Reading Columbus

READING COLUMBUS

LATIN AMERICAN LITERATURE AND CULTURE

General Editor

Roberto Gonzalez Echevarría

Bass Professor of Hispanic and Comparative Literatures

Yale University

1. Manuel Bandeira, This Earth, That Sky, trans. Candace Slater

2. Nicolas Guillen, The Daily Daily, trans. Vera M. Kutzinski

3. Gwen Kirkpatrick, The Dissonant Legacy of Modernismo: Lugones, Herrera y Reissig, and the Voices of Modern Spanish American Poetry

4. Pablo Neruda, Selected Odes of Pablo Neruda, trans. Margaret Sayers Peden

5. Rosamel del Valle, Eva the Fugitive, trans. Anna Balakian

6. Jean de Léry, History of a Voyage to the Land of Brazil, Otherwise Called America, trans. Janet Whatley

7. Pablo Neruda, Canto General, trans. Jack Schmitt

8. Doris Sommer, Foundational Fictions: The National Romances of Latin America

9. Margarita Zamora, Reading Columbus

READING

COLUMBUS

Margarita Zamora

University of California Press

Berkeley • Los Angeles • London

The publisher gratefully acknowledges a grant from the Program for Cultural Cooperation between Spain’s Ministry of Culture and United States Universities.

University of California Press

Berkeley and Los Angeles, California

University of California Press, Ltd.

London, England

© 1993 by

The Regents of the University of California

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Zamora, Margarita.

Reading Columbus I Margarita Zamora.

p. cm. — (Latin American literature and culture; 9)

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN 0-520-08052-1 (alk. paper). — ISBN 0-520-08297-4 (pbk.: alk. paper)

1. Columbus, Christopher—Literary art.

2. America—Early accounts to 1600—History and criticism. I. Title. II. Series: Latin American literature and culture (Berkeley, Calif.); 9.

E112.Z35 1993

970.01'5—dc2o 92-39234

CIP

Printed in the United States of America 123456789

The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of American National Standard for Information Sciences—Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ANSI Z39.48-1984. ®

In memory of

Juan Clemente Zamora y López-Silvero and

Rosario Munné y García de Andina

Et convertat faciem suam ad insulas, et capiet multas.

And he shall turn his face to the islands and take many.

(Daniel 11:18a, as cited by Columbus,

Libro de las profecías)

Contents

Contents

Illustrations

Acknowledgments

Note on Editions and Translations

Introduction

Reading Columbus

This present year of 1492

All these are the Admiral's exact words

THE EDITOR SPEAKS

EDITING AS APPROPRIATION

THE PROLOGUE AND THE BOOK

In the Margins of Columbus

Voyage to Paradise

JOURNEYS

CHRONOTOPES

CARTOGRAPHIES OF DISCOVERY

EXPLORATION

AMERICA TWICE-DISCOVERED: COLUMBUS VERSUS VESPUCCI

THE GRAMMAR OF DISCOVERY

PILGRIMAGE

TIERRA DE GRACIA

Gender and Discovery

APPENDIX Carta a los Reyes de 4 marzo 1493

Letter to the Sovereigns of 4 March 1493

Notes

Bibliography

Index

Illustrations

1. Pages from the Libro de la primera navegación y descubrimiento de las Indias. 70

2. Claudius Ptolemy, world map, 1472. 104

3. Isidore of Seville, T-O mappamondi, 1472. 105

4. Ebstorf mappamundi, c. 1240. 106

5. Zuane Pizzigano, portolan chart, 1424. 109

6. Albino de Canepa, portolan chart, 1489. 110

7. America. Engraving by Theodor Galle after a drawing by Jan van der Strået [Stradanus], c. 1575. 153

8. Ynsula hyspana. Woodcut print from De insulis epistola Cristoferi Colom (Basel, 1493). 168

9. Woodcut print from La lettera dellisole che ha

trovato nuovamente il Re dispagna (Florence, 1493). 174

Acknowledgments

This book began to take shape in the classroom, stimulated by questions my students at the University of Wisconsin raised regarding the validity and usefulness of reading Columbus in courses devoted to the study of Spanish-American literature and culture. Their probing of issues too often taken for granted in the traditional academic disciplines, chief among them the interface of literature and history, prompted me to write an early version of the essay All these are the Admiral’s exact words.’ For that initial stimulus I owe them a debt of gratitude.

Institutions that provided research support include the University of Wisconsin Graduate School, the Program for Cultural Cooperation Between Spain’s Ministry of Culture and United States Universities, the Institute for Research in the Humanities of the University of Wisconsin, and the Cyril B. Nave Bequest.

This work would not have been possible without the resources and assistance offered in the United States by the Memorial Library of the University of Wisconsin, Madison; the John Carter Brown Library of Brown University; the Newberry Library; the William L. Clements Library at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor; the James Ford Bell Library of the University of Minnesota; and the American Geographical Society Collection at the University of Wisconsin, Milwaukee. For generously sharing their time and expertise, I would like to express thanks to John Parker of the James Ford Bell Library, Daniel J. Slive of the John Carter Brown Library, and Mark Warhus of the Office for Map History, American Geographical Society Collection, University of Wisconsin, Milwaukee. I am very grateful to have been able to consult materials in the archives and libraries of Portugal at the Biblioteca Central da Marinha, the Biblioteca Municipal de Evora, and the Biblioteca Nacional. The staff at the Biblioteca Colombina in Seville, Spain, was especially helpful in facilitating my access to the Columbian postils, even as a major reorganization of the collection was in progress and the library was essentially closed to the public.

For their support of this project in its formative stages I am grateful to Birute Ciplijauskaité, Roberto Gonzalez Echevarria, Nellie McKay, Elaine Marks, Stephanie Merrim, and Enrique Pupo- Walker. For sharing work-in-progress with me I am indebted to Tom Conley, Stephen Greenblatt, David Henige, Dennis Martin, and Steven Hutchinson. To Claudia Card, E. Michael Gerii, Roberto Gonzalez Echevarria, Stephen Greenblatt, and Juan Clemente Zamora, each of whom made valuable comments and suggestions on the manuscript, I reserve a special thank you. My most heartfelt thanks go to Judith Green, for her support through every stage of this project.

Three editors at the University of California Press have left their mark on this volume. I appreciate the efforts of Eileen McWilliam, who guided the project through a rigorous review process, Amy Einsohn, who attentively copyedited the text, and Dore Brown, who carefully helped shape the manuscript into a book. The work’s most constant reader has been David Henige, from whose knowledge of Columbian history I and the manuscript have greatly benefited.

Finally, I wish to thank the editors of various journals for granting permissions to reprint revised versions of my earlier publications. The following pieces have been incorporated into the essays in this volume: "Todas son palabras formales del Almirante: Las Casas y el Diario de Colón," Hispanic Review 57 (1989): 25-4I; "Text, Context, Intertext: Columbus’s diario de a bordo as Palimpsest" [coauthored with David Henige], The Americas 46, no. 1 (1989): 17-40; Abreast of Columbus: Gender and Discovery, Cultural Critique 17 (Winter 1991): 127-49; Reading in the Margins of Columbus, Amerindian Images [reprint of Hispanic Issues 9], ed. René Jara and Nicholas Spadaccini (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1992): 183-97; Christopher Columbus’s ‘Letter to the Sovereigns': Announcing the Discovery, New World Encounters, ed. Stephen Greenblatt (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993): 1-11.

Note on Editions and Translations

Editions and translations are identified in the text and notes by the following abbreviations. All translations not otherwise credited are the author’s.

XV xvi Editions and Translations

Introduction

Los niños con los juegos, los mozos con las letras, los mancebos con los deleites, los viejos con mil especies de enfermedades pelean, y estos papeles con todas las edades. La primera los borra y rompe, la segunda no los sabe bien leer, la tercera, que es la alegre juventud y mancebía, discorda. Unos les roen los huesos que no tienen virtud, que es la historia toda junta, no aprovechándose de las particularidades, haciéndola cuento de camino, otros pican los donaires y refranes comunes, loándolos con toda atención, dejando pasar por alto lo que hace más al caso y utilidad suya. Pero aquellos para cuyo verdadero placer es todo, desechan el cuento de la historia para contar, coligen la suma para su provecho, ríen lo donoso, las sentencias y dichos de filósofos guardan en su memoria, para trasponer en lugares convenibles a sus actos y propósitos. Así que cuando diez personas se juntaren a oír esta comedia, en quien quepa esta diferencia de condiciones, como suele acaecer, ¿quién negará que haya contienda en cosa que de tantas maneras se entienda?

(Rojas, Celestina)

Children with their sports, boys with their books, young men with their pleasures, old men with a thousand sorts of infirmities, skirmish and war continually; and these papers with all ages. The first blots and tears them; the second knows not well how to read them; the third (which is the cheerful livelihood of youth, and set all upon jollity) doth utterly dislike them. Some gnaw only the bones, but do not pick out the marrow, saying there is no goodness in it— that it is a history, huddled, I know not how, together, a kind of hodgepodge or gallimaufrey; not profiting themselves out of the particularities, accounting it a fable or old wife’s tale, fitting for nothing save only for to pass away the time upon the way. Others call out the witty conceits and common proverbs, highly commending them, but slighting and neglecting that which makes more to the purpose and their profit. But they for whose true pleasure it is wholly framed reject the story itself, as a vain and idle subject, and gather out the pith and marrow of the matter for their own good and benefit, and laugh at those things that savour only of wit and pleasant conceit, storing up in their memory the sentences and sayings of philosophers, that they may transpose them into such fit places as may make, upon occasion, for their own use and purpose. So that when ten men shall meet together to hear this comedy, in whom perhaps shall happen this difference of dispositions, as it usually falleth out, who will deny but that there is a contention in that thing which is so diversely understood?¹

Reading is a contentious practice, Fernando de Rojas affirmed in the prologue to Celestina, a work published during Columbus’s third voyage to the Indies. For the act of reading is never perfectly smooth; it is usually carried out in tension with the text as well as with other readings. As Rojas could have predicted, the ink from Columbus’s pen was hardly dry when Isabella and Ferdinand expressed their dismay, in September 1493, over the report on the voyage he submitted to them upon his return from the first navigation.² Clearly, what they had anticipated reading was different from the text they received.

Since then, scholars have made careers and reputations out of arguing about what exactly Columbus meant by what he wrote. No aspect of his writings has been more controversial than the question of the Discovery itself. In one corner are those who insist that Columbus died believing he had found a new route to Asia and had in fact landed on the Asiatic mainland. But other scholars, using the selfsame texts for evidence, claim with equal vigor that Columbus knew all along, or very early on, that he had found a new continent. Only slightly less controversial are such topics as the route Columbus followed, where he made landfall, the authenticity of the texts attributed to him, the nature of the enterprise, and Columbus’s views of the Indians. The Columbian texts have something to say about all of these issues, but they say different things to different people and, apparently, in different ways.

The essays in this volume approach Columbian writing precisely at its historical stress points; that is, they revisit those aspects of the texts that have caused readers the greatest anxiety or have resulted in significant disagreements among scholars of the Discovery. Doubtless, my arguments and interpretations will provoke further disagreement and dissent. But I trust that my interrogations of both the Columbian texts and the assumptions made by previous readers will provide new vantage points from which to reconsider persistent questions about Columbian writing.

Typically, the Columbian texts have been under the purview of scholars working in disciplines devoted to determining the nature of the past. They treat the texts as evidence, and their readings are based on particular assumptions about the texts’ authenticity, reliability, and accuracy. To date, there is no consensus: the Columbian texts have been deemed both very reliable and largely untrustworthy testimonies on the Discovery. All the essays here consider this problem, either implicitly or explicitly. But rather than focus on the relation between the texts and the events they refer to, I approach the texts as texts and emphasize the mediated nature of reading and writing.

For just as every text arises in a particular context and a specific set of circumstances, so do readings of that text. And although we cannot reconstruct those contexts in all their complexity and specificity nor approach writing and reading as if they were only responses to circumstances, to disregard the contexts within which texts become meaningful is to ignore an important aspect of how writing and reading help make history. The results of an interpretation that treats the mediated character of a text’s mode of existence as a central focus of the analysis can be unsettling to those who feel most comfortable with the positivist assumption that the past can be essentially reconstituted in the present through the study of documentary sources. Yet if mediation is not taken into account, one runs the risk of producing a flat, static picture of historical writing.

In putting these differences between two critical perspectives on Columbian writing in such stark terms, I am overstating the problem somewhat in order to draw a clear distinction between two ways of reading that differ in purpose and emphasis. One can read to understand the past or to understand how stories about the past are told. Both these manners of reading require an awareness of the nuances and ambiguities of language, of the plural condition of meaning, of the importance of exegesis and interpretation in understanding the written word. But a historical reading seeks ultimately to recreate what really happened, through an archaeology of the word. Instead, the essays in this volume seek to understand the ways in which writing about the past makes it meaningful.

Several of the essays, for example, concern the pragmatics of Columbian writing; that is, they consider how a text may have been used by its author and readers, under what circumstances, and with what consequences. They focus, in other words, on the rhetorical rather than the referential qualities of writing. The readers to whom a text is explicitly or implicitly addressed, the circumstances surrounding the act of writing, the author’s intentions, and the reader’s expectations are only a few of the kinds of mediations that affect how information is selected and conveyed and, of course, the meaningfulness or usefulness of that information to those who receive it.

Such rhetorical inflections are most evident in the case of so- called creative writing. But in fact every text, even the most ostensibly objective of legal documents, can be shown to respond inventively to its circumstances, if only in the determinations the writer makes regarding exactly what information would be relevant to readers and most appropriate to the situation, and the form in which that information should therefore be presented. The creative dimension of historical writing and its relevance to the study of the past has been a recent focus of studies exploring the relation between historiography and literary criticism, history and the language arts.³ These essays, however, strive to move the discussion beyond the specific fields of history and literature in order to consider the effects of other modalities of expression, including nonwritten forms, on Columbian writing’s representation of the Discovery.⁴ Such an approach necessarily transcends traditional disciplinary boundaries, touching as it does on a variety of fields in order to explore the cognitive bridges between them. Its object of study, however, is the text. It is, therefore, literary in the larger (and today archaic) sense conveyed by the Latin litterarius—of reading and writing. It does not distinguish between literary and historical texts. Indeed, as I will argue, in the analysis of Columbian writing the notion of disciplinary boundaries is highly questionable, if not obsolete.

In this regard these essays pose an alternative to the two traditions in the study of Columbian writing, history and literary criticism, by raising the types of questions that cannot be explored with a single methodology alone. The essay ‘This present year of 1492/ for example, considers the influence of the medieval notarial arts on the articulation of the enterprise of the Indies, as well as the circumstances that dictated the norms of the exchange between the writer and his addressees. Voyage to Paradise takes up the vexing question of Columbus’s destination by looking at the relations between the Columbian texts’ representation of the journey of discovery, its geography, and the cartographic paradigms to which they respond. Gender and Discovery approaches Columbian writing as a response to the contractual documents of commission issued by the Crown on the eve of the first voyage, and then evaluates gendered imagery in the Columbian texts in relation to the commercial and political goals of the enterprise as expressed in the royal contract.

Another important stress point in the interpretation of the Columbian texts concerns their transmission to later readers. The part reading plays in perpetuating writing is perhaps too obvious for comment. A text that is not read at least once stands little chance of survival. But the role of reading in transforming writing is generally not recognized as a significant problem in the study of texts. As Rojas had already pointed out in the fifteenth century, the relations between readers and texts are usually more complicated than simple, more combative than congenial. The three stages he identified in the life of the text as an object of reading suggest that it is an invasive activity. The Carta a Luis de Santangel (15 February 1493), announcing the Discovery, illustrates this point. Within a few months of Columbus’s return, the letter (the only Columbian text to be published in his lifetime) appeared in Spanish, Italian, Latin, and in Italian verse. A manuscript copy in Santángel’s hand is preserved in the Archivo General de Simancas. None of these versions are identical. The Latin editions, for instance, are addressed not to Santángel, the keeper of the royal privy purse, but to Gabriel Sanchez, the general treasurer of the kingdom of Aragon, whom the texts misidentify as Rafael Sanchez. The versions differ from each other in other small ways, in part because all but the Spanish text are translations, and they differ quite significantly from the text that was probably their common matrix, the Carta a los Reyes of 4 March 1493, also announcing the Discovery.⁵

Moreover, a comparison of the letter to Santángel and the letter addressed to the Crown the following month suggests that the earlier version was probably derived from the later one and that the February letter was at least substantially revised, if not completely composed, by someone other than Columbus. As it turned out, the derivative February letter not only modified but actually took the place of—or, more precisely, masqueraded as—the original announcement of the Discovery for almost five hundred years. Samuel Eliot Morison’s assessment of the letter’s authority and privilege is representative of the esteem in which most scholars have held it: This letter is the first and rarest of all printed americana. It tells not only what the Admiral himself thought, but the most important things he wished the sovereigns to know. … Columbus composed this letter on board the caravel Niña, on his homeward passage (Morison, 180). The 4 March letter, lost or suppressed for half a millennium, was known to have existed at all only because it was mentioned in a postscript to the 15 February version.⁶ The consequences of this censorial reading and rewriting are taken up in more detail in the opening essay, Reading Columbus.

Two other essays focus on the decisive mediation of Bartolome de Las Casas, who copied, edited, paraphrased, and commented on a significant number of Columbus’s writings, some of which survive only in Las Casas’s versions. Conversely, the Columbian texts that remain lost today, including the diarios of the second, third, and fourth navigations, are, in part, unavailable because Las Casas did not transcribe them.⁷ Thus, much of our understanding of the Discovery, much of what we know of what Columbus thought or said, as well as what we do not, is the result of Las Casas’s intervention in the transmission of the Columbian texts. Although neglect, scribal error, official suppression, and foul play may also have contributed to the deformation and attrition that Columbus’s words have suffered since their original inscription, nothing has had as comprehensive and profound an effect on them as Las Casas’s hand. The scope and character of Las Casas’s editorial interventions in the reconstitution of his source, the since lost diario of the first voyage, is the subject of the essay All these are the Admiral’s exact words’ —a phrase that appears frequently in Las Casas’s edition of Columbus’s journal. In the Margins of Columbus considers the effects of Las Casas’s mediation in the transmission of Columbian writing by examining the annotations and commentary he inscribed in the margins of the Columbian texts.

I use the phrase Columbian writing throughout these essays in recognition of the problems inherent in the notion of authorship and, especially, in acknowledgment of the mediated condition of the texts under consideration. From this perspective, Reading Columbus is an ironic title, since not only is it impossible to determine with absolute certainty which portions of these texts are Columbus’s very words, but the very signature Columbus must be seen as an aggregate, a corporate author as it were.

Discourse appears frequently and prominently in the pages that follow. The term has a long history: In Latin discurrere means to run back and forth, a purely physical action. In its evolution through medieval Latin and into the modern European languages, however, the word retained of the original sense only the connotation of movement to and fro, and it came to designate intellectual activity, specifically, the process of reasoning or argumentation. More recent usage has branched into seemingly antithetical directions, with the twin senses of formal presentation or discussion (in Spanish discurso means speech) and dialogue or exchange.

Upon further consideration, however, the one meaning implies the other. A lecture or speech may be performed as a monologue, but it is inherently dialogical insofar as it is a reaction to the current state of knowledge or opinion on the topic. Moreover, every lecture or speech addresses someone (even if only implicitly) and, perhaps most importantly, seeks to elicit a response (even if only to squelch dissent). Knowledge is not created by an individual genius working alone; it is the product of intellectual give and take, of the movement of ideas back and forth, of conversations comprising many voices.

To speak of the discourse of the Discovery then, suggests an exchange. Using the analogy of conversation or dialogue helps to underscore that the Discovery was a dynamic process constituted not by persons acting and speaking autonomously, but in formal official exchanges in the public sphere, situations that were inherently contractual—that is, dialogical in a figurative sense.

These essays consider the Discovery, then, not as a single and unique event, but as a process defining how Europeans were to relate to the newly found peoples and the territories they inhabited. In these terms, the Discovery and its discourse continued for decades, even centuries, after Columbus, as Las Casas’s treatment of the Columbian texts illustrates. The exchange in question, however, was not between Europeans and Indians, but rather almost exclusively among Europeans themselves. The indigenous peoples of the New World suffered the Discovery, resisted or collaborated in various ways, but they were not participants in defining the terms of the Europeans’ discourse. Neither Guacanagari, the Haitian cacique who helped Columbus recover from the Santa Maria disaster on Christmas Day 1492, nor Cahonaboa, who subsequently destroyed the Spanish settlement established with the aid and protection of Guacanagari and named La Navidad in commemoration of that first collaboration, were able to affect the essential European character of that process. The most significant contribution of the indigenous peoples—their resistance—constituted a rejection of the Europeans’ definition of the Discovery and its implementation—but they were not allowed a voice in the discourse. Cahonaboa was eventually duped, captured, and sent to Spain in shackles. Guacanagari remained a faithful ally of Columbus even in the face of the everincreasing devastation inflicted by the discoverers on the other tribes of the island. Yet neither indigenous collaboration nor resistance have a say in this encounter. When the indigenous peoples speak through the Columbian texts at all, it is only because others do the talking for them.

One final clarification. Each of the essays in this book probes the tensions and contradictions in the discourse of the Discovery from a different perspective. But each new vantage point, by definition, also limits the angle of vision, by restricting the types of questions raised and, thereby, the character of the responses. Thus while each essay affirms a position with respect to the object of study and the issues raised, the volume as a whole does not resolve the complexities, incongruities, and tensions that inhabit the Columbian texts into a totalizing theory that would be compelling in its homogeneity. Such a perspectivistic strategy is heterogeneous not out of a relativistic reluctance to take a stand but, rather, out of a conviction that a critical stance is itself, like the texts it addresses, the contingent product of interactions at a particular time and place.⁸

Reading Columbus

Christopher Columbus’s act of writing to the Crown to announce the Discovery was an event almost as momentous as the act of discovering itself. Not only did his letter make the fact of the historical event known to others, but the very future of the enterprise depended on how it was represented to those who were in the position to decide its fate.

Like writing, reading has consequences, and our thoughts today about Columbus’s first voyage are at least as much the result of how the Columbian texts were read as of the manner in which they were written. This essay considers the earliest readings of Columbian writing through a comparative lens, focusing on two versions of the announcement of the Discovery. Both were presumably written by Columbus, although, as I note below, that is a matter of some debate. The dispute over the actual authorship of these versions aside, however, the significant variations between the two texts suggest that one constitutes a reading of the other, an emendation of the original scriptural act that created a new and different image of the Discovery.

Of course, not every act of reading literally constitutes a new text. But reading is always, if only in a metaphorical sense, a rewriting. As readers, we privilege certain aspects of the text, repress others, misunderstand some, and perhaps on occasion even understand only too well the story before us. Readings are, in any case, always in creative tension with the text. In underscoring the generative quality of the act of reading, my purpose is to explore the role reading has played in the writing of the history of the Discovery.

As the Diario of the first navigation tells it, on 14 February 1493, in the midst of a life-threatening storm, Columbus wrote to Ferdinand and Isabella, announcing the Discovery. He sealed the letter inside a barrel, along with a note asking whoever found it to deliver it to the sovereigns unopened, with the promise of a substantial reward if the instructions were followed; he then tossed the barrel overboard to the fate of the wind and the waves.¹ Given the raging storm and the fact that Columbus had not yet sighted any land, although he calculated that he was sailing in the vicinity of the Azores, the composition of this letter seems more an act of desperation than of premature optimism. On 4 March he wrote to the king of Portugal and to the Spanish sovereigns again. According to the Diario, Columbus had managed to find his way to tranquil waters in the mouth of the Tagus River on that day, and both letters were apparently posted overland.

Two other letters, both dated 15 February 1493, also announcing the Discovery, have been ascribed to Columbus. One was addressed to Luis de Santángel, the other to Rafael (Gabriel) Sanchez. Both these men were officials of the Crown of Aragon who had been instrumental in facilitating the Columbian enterprise. Neither of these letters, however, are mentioned in the Diario, and the