American Demons

Pushed into Paradise

In December 1492, Columbus loses his flagship Santa Maria. The shipwrecked crew remains in the care of the cacique Guacanagari while the admiral sails to Spain to report. The thirty-nine, who were forced to be left behind by their boss in the New World, feel pushed into paradise by the moral simplicity of the local people. Until then, they led a laborious and unhygienic life in civilization. Ulcers and bumps swarm under their skin. These Spanish boatmen are stunted people. Their faith is without love, just as they themselves have learned to live without love. Now they come to people who cannot even imagine lovelessness. Who spend the long day in idleness.

No (stranded) Spaniard wants to go back home. On the West Indian island, the Thirty-Nine are not only free, but also masters. The locals submit without a care in the world. They don't understand the madness that lives in the strangers. The shipwrecked believe that they were sent to this place. They interpret the accident of the Santa Maria as a sign from God. This is where Christianization should begin. The intruders show an audience that has no use for bows and arrows (people run away from armed opponents) the effects of firearms.

Spanish exploration of the sea route to India competed with a larger state goal: the reconquest of the Holy Land. For the Christian salvation there was little in the West Indies and everything in Jerusalem. The royal highnesses Isabella and Ferdinand expected Columbus to provide them with sources of income with which they would finance the fight for the Holy Land.

Many land grabs in Latin America have the colonists' expectations of salvation in their name. The idea of finding a godly world once again in the southern hemisphere (under a new sky) fills more than a modern platitude. Modern in the spirit of the Renaissance. The Genoese Columbus promises the Spanish rulers the means for a magnificent ascent to heaven. In the spring of 1495 he passes the Dragon's Throat outside Trinidad and came across "Natives" who were not friendly. A military force opposes the expedition.

The sudden expansion of European scope provokes "a violent change in the space of the soul" (Stefan Zweig). The traditional measure no longer applies. Thousand-year-old certainties crumble in a flash in the light of new views. In the spectrum between geography and geometry, unexpected perspectives emerge.The received loses its usefulness. "A spiritual fever for knowledge and science arises from the sudden perfusion of the European organism with new world material, the rhythm accelerates", so Stefan Zweig. On the peripheries of the upheavals, the inertia of an outdated order prolongs the decline of medieval formats.

Old values are shattered by new technology.

Europe did not expect America. The continent stands in the way of an untenable vision of the world and trade. Between the start (Spain/Portugal) and the finish (the Moluccas) there is not only a lot more water, but also a lot more land than expected. Since it was certain that Columbus was not stranded in the West Indies, every captain on a long voyage hopes to discover a passage to the Pacific.​