The Great Dying

What struck me most about last night's reading was the quote by Governor Bradford of the Plymouth colony. He said that the epidemics and awful living conditions for the native people "represented the good hand of God sweeping away great multitudes of the natives....that he might make room for us." This really struck me as shocking and I am interested into understanding how the mindset of the Europeans was at that time to make them think this. I don't know what made them feel that they have the right and authority to come into land that another civilization was living in and feel so much power over them. It seems as though they truly believed that the land was their's despite the fact that it was quite obvious other people had already claimed it as their's long ago. Maybe it was the fact that the civilizations and people were so different from their's and they had different beliefs, so they felt that they were wrong and needed to be killed. It is interesting to them compare this way and mindset of conquering to the way the Mongols conquered other civilizations. They incorporated the other beliefs and ways of life into their civilizations and accepted different religions, but the Europeans very clearly didn't have this same way of thinking. You can also think about how the conquering of the America's might have been different if Europe had in fact been conquered by the Mongols. Obviously the diseases still would have spread, but the the way they conquered and their mindset might have been a lot different.