Columbus
through Contact: 
Origins of the First Voyage, Cartography,
and the Marvelous Possession of the New World
Historiography
Univeristy of Arkansas
Jeffrey L. Littlejohn
Spring 1998
Columbus
through Contact:
Origins of the First Voyage, Cartography,
and the Marvelous Possession of the New World
Historiography
Univeristy of Arkansas
Jeffrey L. Littlejohn
Spring 1998
I.
"Raise your spirits . . . Hear about the new discovery!"1 exclaimed Peter Martyr in a letter to the archbishop of Granada in September 1493. Christopher Columbus had just returned from the "Indies" and western Europe would soon be aglow with amazement and wonder at the idea of a New World. By the mid-sixteenth century, Francisco López de Gómara believed he had captured the earth-shattering importance of the voyages to the West. In the dedication of his General History of the Indies to Charles V, Gómara wrote that the "discovery of the Indies" was, excluding the incarnation of Christ, the "greatest event since the creation of the world."2 Samuel Eliot Morison carried the glorification of the Columbian voyages into our own century, as he wrote that Columbus's work represented "the most spectacular and most far-reaching geographical discovery in recorded human history."3 Columbus has been portrayed by many historians as the most skilled and enlightened explorer of all time, the greatest Christian crusader in history, and the redeemer of the New World "savages" who lived in primitive destitution before the coming of European civilization.
Although there have always been scholars who have refuted the heroic image of Columbus, it was during the 1992 quincentenial anniversary celebration of the explorer's landfall in the Caribbean that tempers flared. The commemoration was seen as a Eurocentric consecration of western dominance and was bewailed from many sides. Ward Churchill, who served under the funding auspices of the National Endowment for the Humanities as the distinguished scholar of American Indian studies at Alfred University, wrote that the "celebration of Columbus and the European conquest of the Western Hemisphere" was much like celebrating "the glories of nazism and Heinrich Himmler."4 Kirkpatrick Sale turned the hero on his head, as he portrayed Columbus as a ravenous, barbaric, greedy explorer who happened upon an American Eden through his own ignorance.5 Columbus became the harbinger of an Amerindian holocaust and an environmental disaster of incredible proportions.6
What are we to make of these different perspectives? To argue that both interpretations misrepresent Columbus and the importance of his voyages offers little to the debate besides the obvious. Here, we will examine the European intellectual milieu in which Columbus moved so that we might understand him as a web of beliefs, not a heroic or demonic central subject, but as a person of his own time who somehow, some way, became a figure of such great importance that he could divide our late twentieth century academy into teams of professionally trained bruisers with a scholarly bent.
The scholars involved in the Columbian debates depend on five major sources, which all present serious theoretical problems. The book that has received the most academic attention is Columbus's Diary, a day to day log of the first voyage to the Caribbean.7 The Diary was sent to Queen Isabella in Spain upon Columbus's return, and it was then copied by hand into other editions. The original is lost; the book we have today is Bartolomé de Las Casas's "abridgment of a copy of the copy of the original."8
The second major source is a group of seven books that Columbus annotated during his life, which are now preserved in the Biblioteca Colombiana at Seville.9 Columbus made many marginal notes, called postilles, in these books. Although they are the source of information for much of the data on which we base our understanding of Columbus's intellectual development, often the notes in these books are not dated, making it difficult to pinpoint significant details in the progression of Columbus's thought. Key questions about what he knew before the first voyage unfortunately cannot be answered with any precision without dated material to base theories upon.
The third principal source is the Libro de las profecías, which has been given the title the Book of Prophecies. 10 It is an unfinished anthology of apocalyptic texts that Columbus was putting together between 1501 and 1502. Beyond the problematic fact that this was not a completed piece of work is the difficulty arising from the cooperative nature of the document; four hands can be distinguished in the manuscript: that of Columbus, that of his son, Fernando, that of his friend and fellow Italian father, Gaspar Gorricio, and that of Columbus's brother, Bartolomé. In addition, there is the tentative aspect of interpretation that goes along with actually trying to understand what Columbus meant when he quoted a certain passage from the Bible or other non-canonical religious texts.
The fourth important source is the biography of Columbus by his younger son, Fernando, entitled Historie del S.S. Fernando Columbo.11 The Historie of Fernando was originally written in Spanish, but the first published volume that appeared in Venice was in Italian. This published work did not appear until 1571, more than 30 years after Fernando's death in 1539. Unfortunately, the Spanish original has been lost. Thus, the original reflection that Fernando provided of Columbus, itself a biased work to ensure his father's prestige, has become doubly dangerous because the primary document is gone.
The final major text is Bartolomé de Las Casas's Historia de las Indias written between 1550 and 1563, but not published until 1875.12 Las Casas was one of the first and most important Spanish missionaries in Latin America. He went to Hispaniola in 1502, and after becoming a priest in 1512, he devoted his life to improving the worldly conditions for Amerindians within the Spanish colonial system. Las Casas was a harsh critic of the Spanish leaders, including Columbus, whom he felt did not treat the native population justly.13
What I have hoped to show with this brief look at the "primary"
sources is that there are no primary sources. Each is biased and presents
only a reflection, or in most cases a reflection of a reflection (of a reflection
and so on). To say, as some authors have, that one can fully understand
Columbus's motives on the eve of his transatlantic voyage, and then to idolize
or demonize him for his actions is to go too far, to step into the realm
of pure fiction or presentist politics. I do not want to give the impression
that I think we cannot get at a little bit of Columbus. But, I do want to
emphasize the complicated nature of the endeavor. In what follows I have
presented my reading of scholars who evaluate and interpret reflections
as they attempt to understand Christopher Columbus and the first voyage
he made to what we today call the Americas. In my reading, the most provocative
and believable pieces have focused on the general intellectual and social
trends in which Columbus developed his sense of himself and his world.
II.
Early Life
Although there has been much heated debate over the birthplace of Columbus, with many European countries claiming the one-time hero as their own, most historians agree that the Cristóbal Colón (Spanish) who sailed across the Atlantic in 1492 was the same Cristoforo Colombo (Italian) born in or around the city of Genoa in 1751. He was the son of Susanna Fontanarossa, a weaver's daughter, and Domenico Colombo, a humble weaver himself. Columbus had two brothers, Bartolomé and Diego, who became his life-long partners in the Indies Experiment.14
As a young Genoese man, Columbus was driven and ambitious. The fifteenth century offered few roads for young upstarts however: the family business, the Church, or maybe the sea could provide an opportunity for social advancement. Columbus worked in the family weavery throughout his youth, and by his tenth year he was on the Mediterranean making short journeys to buy and sell for the family business in other nearby European ports.15
Although it is not exactly clear when, sometime during 1476 or 1477, Columbus moved from Genoa to Lisbon. One popular interpretation has it that Columbus was shipwrecked off Portugal during a naval battle, found his way ashore, and went to Lisbon to meet his brother;16 however Fernández-Armesto believes this tale may have been orchestrated by Columbus himself, since he wanted to appear as "a divinely elected protagonist of great deeds."17 Whatever the case, by 1477, Columbus was in Lisbon, the heart of the developing Portuguese empire.
Columbus's brother Bartolomé was already living among the Genoese community in Lisbon and had a job in a chart-making business there, where Christopher quickly found work. Soon, Columbus and his brother had their own mapping business, which put them in touch with many of the leading shippers from all over Europe. In his characteristic style, Samuel Eliot Morison wrote that it may have been at one of the many meetings Columbus and his brother had with these sailors that "a grizzled captain, looking at a chart of the known world, remarked, 'I'm sick of sailing alonge the fever-striken Guinea coast . . . why can't we sail due west beyond the Azores, till we hit the Golden East, and make a real killing?'"18 In all fairness, Morison does not present this as actual dialog, but as a hypothetical situation to prove a point: it was widely believed that the world was round, and every educated man would agree that it was "theoretically possible" to reach the Orient by sailing west.
It was Washington Irving who popularized the myth that Columbus was a brilliant lone figure struggling against the antiquated medieval idea that the earth was flat.19 While visiting Spain in the late 1820s, Irving was invited to translate the documents that Martín Fernández de Navarrette had just recovered from the Spanish archives, and the successful American author decided that he would compose a narrative of Columbus's life, which soon came out in four volumes in London. Irving's Columbus was a genius, whose mistakes, founded as they were on the errors of his age, made him even more splendid. His desire for wealth and honor was not greed, but simply the aspiration for what he deserved as recognition for his service to Spain. Irving portrayed Columbus as a deeply spiritual person as well; his piety sustained him through disappointment, and enabled him to uphold his high moral character, although he sometimes fell into the snares of his age, such as when he condoned the enslavement of Indians because they were not Christians.20
Columbus was one of the many merchant-sailors who were engaged in speculative thought about what would be found to the west across the Ocean. From Lisbon and Genoa, which seem to have been his two main posts, Columbus traveled widely during the 1470s and 1480s. He sailed throughout the Mediterranean and all over the European edge of the Atlantic, going as far as Chios in the east, and to the furthest established points of contact in the Atlantic: Iceland, the Azores, and the Gulf of Guinea.21 He became a captain of his own ship and was a prominent trader and agent for Italian importers. Columbus was particularly close to the Centurione family, a leading Italian business house that transported goods from islands close to the European mainland, including the Madeiras and the Azores. Columbus's connection with the powerful Centurione family and his position as a sea captain enabled him, in 1479, to marry Dona Felipa, a noblewoman whose family had a long heritage of service to the Portuguese Crown. The bride's father, Bartolomeo Perestrello, was the administrator and ruler on Porto Santo, the smallest royal fief in the Portuguese empire. The marriage was a great social step for the weaver's son. Soon after the birth of their son, Diego, however, Columbus's wife tragically died.
By the early 1480s, Columbus had fifteen years experience as a merchant, a ship's captain, and as a cartographer. His interest in a journeying west across the Ocean was developing and intensifying. He was living on the cusp of the Atlantic and had sailed to the reaches of the European known world. So, let us consider what Columbus knew, or thought he knew, on the eve of his transatlantic journey into the unknown.
III.
The Geographical Issues
In her article entitled "What Columbus Knew," Helen Wallis has put forth the two most important considerations that Columbus and his interlocutors were concerned with as they discussed the possibility of transoceanic voyages: (1) the circumference of the globe and (2) the size of the oecumene, the continental land mass of Europe, Africa, and Asia, in relation to the whole circumference.22
Of course, it is impossible to say exactly what Columbus's answers to these considerations were in 1492 before his voyage into the Ocean Sea. We must content ourselves with a general overview of the worldly representations that were available at the time, and with Columbus's own version of his intellectual development.
The most important cartographical text in fifteenth century Europe came from the ancient world through Constantinople. Around 1395, a group of cutting edge Florentine intellectuals and businessmen had organized themselves into a reading and study group to learn Greek. Palla Strozzi, Leonardo Bruni, and Jacopo d'Angiolo da Scarperia were among the leaders. They hired a Byzantine scholar, Manuel Chrysoloras, who quickly had them translating. The readers were voracious, and the group soon ran out of Greek literature. Chrysoloras and Jacopo d'Angiolo decided to refurbish the group's library with a trip to Constantinople for more texts. When the two returned to Florence around 1400, after surviving a nearly disastrous shipwreck off Naples, they had, among their salvaged selection, a copy of Ptolemy's Geography, which included the soon to be famous world map.23
From 1477 onwards, Ptolemy's Geography was printed with maps- including the influential world map, which was constructed on a latitude-longitude framework.
When dealing with our two considerations above, the world map is illustrative of two conceptual mistakes made by Columbus and others of his era: (1) Ptolemy had underestimated the circumference of the world, and (2) Ptolemy had overestimated the size of Eurasia by 80 degrees. When Columbus actually explained his own geographical theory, he described a world of even greater distortion. In an undated note in his copy of Pierre d'Ailly's Imago Mundi, Columbus wrote that his own observations during a voyage to the Gulf of Guinea had shown that "my measurements endorse the opinion of Alfraganus: that is, that to any one degree, 56 2/3 miles correspond. Therefore we may say that the perimeter of the earth at the equator is 20,400 miles."24 Actually, the "miles" expressed by Alfraganus, the ninth and tenth century Arabian cosmographer al-Farghani, were much larger than the "miles" of the Greek and Latin civilizations.25 Columbus had gotten his only information on al-Farghani from d'Ailly's Imago Mundi, and must not have considered standardizing the measurements. Whatever the case, Columbus considered Ptolemy's estimation of the Eurasian land mass, although important, to be too small. He relied on d'Ailly's appraisal and on the cosmographer Marinus of Tyre, whose estimation of the Eurasian land mass, 225 degrees from east to west, Ptolemy had dismissed in his Geography.
The theory of Paolo dal Pozzo Toscanelli, a Florentine doctor and cosmographer, reinforced Columbus's suspicions that the Ocean was narrow.26 In 1474, Toscanelli had first expressed his views in a letter sent through Canon Fernao Martins of Lisbon to Afonso V, the king of Portugal, who had asked the scholar for information on the shortest route to Asia. In 1481, upon Columbus's request for the same information, Toscanelli sent him a copy of the letter he had sent to Martins, which Columbus transcribed into his copy of Piccolomini's Historia. In this important letter, Toscanelli argued that the distance from the Canaries to Cathay was 5,000 nautical miles. Although this distance was a bit too far for ships of the era, Toscanelli said the journey would probably be broken by the mythic Portuguese island of "Antillia" and by the "very noble island of Cipango [Japan]," which was a land thought to be "rich in gold, pearls, and precious stones."27 Toscanelli's interpretation came to have the support of other important cosmographers including Martin Behaim, the map-maker of Nuremberg who made the first known global representation of the world.
From Toscanelli, Columbus also learned of Marco Polo, the thirteenth
and fourteenth century Venetian explorer who had traveled through Asia and
served the Mongol emperor of China, Kublai Khan. The stories in The Travels
of Marco Polo were supplemented by the tales of exploration published
under the name of Sir John Mandeville. Columbus believed both Polo and Mandeville
had gone "far beyond the eastern lands described by Ptolemy and Marinus."28 Thus, the huge Asian land mass must push further into
the narrow Ocean Sea. A trip across was surely possible.
IV.
The Religious Background
To focus solely on Columbus as a scientific cartographer or as a student of European travel literature is to miss much of who he seems to have been. Pauline Moffitt Watts and Delno West both argue that Columbus had another side, a self-image in which he "came to believe that he was predestined to fulfill a number of prophecies in preparation for the coming of the Antichrist and the end of the world."29 Columbus's apocalypticism became what West calls a "geoeschatology," in which the explorer melded his geographic lore with the theology of the last times.30
To understand Columbus's theories here, it will be useful again to look at representations of the world in which he lived, but this time from a different perspective. As we have noted, Ptolemy's Geography was not reintroduced to Western Europe until the early fifteenth century. At this time there was another symbolic cartographic tradition dominant in the West: what we today call, medieval mappaemundi. These maps make clear that the earthly world of the period was understood in Christian terms. The T-O map is the greatest example of the Christianization of cartography. These maps presented a world that was circular in shape and was bisected by the Mediterranean Sea and the Nile and Don rivers. The maps were oriented toward the East, with Eden located at the top in accordance with Biblical scripture: "And the Lord God planted a garden eastward in Eden and there he set the man he had formed"(Genesis 2:8). The land of the earth was divided into the three parts of which Europeans knew: Europe, Africa, and Asia. The land masses were divided to the sons of Noah, again in accordance with scripture: "The sons of Noah who went forth from the ark were Shem, Ham, and Japheth. . . . These three were the sons of Noah; and from these the whole earth was peopled"(Genesis 9:19). Since Shem was the oldest he received the largest area, Asia. Ham was given Africa, and Japheth, Europe. At the center of this Christian world view was the Holy City: Jerusalem.31
Columbus lived and worked in this Christian framework. Worldly space was represented in accordance with scripture, and time, the passage of history, was working itself out towards the second coming of Christ.
Basing their arguments on Columbus's Book of Prophecies, West and Watts show how Columbus linked his travels and findings with a combination of events that would bring the end of secular history.
Columbus based much of his eschatology on the person whom he relied upon for his scientific geographical knowledge: Pierre d'Ailly. In his Book of Prophecies, Columbus included sections from d'Ailly's Vigintiloquium, in which d'Ailly quoted Augustine's City of God as a summary of historical periodization:
The first age, corresponding to the first day, is from
Adam to the flood, the second from then on til Abraham. These are equal,
not in years, but in the number of generations, for each age is found to
have ten. From this point, as the evangelist Matthew marks off the periods,
three ages follow, reaching to the coming of Christ, each of which is completed
in fourteen generations: one from Abraham to David, the second from then
until the deportation to Babylon, the third from then until the birth of
Christ in the flesh. Thus there are five ages in all. The sixth is now in
progress and is not to be measured by any fixed number of generations, for
the scripture says: "It is not for you to know the times which the
Father has fixed by his own power"(Acts 1:17). After this age God will
rest, as on the seventh day, when he will cause the seventh day, that is,
us, to rest in God himself. This will be our sabbath and its end will not
be an evening, but the Lord's day, an eighth eternal day, sanctified by
the resurrection of Christ, which prefigures the eternal rest of both spirit
and body.32
The idea of major importance to Columbus seems to have been that he was living in the age during which the earthly secular world would come to a close. He was intensely interested in the end of the world and focused on specific events that would bring about the coming of the Antichrist, who must come before Jesus himself.
To this general background concerning the end of the world, Columbus incorporated pieces from the Old Testament prophets and the Psalms which illustrated how Columbus linked his efforts with the events that would bring the end of worldly history, an event which he thought would occur in 150 years. Columbus believed three prophesied events first had to occur before Christ's return: (1) the discovery of the Indies, (2) the conversion of all people, and (3) the recapture and rebuilding of the Holy Temple in Jerusalem.33 Columbus believed he was the Divine instrument of Providence, and that under the direction of the Holy Spirit he had found the Indies, opened the last minds to the gospel, and provided the wealth to pay for the last Crusade to capture Jerusalem by bringing to Spain the new lands of riches.
Theoretically, here, when we make this bold claim and connect it with
the first voyage of Columbus we are in troubled waters, which both Watts
and West acknowledge. The Book of Prophecies was not put together
until 1501-1502, nine years after Columbus's initial journey to the Americas
so there is no basis to the argument that Columbus understood his 1492 voyage
in exactly the terms presented above. However, it seems clear that Columbus
did actually envision his first voyage as a Crusade to bring glory to Christ
and Christ to people who had not heard of him before, as an analysis of
the first voyage will demonstrate.
V.
The First Voyage and Possession
Columbus straddled two worlds, with one foot in the new rationalist world of renaissance science, and the other foot in the older European world of religious mysticism. He used both world views as he attempted to get support for his enterprise to the Indies. In 1485, Columbus went with his son Diego to Spain, where he spent seven years attempting to win the support of Isabella of Castile. Foster Provost has attempted to provide an analysis of what exactly Columbus did during those seven years in Spain as he sought royal support.34 In 1492, after years of failure, Columbus prepared to seek support in France, but a final appeal to Isabella proved successful, and an agreement between the crown and Columbus set the terms for the expedition.
Columbus was outfitted with three ships: The Nina, the Pinta, and the Santa Maria.35 On 3 August 1492, the ships left the small port of Palos and sailed southwest. The Nina was rerigged in the Canaries, and then the three ships sailed into uncharted territory. Contact was made on the morning of 12 October 1492 at an island in the Bahamas, which Columbus named San Salvador.
Columbus's sailors were met by a friendly, if frightened, local population to which Columbus gave the name, "Indians." The expedition later sailed to Cuba, and then to Hispaniola, where the Santa Maria was wrecked. After getting his men ashore, Columbus met with the local Indians, whom seemed friendly enough to allow 39 Spaniards to stay and start a settlement, which Columbus called Navidad. Columbus returned to Spain on the Nina with Martin Pinzon captaining the Pinta. Columbus reached Lisbon in March 1493, and then he went to Barcelona, where he was received with honors by Ferdinand and Isabella. Columbus believed he had traveled to islands right off the Asian land mass.
Columbus wrote to Luis de Santangel explaining his voyage and the way he took possession of the new lands he found in the "Indies:"
As I know that you will be pleased at the great victory
with which Our Lord has crowned my voyage, I write this to you, from which
you will learn how in thirty-three days, I passed from the Canary Islands
to the Indies with the fleet which the most illustrious king and queen,
our sovereigns, gave to me. And there I found very many islands filled with
people innumerable, and of them all I have taken possession for their highnesses,
by proclamation made and with the royal standard unfurled, and no opposition
was offered to me. To the first island which I found, I gave the name San
Salvador, in remembrance of the Divine Majesty, Who has marvelously
bestowed all this; the Indians call it 'Guanahani'. To the second, I gave
the name Isla de Santa María de Concepción; to the
third, Fernandina; to the fourth, Isabella; to the fifth,
Isla Juana, and so to each one I gave a new name.36
If Columbus thought he had reached the Indies, why did he change the islands' names? Why did he "take possession" of the islands? How? On who's authority? You can see how tension on these questions quickly escalates. An interesting interpretation is offered by Stephen Greenblatt in Marvelous Possessions. Columbus was not a merchant (like Marco Polo), nor was he a pilgrim (like Sir John Mandeville). Instead, Greenblatt argues, he was on a state sponsored mission from a nation caught up in the exercise of the Reconquista. Unlike previous cultural encounters between Europeans and non-Europeans that had taken place gradually, this meeting was sudden. The extreme length of the oceanic voyage, the invaders' total unfamiliarity with the land, and their absolute ignorance of the inhabitants' cultures, languages, and socio-political organizations made this encounter drastically different for those that had gone before.37 And yet, Columbus worked from a set of proscribed formal procedures, which, in the unprecedented situation, appear very strange. He took possession of the lands through the performance of linguistic acts, specifically by declaring, witnessing, [and] recording."38 Columbus issued a proclamation of possession on the islands, and noted that no opposition was offered. Each of these performances were for "a world elsewhere," for Spain and her young European imperial competitors. Columbus was not concerned with the inhabitants of the lands; he knew they could not understand his language.
So how did these European ceremonies take the place of cultural contracts? Greenblatt argues that the fact that "no opposition was offered" satisfied the Spanish that their legal claim could be made on the islands; Columbus had observed the ceremonial process. The legal form had been fulfilled. Columbus did not say "the natives did not contradict me," but "I was not contradicted."39 We see complete indifference for the consciousness of the other.
Greenblatt calls Columbus's rhetorical strategy "Christian imperialism." Columbus takes possession of the land and later the people, but at its core this is not a transaction based on "wealth or convenience" in which the Spanish get new lands and slaves, instead it is a "dream of marvelous transformation," in which the "savages" undergo a "metamorphosis from inhumanity into humanity."40
The ritual of possession was based on "an absurdity, a tragicomic invocation of the possibility of a refusal that could not occur." Therefore, the legal declaration which was based on a spirit of a radical formalism left in its "wake an emotional and intellectual vacancy-a questioning of the legitimacy of the Spanish claim." To fill this "intellectual vacancy," Greenblatt argues that Columbus tried to draw the reader toward a sense of wonder, toward the marvelous. Possession becomes the marvelous gift of "the Divine Majesty," and thus is legitimated in Columbus's mind-and he hopes in the readers.41 Wonder leads Columbus to the act of naming, by which he commemorates the Savior's marvelous gift in an act of christening. Here, again, we see Columbus's Christian world meet the new scientific world where things must be rationally explained, even if in the old language game.
While Greenblatt tries to understand Columbus, his voyage, and possession, other recent authors have tried to use Columbus to present their own presentist agendas. I do not think this is all bad, for one thing I do not think we can actually do otherwise; we are all caught up in our own world. However, when use overshadows understanding, then history becomes propaganda of the worst type. Kirkpatrick Sale's Conquest of Paradise illustrates the perversion of Columbian historical scholarship for presentist purposes. In Sale's hands Columbus becomes a megalomaniac concerned only with enriching himself with new world gold. A quick glance at the index of Sale's book shows that the word "gold" has 106 citations, while "Christianity" gets less than half that number at 44 notes, and the "Roman Catholic Church" receives a paltry 23; neither "God" nor "Christ" appears.
Sale's Columbus entered a pristine world, where there was no ecological impurity or human violence. The Tainos who lived on the island Columbus called San Salvador were "as idyllic as their surroundings."42 Columbus becomes for Sale the transmitter of European filth and contamination. "You begin to see the Admiral's problem," wrote Sale, "he cares little about the features of nature . . . and even when he admires them," his "ignorance" prevents him from describing them.43 He has no connection with the world around him, if it will not yield wealth.
In addition to his gold-centered megalomania and his ecological disinterestedness, Sale's Columbus is the father of American slavery. He feels no sense of compassion for the Tainos and is concerned only with extracting the directions and labor force needed to get gold. Marvelous Christianization plays no role in Sale's story.
Sale closes his work by issuing his presentist lamentation: "There is only one way to live in America," he writes, "and that is as Americans-the original Americans-for that is what the earth of America demands. We have tried for centuries to resist that simple truth. We resist it further only at risk of the imperilment-worse the likely destruction-of the earth.44 While one may support Sale's concern for the environment, this seems a foolhardy and hypocritical argument. For one thing, we know Sale has two homes, one in New York City, which surely is not the capital of the "original Americans" and their way of life. We expect that Sale uses running water, drives a car, eats his share of fast food, and certainly he uses the electrically powered printing press. So we may ask, what does Sale mean when he writes that we should live like "the original Americas?" Neither he, nor we, will ever live like the Tainos again. If we are going to face the "simple truth" that we are slowly destroying our world, than we must face the fact and deal the environmental issue as members of the late twentieth century world. Romanticizing and perverting history is not the way to improve our world.
VI.
Conclusion
Where are we now in Columbian scholarship? As I argued earlier, I think we should consider Columbus as a web of beliefs, not a heroic or demonic central subject, but as a figure who was made by his own age. The representations of Columbus with which we have dealt all present some glimpse of the who he was. He was a complicated man; a man who embodied the contradictions of his era. Was he motivated mostly by religion, science, gold, power, or some other intimate desire? In the end, I think, we must be happy with all of these diverse motivations. They were all in the web that made Columbus. He was a hero; he discovered the oceanic path to the lands that we call the Americas. He was a demonic villain; he enslaved Indians and forced them to work on the islands he discovered on his last three voyages. He was a man of his time; he did not understand the ways in which microscopic organisms were transmitted between individuals and thus cannot be held responsible for an Amerindian holocaust. To understand Columbus, then, is to understand his own worlds, those of medieval Christianity, budding renaissance science, and the frontier art of exploratory sailing, and to understand the way he brought each of these together when contact was made with another biosphere of diverse worlds.
Endnotes