Q: BEFORE A DATE, I LIKE TO DO A LITTLE ONLINE RESEARCH ON THE PERSON. IF I FIND INTERESTING STUFF, SHOULD I BRING IT UP?

摘要

A:Sir John Hawkins was a British slave trader who voy-aged through what is now Florida in 1565. The landscape Hawkins traversed was murky, disorienting, wild-a new world that no European could easily comprehend. Hawkins tried his best to make sense of what he saw. But in addition to being a morally despicable trafficker of humans, he was also, apparently, a moron. For example, when he saw animal horns being worn around native people's necks, he decided they must be unicorn horns. From there, Hawkins employed his own special brand of extrapolative idiot-logic to deduce that there must be lions in Florida-because, as the historian Andrea Smalley writes, "the enmity between lions and unicorns was well known, and no beast could exist without its enemy." 1 Hawkins was only one of many explorers groping boneheadedly through America and transmitting their awestruck, staggering wrongness back to the societies from which they came. (Another early traveler named Job Hortop-even the guy's name sounds preposterous-reported catching a 23-foot-long, porcine-headed aquatic dragon by baiting a fish hook with a dog.) Still, if you were living in Europe and curious about the entirely new-to-you second half of the planet-which: of course you were-you had little choice but to wade through this kind of intelligence gathered by egregious, hooey-slinging buffoons.