Not enough words

When the Europeans arrived to the shores of the New World, the people living there were surprised, sometimes even afraid, because nothing like that had even happened before. The things they saw were so strange that in most cases they didn’t have words to describe them. In the text of Josiah Jeremy we learn that the Micmac people one day saw “a singular little island, as they supposed, which had drifted near to the land, and become stationary there”. The singular little island was, of course, a ship, but Indians had never seen ships before. The concept of a ship was incomprehensible for them, and so they struggled to describe what they saw as best as they could. In the text of John Heckewelder on the arrival of the Dutch, it is said that the some of the people thought the ships to be a very large animal (probably a fish) while others considered it was a very large floating house. In Mexico, the great aztec emperor Motecuhzoma received news that there was a mount or a big hill drifting in the sea, not quite reaching the shore.

 

When the Indians finally saw the European people in their shores, they found they could not understand that either. The newcomers had different clothing, language, skin color, hair color (and they had a lot of that one) and eating and living habits. They were far too different from them. And so, in some places they were thought to be gods. The Micmac at Manhattan, according to John Heckewelder, believed that the captain of the Dutch ship was Mannitto, the Great Being, that had come to visit them: “They are lost in admiration, both as to the color of the skin (or these whites) as also to their manner of dress, yet most as to the habit of him who wore the red clothes, which shone with something they could not account for. He must be Mannitto, they think, but why should he have a white skin?”

The Aztecs in the valley of Mexico also believed at first that the Spanish were gods. They had the legend of Quetzalcoatl, a god sometimes represented with white skin, who had gone away through the sea with the promise to return again someday. So when Hernan Cortez found his way through the mexica empire, Motecuhzoma obviously thought he was Quetzalcoatl.

Too late did the Indians realize these were not the gods they waited for, but only people with an amazing destructive power.