Horizon

by Barry Lopez

The moral oblivion of the slave trade. The piracy and ransacking of Spanish villages by Drake and the other West Country mariners. These things do not seem at all immediate in the modern world, nor any longer even relevant. Indeed, to recall them and to express outrage, regret, or sorrow is regarded by some as unworldly, as if conquistadores like Pizarro and perros de presa like Berganza were part of the West’s uncivilized past, largely gone, or an unfortunate aspect of the human desire to possess, to exercise control. Most people do not wish to hear about what the historian David Stannard calls “the worst demographic disaster in the history of the world,” the elimination of the Indian populations of the Americas. For schoolgirls in northern Nigeria trying to run from Boko Haram raiders laughing at their panic, for impoverished Christians in South Sudan trampled by Janjaweed cavalry, for a family blown piecemeal across a city square by one of al-Assad’s barrel bombs, the sixteenth century is now.