by David Boyle
Columbus was emerging from history again as a semireligious symbol in his own right, a savior who brought his own kind of Advent moment for the world by his discovery. Columbia was adopted as the name of the administrative district around the new capital city of the United States, and in 1819 revolutions in Latin America led to a new republic of Great Columbia, incorporating modern Ecuador, Venezuela, and Panama.
By then, there were historians on both sides of the Atlantic delving into the details of the real story of Columbus and his discoveries. In Spain a former naval officer named Martin Fernandez de Navarette was asked by King Carlos VII to track down some of the documents that had been sold by Luis Colón, and to piece together the full story. The writer Washington Irving, author of The Legend of Sleepy Hollow, met him in Spain, was asked to translate some of his work, and used it as the raw material for the four-volume Life and Voyages of Christopher Columbus, which was published in 1828 and made his name.
It was hard work. When the naturalist Alexander von Humbolt traveled widely in North and South America two generations earlier, he said he could find not a single stone to commemorate Columbus. When the young Roman Catholic priest Giovanni Mastai-Ferretti did the same shortly afterward, he agreed: no statues, no memorials, nothing. Two decades later the doors to the U.S. capitol in Washington, D.C., depicted scenes from Columbus’s life, and the young priest had become Pope Pius IX and was starting the process to make Columbus a saint. This bid limped on for three decades before it finally collapsed—not because of the slaughter that had happened as a result of his discovery, or any of the other ugly rumors of brutality, but because he was not married to Beatriz de Harana when Ferdinand Columbus had been conceived, and because he had diverted the reward money to her when it should have gone to the man who first sighted the New World in 1492.
Spain had also failed to erect any statue to Columbus for the first 350 years after his landfall, but marked its four-hundred-year anniversary by unveiling enormous monuments in Seville, Barcelona, Huelva, Salamanca, and Madrid. The Spanish government also designed and built replicas of the Santa Maria, the Niña, and the Pinta as a present for the American people.* Chicago won the chance to host a massive exhibition and it opened on May 1, 1893, in the presence of President Grover Cleveland and Columbus’s heir, the Duke of Veragua, on 664 acres next to Lake Michigan, with forty buildings and 24 million visitors. It was the largest crowd—or so they claimed at the time—in the history of the world.
The rediscovery of Columbus in the United States meant a corresponding drop in Vespucci’s reputation. Although there was no friction between Columbus and Vespucci in their lifetimes, those who were brought up on Washington Irving were irritated that Vespucci’s name appeared to have been given to their continent. “Strange . . . that broad America must wear the name of a thief: Amerigo Vespucci, the pickle dealer at Seville,” wrote Ralph Waldo Emerson, “whose highest naval rank was boatswain’s mate on an expedition that never sailed, managed in this lying world to supplant Columbus and baptize half the earth with his own dishonest name.”
Vespucci’s reputation remained high in Italy, and particularly in Florence. In 1719 a tablet was erected on the Vespucci mansion there that referred to Vespucci as the “Amplifier of the World.” It was also Italian historians who began to rescue his reputation. The idea that The Four Voyages was a forgery waited until 1879 even to be suggested. The case was not considered proven until the Florentine historian Alberto Magnaghi tackled the subject in 1926, though even as late as 1955 some biographers were still assuming Vespucci actually wrote it himself. If Vespucci had not claimed to have discovered America, it was time to look more closely at his life, and historians have been doing so ever since.
John Cabot’s reputation was more difficult to recover because he had been almost entirely forgotten, partly because his son Sebastian seems to have edited him out of the narrative. A copy of the original patent to Cabot, the basis of the English claim to North America, hung on the wall in Whitehall Palace in Queen Elizabeth’s day, but the careers of father and son became confused and soon the only known portrait of Sebastian was confused with his father too. It hung in Whitehall Palace in the reign of James I, and survived the fire which burned down the palace in 1698, but not the one that destroyed the Pennsylvania home of the congressman, lawyer, and author Richard Biddle in 1845. The confusion continues to this day. The Canadian post office used the portrait of Sebastian Cabot on stamps in 1997 to commemorate his father’s achievement. Even in 2006 a major exhibition in Seville attributed the 1497 voyage to Sebastian.
By 1897, the fourth centenary of Cabot’s landfall, scholars had begun to reconstruct his story, and a steady stream of documents began to come to light that added details to the story, culminating in the peculiar discovery of the John Day letter to Columbus in 1956, filed wrongly under “Brazil” in the Spanish archives. Just as Florence became the center for preserving the memory of Vespucci, so Bristol and Newfoundland became centers for remembering Cabot.
In Canada the leaders of the English community looked at the Columbus exposition in Chicago in 1893, jealous about the apotheosis of Columbus as a fearless, modern, and freedom-loving hero. They had been searching for some similar hero of their own to counter this growing nationalism from the United States. Moses Harvey, the pastor of the Presbyterian church in St. John’s, Newfoundland, urged the Royal Society of Canada to claim Cabot as its founder and to celebrate him in the same way. “As surely as Columbus pioneered the way in the South,” he wrote, “did the Cabots open a pathway to a far nobler civilization in the North.”
The man he wrote to, the society’s secretary, Samuel Edward Dawson, was skeptical about whether Cabot had even landed in Canada—Newfoundland was at that time not part of Canada—but he soon became the most enthusiastic advocate. “The English tongue was heard, of all the languages of Europe, the first upon this great continent,” he wrote. But this was inflammatory in a nation with sizeable French and Italian populations, who firmly believed that it was Verrazzano and Cartier who were the founding navigators of their nation.
Three decades later, when the first Fascist party cell was formed in Montreal, they decided to hold a competition to encourage Italian Canadians to have pride in their Italian heritage.* The result of this, a decade later, was a statue of Cabot, forged in Florence and unveiled in Montreal in 1935. The Italian Canadian newspaper L’Italia celebrated with the headline HALF OF THE WORLD WOULD BELONG TO ITALY IF WE WERE TO CLAIM ALL THE LAND DISCOVERED BY ITALIANS.
But while Cabot was becoming a symbol of Italian achievement for Italian Canadians, he remained a symbol for the Canadian establishment of their different origins to the superpower south of the border. The United States had their founding heroes already, and had no need of symbols of staunch English values in Canada. But Cabot has more recently, and more oddly, become a symbol of Protestantism. Cabot was not English and he may have died before the word “Protestant” was even coined. Yet because he was not Columbus, and sailed from a country that would in one short generation be officially Protestant, he has been hailed more recently in North America as the hero of those who see themselves as struggling against Roman Catholic conspiracies to defend American life. To this day, the main source of information on the Internet about Cabot’s life is on a maverick Protestant Web site.
For the English, on the other hand, Cabot became in the twentieth century a comforting reminder of their own status as underdogs. Cabot had been marginalized by Columbus, just as Britain had been sidelined by the United States. His memory dovetailed neatly with the postwar mood of lost empires and economic recession. It also reinforced a link with Canada that had been strengthened by two world wars, and a memory that Cabot had probably sacrificed his life to build that link. In 1947, 450 years after Cabot’s landing, a new model of Cabot’s ship the Matthew, built to replace the one destroyed in the heavy wartime bombing of the city and docks, was unveiled in Bristol, and Bristol Cathedral was filled for the occasion wit
h leading members of the Canadian armed forces. “Let us leave this cathedral, with all its historical association long before and long after John Cabot set sail,” said the dean, Harry Blackburne, “with the thought in our hearts and minds that, God willing, we too will serve.”
The most recent centenary was celebrated with new replicas of the Santa Maria, the Niña, and the Pinta—still moored near Palos—and of the Matthew, now moored in Bristol, but regularly traveling around the United Kingdom and Ireland and sometimes beyond. Expo 92 in Seville was the equivalent of the Chicago exhibition a century before, next to the river in Seville and including the site of the monastery that contained Columbus’s second tomb.
Newfoundland, only part of the Canadian union since 1949, seized the initiative for the 1997 anniversary, announcing that the celebrations of Cabot’s 1497 landing would be held there in June. The Matthew replica repeated the journey in forty-six days, arriving at Bonavista, Newfoundland, which was the official landing site chosen for the celebrations. On June 24, the Matthew was joined by a flotilla of nearly a hundred other boats, with Queen Elizabeth II and Prince Philip aboard one of them.
The difference between the end of the nineteenth century and the end of the twentieth is that Columbus has become a far more controversial figure in the Americas, just as the whole concept of “discovering” a continent that was already peopled has become more dubious. Columbus has been emerging as the very opposite of the enlightened “Columbia” and instead as a symbol of imperial presumption and oppression. Venezuela has renamed Columbus Day (October 12) as the Day of Indigenous Resistance. Columbus’s statue was pulled down in Caracas in 2004. When Brazil celebrated the five-hundred-year anniversary of the arrival of Cabral in 1500, thousands of landless farmworkers and members of Brazil’s indigenous tribes arrived at the same time, marching to Porto Seguro. They found the road blocked and were attacked by police with batons, tear gas, and rubber bullets, injuring 30 and arresting over 140. The discovery of the evidence of the cruelty of the Columbus brothers on Hispaniola given to Bobadilla, published for the first time in 2006, is likely to further undermine his reputation.
The truth is that all three figures, Columbus, Cabot, and Vespucci, remain symbols of different kinds of nationalism, depending on taste, all now deeply complex, so much so that it is still hard to get through all the layers to the truth. With some notable exceptions historians stick to their national icons without straying too far into the lives of their rivals, while the historical figures become political symbols that shift into different shapes for each generation.
Brazil was settled by the Portuguese, so it was Cabral’s arrival they celebrated, partly because he was Portuguese and partly because the evidence that Vespucci sailed along the coast a year earlier is not absolutely clear-cut. One of the few places left in the world that celebrates the arrival of Vespucci is the island of Bonaire, in the Netherlands’ Antilles, but even here Bonaire Day (September 6) every year is as much a political festival and an assertion of national unity for a tiny island as it is historic. Perhaps the depth of confusion and symbol is inevitable, if Francisco López de Gómara was right, and the accidental arrival of Europeans in America was indeed the most important event since the birth of Christ. And maybe it was.
10
THE MEANING OF THE NEW WORLD
“New islands, new lands, new seas, new peoples; and, what is more, a new sky and new stars.”
PEDRO NUNES, Treatise of the Sphere, 1537
“In discovering America, Europe had discovered itself.”
J. H. ELLIOTT
IN HIS SPARE moments between negotiating with Charles V in the Burgundian city of Bruges in 1515, the future chancellor of England, Thomas More, was writing what would probably be his most influential book. In just over two decades, he would be lying in prison awaiting execution for defending the rights of Ferdinand’s daughter Catherine of Aragon against her husband, but for now he could afford to be a little satirical. He told his friend Erasmus that he had dreamed he was king of an island called Utopia. As he wrote up the result of this dream, he spent some time in the nearby city of Antwerp—the city that was replacing Florence as the European financial center—a new city spectacularly taking shape before his very eyes.
His Utopia is an island off the New World, shaped like an enormous crescent exactly the same size and on the same latitude as England, with a principle city remarkably like London, but with at least one massive difference: In it there is no greed or pride. The streets are laid out in a sensible grid. The men and women dress alike and eat communally. Like Vespucci’s Indians, they have no private property. They have never heard of Christianity and there are also no lawyers. More also imagines that there is no need for money, and safes are never locked. It is a place where there is so much gold that it is made into chamberpots and chains for slaves, and, when foreign ambassadors arrive in gold chains themselves, the Utopians mistake them for servants.
The story begins outside the brand new Antwerp Cathedral, where he sees a friend talking to a sunburned stranger with a long beard and cloak, who is introduced as a Portuguese traveler named Raphael Hythlodaeus. He describes him as a former shipmate of Vespucci’s, who had gone with him on his last three voyages “of those four that be now in print and abroad in every man’s hands.” Like everyone else, More had devoured the forged letter of Vespucci to Piero Soderini.
Utopia was and still remains an ambiguous book. More was a humorist and was using this imaginary place to make fun of the people, institutions, and mores of those around him. He was making serious points about the way society ought to be managed. Utopia was originally called The Best Condition of Society. But he also set out to confuse and lampoon his readers. More occasionally hints that Hythlodaeus has made Utopia up, just as it was beginning to be agreed that Vespucci had made up some of his famous Four Voyages, and that Mundus Novus was not quite the whole truth about the discovery of America. The first of Vespucci’s four voyages in that letter definitely never happened, and the fact that not even Hythlodaeus had been on that voyage may have been More’s way of saying that he knew at least some of the real facts.
Just twenty-three years after Columbus’s discovery, and eighteen years after Cabot’s, the New World was entering into the imagination of European thinkers and reformers. It is the habit of idealists to grasp the next frontier, in geography as in technology, and proclaim that this time it will all be different. Europe may have sunk their own continent in a confusion of corruption and hypocrisy beyond unraveling, but there was a New World where humanity might have a fresh start.
The history of the Americas from the moment of discovery contains this same strand of idealism, from Columbus’s excitement at the innocence of the Tainos to Vespucci’s wonder at their simplicity, and the literature about the noble savage ever since. America, and especially revolutionary America, was born with this sense of hope for new beginnings and rational, tolerant social arrangements.
There were two problems with this. One was that the idealization of America by the European humanists meant that they blinded themselves to the complexity and diversity of what America actually was. The other problem was that the European settlement of America, the great project of the 1490s that led to the link between old and new worlds, was born out of a business venture. It was intended as profit-making, and it was monstrously profitable, though without benefiting those who took the original risk. It was a business proposition that gave Columbus and Cabot their edge. Other pioneers might have stumbled on the coastline across the Atlantic before they did, but Columbus and his colleagues had worked out a way to profit from it personally.
Then, tragically perhaps, what began as a business proposition for an equal trading relationship with the Asian powers—hence Columbus’s letters of supplication to the Great Khan—ended with an unequal relationship with a continent that looked unowned, and seemed very much more like plunder. “License my roving hands, and let them go / Before, behind, between, above, below,”
wrote the English poet John Donne a century after Columbus’s death, in his great seducer’s elegy. But he then characterizes the victim of his seduction like this:
“O my America! my new-found-land,
My kingdom, safeliest when with one man manned,
My mine of precious stones, my empery,
How blest am I in this discovering thee!”
Historians will always debate how much the events described in this book were inevitable, but given the shape of the planet, there was bound to be a time when the mariners of Europe became so advanced in their technology and their conceptual thinking that they stumbled across America. The ferment of the end of the fifteenth century, and the burgeoning trade, with ships fifty times the size of the little Matthew plying their wares along Europe’s politically complicated coasts, probably determined that it had to happen around the time it did. That was when Europe began to look westward and away from the advancing Turks and the closed markets of the East. If it had not been Columbus, Cabot, and Vespucci who set out the shape of the world to the west, it would have been one of their contemporaries, and history would now celebrate the names of Dulmo, Corte Real, or Fernandez the labrador instead. It could have been Martin Behaim, an equally complex character, both as well and as badly connected as Columbus.
“It is even a mortal question whether the two worlds would not have been far happier had they remained forever unknown to each other,” said the great French Columbus scholar Henry Harrisse. But the possibility really doesn’t arise. No alternative future was possible.
But the way that the Americas were colonized by Europe, while it was highly likely, may not have been absolutely inevitable. The fact that this colonization came about as an unexpected side-effect of a failed business plan, one which had to produce a profit—and its failure to do so—may at least have sped up the plunder. But these are marginal, almost theological, questions. The relationship between the old world and the new developed in the way it did partly because of the need for profit, but largely because Europe was driven by a similar motive. The innocent, hopeful, idealistic America was inevitably pushed aside by the seducer’s because that was the way Europe was. Only in Vespucci’s encounter with the “giants” of Curaçao do we get a glimpse of a more equal relationship that might have been.
