Columbus read Ailly with the burning intensity of an autodidact who discovered in the Cardinal’s writings nothing less than the divine path to truth. The margins of the Admiral’s copy of Imago Mundi, which survives today in Seville’s Biblioteca Colombina, are covered with almost 900 separate annotations by Columbus on matters of theology, geography, and history. Africa, he notes, is half the size of Europe—and south of the equator the days are only 12 hours long. Chinese people in small boats have drifted across the Atlantic to Europe, including a man and a woman who have turned up in Ireland. “Aristotle [says] between the end of Spain and the beginning of India is a small sea navigable in a few days.” Other ancient authors are called upon who allegedly say the same or similar things, all of which indicate to Columbus that the earth is small and that India and China can be reached rather easily by sailing west. Alongside these temporal if fanciful observations are comments on Scripture, along with calculations for determining when the Muslims finally will be destroyed and when to expect the arrival of Antichrist.4
It was through the exploration of sources such as this, apparently in addition to lengthy conversations with Franciscan monks who were convinced that the end was near, that Columbus figured out to his satisfaction precisely when the Second Coming would occur. He did this through a kind of simplistic biblical numerology he had worked out, but he also knew it from the historical signs that were all around him.5 Failure as well as success always has been absorbed easily into the all-embracing chiliastic logic of those convinced that the millennium is at hand; even contradictory evidence is interpreted so that it leads to the same desired conclusion. Thus, the obstinate resistance of the Jews to conversion, like the alarming successes of the Muslims in Turkey, were only part of God’s great plan, his testing of the Christians—the inevitable dark before the dawn—Columbus thought. Conversely, the even more recent expulsion of the Jews from Spain (along with the baptism of those who repented), like the fall of the Muslims at Granada, were equally clear indications that a new and glorious day was arising.
What was present in Columbus’s mind and marginal jottings before his departure in 1492 became a fully elaborated (if wildly confused and undisciplined) theory following the end of his third voyage in 1500, when he began compiling what he called his Libro de las Profecías—his Book of Prophecy: a scrapbook of hundreds of quotations from Scripture, from early Christian writers, and from classical authors, all purporting to demonstrate that the end of time was but a century and a half away, that the Jews and infidels and heathens throughout the entire world soon would be either destroyed or converted to Christ, and that before long the Holy Land would be recaptured. By the beginning of the sixteenth century Columbus had become certain that his voyages and discoveries had confirmed all this. Moreover, not only would each of these miraculous events soon be initiated, so the prophecies said, by the Messiah-Emperor from Spain, but the final conquests and the liberation of Jerusalem would be funded by vast quantities of gold that Columbus expected to discover either in those densely populated islands he had found lying off the coast of what he continued to think was Asia, or on the mainland of the continent itself. Indeed, for a time he thought he had discovered—with the Lord’s guidance, of course—King Solomon’s mines, and it was this gold that would launch the crusade that would bring on the end of the world. “Never was the popular image of the gold of the Indies more mystically spiritualized than on this occasion,” writes John Leddy Phelan, adding: “The discovery and the conquest of America, among many other things, was the last crusade. If Columbus had had his way, this would have been literally so.”6
But Columbus had read more than Ailly’s Imago Mundi before embarking on his famous voyages. He also had read Plutarch and Marco Polo and several other works—including Pliny’s Natural History, the earliest catalogue of the monstrous races that were said to live in distant realms, and John Mandeville’s Travels, a largely plagiarized volume of supposed reports on the Holy Land and on the monstrous races of the East, a book that also happened to be the most popular prose work of the Middle Ages.7 Columbus believed in and expected to encounter in his travels representatives of the monstrous races, just as he expected to find—and never stopped searching for—the fabled terrestrial paradise. Again, Columbus was far from alone in these assumptions. As he wrote in his letter to the king and queen while returning from his first voyage: “In these islands I have so far found no human monstrosities, as many expected,” but elsewhere he wrote that within a few weeks of his first sighting of land he had been told by some Indians that on other islands “there were men with one eye, and others with dogs’ heads who ate men and that in killing one they beheaded him and drank his blood and cut off his genitals.”8
In fact, there was no real evidence of cannibalism (to say nothing of dog-headed people) anywhere in the Indies, despite widespread popular belief to the contrary that continues to exist today, belief largely based on the fact that Columbus said the alleged man-eaters were called Caribs. Through Spanish and English linguistic corruption that name evolved into “cannibal,” and although both the more level-headed of Columbus’s contemporaries and the consensus of modern scholarship have strenuously contradicted the charge, it has stuck as a truism in the Western imagination.9 The important point here, however, is not the spuriousness of the claim that some of the natives ate human flesh, but only that Columbus and those who heard his report readily believed, indeed, needed to believe, that the charge was true. If no dog-headed people had yet actually been seen, or races without heads and with faces in their chests, or one-legged folk, or cyclopes, or other bizarre semi-human beasts, that did not mean they were not there. But for the time being rumors of some cannibals would do.
As for the terrestrial paradise Columbus knew to exist, he found it. At least he thought he did. It took awhile—six years and three long voyages—but in the autumn of 1498, while sailing along the coasts of Venezuela and Colombia and then on north to Honduras, the Admiral noticed (or so he wrote to his king and queen) that the people he observed were not as “dark” or “extremely black” as he claimed they were in other regions, “but are of very handsome build and whiter than any others I have seen in the Indies. . . . [and] are more intelligent and have more ability.” At the same time he observed that he was in the vicinity of towering mountains and fabulously powerful rivers, including the one that we now know as the Orinoco, that rushed from the mountains in powerful currents down into the Gulf of Paria. Recalling no doubt that in some traditional accounts the earthly paradise had been located atop a high mountain, which allowed it to survive the great biblical flood, and noting that “Holy Scripture testifies that Our Lord created the Terrestrial Paradise and planted it in the tree of life, and that a fountain sprang up there, from which flow the four principal rivers of the world,” the logical conclusion could not be ignored: “I say that if this river [the Orinoco] does not originate in the Terrestrial Paradise, it comes and flows from a land of infinite size to the south, of which we have no knowledge as yet. But I am completely persuaded in my own mind that the Terrestrial Paradise is in the place I have described.”10
Indeed, so extraordinary was this insight that it caused Columbus to revise his entire vision of the shape of the earth. “I am compelled,” he wrote to his royal patrons, “to come to this view of the world”:
I have found that it does not have the kind of sphericity described by the authorities, but that it has the shape of a pear, which is all very round, except at the stem, which is rather prominent, or that it is as if one had a very round ball, on one part of which something like a woman’s teat were placed, this part with the stem being the uppermost and nearest to the sky. . . . So neither Ptolemy nor the others who wrote about the world had any information about this half, for it was altogether unknown. They merely based their opinion on the hemisphere in which they lived, which is round, as I have said above.11
At this point, some modern observers have claimed, Columbus was demented, or at l
east had been at sea too long. Others have said that obviously he was looking at the island now known as Marguerite, lying at the mouth of the Orinoco, and that indeed there is on that island what German Arciniegas calls “the extraordinary mount that anyone today may see. . . . They call it María Guevara’s Teats.”12 In any case, Columbus was convinced that he had seen paradise, at least from a distance, bulging out like a woman’s breast and nipple at the top of the world. It was soon after this that he began compiling his Book of Prophecies. And when he died, just six years later, this man whose life has so aptly been described as “a curious combination of the celestial and the crass,” was laid out in the garb of a Franciscan monk and was buried in a Carthusian monastery. As it turns out, he had been deeply involved with the Franciscans for years—as the Franciscans had been deeply involved with the Inquisition for years—perhaps even was a lay member of the order, and in 1497 and 1498, “while preparing for his third voyage,” writes Leonard I. Sweet, “Columbus wore the habit of a Minorite friar, and was indistinguishable in the streets of Cadiz and Seville from his Franciscan friends.”13
Apart from his navigational skills, what most set Columbus apart from other Europeans of his day were not the things that he believed, but the intensity with which he believed in them and the determination with which he acted upon those beliefs. If most Christians at that time did not walk around wearing the robes of Franciscan monks, as Columbus did, few would have denied that the conversion of the world to Christianity (and the destruction of those who resisted) was a necessary prerequisite to Christ’s Second Coming—or that there were then present unmistakable signs that such mass conversions and mass destructions were imminent. Similarly, if most people did not cross the ocean in search of the terrestrial paradise or King Solomon’s mines, as Columbus did, few would have denied that such places probably existed in some distant, hidden realm. And if most people did not take part in slaving voyages to the coast of Africa “many times,” as Columbus acknowledged that he had done, few would have found anything morally improper in such activities.14
Columbus was, in most respects, merely an especially active and dramatic embodiment of the European—and especially the Mediterranean—mind and soul of his time: a religious fanatic obsessed with the conversion, conquest, or liquidation of all non-Christians; a latter-day Crusader in search of personal wealth and fame, who expected the enormous and mysterious world he had found to be filled with monstrous races inhabiting wild forests, and with golden people living in Eden. He was also a man with sufficient intolerance and contempt for all who did not look or behave or believe as he did, that he thought nothing of enslaving or killing such people simply because they were not like him. He was, to repeat, a secular personification of what more than a thousand years of Christian culture had wrought. As such, the fact that he launched a campaign of horrific violence against the natives of Hispaniola is not something that should surprise anyone. Indeed, it would be surprising if he had not inaugurated such carnage.
But why did the firestorm of violence turn openly genocidal, and why did it continue for so long? Why did it take the grotesque forms that it did? Why was it morally justified in the terms that it was? And why, and in what ways, were the later British and American genocide campaigns different from those of the Spanish—if at least equally destructive in the long run? The answers to all these questions must be sought in the constant interplay of Western ideologies and material realities, beginning with the initial Spanish quest for gold and for glory, proceeding from there to evolving concepts of race along with traditional notions of divine providence and sin, and then back again to the hunger and thirst for wealth and for power, sought down different paths by different European peoples on the different American continents of the north and of the south.
II
Columbus drove a hard bargain with his royal patrons. Not only did he demand a substantial share of whatever treasure he might bring back from his journey across the Atlantic horizon, he also required of them, as he noted in the prologue to the journal of his first voyage, “that henceforth I might call myself Don and be Grand Admiral of the Ocean Sea and Viceroy and Perpetual Governor of all the islands and mainland that I should discover and win.”15 Since he thought he was sailing to China and India, these were not meager titles, were he to succeed in gaining them. For Columbus, like the conquistadors to follow, was driven by various forces in his quest to discover and conquer, but during this era when individualism was sharply ascendant in European culture, few if any motives were more important than what in Spanish is called el afán de honra—“an anxiety, a hunger for glory and for recognition,” is the way one historian puts it.16
To Columbus, the Genoese ex-slave trader and would-be holy Crusader, returning to Spain with slaves and with gold and with tales of innumerable heathens waiting to be converted was the surest way to achieve such fame. Thus, within hours of landfall on the first inhabited island he encountered in the Caribbean, Columbus seized and carried off six native people who, he said, “ought to be good servants. . . . [and] would easily be made Christians, because it seemed to me that they belonged to no religion.” Bereft of religion though he thought these “very handsome and . . . very well proportioned” people to be, the Admiral was certain that they possessed gold: “I was attentive and worked hard to know if there was any gold,” he wrote during the second day of his visit, “and saw that some of them wore a little piece hanging from a thing like a needle case, which they have in the nose; and by signs I could understand that, going to the S, or doubling the island to the S, there was a king there who had great vessels of it and possessed a lot.” This was likely the island of Cipango—or Japan—Columbus thought, the fabulous place Marco Polo had written about, and he set out the next day to find it.17
And so the man who now could call himself Don moved from island to island, snaring more natives for eventual servitude, and grilling them—incoherently—as to the whereabouts of the great deposits of gold. He thought he understood them to say that on one island the people “wore very big bracelets of gold on their legs and arms.” They didn’t, and Columbus bitterly but probably correctly noted later “that all they said was humbug in order to escape.” But he pressed on, always believing that magnificent riches in gold and jewels lay just beyond the next landfall. Columbus continued to think he was quite close to the Asian mainland and that the people of “all these islands are at war with the Grand Khan” who presumably wanted from them what Columbus wanted: their precious metals and the wealth of their forced labor. Hearing what he wanted to hear in the words of a people whose language he did not understand, the Admiral “was the victim of the same psychological illusions,” one writer has observed, “that lead us to hear sweet melodies in the chime of church-bells, or to discover in the clouds familiar features or impressive images of phantastic shapes.”18
It is clear that Columbus had several purposes, none especially complex, for lusting after the gold of the Indies. Personal wealth and fame and power, of course; that is evident in everything he wrote. But there is no reason to believe he was not also sincere in his expressed desire to bring gold back to Spain in order to finance the last great crusade that would liberate the souls of all the world’s infidels and heathens ‘who were willing to convert, while at the same time crushing the bodies of those unwilling to cooperate. And, of course, there was the matter of financing the next transatlantic excursions. As Leonardo Olschki rightly puts it: “Gold represented the only profit immediately realizable of such costly enterprises, and provided the most direct means of financing an oceanic expedition in this critical epoch of Spain’s economic life.”19
There was little doubt in Columbus’s mind that with sufficient manpower, both military and ecclesiastical, he would reap with ease a vast fortune in gold and souls. Both of these godly gifts to the Admiral and to his Spanish supporters were simply there for the taking. In a letter to the king and queen dated April 9, 1493, Columbus outlined his plans for the second voyage. In
stead of the fewer than 100 men he had brought on the initial expedition, he recommended that he be allowed to transport twenty times that number “so that the country may be made more secure and so that it may be more expeditiously won and managed.” So great was the supply of gold that awaited them, and so effortless would be its collection, he believed, that he urged the sovereigns to establish on the islands magistrates and notaries to oversee what he repeatedly referred to as the “gathering” of this fabulous wealth, all of which was to be “immediately melted and marked . . . and weighed” and placed in carefully guarded chests. He also proposed that “of all the gold which may be found, one percent be reserved for the erection of churches and their furniture and for the support of the priests or friars attached to them.”20 One percent may not appear to be much, but if the Admiral’s estimate of how much gold awaited them had been even close to the truth, one percent could have paid for cathedrals.
Following the deduction for the Church’s one percent of all the gold that was gathered, and a little something for the magistrates and notaries, Columbus recommended that during the first year of Hispaniola’s colonization those who did the gathering be allowed to keep one-half of what they personally collected, the other half going to the Crown. After the first year this proportional division was to be reassessed, in light of the amount of treasure actually found. Considering the immensity of riches that awaited them, however, and “since, owing to the greed for gold, everyone will prefer to seek it rather than engage in other necessary occupations,” Columbus suggested that “during a part of the year hunting for gold should be prohibited, so that there may be on the said island an opportunity for performing other tasks of importance to it.”21
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