Aliens and Natives: When Worlds Collide Orson Welles--"War Of the Worlds" and Christopher Columbus--Invasion of the New World by
Tatiana Heckles Dr. Thomas Tirado
December 4, 1997
History 392ALIEN: Strange, bizarre, foreign, unfamiliar, unknown, different, exotic, outlandish, extraterrestrial.
Orson Welles broadcasted the "War of the Worlds" on Halloween night, 1938. (http://waroftheworlds.com/original.html) Those who tuned in from the beginning and especially those who tuned in halfway were shocked and dismayed...fearing for their lives...believing it was true...readying for a fight...running for their lives.
In 1492, Christopher Columbus came to the new world to find a population alien to anything he knew. These indigenous people were so far removed from anything European or understood that within a short amount time they were Europe’s aliens.
Welles’ idea of "alien" is the embodiment of the word--extraterrestrial monsters. Christopher Columbus’s "alien" was probably as horrific to him (being a Christian) as these Martian Invaders. By no means were these people the aliens, though. Not knowing what they were or who they were, Columbus fabricated grand stories of their bestiality and paganism. In the late fifteenth century, these words were as ferociously as Welles’ wild words were in the 1930’s. Every century has it’s monsters.
It’s just an ever changing shift as to who they are.
Part One
Orson Welles’ Martians were remorseless killers, ugly, and vile:
I can see, peering out of the black hole two luminous disks. I can see the eyes, what might be a face, might be...oh my Heavens. Something wriggling out of the shadows like a gray snake...now it’s another one, and another one and another one... They look like tentacles to me. Wait... I can see the things body now. It’s large, large as a bear. It glistens like wet leather, but that face, ladies and gentlemen it’s indescribable. I can hardly force myself to keep looking at it. It’s so awful. It’s eyes are black and they gleam like a serpent and the mouth is kind of V-shaped with saliva dripping from its limmerous lips. It seems to quiver and pulsate and the monster, or whatever it is, can hardly move. It seems weighed down by possibly gravity or something. The thing’s rising up now. The crowd falls back..they’ve seen plenty. It’s the most extraordinary experience ladies and gentlemen. I can’t find the words. Some shape is rising out of the pit...(Wells).
The natives of the new world were pagans and devil worshippers. They were beasts (Shirk). Peter Martyr describes his account of the Native Americans as cannibals (capturing children) in the New World during the Age of Encounter:
They geld them to make them fat as we do cock chickens and young hogs, and eat them when they are well fed; of such as they eat, they first eat the entrails and the extreme parts, as the hands, feet, arms, neck, and head. The other more fleshy parts they powder (salt) for storage, as we do pieces of pork and gammons of bacon (Sale 133).
Other accounts:
The neck of a man was found cooking in a pot...in the huts, bones from which the Indians had gnawed everything that could be gnawed...a human arm ready for roasting...a human hand roasting on a spit...(Sale 132).
Welles and Columbus created this horrific imagery. They were masters of the horror story. Christopher Columbus was the first. They both chose subjects with which the general populous was unfamiliar. They fed on this civilian ignorance to create these monsters. Welles created Martian invaders from the questioning seeds of uncertainty that lie tucked in the minds of the pre-Apollo radio listeners. As Welles audience tuned in their dial that Halloween evening in 1938 their preconceptions of the extraterrestrial were treated with Welles monstrous and vivid imagery.
Christopher Columbus transformed a nation of indiscernible natives into icons of paganism. He could do this because his audience was like a theater full of young children. They were the Europeans across the sea, watching with their eyes wide and receptive. Columbus told them of the beasts, pagans, and devil worshippers. Since they didn’t know any better, they believed. It seems, people will believe what their told about unfamiliar subjects until they have further information. Even then, when people know the truth, these original images linger, often with resolve--kind of like going to a horror movie, laughing at it’s impossibility, and sleeping with the lights on. People of Columbus’s time really didn’t know any better.
Part Two
Man will fight for his values:
In the meantime, placing our faith in God we must continue the performance of our duties, each and every one of us, so that we may confront this destructive adversary with a nation united courageous and consecrated to the preservation of human supremacy on this Earth (Welles).
Well’s "destructive adversary" is the New World’s paganism.
Well’s "human supremacy" is Christianity.
This is comparable to Christopher Columbus declaring to Isabella that he can conquer this adversaryand instill Christianity (Sale 96).
Part Three
Ironically, Christopher Columbus was the real alien. He was comparable to Welles’ Martian Invaders. He was the one who reeked havoc, killed randomly, and in the end, conquered a nation. In the end of Welles’ broadcast it could be the voice of a Native American who speaks--speaks as Richard Peirson, a lonely survivor. There is nothing left of what he knew, his world, his culture:
My wife, my colleagues, my students, my books, my observatory...my world. Where are they? Did they ever exist? Am I Richard Peirson? What day is it? Do days exist without calendars? Does time pass when there are no hands to wind the clocks? Writing down my daily life, I tell myself that I shall preserve human history here between the dark covers of this little book that was meant to record the movements of the stars. But, to write I must live and to live I must eat. I find moldy bread in the kitchen and an orange not too spoiled to swallow. Keep watch at the window. From time to time I catch sight of a Martian above the black smoke. The smoke still holds the house in a black coil...but there’s a hissing sound and I suddenly see a Martian mounted on his machine spraying the air with a jet of steam as if to dissipate the smoke. I watch in a corner as it’s huge metal legs nearly brush against the house. Exhausted by terror, I fall asleep (Welles).
This may be how the Native American feels--reduced to nothing, trying to hold on to heritage, passing on stories of the past, passing on tradition, living on...with nothing. Well’s "moldy bread and spoiled orange" are symbolic of the Native Americans not having nourishment for their traditions--nothing to fed their development. A nation that once had everything, now has but a reservation, an isolated and plotted region of the land they once traversed wholly. Outside of these boundary lines, modern culture fogs the air and the Earth with pollution--periodically attempting to "dissipate the smoke" with "environmental action." They watch. Soon their attempts to fight for what they’ve had taken from them will yield to exhaustion, too.
Part Four
The Native Americans were a huge civilization. Though impossible to accurately determine their exact population, scholars estimate forty to fifty million people were living in the Americas before Columbus washed ashore in 1492 (Gunselman 1). There were great tribes--civilized and complex. The Cahokia had a trade route that extended from the gulf of Mexico to the Dakotas (Lord and Burke 1). They built 100 mounds, some larger than the Egyptian pyramids. They developed vast croplands to feed their population of over 20,000 people.
The Incas. The Aztecs. It is said that the Spanish conquistadors "gawked like country bumpkins at Montezuma’s capital," for it was comprised of several hundred thousand people (Lord and Burke 1).
When Christopher Columbus came to the new world he brought diseases--disease that killed these natives with the proficiency of a Martian heatgun. To this point, the Americas had been virtually untouched by the biological dangers swarming throughout the world. It was this sterility that caused their demise. (Linton 156).
The Inca nation, a powerful nine to fourteen million strong in 1492, was reduced to one million in just a quarter of a century. The entire population of Mexico, once twenty million, was reduced to three million in one half a century (Stannard 90). The Europeans had brought smallpox to the New World. Since they were the host of these diseases they had established immunity. The natives, having no prior protective immunities, fell prey to it’s strength.
"Well It’s all over for humanity, stranger."
"There’s still you and I."
"Two of us left...yea...They got themselves in solid. They wrecked the greatest country in the world. Those green stars, they’re probably falling somewhere every night. They’ve only lost one machine. There isn’t anything to do. We’re done. We’re licked" (Welles).
Part Five
In the end, Well’s aliens are unable to maintain life. This is comparable to Western Culture not be able to maintain itself. Western Culture has limited spirituality and is lacking in its’ ability to harmonize with the Earth. It looks like we swept a nation with brute force and are now dwindling due to our ignorance of its’ maintenance. Though speculation, eventually we will die, too.
This separation from the natural world, this estrangement from the realm of the wild, I think, exists in no other complex culture on earth. In its attitude to the wilderness, in heightening of its deep-seated antipathy to nature in general, European culture created a frightening distance between the human and the natural, between the deep silent rhythms of the body, between the elemental eternal workings of the cosmos and the physical and psychological means of perception, by which we can come to understand it and our place within it (Sale 79).
Works Cited
Gunselman, Ann-Marie B. "The Impact of Infectious Disease in the New World http://marauder.millersville.edu/~columbus/data/cwk/AMG-01.CWK
Linton, Alan H. Microbes, Man, and Animals. New York: Brisbanes,1982.
Lord, Lewis and Burke, Sarah. "America Before Columbus." U.S. News and World Report. July 8, 1991. pgs.22-37.
McNeill, William H. Plagues and Peoples. Garden City: New York, 1976.
Sale, Kirkpatrick. Conquest of Paradise: Christopher Columbus and the Columbian Legacy. New York: Knopf, 1990.
Shirk, Willis. "European Psyche Confronting It’s Dragons." http://marauder.millersville.edu/~columbus/data/his/SHIRK-01.HIS
Stannard, Paul. American Holocaust. New York: Oxford, 1992.
Welles. Orson, "War of the Worlds." http://waroftheworlds.com/original.html