For hundreds of centuries,
and long after men had settled in the land masses of Europe, Asia and Africa,
this continent was unknown to any human being.
In swamps and valleys the size of Scotland,
animals unknown in Europe disturbed only each other.
(SNARLING)
(RATTLING)
(EAGLE CRIES)
Strange birds of prey wheeled safely over an empty continent.
At some point - we suppose not later than 15,000 BC -
humans drifted down from Asia and the Aleutians,
ranged the length and breadth of the Americas,
built and exhausted civilisations we know nothing about.
Today there are only a few ancient relics,
such as this one in a remote canyon of northern Arizona.
There were nations that never knew each other,
500 languages, tribes that worshipped a bison
or a matriarch or the corn they grew.
There were tribes ruled by warriors.
Or by women farmers.
Or by sacred elders.
Tribes that had never heard of war.
And tribes debauched by centuries of fighting.
(CHANTING)
Hollywood has often restaged the sight and sound of imaginary dances,
but those sounds you hear are not those of $25-a-day Indian extras.
(CHANTING)
These are Apaches of the 1970s, for once in their history
allowing us to watch all but the most sacred moments of an annual ceremony
in which supernatural figures celebrate the passage of their women
from childhood to puberty.
So for at least 150 centuries before Yankee Doodle,
theirs was the American way of life.
(FREE JAZZ)
But, for better or worse, this is what we've made of it
and it is the past 400 years that we think of as the history of the land
that became the United States.
I've been discovering that history
for 40 years of reading and travel throughout the United States,
and for 20 of those years I've lived here in this apartment, overlooking Central Park.
For most of my time as a foreign correspondent,
this has been my daily map of the United States. I mean, literally, a map.
I once had a secretary who was hopeless at geography
and to help her - and me - find the right books, I arranged them in this order.
Everything on New England is in the north-east corner. You go down the coast to Florida,
across the Deep South to California, up to Oregon, Washington,
and you have to have high boots to reach Alaska.
Now, because of a continuing interest in California history,
California tends to go halfway across and spill right into Texas -
rather like a Californian's mental map of the United States.
Well, we all lay great stress on our favourite states and places and people.
Don't be upset if yours get squeezed out.
I have a man I'm mad about over there - Benjamin Franklin -
and I'm not sure that even he will make it.
You know, when I told an old Southerner, a friend of mine,
that I was going to try and tell my version of American history in 13 hours,
he said, "Better talk fast, boy."
So we ought to begin with the simple colossal question:
Who was the first white man to discover America?
Which, incidentally, was named after a Florentine businessman and promoter
who promoted himself so well as to get his first name attached to a continent.
He was Amerigo Vespucci.
He took no part in the early voyages, so who was first?
There are people who are hot for the Vikings, now we hear the Phoenicians were here first.
No, the Jews, who presumably took one look at New York City and beat it back to the Nile.
The records of the earliest voyages are either lost or highly debatable,
but there was one historic expedition which is documented beyond all question,
which is why we're going into my kitchen.
You know, some of the great explosions of history have been caused by nothing more
than the denial of a simple human need.
Like a shortage of water.
Or too many people in a small country.
A total absence of timber, which has plagued the Egyptians since the time of Solomon.
Today we think of these spices -
pepper, paprika, cinnamon, cloves -
as no more than gilt to the lily,
but in the 15th century they made food edible.
They had salt, but no other way of preserving food and, even in rich houses,
it often came to the table putrid, so these spices deceived the palate,
if not the digestion - which they sometimes still do.
Now, in 1453, the Turks conquered Constantinople,
our Istanbul, and it was the gateway to Asia.
What they'd done was shut off Europe from Asia, which was where the spices came from.
That is to say from here - from the Molucca Islands between Borneo and the Philippines.
It's astounding to me that the name, the Moluccas, is not as famous as London or Boston
because they were the spice islands, where the natives grew precious products for the Turks
and for Europe.
How to reach them except through Constantinople?
There was a superb sailor, an Italian who not only thought he knew how
but was determined to do it himself.
For many years a master mariner with the Portuguese - Europe's best merchant marine -
he had spent much time with astronomers and mathematicians, who believed, unlike sailors,
that the Earth was round.
The known map of the world was a single land mass, as flat as a pancake,
with the unknown ocean sea around it.
But if it was a sphere, you could obviously sail from the western extreme to the eastern,
to Japan, China and Indonesia, to the Indies where the spices lay.
So thought Cristoforo Colombo.
This tough, passionate Christian held visionary talks with God,
but they did not cloud his instinct for 10%,
which was what he demanded and got for all the loot of the lands he might discover.
After a 15-year trek around Europe, he found his sponsors in the King and Queen of Spain,
who coveted the spice trade, needed gold for their dwindling treasury
and shared Columbus' horror of the infidel Turk.
So they packed him off on his mission for gospel and for gold.
And here in Barcelona harbour is a replica of the ship in which Columbus sailed, the Santa Maria.
Today it would not be acceptable as a yacht by any self-respecting member of the jet set.
100 tons only and 75 feet long.
It was not, by a long shot, one of the big ships of the time,
but it would have to be sturdy enough to withstand roaring storms
and quick enough to take shelter in the shallow channels of the imagined Atlantic islands.
It was paved with pitch against barnacles, had stones for ballast
and a main mast as long as the keel.
The other two ships were smaller still.
Here in the stern is Columbus' cabin.
And his bed.
Incidentally, he was six feet, which in those days was enormous.
By the time he landed, he must have been permanently bent over.
And here he would have his charts. He'd been in the chart business with his brother for years.
And an odd detail, about the provisions.
Naturally, they carried red wine, the standard laxative,
but 2.5 litres per man per day, which sounds like an awful lot.
I suppose they meant it to keep them philosophical if the worst happened.
There were 40 men aboard, including a surgeon and the king's comptroller of accounts
to keep tabs on Columbus' swindle sheet when he started to figure the cost of the gold
and the spices he was going to take.
There was a converted Jew who spoke Arabic,
which they thought was very similar to Chinese, and so he'd be the interpreter.
One Portuguese, another Italian and the rest were Spaniards.
And so, on the evening of the 2nd of August 1492,
the entire crew went ashore for confession, received absolution for their sins
and, on the morning of the 3rd, they set sail from Palos.
They sailed all through August and September
and saw none of the islands they'd expected.
The crews grew weary, then nervous, then panicky and were close to mutiny.
Maybe the world wasn't round. Maybe they would fall off into space.
The two other captains begged Columbus to turn back.
He had drastically miscalculated, by about 80%, the width of the ocean sea,
so he faked the log by reducing the mileage they'd gone from Spain,
and to redress this deceit, he tells us, he prayed mightily to the Lord.
Well, by divine intervention or luck, on the following day, the 12th of October,
he sighted, as he believed, the mainland of Asia, or one of its offshore islands.
We know it was San Salvador in the Bahamas,
and he went on to explore Haiti and Cuba.
Like most eager travellers, Columbus found what he was looking for.
He decided that Cuba was Japan.
He was a little baffled by the absence of cities, but there were spices and cotton
and weird birds and coppery-coloured natives who assured him there were mountains of gold inland,
always farther inland.
If this were so, the slaves to work the gold mines were already on hand
in these peaceable natives.
He was almost convinced and, like a good salesman,
he hurried back to Spain with what we should call display samples
of the products he'd gathered - exotic plants, an alligator, brilliant parrots,
prize natives got up like show horses,
some gold.
Columbus' sales exhibition was a total success
and his next fleet was 17 ships and 1,500 men.
Sailors, soldiers, adventurers rushed to found gold and silver mining colonies
and there was a clutch of priests along to sanctify the necessary slaves.
But this time he really did find gold
and there now began the longest, most determined and most brutal gold rush in history.
If the natives were sulky or hostile,
they were terrified into submission by two acts of magic.
One was the firing of monster machines called cannons.
And the other was the appearance, and this always worked, of living monsters called horses.
There were many brave priests along who were sickened by the outrages along the trail,
and there's an unforgettable story of a native king who was about to be burned at the stake
and, as he felt the first fires rise on his body, he refused baptism
on the grounds that he might go to heaven and meet there only Christians.
Within 50 years of Columbus sighting San Salvador, the Spaniards had conquered
the whole of Central America and Peru.
Now, the Pope had proclaimed that everything 100 leagues west of the Azores
belonged to Spain or her brother Portugal,
but some nations refused to bow to this, most dramatically the King of France.
"We fail," he said, "to find this clause in Adam's will."
The first French arrivals, only 12 years after Columbus, were Breton fishermen,
working the cod banks off Nova Scotia,
but they soon came on Indians eager to barter furs for bits of metal and gunpowder,
so they abandoned the cod, penetrated the gulf and the river St Lawrence
and trapped and skinned every animal in sight.
These humble trappers were, incidentally,
putting out the tentacles of a French empire in the north,
while, down in Mexico City, Cortez, a penniless nobleman turned soldier,
was crowning himself as a Mexican god.
The Spaniards were now ready to investigate their favourite myth
that to the north lay seven cities of gold.
So, in 1540, another soldier, Francisco Vasquez de Coronado, marched north to find them.
He started from Mexico with 300 men, a horde of Indians, hundreds of horses, mules,
cattle, sheep, goats and priests.
They marched for two years, going up through Arizona, New Mexico and Texas,
wheeling north-east into the middle of the present state of Kansas.
To us, their expectations seem preposterous,
based on a whole Spanish literature which said
North America contained volcanoes and mermaids
and was the place where Judas took his annual winter vacation from Hell.
Also, the splendid golden objects that abounded in Central America
were said to hang in the north from trees.
They found no cities, no gold, much less trees to hang it on.
Nothing but an endless lunar landscape.
But these were the rigours of the soldier's lot.
Their one consolation was that the native humans at least could be conquered and hired to serve.
But once they came on a seemingly invincible pueblo.
It was a mountain stronghold of hostile Indians and it was called Acoma.
The first white man to see it was a scout from Coronado's expedition.
He went back and told his commander of a great city in the sky,
the strongest position ever seen in the world.
The Acoma Indians have lived here for at least 1,000 years.
On their sheer pathways up the rock, countless hands have worn down cracks
into smooth hand holes.
On such a climb, the armour-clad soldier was a pretty poor match for a nimble Redskin.
Coronado surveyed it from afar and gave it a miss.
To this day, the elders of the Acomas, unlike many Indian tribes,
refuse to yield their ancient ways or to perform for the white man.
They forbid all strangers to enter or see these sacred places called kiva.
No power lines may be laid, no artificial heat of any kind is available, even to bake bread,
not for want of money, but because the rock on which the city itself is built is sacred
and may not be broken or defiled in any way.
This old man, 30 miles away from motels, pizza parlours and Joe's Second-Hand Car Lot,
is adding an extra room to his house
with no help from the techniques of the American way of life.
How about the young? They look American, they talk American
and today they are learning that their heritage is one of betrayal.
This may be the last generation willing to walk the old, uncomplaining ways.
Well, this windswept fortress, which is at the top of the continental divide,
remained unconquered for 59 years after Coronado had seen it.
And then the Spaniards mounted a three-day-and-night assault and they took it.
It was a feat sufficient to provoke in a soldier poet a still-celebrated epic poem,
and certainly the Spanish took an epic revenge.
600 prisoners, 600 killed.
They took the leading 70 warriors and tossed them off the top of the cliff.
They bound to lifetime servitude another 500, mostly women and children.
And with the rest of the population, the adult males, they cut off one foot
to discourage escape or any further military adventures.
Those who couldn't be wooed out of their own religion were thrown to the dogs
or flogged into devotion to the carpenter of Nazareth.
As usual, time softened the sting of these atrocities
and 30 years later a mild Franciscan priest, Father Ramirez, walked to their fortress,
barefoot and unarmed, and with the single weapon of a crucifix converted them.
And they built this church.
It was not possible to bury the dead in this solid stone,
so for over 40 years the Indians brought up earth in handfuls from the plains below
to make this graveyard.
If the desert wind can leave mountains with the sheen of bones,
it's not surprising that there are hardly any traces of the Spanish marches,
but there's an amazing one. It is this towering bluff - El Morro.
Indian guides led Coronado to it when his men were fainting with thirst.
At the foot of it was this pool of pure water,
which is something that anywhere in the arid west is likely to become a way station
or a camp ground.
It's odd that the first white men on the march through America should have yielded
to that curious human itch which has afflicted tourists
in the Greek islands, the Grand Canyon and Disneyland -
to write up their names on a stone.
It's odder still that such inscriptions should survive in a country
which tears down a skyscraper that is less than a quarter-century old.
At any rate, the first man who carved himself into immortality,
we think probably with the point of a sword, was this one.
"Pasó por aquí el adelantado."
Through here passed the governor, Don Juan de Oñate,
after his discovery of the Sea of the South, April 16th, 1605.
Now, by the Sea of the South he meant that he'd been as far as the Gulf of California,
and like every other Spaniard who ever saw a body of water that was seemingly endless,
he thought he'd found that passage to the Pacific.
He did set up the first Spanish government in the south-west,
and here is his palace at Santa Fe.
It was built ten years before the Pilgrim Fathers landed on the New England coast.
For the next 200 years, these remote provinces of New Spain -
today's Texas, Arizona, California -
slowly developed an outpost economy
throughout a burning landscape half the size of Europe.
The Spanish had introduced the two indispensable elements of Western life -
the horse and the cow.
It was the horse that had first terrified the Western Indian into submission.
It was the horse that was to set him free and freewheeling from Mexico to the Canadian tundra.
And the Spanish left behind in the branding signs and the embossing of saddles
a whole heraldry of ranching.
I imagine that those of us born abroad think of a rodeo
as a Western circus for the public's entertainment,
but throughout 2,000 miles, the whole arc of the south-west,
a rodeo - literally, a roundup - is one of the timeless chores of ranching.
The word "cowboy" is directly translated from "vaquero".
On this ranch in Arizona, all these men speak only Spanish,
except the ranch owner and his foreman, known as the major-domo.
And their equipment retains the Spanish names.
The lariat. The chaps they wear for protection against the desert scrub called chaparral.
The purpose of the rodeo was to round up once a year all the cattle
that had run free and multiplied on the open range,
to distinguish one man's herd from another
by branding the yearling calves with the owner's initials or emblems,
which were registered with the governor of each province.
By the way, the word "cinch" comes from ranching.
The saddle girth is called a cincha
and when it was securely fastened it was said to be cinched.
I don't know who said it - and it could have been me -
that a civilisation is founded in a crop and survives by a code of law.
Well, the Spaniards introduced many of the basic American crops - oats, wheat, barley, oranges -
and they took the rudest indigenous cereal of the Indian and they made it a staple
from the Canadian border to the tip of South America.
That's maize, what is called corn.
2,000 miles to the north and east, though, a very different way of life was being developed
by tough descendants of those Breton fishermen.
They were exploring the waters and tracking down the game of that yawning stretch of forest
and tundra in le Canada.
Furs, especially beaver, were in fashionable demand in Europe,
and to get them the French developed an entirely new breed of explorers, trappers and hunters
living rough, outdoing the Indians at their own game, so that it was said,
"No four-legged thing is safe from a Frenchman."
These French-Canadians are hunting the biggest and most elusive of all North American deer,
the moose.
The man in the lead, incidentally, once had to kill a bear that was stealing his food.
He had no gun and stabbed it with a knife on the end of a stick.
(SINGLE SHOT)
So rapacious were the hunters that they had to track farther and farther into the interior
in order to find enough animals to kill.
Forsaking the familiar boats of Europe, they adopted from the Indians the canoe,
which was ideal for plying the wide rivers and going through the channels of lakes and marshes.
(SINGING IN FRENCH)
Only the French, it was said, would have wanted to settle a landscape of giant lily pads.
Certainly only they, and later the Scots, would knot a lifeline across a continent of tundra.
One of the epic French journeys of exploration began in November 1678,
when a young nobleman, René Cavelier Sieur de La Salle, set sail across Lake Ontario.
He was seeking a way south across the continent by water.
His boat was wrecked, and in mid-winter
his expedition had to drag its equipment around Niagara Falls.
Despite many disasters,
and to the wonderment of the Seneca Indians, they managed in the spring of 1679
to build another boat, and launched it on Lake Erie, where no ship had ever sailed.
In it, La Salle sailed across the Great Lakes, over Lake Erie, up the St Claire,
up Lake Huron, westward into Lake Michigan.
Battling hunger and appalling weather, they reached the Illinois River.
The boat sank. They met and had to fight hostile Indians
and La Salle was plagued with debts and doubters back at home.
In the winter, they had to drag their supplies overland,
the going so bad that they wore out a pair of leather moccasins every day.
But eventually they reached open water on a branch of the Illinois River.
On the 6th of February, 1682, they floated into the Mississippi
and 1,500 miles down the great river until, after two months, they reached the open sea.
On the 9th of April, La Salle assembled his men, raised a cross and the banner of France
and in the name of Louis XIV he took possession of all the vast lands he had covered
and called them Louisiana.
La Salle was killed on a later expedition,
but the French built the port of New Orleans at the mouth of the Mississippi,
yet they never domesticated the enormous hinterland La Salle had brought them.
Here is a French map of the mid-18th century, 1755,
which shows what an exclusive hold the French had in the north,
what an accurate picture of what you might call "Lateral America".
But the French were just as vague about what lay to the south and west
as the Spanish had been about what lay to their north and west.
Being fishermen and trappers,
the French did a fine job of mapping this entire nervous system of the rivers,
but beyond them they simply put in the names of Indian tribes - Miamis, Illinois, Sioux.
Down here in what is now the United States, they did not plan colonies.
They settled, always close to the river, way stations or what we might call retail centres
for the downriver traffic, bearing fur and hides and timber
down to the port of New Orleans.
But if they found some local useful product - a mineral, salt -
then they would stop and make a town, and we're in one now,
at St Genevieve, Missouri, on the Mississippi,
one of the last to retain the flavour and look of provincial France.
We're in the house of a French-Canadian-born merchant.
This is the desk where he did his accounts.
Here are the steps going up to the bedroom, also used for winter storage.
I think this is the most characteristic French house now remaining in the Mississippi valley.
What the French found here was lead.
Veins of lead of incredible richness.
So they brought in 200 French miners
and imported 500 Negro slaves from Santo Domingo
and they carried the lead for shipping down the Mississippi across the flatlands to the south,
which they called "le grand champ" - the big field.
The French usually started with a fort and a few soldiers,
but they found this straggling village indefensible
so they palisaded the houses and it was every man for himself.
However, they prospered and made a country town and brought over missionaries and priests,
planted their familiar vines and shrubs,
in fact, imported their culture, including a useful strain of thrift.
The first man who owned this house prospered exceedingly. A man named Louis Bolduc.
And he kept his money stored in the cellars there.
One time, an American merchant came through and they took a bet as to who was the wealthier.
When Bolduc sent for a servant
and ordered up a half-bushel basket to measure his silver, the American paid up.
Now, this place, St Genevieve, in the late 18th century
was a little Paris for the Mississippi valley,
and parents with aspirations to gentility sent their children here
to learn to be good Catholics, to learn to speak good French.
One boy, who came all the way from Pittsburgh, remembered very vividly
that he had, after Sunday Mass, attended a school of manners
where, he said, "we learned the two elements of true politeness -
"grace and self-denial."
(DRUMMING AT A BRISK TEMPO)
On the whole, the French Catholic influence was instructive and benign.
It was rarely so in the Spanish south-west.
(CHURCH BELL CHIMES)
The conquistadors had been sent as the sword of the Pope,
and today in southern Arizona the Papago Indians go off to worship
in one of the great imperial monuments left by the Spanish,
the Church of San Xavier del Bac,
where primitive Indians practised the most sophisticated rituals of Europe.
The chief of the Papagos.
(CHOIR SINGS)
After four centuries, both old and young are as unquestioningly devout
as the soldiers who had beaten their ancestors into a new, bizarre religion.
(SOMBRE SINGING IN SPANISH)
Neither the plundering life of the conquistadors
nor the vigorous life of the rancheros went on for ever.
As time went on, so did the mellowing of the Spanish heritage
until, by the beginning of the 19th century,
the Spanish were thoroughly domesticated in this part of the world, especially in California.
By now, the Indians had been trained to be carpenters and farmers
and blacksmiths and growers of vines.
And comfortable families, not much interested in money, raised enough cattle
and enough crops for their needs,
practised a strict but affectionate Catholic discipline on their children
and lived, in squares like these,
lives that were balanced and useful and benevolent.
The Spaniards' imperial ambitions were checkmated too soon for them to build,
as the French did here in New Orleans, a full-blown capital city.
This might have been the capital of the United States if Napoleon had not sold for cash
the huge interior which La Salle had claimed as Louisiana.
But the French and Spanish prospered here - lawyers, bankers, ambassadors and playboys -
maintaining their mistresses in terraced apartments overlooking the main square.
Today New Orleans more or less incorporates as a tourist package the French heritage,
and it is practically an obligation to abjure the hot dog for the snail.
Holidaymakers troop through curio shops
which were once the homes of diplomats and opera singers.
But you won't find here reminders of the French figures who created this city
and the cities of the Mississippi valley.
They're not much known to Americans.
We hardly know that we pronounce Arkansas "Arkan-saw" and Chicago "Shicago"
because that's the way the French said them.
We look to the north for the French contribution and think of Canada.
And Canadian history is little taught in American schools.
Consider their heroes - Pontiac, the Ottawa chieftain,
Cadillac, the settler of Detroit, La Salle himself.
They are recognised only as automobile names.
But in these quiet patios I am reminded of one grand exception,
the only French god in the American pantheon.
In the unlikely event
that 200 million Americans were ever put up against a wall,
at gunpoint,
and ordered to name one Frenchman who had meant most to America,
I think the name would be the Marquis de Lafayette.
A young French nobleman, 19, newly married,
forbidden to leave France for the War of Independence, he escaped to America.
"My heart," he said, "enlisted in the cause of liberty." George Washington was moved by him.
He was made a major general, was wounded, fought at Yorktown
and was given the freedom of a grateful republic.
He went home to fight in the French Revolution
for what he believed was a similar brave cause.
He was too liberal for Royalists, too moderate for Republicans
and he was thrown into a dungeon.
His wife asked to join him there and she was allowed to
and they stayed five years, which broke her in spirit and in body.
They came to be buried together in a small graveyard in Paris and, in time, by their side,
lay their only son, George Washington Lafayette.
No country has been luckier than France in having in the person of one man
such a permanent investment in American goodwill.
When General Pershing arrived in Europe with the vanguard of the American Expeditionary Force
in 1917, and first set foot on French soil, he greeted the French host commander
with the short sentence, "Lafayette, nous voici."
"Lafayette, we are here."
Since we know which of the big three - the Spanish, the French, the British - won America,
it seemed to me only sporting to pay an introductory tribute
to the losers who left such a large and indelible mark on this country.
And it may be some consolation
to those who believe that the meek or the crafty inherit the earth
to reflect that this continent was ultimately won
not by a race of military conquerors like the Spanish,
nor even by a nation of hunters, explorers, missionaries like the French,
but by a small handful of people from a small island in the North Atlantic
who first sailed in three ships into Jamestown, Virginia,
to find a home from home.