Review of Books by Woodrow Borah in American Historical Review (February 1992, pp. 156-57) Kirkpatrick Sale. "The Conquest of Paradise: Christopher Columbus and the Columbian Legacy." New York: Alfred A. Knopf. 1990. pp. 453. $24.95. In Kirkpatrick Sale's eloquent and passionate treatment, Columbus and the Columbian legacy become a paradigm for the ruthless expansion of Western Europeans overseas. Western and Mediterranean Europe developed an energy-hungry civilization different from cultures in Asia, Africa, and America. The conquerors, according to Sale, consumed too much meat, were reluctant to adapt to more productive local crops, had a callous attitude toward women, and, in the first centuries of contact, possessed a mind closed to any understanding or appreciation of native interpretations or conceptions. In a blundering, heedless course, Europeans settled large parts of the globe without regard to the rights of natives, devastated huge areas, violently disturbed or replaced native biota, and now threaten to leave a gutted, overpopulated, and seriously impoverished planet. In contrast, native Americans before Columbus lived essentially in harmony with their environment. They extracted sustenance from the biota while maintaining it; they made shrewd use of native plants and held down natural population increase. In general, women enjoyed much higher status than in Western Europe and, in many tribes, inheritance moved through them. Warfare was infrequent. Much of Sale's description pertains to what is now Anglo-America, for Mesoamerica and the Andes had developed state systems with high degrees of social stratification that meant wars, expansion, and (in Mesoamerica) destructive exploitation. According to Sale, Columbus's voyages initiated the period when Europe began its overseas expansion and eventual domination of the planet. A large part of the book examines the myth- shrouded enigma of the Genoese sailor who became Admiral of the Ocean Sea. Sale has carefully studied the writings of Columbus's contemporaries and the admiral's later writings, which have only recently become accessible, and through rigorous analysis declares baseless such myths as the admiral's lifelong conviction that he had reached Asia. Sale points to personality quirks, questions Columbus's religious zeal, and denounces his brutal exploitation of the Taino. Following Columbus's voyages, Spain developed a vast American empire and a consonant administrative structure. With huge revenues from American mines, the Spanish Hapsburgs could attempt to reorder Europe, exhausting their newly won resources in a century-and-a-half of incessant wars. A particularly fine part of the book explores changes in Columbus's reputation, as found in histories, biographies, poems, and literary prose, in Spain and other countries. Only in 1892 did the anniversary of his achievement excite great attention, as it will in 1992, but now with much challenge from other points of view. One example Sale cites of how Europeans adopted the Columbian legacy is in the British colonies, particularly in Virginia and New England, where he finds the same callousness toward the natives and the same reluctance to adapt. This behavior was distinguished from Spain's only by the lack of any protesting voice such as Bartolome de las Casas and by the fiercer attitudes that Protestantism engendered. Sale's examination of Columbus has a hard-minded quality that cuts through much obfuscation and legend. He emerges as a more human and complex figure, but this treatment also anachronistically applies views that come from the native American and women's rights movements, environmentalism, vegetarianism, animal rights, and so on, so that European civilization becomes the Great Satan of time and the planet. I must point out that the destruction of the environment by humans can easily be found in the Middle East, Africa, and Asia, where much desertification has occurred; nor have the inhabitants of those areas been distinguished by concern for the rights of other peoples, women's rights, or animal rights. The most that can be said is that they did not invariably have the dynamic of Western Europe. As for the native Americans, Sale's picture of paradise is overdrawn. Mesoamerica apparently went through cycles of over-exploitation of resources and population collapse. In short, Sale has written a work of considerable virtues as well as defects.