62

The Structures o f Everyday Life

centuries; very often they consisted of only a dozen or so houses. How far removed they are from the village-towns of Italy or the large market-towns between the Rhine, the Meuse and the Paris basin. Surely the small size of the village in so many eastern and central European countries was one of the basic causes of the fate of the peasantry? It was all the more vulnerable vis-a.-vis the nobility because it lacked the solidity provided by large communities.89 Other points inferred from Cordon W. H ew es map At least three points emerge from the map: (1) The permanence of the sites occupied by the cultures (the first achieve ments) and the civilizations (mans second achievement), for these sites have been reconstructed by a simple deductive method. Their boundaries have not changed. Their distribution therefore forms as marked a geographical feature as the Alps, the Gulf Stream or the course of the Rhine. (2) The map also shows that man had already explored and exploited the whole world for centuries or millennia before the triumph of Europe. He was only stopped by major obstacles: vast expanses of sea, impenetrable mountains, dense forests (as in Amazonia, North America or Siberia) and immense deserts. Even so, closer inspection reveals that there was no expanse of sea able to escape mans spirit of adventure for very long and guard its secrets (the ancient Greeks knew about the monsoons in the Indian Ocean); no mountain mass that failed to reveal its access and passes; no forest man did not penetrate; no desert he did not cross. As for the habitable and navigable90 parts of the world, :there is not the slightest doubt: the smallest patch already had an owner before 1500 (and before 1400 or 1300 as well). Even the forbidding deserts of the Old World harboured their share of humanity, in the form of the great nomadic peoples we shall mention later in this chapter. In short, the world our familiar home91 was discovered a long time ago, well before the Great Discoveries. Even the inven tory of vegetable wealth had been drawn up so precisely since the beginning of written history, that not one single nutritious plant of general usefulness has been added to the list of those previously known, so careful and complete was the exploration to which the primitive peoples subjected the plant world.92 Europe therefore neither discovered America and Africa, nor first penetrated the mysterious continents. The nineteenth-century explorers of central Africa, so greatly admired in the past, travelled on the backs of black bearers. Their great mistake, Europes mistake at that juncture, was to think they were dis covering a sort of New World. Similarly the discoverers of the South American continent, even the bandeirantes paulistas who set off from the town of Sao Paulo (founded in 1554) were merely, for all their heroic adventures, rediscover ing the old tracks and rivers the Indians already used with their canoes. And they were generally guided by the Mamelucos (Portuguese and Indian halfbreeds).93 The same adventure was repeated, to the profit of the French, from