During the late 15th and early 16th centuries Catholic Spain was beginning a vast movement in efforts to dominate Europe by conquering lands about the “New World. ” Lands in Mexico and areas near the Yucatan known as New Spain became the focal point of Spain’s conquest. Being the first country to distribute their colonies throughout the New World, Spain was ridiculed by neighboring countries like England and France. However this type of ridiculing was largely due to the religion of Spain at the time. After the Protestant Reformation, Spain had remained to be a Catholic nation.
Thus powers like England were able to attack Spain from all political sides. This new vision of Spain’s bloody conquest in South America allowed Protestant Europeans to initiate a theory on Spain’s conquests known as the “Black Legend. ” This Black Legend was said to say that the Spanish were cruel to the natives in their colonies just because they were Catholic. Based on the given articles written from the majority of which were brought about from different view and opinions, this legend in my opinion must be true.
Such people who wrote these letters or documentaries were well- trusted statesmen, and to lie to the governor of one’s nation was considered to be a sin to both the Majesty and to God. Even in the views of those belonging to Spain and the Catholic Church, the Spaniard’s attempt to exemplify themselves in the New World was an unjustly and cruel cause. The main reason for Spain’s barbaric approach to the New World was in attempt to the counter-Reformation.
The Spaniards wanted to attract new voices in the Catholic Church by sending missionaries and Jesuits to the New World in order to expand the religion and hopefully bring the end of Protestant Reformation by blocking off all England’s and Europe’s attempt in colonization. Thus, the use of force was needed to conquer new lands and promote God and His Majesty for Spain. Since the view of the French, English, and even Spanish are used, in my best words I claim the “Black Legend” to be true.
In the words of de Las Casas who he himself was a Catholic Spaniard said that the natives were people who were patient, peaceful and calm. They never had hate, desire, or vengeance. He considered them to be weak and delicate people who lived amongst themselves in peace and harmony. However, in accordance to the priest, the Spaniards and their horses came and slaughtered the women, men, and children in search of expansion and mainly gold. This desire for gold kept the Spaniards on the move, and until they had had all they would not rest.
Even in the eyes of an Aztec who had nothing but his people, the Spaniards killed and robbed the people and even at times took advantage of their women. This brutality, however, only seemed to exist in the eyes of conquistadors. For among present day America, the French and Puritans struck remarkable friendship among the local natives. The French with the aid of the noble Samuel de Champlain struck a trade deal with the Indians for beaver fur. Even the Puritans gained trust from Squanto in Plymouth to build a long-lasting relationship of trust and friendship.
When Sir Walter Raleigh arrived in the Caribbean he described the people as scared and bewildered due to the despoiling Spanish who took advantage of their women and embarrassed their men. Even with such conquests and brutality of the Spanish, commercial Catholicism was not reached according to Father Juan Rogel in a letter to Pedro I. He claimed that despite great advancements in the modernization of the natives, he was unable to bring them to the understanding about the religion. Since the Indians were on the move 9 of 12 months he was unable to learn the language fully or completely preach to them.
And when he did they would constantly make fun of his words. He acknowledged that the only way get them to cooperate were to settle them down and build villages. For if any man was to follow them for 50 years, his message would never get across. These concrete facts, letters, and personal accounts seem to point at the Spaniards as being cruel due to the fact that they were Catholic and had the desire to get their message across and take advantage of the people and possessions of the ancient civilizations established in the New World.
The Protestants very well could have done such things as well in order to block the counter-Reformation, instead they took the advice of the natives and established a more prosperous foundation and colony. Even though today most of South America is Catholic, they are still behind mainly due to the acts that occurred hundreds of years ago. In turn the “Black Legend” did have a large impact on the colonization and Reformation of the “New World. ”here is no rock record) 2. Archean 3800-2500 mya) 3. Proterozoic 2500-570 mya.
The present atmosphere is greatly depleted in Ne, Xe and Kr which are inert gases that should be preserved in the atmosphere. This suggests that the earth’s initial atmosphere was lost early on either by boiling away during the magma ocean event or by being carried away by intense solar wind in the early solar system. At the end of the Hadean the present atmosphere and hydrosphere began to develop from volcanic emissions. It was during the proterozoic that a critical change occurred in the atmosphere, when it changed from a trace oxygen content of the Archean atmosphere to above 15% oxygen by 1800 mya.
It is widely believed that this change was brought about by the emergence of cyanobacteria which had adapted to create energy from the sun by photosynthesis(probably due to a shortage of raw materials for energy), as a result they had began to poison the earlier anaerobic bacteria or archea with their waste product; oxygen. This essay will focus on the evolution of the atmosphere and its relation to the banded iron formations of the late Precambrian.
Banded Iron Formations Cloud (1968) calls Banded Iron Formations, rhythmically banded chemical sediments of large, open water bodies that take different aspects but most characteristically consists of alternating layers of iron- rich and iron-poor silica. It is present in some of the oldest volcanic sequences (greenstone belts ca 2800 mya) and is a common sediment type formed until approximately 1800 mya. Although some younger formations with similar structure can be found there is great distinctions between them and the BIF’s of the Precambrian.
The BIF’s can occur in sequences which range from 15 ferric iron. Some people believe the iron to be of volcanic origin, weathered and transported into the oceans or exhaled from fumeroles Relation to the atmosphere The link between Banded Iron Formations (or BIF’s) and this change in oxygen levels is a close one, as BIF’s appeared about 2600 mya and continued until about 1800 mya. These deposits of marine hematite and quartz represent a precipitation of dissolved iron from sea water as the dissolved oxygen content of the water increased.
After 1800 mya, Banded iron formations are rare, but terrestrial red beds are common for the first time suggesting that iron is being oxidised and precipitated in soils and rocks on land in the source area of sediments instead of being dissolved and carried into the oceans in its unoxidised form. Thus, it has been reasoned that the BIF-red bed transition marks the rise of atmospheric oxygen. Complimentary information comes from detrital uraninite in Archean and earliest Proterozoic alluvial rocks.
Because this uranium mineral can survive prolonged transport only in media containing little or no oxygen, the lack of detrital uraninite deposits younger than 2300 ma also points towards a significant environmental transition (Roscoe,1969). Not all scientists have accepted the validity of these observations or of their interpretation, Dimroth and Kimberley(1976) argued that at least some red beds antedate the end of BIF deposition, that Archean granites have paleoweathering profiles indicative of oxic environments, and that oxidised sulphur minerals (sulphates) occur in some of the oldest known sedimentary successions.
All of these observations are correct, and we must ask whether they preclude the interpretation of Archean and earliest Proterozoic environments as oxygen poor. Holland (1984) believed the answer to be no. As the formation of red beds and oxidised weathering profiles on granitic substrates requires oxygen, but only in minute quantities- considerably less than is needed for aerobic metabolism.
Also, marine sulphate does not require free oxygen as all as H2S can be photooxidized anaerobically to SO42- by photosynthetic bacteria, while the photochemical oxidation of volcanogenic S and SO2 to sulphate was probably a steady source of oxidised sulphur in the Archean oceans(Walker, 1983). Towe (1990) has specifically argued for the development of aerobic respiration early in the Archean and, therefor, for the presence of 1 to 2% PAL (present atmospheric level) O2 in the atmosphere since that time.
The possibility that oxygen levels reached this physiologically important threshold so early is not contradicted by the sparse geochemical data available for early Archean rocks, Towe’s model however suffers from the absence of Archean O2 sinks other than Fe2+. Some believe that the neglect of volcanic gases in his model casts significant doubts on the validity of his analysis. Knoll(1979) believed increases in atmospheric oxygen were probably occasioned by increases in primary productivity and/or decreased rates of oxygen consumption.
He believes the increase from very low O2 levels to 1 to 2% PAL may have been related to productivity increases associated with rapid growth and stabilising of the continents during the late Archean and earliest Proterozoic, in contrast, Cameron(1983) stated that ‘the later increase to 15% PAL does not seem to be related to a major tectonic event. The high oxygen level in today’s atmosphere must be related to the role of PO2 in the maintaining of redox balance of the atmosphere-biosphere-ocean-lithosphere system’. The nature of the connection is still in dispute.
It is believed that atmospheric PO2 determines the concentration of O2 in surface ocean water, but the influence of the O2 concentration in seawater on the burial efficiency of organic matter within marine sediments seems to be slight. Nutrients are a more likely link between PO2 and the burial rate of organic matter, and hence between PO2 and rates of long term O2 generation(Betts and Holland,1991). Holland constructed a plausible argument that links the marine geochemistry of PO43- to that of iron and hence to the O2 content of the atmosphere today.
He believes that if this argument is true then the history of atmospheric O2 may have been controlled by a complicated feedback system involving the marine geochemistry of iron and phosphorus. This would explain the rapid increase in PO2 around 2100 mya as marking the passage of the system across a threshold from one steady state to another. Conclusion The complexities and conflicting arguments involved in relation to the evolution of the atmosphere and its links to banded iron formation are hard to over emphasise.
It is a topic which still has a long way to go and one which may never be conclusively understood due to the lack of evidence from the Precambrian rocks (or lack of rock record altogether). However the general consensus seems to be that for a period of over a 1000 my until 1800 mya, conditions where favourable for chemical deposition of iron, there was distinct changes occurring in the atmosphere with rapid increase in free O2 coupled with a fundamental change in the evolution of early life from anaerobic bacteria to aerobic cyanobacteria.
The origin sequence and connection of these events are the issues that are currently in debate. Most are in agreement that they are all linked and that O2 levels are a key factor in the formation of banded iron formation, the problems arise when trying to distinguish when and how O2 began to be produced, the question arises, which came first the oxygen producing bacteria or the oxygen causing life sensitive to it to adapt?
