The whole place had been made in a human image. The spirit of the place had long ago been swarmed and ploughed under. The land had been turned into a setting for human life, with no life of its own. The tragically false idea that there was land for the taking across the waves that was free of people and free of history, a place where you could reinvent your identity and craft a nobler history for yourself and your kin, must have been intoxicating to the European of the time to a staggering degree that we now are heirs to but cannot imagine.
