The New World to which Columbus came at the end of the fifteenth century was not, as we are tempted to believe, a wholly savage and untamed place. The people lacked some of the basics of European civilization, it is true; for instance, horses were unknown to them, and they had never discovered the use of the wheel. But there were many accomplishments to offset such handicaps. In the political domain these original Americans, as early as the tenth century, were building mighty empires; and, in the realm of intellectual achievement, they developed a cosmographic science dealing with the constitution of the whole order of nature, that was far superior to that of Europe.
It would be a mistake, however, to believe the New World, as a whole, was an oasis of civilization in the European sense of the term. America had many faces, and to its conquerors it offered a variety of aspects. Christopher Columbus, when he went ashore on the island of San Salvador - one of the Bahamas - was greeted by the Lucayas, an agricultural and artistic people who typified the "noble savage" of popular legend. The Spaniards, on the other hand, were shortly to meet a completely different sort of native; the ferocious cannibals of the Caribbean. Such diversity is reflected in the history of the pre-Columbian New World, a history so complex that it has taken historians almost five centuries of study in order to disengage its main lines