to spend
couldn't get the luxuries they could now afford from Spain
because the Spanish domestic economy
just wasn't diversified enough to come up with the goods.
But the international port of Antwerp,
which, at the time, belonged to Spain, was.
So with all the general wheeling and dealing,
it won't surprise you to know
that Antwerp also kicked off the stock market.
The first one ever started here in 1531
with all the discount rates, bills of exchange,
commodity prices, promissory notes,
bulk trading, credit transfer,
clearing houses, and the general pandemonium
and financial gobbledygook
that stock markets have been ever since.
Because what all that Inca silver had done
was turn Western life into the money-go-round it is today.
Precious metals poured down these South American rivers,
across the Atlantic,
and into Antwerp in the form of silver bullion
and poured out again in the form of mortgages,
credit notes, loans, you name it.
For the first time, you could make big money by doing nothing.
All you had to have was money.
And there was now more of that around than ever before...
which is why colonies were invented, like this English colony in Virginia.
See, at the time,
the new way for a European country
to be powerful, win wars, and so on
was to have a new thing called a positive balance of trade.
All that meant was getting your hands on as much as possible
of that Inca silver floating around Europe
by selling things to other countries,
and the cheaper your manufacturing costs, of course,
the more profit you made
and the more positive your balance of trade.
Hence, the colonies,
whose only purpose in life,
apart from producing the bare necessities
to keep themselves going,
was to produce some commodity or other
that you could sell all over Europe for large amounts of money.
The commodity here in Virginia was tobacco,
which, by law, had to be sent only to England
only on English ships
with only English crews
to only English merchants
in only English ports.
Putting the squeeze on a colony like this
meant everybody back in England really made a packet.
The only people who didn't clean up were the colonists
who didn't get to see any of the profits
they had so kindly generated for the mother country.
Actually, come to think of it,
some of the money did end up getting back here.
Here, to Williamsburg
or, to be more exact, to the building behind me.
It's the College of William and Mary.
Nice, isn't it?
The second oldest in the U.S.
and a real pioneer in education
and, more to the point, founded in 1693
with some of those trading profits I was talking about.
Well, trading profits may not be quite the right way to describe them
because this is where history
makes some really extraordinary connections.
One, two, three, four, five...
There was one other way besides trade to get your hands on Inca silver:
knocking off Spanish treasure ships in the Caribbean
on their way back from South America
and, since anybody else might then take the treasure off you,
burying it temporarily for safekeeping.
Look at that.
Who knows how much treasure is still buried out here
that they never came back for, eh?
By "they," I mean the kind of criminals
who lived in this place:
Port Royal, Jamaica.
It was a certain type of person
with whom otherwise quite respectable governments,
especially the English,
made the kind of arrangements
that make Watergate look like Sunday school.
I am, of course, talking pirates, most of whom were quietly under
rob, pillage, and plunder contract to the English government
in return for 50%/ of whatever it was they managed to knock off,
all strictly deniable of course.
I said they lived here in Port Royal,
but not for long,
because at 11:57 on June the 7th, 1692,
everybody's contract was cancelled
by that thing they always put in small print:
"Act of God,"
an earthquake that would have been off the Richter scale
if they'd had one.
They never got the place straightened up since.
Oh, I forgot the payoff.
You remember I mentioned strange connections?
Well, here's one.
Since pirate profits
could sometimes go as high as 5,000%/,
sometimes, some of these privateering characters
would do a little freelance work,
and sometimes, they'd get caught,
like a fellow called Wafer,
whose punishment was his back pay for three years,
money which the English government then used
to set up the William and Mary College in Virginia.
Remember?
Meanwhile, more strange connections.
One of the other pirates at Port Royal was a fellow called William Dampier,
and at one point, he went off down to the Yucatan
to recruit a bunch of bloodthirsty buccaneers
for a grand attack on Panama City.
Now, those recruits only did their pirating part-time
when they weren't cutting this stuff: logwood.
You find it all over South America.
You can get a great purple dye from logwood
because there are crystals of the dye inside the wood,
worth a fortune back then.
So some of the Spanish galleons
that these logwood cutters turned pirates hit
for their gold and silver also carried logwood cargos
and the other luxury dye for Mexico, cochineal.
Back in England, the hijacked cochineal
was mainly used to dye the First Army uniforms,
kicking off the idea of redcoats and regimentation.
The concept of military discipline
was taken several steps further by a distant ancestor
of the lady reviewing the British guards here today.
She's Elizabeth II.
The ancestor was Frederick the Great of Prussia,
who practically invented the modern army
with spit and polish, iron discipline, and permanently clean weapons.
Frederick also introduced compulsory military service,
brutal punishment,
the slow and quick march,
and regular pay.
In 1742, he cut troop formations to three ranks
to make them more maneuverable and to drill them round the clock.
Not surprisingly, he won every battle he fought.
Now, Fred was also nuts about anything French,
and at this time, they were heavily into education theory.
So being a thorough Prussian, Fred took things to extremes,
set up the first ministry of education, primary school system,
regular exams, school inspectors,
made the whole thing compulsory,
made German kids what they are today,
disciplined and knowledgeable,
which got his in-house philosopher thinking about knowledge.
And in the nutshell this program has to put everything,
here's what he came up with.
The only way that anything you know...
reality out there...
has any order to it
is because your mind gives it order with categories.
What is something?
What does it do?
Where is it?
When is it?
For instance, fire heats here now.
Once you've put the world into those categories,
you can fill in the details.
And he also said, knowledge is really only two things:
history... categorizing everything in time...
and geography... categorizing everything in place,
music to the ears of simplifiers like me.
Thank you, Immanuel Kant,
whose ideas also persuaded a young man to leave
the elegant sitting rooms of Berlin
for the dubious pleasures of the jungle.
The young man's name was Alexander Humboldt,
and in 1799,
all excited by what Kant had said about categorizing knowledge,
he went off to spend five years in South America
inventing geography and environmentalism.
Everywhere he went, he saw evidence
of the intimate relationship between plants and animals
and people and the place where they lived.
The environment held the key to success for all life-forms.
Humans were no different from the nature all around them.
When he got back home,
Humboldt wrote the best seller of all time about his trip
and changed everything people thought about the world.
In 1874, one of Humboldt's greatest fans,
a German travel writer called Ratzel, went on a tour of the United States,
and it hit him like a ton of bricks.
Humboldt was right.
Environment was everything.
A nation was just like an organism in nature.
It needed space to thrive and multiply and spread.
"Look at the U.S.," he said.
" Big country, big future. "
What Germany needed was room to breathe...
colonies.
Fortunately for Ratzel,
the theory of evolution has just come out,
so he goes home,
puts together a mishmash of Darwin and Humboldt,
and starts laying them in the aisles
with public lectures on the subject of human geography.
Totally hits the spot with his German conationals
who've just become a united country for the first time
and are thinking of, well, moving out
and taking over here and there.
But Ratzel really blows them away when he starts to talk about
how there's only room on the planet for one superstate,
how nations and nature obey the same rules of survival.
In 1932, the book Ratzel had written about his theory
excited a fellow called Haushofer,
one of whose politically radical friends was in jail
and writing his own book.
When Haushofer showed him Ratzel's work,
this guy read just what he was thinking himself.
Only through expansion could Germany fulfill her destiny
as one of history's winners.
Superior organisms like Germany needed room.
So when his book came out, it was all there:
racial purity, Aryan conquest, world domination.
I presume you've guessed the name of this author.
Deutschland, Sieg Heil!
Heil!
Well, that's almost it.
The name of that book
that Ratzel was inspired by Humboldt to write
when he got back from America,
the one about expand and take over, was "Lebensraum. "
And thanks to Haushofer and his pals in prison,
"Lebensraum"... "Expansionism"...
became part of Nazi policy.
"Lebensraum" plans came in several stages.
After winning the war in 1942,
the plan would be... what else?
Move out and take over.
Make sure of raw material supplies forever
by grabbing central Africa and then South America,
with plans for the locals here
almost exactly the same as those
of the Spanish conquerors centuries before.
Fortunately for the locals here and for the rest of us,
that particular example of history repeating itself
never made it past the Nazi moviemakers.
Hasta la vista.