The Age of Discovery

Peter C. Mancal

Figures

"[B]ecause I know you will take pleasure in the great victory that Our Lord has given me in my voyage, I write this letter to inform you of how in twenty days I reached the Indies with the fleet supplied to me by the most illustrious King and Queen, our Sovereigns, and how there I discovered a great many islands inhabited by people without number." So began the published version of Columbus's letter to Ferdinand and Isabel, the so-called Barcelona Letter of 1493, in which the mariner went on to report--still in the first paragraph--that he had not only "discovered" new lands but named them: San Salvador, Santa Maria de Concepción, Ferrandina, Isabella, Juana Island, "and so to each a new name." ¹

Europeans devoured news about Columbus's voyages; the Barcelona Letter went through perhaps 20 editions by 1500. ² Over the course of the sixteenth century, the news about the feats of the conquistadores and other Europeans who traveled to the Americas spread throughout Europe. By the end of the eighteenth century, after hundreds of thousands of Europeans had moved to colonies in the Western Hemisphere, no less an authority than Adam Smith pronounced the "discovery" of America a turning point in world history. In the 1840s, Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels agreed about the significance of Columbus's discovery, seeing the event as crucial for opening "up fresh ground for the rising bourgeoisie." ³

But if Columbus's achievement attracted rapt audiences at the time and was, in retrospect, a defining moment in the history of the world, the Europeanization of the Americas was not inevitable. The renaming of islands in the Caribbean did not mean that Europeans already controlled them. Similarly, information alone did not necessarily translate into a yearning to colonize the Western Hemisphere. Many Europeans were already familiar with lurid travel accounts such as those circulating about Mandeville's fantastic trips, with their depictions of the half-beast, half-human denizens who resided beyond the fringes of Europe. ⁴ Schooled in such fantasies, few Europeans were eager to establish overseas colonies. Nor did information about America quickly reshape the way that Europeans looked at the world around them. As late as the 1630s one character in an English travel play expressed the common fear of what existed in the tropics, in "the Antipodes" [End Page 26] beyond the so-called "burnt zone." To travel to such places was to go "beyond the line of madness." ⁵

Modern historians have done much to explain how Europeans overcame their fears about the world beyond their borders. Ever since the late eighteenth century scholars have analyzed the initial European forays to North America, seeing in the age of discovery the logical starting point for American history. Nineteenth-century writers often venerated Columbus and the explorers who followed in his wake. Though many historians demonstrated little interest in the subject for much of the twentieth century, the 1992 quincentennial of Columbus's first voyage--and a growing awareness of the potential contributions of scholars in fields such as literary criticism and archaeology--led to an outpouring of new work on American history before 1607. This new work on what we might term the "long" sixteenth century, running from 1492 to the establishment of English colonies in mainland North America during the early seventeenth century, has deepened our knowledge of the forces that led Europeans across the Atlantic Ocean and the consequences of their decision to establish colonies in the Western Hemisphere.

The new work needs to be set into its proper historiographical context. After all, the age of discovery had many chroniclers who left to posterity written records of the events that transformed the Atlantic world during the long sixteenth century. To understand this period, we need to read the texts and pictures of those who observed the process of discovery, as well as modern accounts. There was no "American" history before 1492 but instead separate, if often overlapping, histories of hundreds of distinct peoples on each side of the Atlantic basin. The renaming of the Western Hemisphere to honor the Florentine navigator Amerigo Vespucci did no justice to the indigenous peoples of these continents, but that act of renaming did signify the beginning of a new age.

I

Ever since the American Revolution, historians have recognized the connections between the history of the nation and the age of discovery. Much of the historical work was straightforward, with a focus on the exploits of Columbus and those who followed. Jeremy Belknap offered the common view of the late eighteenth century. Addressing the Massachusetts Historical Society in October 1792, Belknap summarized the crucial points. "[I]n the space of thirty-six days, and in the forty-fifth year of his age, Columbus completed a voyage which he had spent twenty years in projecting and executing," he declared, "a voyage which opened to Europeans a new world; which gave a new turn to their thoughts, to their spirit of enterprise and of commerce; which enlarged the empire of Spain, and stamped with immortality the name [End Page 27] of Columbus." ⁶ Belknap's ode to the admiral fit a post-Revolution world which had only recently come to appreciate Columbus himself. By 1791 Americans decided to name their capital after him and the iconographic figure Columbia reigned supreme in allegorical illustrations of the nation. ⁷

During the nineteenth century, the age of discovery became a standard part of the histories of the United States. Columbus and those who followed in his wake might have concentrated many of their energies on territory that never became the United States, but in the hands of George Bancroft or Justin Winsor the conquistadors' exploits still took pride of place at the start of what came to be known as American history. ⁸ The popularity of some of these works was incredible: Washington Irving's biography of Columbus, for example, appeared in almost two hundred editions according to one recent estimate and translations spread the word in eight languages. ⁹

The Columbus who emerged from these works was a heroic figure of the first magnitude. The appeal of that Columbus, along with that of the explorers who followed in his wake, did not disappear in the twentieth century. Charles McClean Andrews began his monumental administrative history of the British colonies in North America with a chapter on the sixteenth-century expeditions of discovery. ¹⁰ Soon after, Samuel Eliot Morison began his campaign to create a Columbus suitable for the twentieth century. To do so, he promoted the image of a brave and tireless leader bent on advancing civilization. Perhaps this is not surprising since Morison felt, as his biographer noted, a "spiritual closeness" with Columbus; Morison even went so far as to claim, after traveling to read volumes from Columbus's library, that he felt like "Columbus, Jr., coming home." ¹¹ Morison, imbued with the patriotic fires of some nineteenth-century historians, was obsessed with Columbus; he even organized a Harvard expedition to reenact the admiral's voyage. Why go to this trouble? Perhaps because he was consumed with the notion that the discovery and Europeanization of America was a good thing. "Never again may mortal men hope to recapture the amazement," he declared in his biography of Columbus in 1942, "the wonder, the delight of those October days in 1492 when the New World gracefully yielded her virginity to the conquering Castilians." ¹² Yet Morison also thrilled to Columbus's feats because he shared the religious arrogance of the long sixteenth century. "To the people of this New World," he wrote in 1974, "pagans expecting short and brutish lives, void of hope for any future, had come the Christian vision of a merciful God and a glorious Heaven." ¹³

Yet other than Morison, most historians by the mid-twentieth century paid little attention to either Columbus or anything else that took place before 1607. Despite the heroic efforts of historians such as David B. Quinn, whose studies of the sixteenth century have provided crucial material for all scholars [End Page 28] of the period, the age of discovery was moribund, at least to professional historians. ¹⁴ Though scholars interested in aspects of early American culture could turn to major works of synthesis such as Howard Mumford Jones's O Strange New World (1952), by the 1960s most historians interested in early America tended to examine the issues relating to the formation and maintenance of communities in seventeenth- and eighteenth-century North America rather than the period before 1607. The dearth of interest in the age of discovery was evident in the lack of articles on the topic in the pages of the William and Mary Quarterly, the leading journal of early American history. From the mid-1940s to the mid-1960s, the journal ran 315 articles; of these, four articles--accounting for approximately 1.3 percent of the total--covered topics in the fifteenth or sixteenth centuries. ¹⁵ The lethargy continued after the 1960s; the journal published only a handful of articles on pre-1607 topics during the 1970s and 1980s. ¹⁶ Book publishing followed a similar path. One 1989 bibliography of early American history devoted little space to the age of discovery. In a volume in which most pages are crowded with citations, the editors listed only 24 titles in this section and left blank at least one-third of a page. ¹⁷ The lack of scholarly activity on this age perhaps contributed to the lamentable sections on the age of discovery in many college-level textbooks, ¹⁸ and to the virtual disappearance of the sixteenth century from at least one major anthology of early American texts designed to reach a market well beyond the walls of the academe. ¹⁹

Although the field demonstrated few outward signs of life, a new era of scholarship on the long sixteenth century began to emerge in the early 1970s when historians delineated the ways that the encounter with the Americas had changed life in Europe. In The Old World and the New, 1492-1650, originally delivered as the Wiles Lectures at Queen's University, Belfast in 1969, J.H. Elliott argued that the impact of America on Europe went beyond political and material benefits. "Between 1492 and 1650 Europeans had discovered something about the world around them," he concluded, "and a good deal more about themselves." ²⁰ While Elliott concentrated on the cultural consequences for Europeans of the first phase of colonization, Alfred Crosby, Jr.'s The Columbian Exchange (1972) focused on the biological exchanges of the post-1492 world. Though people figured in this account, Crosby emphasized the transfer of disease-bearing microbes and domesticated livestock from Europe to America, as well as the movement of American plants (such as potatoes and maize) to Europe. In his view, the movements of these entities were as important as any of the economic or political consequences of the encounter. The reawakening of interest in the period was evident when papers delivered at UCLA in February 1975 were edited by Fredi Chiapelli and published in two volumes as First Images of America: The [End Page 29] Impact of the New World on the Old (1976). These volumes included contributions from scholars from a wide range of disciplines, including geography, politics, the visual arts, science, migration, mythology, theology, language, and book culture. Soon after, David B. Quinn published a five-volume collection of documents, New American World: A Documentary History of North America to 1612 (1979). By the mid-1980s, the benefits of this new interest in the sixteenth century were clear when historians offered sophisticated assessments of relations between English colonizers and non-English peoples. ²¹

Yet these works, no matter how powerful, had less impact on scholarly tastes than the approach of the quincentennial. Much of the work that appeared shortly before or after 1992 was aimed less at scholars than at a general audience. ²² For example, Carlos Fuentes's The Buried Mirror was but one of many works that had more to do with personal reflection--"a search," in his words, "for the cultural continuity that can inform and transcend the economic and political disunity and fragmentation of the Hispanic world"--than with advancing historical scholarship. ²³ In a similar vein, Paolo Taviani's biography of Columbus offered a filiopietistic homage to the "genius" of the Italian renaissance and its most famous offspring. ²⁴ The Smithsonian's exhibit entitled "Seeds of Change" revealed another dominant theme of 1992. The project's creators intended to reveal, in the words of Herman Viola, the "biological transformations begun in 1492." ²⁵ Curiously, the organizers of
the exhibit and book claimed that this was "not a story of the discovery of the New World by the Old World" but, instead, "a story of the encounter of two branches of humankind that had diverged from each other over tens of thousands of years of cultural development." ²⁶ As such, this collection is an odd monument: a "commemoration" of the encounter that paid little attention to Columbus. ²⁷ A monumental exhibit at the National Gallery of Art went further: as Simon Schama noted, only one object out of 569 in the "Circa 1492" show had a clear connection to Columbus himself, a distinctive element of a display that was "the curatorial equivalent of a Malcolm Forbes party." ²⁸ One element of these exhibitions--the perceived necessity to dethrone Columbus from his historical pedestal--came through more powerfully in what might best be termed the anti-Columbus literature of the early 1990s. Gone from these accounts is Morison's benevolent admiral, replaced by a man whose actions in the Indies initiated the European-guided destruction of the American environment as well as the genocide and enslavement of the native peoples of the Caribbean basin. ²⁹

If attacking Columbus dominated some of the literature of the quincentennial, some historians took a different tack altogether. Their writings of that period were less focused on the fact of the "discovery" of America in 1492, or even the multiple early modern encounters of Europe and America, [End Page 30] than on the notion of "discovery" as a process that could be found throughout the American experience. No less an institution than the venerable Journal of American History led the charge. Though many of the essays in a special December 1992 issue of the journal entitled "Discovering America" were excellent, the collection sent a distinct message: in late twentieth-century America, the process of discovery can be applied to many things (such as the discovery of "the American idiom" through analysis of language and usage in the nineteenth century), but it is by no means the sole possession of either Columbus or the long sixteenth century. Although some of the contributors paid attention to the period before the Revolution, the sixteenth century had no chair at the great national feast of historical discovery. If Columbus's exploits had "by custom" defined "the beginning of our national narrative," as Frederick Hoxie wrote in his introduction to the issue, ³⁰ such events had less obvious appeal to scholars gathered together to issue one of the defining statements of the quincentennial. ³¹

As various scholars have complained, much of the work generated for the quincentennial proved to be disappointing. "Columbus was mugged on the way to his own party," the historian Kenneth Maxwell lamented. In his view, 1992 turned out to be, in terms of scholarship about Columbus's world, "curious, diverse, and singularly unenlightening." ³² Anthony Pagden, one of the preeminent historians of the early modern period, took a harsher stand. The public "commemorations, celebrations, and commiserations" of 1991 and 1992 were, he wrote, "only intermittently" about "the historical record"; the best efforts of historians to explore the period were, he contended, overwhelmed by a more powerful cultural imperative, the need to understand "the current condition of the Western-European conscience." ³³

But these complaints, though astute appraisals of some of the non-scholarly literature and hucksterism of the quincentennial, should not be taken as a sign that serious historical work did not emerge in the early 1990s. Many historians offered significant contributions to our understanding of the long sixteenth century. Among this group is Felipe Fernández-Armesto, whose Columbus (1991) is the best biography now available on the admiral; combined with his earlier work on pre-1492 expeditions, anyone interested in understanding the admiral and his world can be satisfied. ³⁴ Scholars also explored Columbus's thoughts in remarkable depth, and the publication of new editions of his writings opened up further possibilities for exploring his enigmatic character. ³⁵ Other historians also traced the connections between the peoples of the Atlantic basin. John Thornton, for one, has revealed the contributions of Africans to the creation of the early modern Atlantic world. ³⁶ Several scholars have offered penetrating interpretations of the indigenous peoples of the Caribbean and their reaction to the European invasion. ³⁷ And a [End Page 31] number of scholars--among them Inga Clendinnen, Sabine MacCormack, Anthony Pagden, and James Lockhart--have made historians aware of the rich potential of extant sixteenth-century sources and the benefits of taking a broad approach to the Europeanization of the Western Hemisphere. ³⁸ Taken together, these works show how Europeans came to gain control over the Americas. In their view, epidemic disease, sporadic warfare, and an ability to organize the labor necessary to create profitable overseas economies all contributed to the rise of European power in the Western Hemisphere. ³⁹

The scholarship of the quincentennial era has established a new paradigm. Nineteenth-century historians were interested in the heroic aspects of European expansion (a trend which faded with the passing of Morison); historians of the late twentieth century have been much more concerned with what is now routinely termed the "encounter" between the peoples of Europe, Africa, and the Americas. ⁴⁰ The basic lesson of much of the scholarship of the quincentennial period is obvious; wherever Europeans went, their impact on the native peoples of the Americas was catastrophic. Europeans unwittingly transported death-dealing pathogens that caused epidemic disease to spread throughout much of the hemisphere. Those diseases, in combination with sporadic warfare, reduced the population of Native American Indians by approximately 90 percent between 1500 and 1800. ⁴¹ The threat to Indians went beyond the physiological assault. When Europeans arrived in the Americas, many were bent on taking from the natives anything that had worth in Europe, especially gold and silver. Along with the plunderers came missionaries, many of them aghast at the actions of their fellow Europeans, but all of them nonetheless convinced that the natives needed to be freed from the thralldom of their heathen customs. ⁴² And, finally, when European colonizers crossed the Atlantic to create overseas outposts, they brought with them domesticated livestock previously unknown in the Americas; the animals often thrived, but their search for food threatened the dietary needs of native peoples. ⁴³ The bodies, souls, and lands of Indians were all under siege. If the Europeans later termed this an "age of discovery," it was reckoned by Native Americans as an age in which the discovery was destruction. No wonder that the colonial historian John Murrin has referred to the colonists as "beneficiaries of catastrophe." ⁴⁴ Few other peoples in the history of the world had suffered an apocalypse like the one that consumed the indigenous population of the Americas. ⁴⁵

Yet side by side with accounts of the tragedies befalling the Americas have come other works demonstrating how the encounter provided challenges and opportunities to early modern Europeans. This was, after all, an age of discovery in the widest possible sense; what was learned during this epoch changed the world as it had existed on both sides of the Atlantic Ocean. [End Page 32] Columbus's journey was only one of the crucial political and intellectual developments of an age that also witnessed the invention of printing and the religious shocks unleashed by the Reformation. ⁴⁶

The notion of discovery as an expansion of intellectual and cultural horizons constitutes one of the most important contributions of modern historians to our understanding of the long sixteenth century. Of equal importance is the growing recognition that there was no single act of discovery. Instead, as the historian James Axtell has pointed out, this was an "age of mutual discovery." ⁴⁷ Columbus's landfall marked a decisive moment, to be sure, but it was one of many encounters that took place when Europeans landed in America and, to a lesser extent, when Native Americans arrived, as a few did in the sixteenth century, in Europe.

To speak of "discovery" as a single act is to miss the point; each group involved in the encounter--each European nation, each American nation--drew its own conclusions about the nature of the other. The Mayans' experience of the encounter was very different from the experience of the Aztecs or the Incas. ⁴⁸ When the Spanish moved into North America, their experiences in northern New Spain differed from Florida to the territory they named "New Mexico." ⁴⁹ When the Dutch, the Swedes, the Finns, and the English joined the French and the Spanish in North America, each tried to understand Indians from their own perspective; each native group they encountered from the Iroquois and Hurons in the north to the Choctaws and Cherokees in the south, did the same thing. ⁵⁰ What is more, the arrival of Europeans in the Americas led to such far-reaching changes that, as the historian James Merrell put it succinctly, the Indians too inhabited a "new world": new societies formed in North America in response to the forces unleashed after 1492. ⁵¹ Overall patterns emerge in the literature, to be sure, but the diversity of responses reveals the persistence of local distinctions. The same point could be made about individuals; a spate of recent biographies suggest, when taken together, that the encounter held very different meanings for the people involved. ⁵²

Some of those individual Europeans involved in the encounter had a desire to do more than learn about the Western Hemisphere: they wanted to possess it. They thus collected American artifacts, and occasionally native peoples as well, as Columbus and some of his followers did. Literary critics, anthropologists, historians, and museum curators have recently argued that this lust for possession bordered on the fetishistic, a yearning to own and display anything that could reveal a direct, tangible connection to the Americas. The possessor of an artifact could revel in the reflected glory heaped upon him or her by those who came to observe the marvellous. When crowds gathered in Spain and Portugal to see Taino men and women whom Columbus had [End Page 33] captured and transported back across the ocean, or when English courtiers traveled to see natives from Newfoundland brought to Europe almost a century later, each individual European man or woman who went to bear witness to the moment had a direct connection to the age of discovery, a tangible link to what the organizers of one quincentennial museum show termed the "new world of wonders." ⁵³

The historical literature, as it exists, thus presents a crucial paradox: the "discovery" of the Americas by Europeans proved an enormous boon to the invaders at the same time that the "encounter" brought to the shores of the Western Hemisphere an unending string of catastrophes, one after another, rolling through native communities. Though historians have recently demonstrated concern that we pay attention to specific encounters between specific peoples, it is difficult to ignore the fact that the human costs of the encounter seemingly spread everywhere in the Western Hemisphere. ⁵⁴ When America's native peoples "discovered" Europeans, it was a fatal encounter. The Dominican missionary Bartolomé de Las Casas might have exaggerated when he claimed that Spaniards fed natives into a "human abbatoir," but there is no doubt that the European conquests of the sixteenth century soaked the landscape in blood. ⁵⁵

II

The achievements of recent scholars of the age of discovery have been significant, but there are still many questions to be asked. Clues to what can be found in the future lie in the well-trod territory of the past: the historical literature generated during the long sixteenth century. As scholars of literature, particularly the new historicists, have emphasized, these texts were produced in particular societies at specific times. Each text needs to be understood within its larger ideological, political, cultural, and economic context. As the literary critic Stephen Greenblatt has contended, "[w]e can be certain only that European representations of the New World tell us something about the European practice of representation." ⁵⁶ Greenblatt and others who have looked at these texts have made a crucial point: historians need to view such material less as a statement of observed reality than as a projection of the author's views. ⁵⁷

Though we must be cautious when approaching specific works, these texts nonetheless provide vital access to the history of the Americas, for both natives and newcomers. The challenge of understanding the age of discovery is not simply to recognize the biases in the sources but to use texts in a critical way to get at the underlying historical reality. ⁵⁸ What follows here is an analysis of some of the extant writings, with a particular focus on the historical work generated during the long sixteenth century. [End Page 34]

The arrival of Europeans had an immediate impact on the native peoples of the Western Hemisphere, and almost as quickly influenced prevailing conceptions of the past. Native chroniclers' visions of the conquest were replete with tales of savage acts undertaken by brutal, greedy, and arrogant Spaniards. "The Broken Spears," a tale of Cortez's assault on the heart of Moctezuma's empire, depicted Spaniards defrauding Aztecs, melting down Aztec religious icons to get gold, and murdering and dismembering native men and women gathered together in a temple. ⁵⁹ Other documents from the sixteenth century, such as the magnificent Florentine Codex, contain testimony from native observers whose views were recorded by European witnesses to the conquest. These texts provide details about indigenous practices as well as views of the conquest from the perspective of the invaded. Some of these indigenous sources have been published in recent years, often translated into English. On the issue of the encounter, these sources concur: the arrival of Europeans brought death, displacement, sorrow, and despair to Native Americans. ⁶⁰

By contrast, Europeans' histories of the encounter tended to enumerate the material profits to be gained from colonization. Thus Peter Martyr D'Anghiera, a chronicler of Spain's early sixteenth-century expeditions, implored King Charles (in the words of an Elizabethan translator), to "embrace this new worlde" so full of riches: "from hence . . . shall instruments be prepared for you, whereby al the worlde shalbe under your obesiance." ⁶¹ The accounts of explorers who traveled to the Americas were intended to prod reluctant monarchs to pursue the conquest and colonization of the Western Hemisphere. The author known only as P. Erondelle translated Marc Lescarbot's history of New France from French into English in 1609 because he recognized the benefits that this history could have in shaping public policy toward America. Erondelle emphasized that the English should embrace the mission of converting America's natives to Christianity and establishing colonies. Such an act, he claimed, would be "pleasing to God" since it would lead to "the saving of millions of soules" and, he added, the well-being "of Great BRITAINE, (over populous) doth require it." ⁶² John Wolfe's decision to translate John Huigen van Linschoten's Discours of Voyages into ye Easte & West Indies into English in 1598 went further. Wolfe translated not only Linschoten's treatises concerning Spanish and Portuguese explorations, but also a "most true & exact Summarie of all the Rents, Demaynes, Tolles, Taxes, Imposts, Tributes, Tenths, Third pennies, and generally all the Revenues of the King of Spayne, arising out of all his Kingdomes, Lands, Provinces and Lordships." Why include such accounts in a work of history? Because Wolfe believed that the translation of the entire work, which runs to 462 folio pages, would be "not onely delightfull, but also very commodious for our English [End Page 35] Nation." ⁶³ English translators offered detailed narratives and meticulous accounts not to provide antiquarian detail but, instead, as a further goad to the Queen and her servants.

Such histories did not simply appear in Elizabethan England; those who possessed the time and ability to translate a work into English had to be sure that the effort would be worthwhile. Though it is impossible to know if any of these translators were motivated by a desire for individual profit, some did their work because they were paid or encouraged by a single individual: the younger Richard Hakluyt. By the end of the century Hakluyt emerged as the greatest English chronicler of English overseas expansion, a gatherer and editor of documents who believed that the publication of historical sources was necessary for the survival of the realm. In addition to arranging for the translation of works into English and providing incentive to other writers, ⁶⁴ Hakluyt also left behind, in the two editions of his Principal Voyages, the most extensive collections of historical accounts gathered until that time. ⁶⁵ Europeans had been traveling abroad for centuries--the well-publicized journeys of Marco Polo and Mandeville were only the most famous of the records left by earlier explorers--but the only rival for Hakluyt was the Venetian civil servant Giovanni Battista Ramusio. During the mid-sixteenth century Ramusio published a massive three-volume collection of accounts, known collectively today as Navigationi e Viaggi. The third volume, published in Venice in 1556, included the writings of men who had traveled across the Atlantic--Oviedo, Cortez, Cabeza de Vaca, Verrazzano, and Cartier. ⁶⁶

To be sure, not all histories of the Western Hemisphere had explicit political purpose. Chapters on the Americas that appeared in geographies of the world were often brief descriptive overviews with no apparent political agenda. ⁶⁷ Ramusio's volumes were not linked to any Venetian attempt to establish overseas settlements, nor was Giralamo Benzoni's Historia Del Mondo Nuovo (1572) connected to any expansionary plans of the Milanese. Linschoten offered some details about events in Florida but, as he wrote, "because my meaning is not to recite histories, I remit the reader to the bookes which make mention thereof." But if Linschoten intended only to provide information to European readers, his descriptions of the geography, natural resources, and customs of local natives meant that his ethnography was, in fact, a historical text, an attempt to describe a place at a specific time. ⁶⁸

All historical works, it could be argued, had at least some political intent. Take, for example, one of the most popular works, judging from the number of times that it was translated and reprinted: José de Acosta's Historia Natural Y Moral De Las Indias, first published in Seville in 1590. ⁶⁹ The translator of the volume into English made no direct claims in his dedication of the book to his patron, no overt statements that this history would somehow advance the goals of the nation. But since the translator's patron was the Viscount [End Page 36] Cranbourne, one of the Queen's advisors, it is unlikely that the publication of the English version in the early seventeenth century was meant only to expand knowledge for its own sake. Acosta took into account the "causes and reasons" of the "novelties and wonders of nature" so evident in the territory conquered and peopled by the Spanish. He aimed to explore both natural history and the "histories of the antient Indians, and naturall inhabitants of the New World." In Acosta's mind, this type of dual history, evident in his title, served a goal larger than the expansion of a particular European ruler's claims. "To conclude," Accosta wrote, "the scope of this work is, that having knowledge of the workes of nature, which the wise Author of nature made, we may praise and glorifie the high God, who is wonderfull in all things and all places. And having knowledge of the Indians customes, we may helpe them more easily to follow and persever in the high vocation of the Gospel; to the knowledge whereof, the Lord would draw this blinde nation in these latter daies." But there was more. "Besides al these things," Acosta added, "every one may sucke out some profit for himselfe; for that the wise do alwaies draw forth some good out of the smalest subiect, as we finde deepe Philosophie in the least and basest creatures." ⁷⁰

"To sucke out some profit," as Acosta put it, was the goal of Europeans, as is evident in extant historical writings, but historical writing had another aim: history became a tool which Europeans used to integrate an outpouring of new information into already existing mental universes. Surviving historical literature is crucial for understanding the inner worlds of Europeans struggling to make sense of a universe that did not exist before 1492. That literature reveals that Europeans were not, for most of the sixteenth century, ready to cast off inherited notions about the nature of the world and its peoples. Columbus was unable, at least at first, to sail beyond what the historian Valerie Flint has termed his "imaginative landscape": the set of ideas derived from antiquity that described the world. ⁷¹ As J.H. Eliot noted, Europeans had to learn how to observe the territory they entered; how to describe what they saw for others to read; how to disseminate those texts within Europe; and, most difficult of all, especially for the vast majority of Europeans who lacked first-hand experience in the Americas, how to comprehend what the texts meant. ⁷² These processes continued unevenly during the sixteenth century, though not for lack of effort. Even Acosta recognized the extent of scholarship on the topic: "this new World be not new, but old, in respect of the much which hath beene written thereof." ⁷³

III

The histories written and collected during the sixteenth century provided textual authority for readers. They constituted the first step in the accumulation of knowledge about the Western Hemisphere. But another sort of [End Page 37] authority emerged in texts that contained illustrations, as many did. These histories provided their readers with specific images of the Americas, an addition to knowledge that might have been especially valued in societies where literacy was far from widespread. Here, too, historians can profit from the work of numerous scholars--such as Anthony Grafton, Gloria Deak, Hugh Honour, and Simon Schama--who have subjected early modern visual images to extensive analysis. ⁷⁴

Most common among illustrations from the age of discovery were maps, which adorned works published in England, France, Italy, Spain, and elsewhere. Many historians have interpreted these images, noting that maps were political creations--efforts by European nations to legitimize their claims to American territory. ⁷⁵ Mapmakers had multiple goals when they provided these images. Some wanted to establish a right to territory, demarcating land under the control of specific nations. Others sought a different way to authenticate a stake: by providing drawings of European dwellings, especially forts or churches dotting the landscape, cartographers made tangible claims of the actual presence of colonists on the ground. The 1609 French edition of Lescarbot's Histoire contained pictures of vessels sailing to a small European outpost in Brazil as well as a larger map of Port Royal, the first French settlement in Nova Scotia; this latter map depicted a variety of French dwellings, including at least two churches as well as various imported armaments. ⁷⁶ Why include such a picture? Because such images conveyed notions of stability and security, tangible signs that the era of discovery had evolved into an age of colonization.

By contrast, Linschoten's 1598 account included a large map of South America and the Caribbean, with parts of the Yucatan Peninsula and south Florida tucked into one corner. This image taught a different meaning than Lescarbot's: in Peru, Chile, and Brazil, Europeans had begun to make inroads but there was still much work to be done. This map named countless rivers draining into the ocean that had yet to be explored. It also depicted natives hunting or at war, including, in one small vignette, two natives chopping up a third, apparently aiming to grill the victim on an open fire. Cartography thus became an adjunct of history--a visual depiction of a place at a specific time, with cartouches intended to suggest the progress of the colonizing project. Each image conveyed a message: to map a place was to know it; to know it was to own it. The brilliant Renaissance polymath John Dee took this point to its logical extreme. On the reverse of a manuscript map of the northern hemisphere he drew for Queen Elizabeth in 1580, he provided a rationale for England's ownership of territory stretching across the north Atlantic. ⁷⁷

Not all writers and publishers were quick to realize the potential contribution [End Page 38] of illustrations to their works. Neither the 1555 nor the 1577 English editions of Peter Martyr's work included a map or any other visual image meant to depict the topography, resources, or peoples of the Western Hemisphere. Nor did many versions of Acosta's history of the Indies, even though the specific ethnographic detail offered by Acosta--and the fact that he wrote much of it while he lived in Peru--might have made this volume a logical book for pictures. Lewes Roberts's splendid The Merchants Mapp of Commerce (1638) contained a map of the world and of each continent, but no illustrations to accompany his descriptions of the commodities to be found in particular places. ⁷⁸ And printers of Pietro de Cieza's chronicles of Peru were inconsistent; some included pictures while others did not. ⁷⁹

But many works did include illustrations. The most significant images were those that purported to depict the natural resources of the Americas or native communities. André Thevet's Les Singularitez de la France Antartique (1558) included depictions of plants and animals indigenous to the Americas, as well as depictions of natives, invariably naked, busy at myriad tasks--drinking, fighting, or engaging in cannibalism. ⁸⁰ Benzoni's La Historia Del Mondo Nuovo similarly offered images of naked or partially clad natives using a canoe, sleeping in hammocks, tending the sick, making bread, drinking and regurgitating wine, dancing, and worshipping the sun. ⁸¹ The illustrations that accompanied a 1586 edition of Jean de Léry's account of Brazil depicted natives in postures typical of barbarians--naked, warlike, eager to sever heads--but the images also showed natives weeping in mourning, a vital sign that they were capable of emotions that Europeans would have deemed proper. Perhaps the most important image in this edition depicted the arrival of Europeans (see illustration one), an encounter that prompted demons to either flee Brazil or try anew to work their ways on the natives. A man or woman who picked up the book did not need to know Latin, the language of the text, to understand the meaning of the image. ⁸²

Illustrations had enormous impact on the publishing projects of Ramusio and Theodor de Bry. Ramusio adorned texts such as Oviedo's natural history with illustrations of natives at work, as well as local flora such as a stalk of corn (maize) and a pineapple. Ramusio's double-page maps of cities at Cuzco and Hochelaga revealed crucial distinctions between community formation and architectural styles among America's native peoples. ⁸³ The most famous surviving images from the sixteenth century are contained in the various editions of de Bry's America series. These volumes provided his audience, the literate and the illiterate, with many depictions of America's native peoples, including images based on White's paintings from Carolina and Jacques Lemoyne de Morgue's from Florida. ⁸⁴ From "The History of the Mexican Nation, described in pictures" in Samuel Purchas, Purchas His Pilgrimes (London, 1625). Courtesy of The Library Company of Philadelphia. Hakluyt, that great promoter of colonization who recognized the specific [End Page 39] [Begin Page 41] contribution of historical writing to territorial expansion, was inconsistent in his use of illustrations. Many of his own works were pictureless. Nonetheless, he was responsible for having de Bry transform John White's watercolors of Roanoke into suitable illustrations for the 1590 edition of Thomas Harriot's A Briefe and True Report of the New Found Land of Virginia. This edition became perhaps the most important travel account for the Elizabethans. Hakluyt's decision to include not only depictions of Carolina Algonquians but also White's imaginative renderings of the Picts--the legendary inhabitants of ancient Scotland--demonstrated the real potential of including illustrative materials in any historical or ethnograhic account of the sixteenth century. Harriot and Hakluyt made explicit what other European promoters took for granted: cultural evolution could take place over time and could be best discerned through visual images. The famous transition of the Picts into the English set the precedent. Even those who could not read but who viewed de Bry's portraits of New World natives realized that America's native peoples could also become civilized, as virtually every European promoter of colonization claimed. The proof was in the pictures. ⁸⁵

The illustrations in historical works of the long sixteenth century lend themselves most obviously to interpretations of those who made the images. Given the reliance of European artists on existing conventions relating to such matters as the appearance of bodies, no one who looks at depictions of America's indigenous peoples should forget that all artistic representations had to be filtered through the eye and hand of the artist. De Bry's engravings of John White's paintings of Carolina Algonquians resembling figures from classical antiquity are perhaps the most famous examples of this phenomenon, but they are hardly unique. De Bry was one of many European artists whose depictions of America's natives demonstrated he was unable or unwilling to cast off inherited wisdom. ⁸⁶

Depictions of American territory and American natives often shared space with pictures of flora and fauna. Europeans were fascinated by the natural resources of the Americas; as Purchas put it in 1613, the Western Hemisphere was properly called the "new world" in part because it contained a "World of new and unknowne Creatures, which the olde World never heard of. . . ." ⁸⁷ One of the most magnificent volumes from early seventeenth-century England, John Parkinson's The Theater of Plantes (1640), is a lavishly illustrated compendium of useful information about the seventeen "tribes" of plants in the world, many of them found only in the Americas. To read this volume now is to become aware again how important America's resources were to Europeans' understanding of the natural world. Medicines to cure all sorts of diseases--even plants, such as West Indian balsam, that could "preserve youthfullnesse"--had economic and social value on both sides of the Atlantic. ⁸⁸ [End Page 41]

Europeans' depictions of American territory, people, and natural resources provide clues about those who made them; they also yield real insight into the native peoples of the Americas. Since we possess relatively few images from native artists from before 1492, the illustrations adorning the works of European descriptions of the Americas can, if used critically, document actual circumstances. Perhaps the best example of modern historians using European-crafted images to explore native history can be found in America in 1492, a splendid collection of essays put together by the Newberry Library. Taken out of their European context and put into a native framework, these images provide access to the ways that natives organized their communities and celebrated their rituals; how they hunted and fished and farmed; how they dressed and cared for their children and fought and tended to the bodies of the deceased. ⁸⁹ Though such images need to be used with care--the repetitions of scenes of cannibalism in many sixteenth-century works, for example, were plagiarized artistic contrivances and not renderings of actual events--their potential is nonetheless great.

By the early seventeenth century, visual materials produced by Indians began to reach a wide audience. In 1625 Samuel Purchas published a four-volume collection known as Purchas His Pilgrimes, a work that included what he termed "The History of the Mexican Nation, described in pictures." These pictures, known today as the "Codex Mendoza," depict the history of Mexico from the founding of Tenochtitlan in 1325 (according to the Europeans' reckoning) until the conquest of Moctezuma's Aztecs in 1521. ⁹⁰ In addition to the political narrative and an enumeration of the types of tribute that outlying towns paid to the capital city, the images reveal local customs, such as how the Indians educated their children, how natives traded with each other, and the punishments meted out to those who transgressed the law. As Purchas put it, the pictures depict "their private and publike rites from the grave of the wombe, to the wombe of the grave." In spite of the sheer volume of materials Purchas had assembled, which included maps from around the world, it is no wonder that he referred to these images as "the choisest of my Jewels." ⁹¹ Of the works published during the age of discovery, this 50-page chapter is among the most startling; in the canon of works in English available at the time, it is a stunning recognition that the sources of history can be found in visual images left by peoples who were not literate in the ways that Europeans normally valued.

Many of the pictures in Purchas's collection depicted historical events in the lives of the natives of Mexico. But the more powerful images were those that showed how Indians actually lived. The inclusion of the image revealing drinking customs (see illustration two) had multiple meanings. Most obviously, it showed that the natives had specific rules requiring the consumption of alcohol; those who broke the rules were to be executed. This lesson taught [End Page 42] [Begin Page 44] the English viewer that the Mexicans held views at odds with those of Europeans, most of whom drank vast quantities of alcohol. ⁹² But the lesson went further. By demarcating the rules that allowed some to drink and forbade others, and combining this lesson with other native regulations concerning adultery, this image forced its viewers to acknowledge that Indians possessed a moral system. The English might have recoiled in horror at the rules themselves, but at the same time they had to recognize that this was a depiction of an orderly society governed by its own rules. The burden of colonizers was not to bring these natives out of the woods but, instead, to replace what the English termed "savage" ways with European manners and laws.

Purchas's illustrations and others from the period all convey a sense of the past impossible to grasp through text alone. Strip away the Europeanizing glosses and the pictures become a memento mori of a lost world, a world obliterated by the processes unleashed during the age of discovery.

IV

"Now are wee shipped for the New World, and for new Discoveries." So wrote Purchas in the introduction to materials he had gathered, many from Hakluyt, in his first collection of travel accounts, Purchas his Pilgrimage in 1613. ⁹³ Though it is impossible to know the exact number of copies printed that year, sufficient demand existed for a second edition of Purchas's collection the following year, for a third edition in 1617, and for a fourth edition in 1625, the same year that he brought out the four-volume work (the one containing the Codex Mendoza) with an almost identical name. The reprinting and expansion of such works testified to great appetites among those who read English for works dealing with the world beyond Europe.

European interest in America was not limited to England. Across Europe, books that dealt with the Western Hemisphere, many of them histories or descriptive accounts of indigenous peoples and natural resources, came flying off the presses. ⁹⁴ These works were published in London and Paris and Seville and Venice--the most logical places--and in every other country with a printing press. Knowledge about the Americas, confined to a small number of authors in the decade following 1492, exploded over the course of the sixteenth century. In 1601 alone, 73 authors published works that dealt, at least to some extent, with the Western Hemisphere. That year Abraham Ortelius used three different presses in Antwerp to produce versions of his Theatre of the world in French, Latin, and English. In 1625, 179 separate authors (some of them anonymous) published works that had some American content, and these books emanated from presses across Europe: Barcelona, Rome, Naples, Strasburg, Basel, Rostock, Amsterdam, Oxford, Lisbon, [End Page 44] Valladolid, Frankfurt, Rouen, Madrid, Toulouse, Edinburgh, Naples, Leyden, Ingolstadt, Halle, Ulm, Lyons, The Hague, Cologne, Cadiz, Padua, Utrecht, Augsburg, Milan, Stockholm, and Pisa. ⁹⁵ Many historians might reject the Eurocentrism that lay at the heart of Edmundo O'Gorman's notion that Europeans "invented" America, but few can deny that European readers sought to consume all available information about the Western Hemisphere. ⁹⁶

The sources for exploring the "age of discovery" have continued to be abundant since then, and have even expanded in recent years. The publication of the volumes of the massive bibliography European Americana dealing with the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries allows scholars to identify the location of every known work produced in Europe that had at least some American content; these volumes are useful tools not only for identifying particular books but also for analyzing elements of the early modern publishing industry. Many of the most significant historical writings from the age of discovery--including the work of Columbus, Cortez, Las Casas, Léry, Oviedo, and the French royal cosmographer André Thevet--are available in modern editions, though the work of other major figures (notably the Hakluyts, Purchas, and Ramusio) can normally only be found in research libraries. ⁹⁷ And other types of sources are now being subjected to inquiry by those who seek to describe the sixteenth century. Historians can consider not only printed works from European presses but also other types of artifacts from the past: native codices chronicling Indian customs and ways; archaeological analysis of buildings, sculptures, and trash pits ⁹⁸ ; folklore embedded in oral testimony that stretches back hundreds, perhaps thousands, of years. ⁹⁹

Recent historical work, taken together, has made three crucial contributions to American history. First, no scholar in the future will presume that sixteenth-century European impressions of American Indians are necessarily accurate; each text needs to be assessed as the product of peoples eager to conquer the Americas. Second, the native peoples of the Americas can no longer be seen as mere victims but, instead, should henceforth be interpreted as historical agents facing specific circumstances. Third, the sources for future histories of the American sixteenth century will more explicitly derive from many cultures, including the many cultures of Europe. Even historians of early English America will need to pay attention to clues to be gleaned from texts in various European languages as well as indigenous codices and oral histories. Historians also need to pay attention to the clues lurking in visual images. ¹⁰⁰

The subject matter, then, is more considerable than it was for earlier generations of historians. It now encompasses internecine squabbles and warfare in four continents (North and South America, Europe, and Africa) and the impact of those internal struggles on an emerging Atlantic world. [End Page 45] Future work will also need to take seriously the epic religious battles of the age of discovery, not only between Catholics and Protestants, but between Christendom and Islam, especially the Ottoman Empire, as well as the long, relentless war on Native American and African religions. ¹⁰¹ Such work will allow us to see beyond the superficial prejudices of this era--when Purchas could claim that the teachings of Spanish missionaries were "but a jest and shadow to get money"--and trace the relationship between devotional belief and colonizing ventures. ¹⁰²

The quincentennial of Columbus's voyage might have been the cause of much hand-wringing in 1992, but it nonetheless served as a spur to historical research. The challenge now is to go further. John Locke wrote in the late seventeenth century that "in the beginning all the world was America." ¹⁰³ It is the responsibility of historians to explore this new world as it emerged during the age of discovery.

Peter C. Mancall, Professor of History at the University of Kansas, is the author of Deadly Medicine: Indians and Alcohol in Early America (Ithaca, 1995) and Valley of Opportunity: Economic Culture Along the Upper Susquehanna, 1700-1800 (Ithaca, 1991), and the editor of Envisioning America: English Plans for the Colonization of North America, 1580-1640 (1995) and Land of Rivers: America in Word and Images (Ithaca, 1996).

Notes

Research for this essay was supported by the General Research Fund of the University of Kansas and an Andrew Mellon Foundation Postdoctoral Fellowship at the Library Company of Philadelphia.

1. For a facsimile reprint of the letter, as well as Lucia Graves' translation, see Mauricio Obregón, The Columbus Papers: The Barcelona Letter of 1493, the Landfall Controversy, and the Indian Guides (New York, 1991), 65.

2. J.H. Elliott, The Old World and The New, 1492-1650 (Cambridge, 1970; 1992), 9.

3. Quoted in Elliott, The Old World and The New, 54-55. In the words of Edmund Burke, 1492 was the beginning point when "the two worlds, if I may use the expression, were first introduced to one another; a meeting of an extraordinary nature, and which produced great changes in both." Burke, An Account of the European Settlements in America, in Six Parts, 2 vols. (London, 1756), 1: 10.

4. For the circulation of accounts, see Mary B. Campbell, The Witness and the Other World: Exotic European Travel Writing, 400-1600 (Ithaca, 1988). For the texts of Mandeville and their circulation, see Malcolm Letts, ed., Mandeville's Travels: Texts and Translations, Works Issued by the Hakluyt Society (hereafter Hak. Soc.) 2nd Ser., 101-02 (London, 1950).

5. Richard Brome, "The Antipodes," in Three Renaissance Travel Plays, ed. Anthony Parr (Manchester, 1995), 297.

6. Jeremy Belknap, A Discourse, intended to commemorate the Discovery of America by Christopher Columbus (Boston, 1792), 25.

7. As Thomas J. Schlereth has noted, the late eighteenth century witnessed the change in the name of King's College to Columbia (in 1784), Columbia became the state capital of South Carolina (in 1786), an American ship captain laid claim to the Columbia River (in 1792), and the national capital acquired the name Territory of Columbia (in 1791). See Schlereth, "Columbia, Columbus, and Columbianism," Journal of American History 79 (1992): 937-41.

8. George Bancroft, History of the United States, 23rd ed., 10 vols. (Boston, 1866-1875), 1: 5-73; Justin Winsor, Narrative and Critical History of America, 8 vols. (Boston, 1884-1889), vols. 1-3.

9. Schlereth, "Columbia, Columbus, Columbianism," 943-45.

10. Charles McLean Andrews, The Colonial Period of American History, 4 vols. (New Haven, 1934), 1: 1-26.

11. Gregory M. Pfitzer, Samuel Eliot Morison's Historical World: In Quest of a New Parkman (Boston, 1991), 163.

12. Samuel Eliot Morison, Admiral of the Ocean Sea: A Life of Christopher Columbus (Boston, 1942), 236. On Morison's attempt to relive Columbus's experience, see Pfitzer's reconstruction of Morison's "Harvard Columbus Expedition" of 1939-1940 in Samuel Eliot Morison's Historical World, 147-69.

13. See Morison, The European Discovery of America: The Southern Voyages, A.D. 1492-1616 (New York, 1974), 737. Stephen Greenblatt has called attention to this particular passage; see Marvellous Possessions: The Wonder of the New World (Chicago, 1991), 154, n.14.

14. See, among many works, David B. Quinn, England and the Discovery of America, 1481-1620 (New York, 1974); idem, North America from Earliest Discovery to First Settlements: The Norse Voyages to 1612 (New York, 1977); and the essays collected in idem, Explorers and Colonies: America, 1500-1625 (London, 1990). In addition to these interpretive works, Quinn was a prolific editor. For the most important works, see Quinn, ed., The Voyages and Colonising Enterprises of Sir Humphrey Gilbert, Hak. Soc., 2nd Ser., 83-84 (London, 1940); idem, The Roanoke Voyages, 1584-1590, Hak. Soc., 2nd Ser., 104-05 (London, 1955); Quinn and Paul Hulton, eds., The American Drawings of John White, 2 vols. (London, 1964); Quinn and R.A. Skelton, eds., The Principall Navigations, Voiages, and Discoveries of the English Nation by Richard Hakluyt, Hak. Soc., Extra Ser., 39a-b (Cambridge, 1965); Quinn, ed., The Hakluyt Handbook, Hak. Soc., 2nd Ser., 144-45 (London, 1974); idem., New American World: A Documentary History of North America to 1612, 5 vols. (London, 1979); Quinn and Alison M. Quinn, eds., The English New England Voyages, 1602-1608, Hak. Soc., 2nd Ser., 161 (London, 1983); and Quinn and Alison M. Quinn, eds., A Particuler Discourse Concerning the Great Necessitie and Manifolde Commodyties that are like to Growe to this Realm of Englande by the Western Discoveries lately Attempted . . . by Richarde Hakluyt, Hak. Soc., Extra Ser., 45 (London, 1993).

15. Keith B. Berwick, "A Peculiar Monument: The Third Series of the William and Mary Quarterly," William and Mary Quarterly (hereafter WMQ) 3d Ser., 21 (1964): 3-17.

16. The index for the WMQ for the period from 1959 to 1973 lists only four articles that focus on the period before 1607. From 1974 through 1988 the journal published a listing of pre-1604 voyages to the Caribbean and a reminiscence by Quinn about his career--and nothing else about the age before the establishment of Jamestown. For the listing see K.R. Andrews, "English Voyages to the Caribbean, 1596-1604," WMQ, 3d Ser., 31 (1974): 243-54. For Quinn see "Explorations and Discoveries," ibid., 45 (1988): 569-73.

17. David L. Ammerman and Philip D. Morgan, comp., Books About Early America: 2001 Titles (Williamsburg, 1989), 8-9. Later the editors present a longer list of works dealing with the colonizing experiences of the French, Spanish, Dutch, and Portuguese, but most of these books cover topics well beyond 1600; see pp. 25-27. The revised edition of The Harvard Guide to American History offered more titles, but it too was limited: the section on "The Age of Discovery" filled only 5 pages in a work that ran to 1,067 pages. See Frank Friedel, ed., The Harvard Guide to American History, 2 vols. (Cambridge, Mass., 1974), 2: 611-16.

18. See James Axtell, "Europeans, Indians, and the Age of Discovery in American History Textbooks," American Historical Review (1987), reprinted in Axtell, Beyond 1492: Encounters in Colonial North America (New York, 1992), 197-216.

19. The Encyclopedia Britannica company's The Annals of America, vol. 1, 1493-1754: Discovering a New World, ed. Mortimer J. Adler (Chicago, 1976) devotes only 20 pages to the period before 1607 in an anthology that has 526 pages.

20. Elliott, The Old World and the New, 104.

21. See, for example, Nicholas Canny, The Elizabethan Conquest of Ireland: A Pattern Established, 1565-1576 (Sussex, Eng., 1976); Karen Ordahl Kupperman, Settling With The Indians: The Meeting of English and Indian Cultures in America, 1580-1640 (London, 1980); and idem, Roanoke: The Abandoned Colony (Savage, Md., 1984).

22. See, for example, John Noble Wilford, The Mystery of Columbus: An Exploration of the Man, the Myth, the Legacy (New York, 1991); Zvi Dor-Ner, Columbus and the Age of Discovery (New York, 1991); and Silvio Bedini, ed., The Christopher Columbus Encyclopedia, 2 vols. (New York, 1992).

23. Carlos Fuentes, The Buried Mirror: Reflections on Spain and the New World (New York, 1992), 10.

24. In Taviani's words, it "was the genius of Christopher Columbus that conceived the plan of crossing the Dark Sea, opening the way for the enlargement of the world" and "Columbus was not the only genius in fifteenth-century Italy." Paulo Taviani, Columbus, The Great Adventure: His Life, His Times, and His Voyages (New York, 1991), 262-63.

25. Herman J. Viola, "Seeds of Change," in Seeds of Change: A Quincentennial Commemoration, ed. Herman J. Viola and Carolyn Margolis (Washington, D.C., 1991), 15.

26. Frank H. Talbot, "Forward" in Viola and Margolis, Seeds of Change, 9.

27. A parallel Smithsonian venture focused on the epidemiological implications of the encounter; see John W. Verano and Douglas H. Ubelaker, eds., Disease and Demography in the Americas (Washington, D.C., 1992).

28. Simon Schama, "They All Laughed at Christopher Columbus," New Republic, Jan. 6-13, 1992, pp. 30-31. The book that accompanied "Circa 1492" did a much better job in terms of confronting the place of Columbus in his age; see Jay A. Levenson, ed., Circa 1492: Art in the Age of Exploration (Washington, D.C., 1991).

29. For this literature, see Kirkpatrick Sale, The Conquest of Paradise: Christopher Columbus and the Columbian Legacy (New York, 1990); David E. Stannard, American Holocaust: The Conquest of the New World (New York, 1992); and John Yewell, Chris Dodge, and Jan DeSirey, eds., Confronting Columbus: An Anthology (Jefferson, N.C., 1992), especially the essay by Ward Churchill, "Deconstructing the Columbus Myth," 149-58. For an entire collection of writings from a non-European perspective, see Ray Gonzalez, ed., Without Discovery: A Native Response to Columbus (Seattle, 1992).

30. Hoxie, "Discovering America: An Introduction," Journal of American History 79 (1992): 835.

31. The William and Mary Quarterly, by contrast, devoted an entire issue to works relating to the period of the encounter and its existing historiography; see WMQ, 3d Ser., 49 (April 1992).

32. Kenneth Maxwell, "Adiós Columbus!" New York Review of Books, January 28, 1993, p. 38.

33. Anthony Pagden, "1492-1992: Five Hundred Years of Anxiety," essay 16 in The Uncertainties of Empire: Essays in Iberian and Ibero-American Intellectual History (Aldershot, Hampshire, 1994), 1, 2.

34. Felipe Fernández-Arnesto, Before Columbus: Exploration and Colonisation from the Mediterranean to the Atlantic, 1229-1492 (London, 1989).

35. See, among many works, David Henige, In Search of Columbus: The Sources for the First Voyage (Tucson, 1991); Delno C. West and August Kling, trans., The Libro de las profecias of Christopher Columbus: An en face edition (Gainesville, 1991); and Michael Paiewonsky's exquisite Conquest of Eden, 1493-1515 (Rome, 1991). For an excellent review of these works and others see Schama, "They All Laughed at Christopher Columbus," 30-40.

36. John Thornton, Africa and Africans in the Making of the Atlantic World, 1400-1680 (Cambridge, 1992).

37. Peter Hulme, Colonial Encounters: Europe and the Native Caribbean, 1492-1797 (London, 1986); Philip P. Boucher, Cannibal Encounters: Europeans and Island Caribs, 1492-1763 (Baltimore, 1992); Samuel M. Wilson, Hispaniola: Caribbean Cheifdoms in the Age of Columbus (Tuscaloosa, 1990); and Irving Rouse, The Tainos: Rise and Decline of the People Who Greeted Columbus (New Haven, 1992).

38. Inga Clendinnen, Aztecs: An Interpretation (Cambridge, 1991); Sabine MacCormack, Religion in the Andes: Vision and Imagination in Early Colonial Peru (Princeton, 1991); James Lockhart, The Nahuas after the Conquest: A Social and Cultural History of the Indians of Central Mexico, Sixteenth through Eighteenth Centuries (Stanford, 1992); Pagden, European Encounters with the New World: From Renaissance to Romanticism (New Haven, 1993), and idem, Lords Of All The World: Ideologies of Empire in Spain, Britain and France, c.1500-c.1800 (New Haven, 1995).

39. Ida Altman and Reginald D. Butler emphasize these common themes in their review of a group of books published in the early 1990s in "The Contact of Cultures: Perspectives on the Quincentenary," American Historical Review 99 (1994): 478-503.

40. Thus the two most significant collections of essays on the period contain much about the encounter. See Karen Ordahl Kupperman, ed., American In European Consciousness, 1493-1750 (Chapel Hill, 1995); and Stephen Greenblatt, ed., New World Encounters (Berkeley, 1993).

41. On depopulation see, among many sources, Alfred Crosby, The Columbian Exchange: Biological and Cultural Consequences of 1492 (Westport, Conn., 1972); Russell Thornton, American Indian Holocaust and Surival: A Population History Since 1492 (Norman, Okla., 1987); Verano and Ubelaker, Disease and Demography in the Americas; Daniel T. Reff, Disease, Depopulation, and Culture Change in Northwestern New Spain, 1518-1764 (Salt Lake City, 1991). There is, at the moment, no consensus the size of the pre- or post-contact native population; see John D. Daniels, "The Indian Population of North America in 1492," WMQ, 3d Ser., 49 (1992): 298-320.

42. On the cultural clash in the Americas, with particular attention to its religious aspects, see especially the work of James Axtell, notably The Invasion Within: The Contest of Cultures in Colonial North America (New York, 1985).

43. See William Cronon, Changes In The Land: Indians, Colonists, and the Ecology of New England (New York, 1983); Alfred Crosby, Ecological Imperialism: The Biological Expansion of Europe, 900-1900 (Cambridge, 1986); and Elinor Melville, A Plague of Sheep: Environmental Consequences of the Conquest of Mexico (Cambridge, 1994).

44. John Murrin, "Beneficiaries of Catastrophe: The English Colonies in America," in The New American History, ed. Eric Foner (Philadelphia, 1990), 3-23.

45. In the opinion of some observers, such historical forces continue to degrade life for American Indians. As Alvin M. Josephy, Jr. has written, "[t]he failure to recognize the coherence and humanity of Indian traditions has allowed the hemisphere's governments to persist in subjecting Indian populations to unequal treatment, gross indignities, and worse, from Canada and the United States to Guatemala and Brazil, where genocide against Indians is still widely practiced." See Alvin M. Josephy, Jr., ed., America in 1492: The World of the Indian Peoples Before the Arrival of Columbus (New York, 1992), 5.

46. As Edmund Burke wrote in the 1750s, "the invention of printing, the making of gunpowder, the improvement of navigation, the revival of ancient learning, and the reformation" all "conspired to change the face of Europe entirely." Edmund Burke, An Account of the European Settlements in America, 1: 3. See also Peter Burke, "America and the Rewriting of World History," in Kupperman, America in European Consciousness, 41.

47. Axtell, "Europeans, Indians, and the Age of Discovery," 197.

48. On the Mayans, see Nancy Farriss, Maya Society Under Colonial Rule: The Collective Enterprise of Survival (Princeton, 1984), esp. 12-114. On the Aztecs, see Inga Clendinnen, Ambivalent Conquests: Maya and Spaniard in Yucatan, 1517-1570 (Cambridge, 1987), and Aztecs: An Interpretation. On the Incas see Steve J. Stern, Peru's Indian Peoples and the Challenge of Spanish Conquest (Madison, 1982).

49. See David Weber, The Spanish Frontier in North America (New Haven, 1992); and Ramón Gutiérrez, When Jesus Came The Corn Mothers Went Away (Stanford, 1991).

50. The literature on the encounter between North American Indians and Europeans is extensive, as James Axtell has revealed in two insightful review essays: "Columbian Encounters: Beyond 1992," WMQ, 3d Ser., 49 (1992): 335-60, and "Columbian Encounters, 1992-1995," WMQ, 3d Ser., 52 (1995): 649-96. For the Hurons and Iroquois, see especially Bruce Trigger, The Children of Aataentsic: A History of the Huron People to 1660 (Montreal, 1976); Daniel Richter, The Ordeal of the Longhouse: The People of the Iroquois League in the Era of European Colonization (Chapel Hill, 1992); and Axtell, The Invasion Within. For the Choctaws, see Patricia Galloway, Choctaw Genesis, 1500-1700 (Lincoln, 1995). For the Cherokees, see Tom Hatley, The Dividing Paths: Cherokees and South Carolinians through the Revolutionary Era (New York, 1993). The different encounters reflected not only cultural differences in North America but also the fact that, as Patricia Seed makes clear, each group of Europeans had its own way of establishing a claim to North America; the diversity of approaches ranged from the reading of the Requirimento (Requirement) in Spanish colonies to actual possession of land in English settlements. See Seed, Ceremonies of Possession in Europe's Conquest of the New World, 1492-1640 (Cambridge, 1995).

51. James H. Merrell, The Indians' New World: Catawbas and Their Neighbors from European Contact through the Era of Removal (Chapel Hill, 1989).

52. See Charles Nicholl's study of Ralegh's quest for Guiana in The Creature in the Map: A Journey to El Dorado (New York, 1996); David E. Duncan, Hernando de Soto: A Savage Quest in the Americas (New York, 1995); and John Cummins, Francis Drake: The Lives of a Hero (New York, 1995). For an excellent account of disparities between individuals who traveled to America see Rolena Adorno, "The Discursive Encounter of Spain and America: The Authority of Eyewitness Testimony in the Writing of History," WMQ, 3d Ser., 49 (1992): 210-28. For biographies of Columbus, see, in addition to Fernández-Armesto's Columbus; Delno West, "Christopher Columbus and His enterprise to the Indies: Scholarship of the Last Quarter Century," WMQ, 3d Ser., 49 (1992): 254-77.

53. Rachel Doggett, et al., eds., New World of Wonders: European Images of the Americas, 1492-1700 (Seattle, 1990), a catalog of a show at the Folger Shakespeare Library in 1992. On the desire that Europeans had to own American goods, and the desire to show off captured natives, see Alden T. Vaughan's contribution to this volume, "People of Wonder: England Encounters the New World's Natives," 11-23. For the ways that Europeans conceptualized the act of possessing see Greenblatt, Marvelous Possessions, and Campbell, The Witness and the Other World.

54. See, especially, Richard White, The Middle Ground: Indians, empires, and republics in the Great Lakes Region, 1650-1815 (Cambridge, 1991).

55. Las Casas, A Short Account of the Destruction of the Indies (1542), trans. Nigel Griffin (London, 1992), 63.

56. Greenblatt, Marvellous Possessions, 7.

57. See, for example, Michel de Certeau, "Ethno-Graphy: Speech, or the Space of the Other: Jean de Léry," in The Writing of History, trans. Tom Conley (New York, 1988), 209-43, and Tzvetan Todorov, The Conquest of America (Paris, 1982; New York, 1984). Historians too have profited from the imperative to view texts in this way. See, for example, Richard White, "Discovering Nature in North America," Journal of American History 79 (1992): esp. 877-84.

58. For essays that deal with these questions, see Stuart B. Schwartz, ed., Implicit Understandings: Observing, Reporting, and Reflecting on the Encounters Between Europeans and Other Peoples in the Early Modern Era (Cambridge, 1994).

59. Miguel Leon-Portillo, ed., The Broken Spears: An Aztec Account of the Conquest of Mexico (Boston, 1962).

60. For a splendid use of such codices, see Inga Clendinnen, Aztecs: An Interpretation; for the Florentine Codex see Fr. Bernadino de Sahagún, The Florentine Codex: General History of the Things of New Spain, trans. Arthur J.O. Anderson and Charles Dibble, 13 vols. (Santa Fe, 1950-1982).

61. "The Epistle of Peter Martyr" in The Decades of the newe worlde or West India, trans. Richard Eden [Londini, 1555].

62. [Marc Lescarbot], Nova Francia: Or the Description of that part of New France which is one continent with Virginia, trans. P. E[rondelle] (London, 1609), qq^v.

63. Iohn Hvighen Van Linschoten his Discours of Voyages into ye Easte & West Indies, trans. John Wolfe (London, [1598]), A3^v-A4^r, [A1^v]. Emphasis in original.

64. See [Ferdinando de Soto], Virginia Richly Valued, translated from Portuguese by Hakluyt (London, 1609); and the accounts by Jacques Cartier in Hakluyt's Divers Voyages touching on the discovery of America (London, 1580), which Hakluyt had the linguist John Florio translate from Italian (which he found in Ramusio's collection) into English. For the influence of Hakluyt and the other principle editors of the age, see [Lescarbot], Nova Francia, qq2; Robert Ashley's epistle dedicatory to Christopher Barri's translation, Cochin-China, Containing many admirable rarities of that countrey (London, 1633), A2^v, in which he notes the work of Ramusio, Hakluyt, and Purchas; and Richard Jobson, The Golden Trade: Or, A discovery of the River Gambra, and the Golden Trade of the Aethiopians (London, 1623), 1, which acknowledges encouragement by Purchas.

65. The first collection appeared in 1589; the second, expanded version in three volumes from 1598 to 1600.

66. Giovanni Batista Ramusio, Terzo Volume Delle Navigationi Et Viaggi Nel Quale Si Contengono Le Nauigationi al Mondo Nuouo (Venice, 1556).

67. See, for example, Giovanni Botero, Relationi Universali . . . Diuise in quattro Parti, Novamente Reviste (Brescia, 1599), 345-86.

68. Van Linschoten, Discours of Voyages, 217 ff.

69. Ioseph Acosta, The Naturall and Morall Historie of the East and West Indies, trans. E. G[rimstone?] (London, 1604). Acosta's work first appeared in Spanish in Seville in 1590. In the following years many editions followed: three more in Seville in 1591; a Latin edition published in Cologne and an Italian edition published in Venice appeared in 1596; German, French, and Dutch editions appeared in 1598; and another eleven editions were published between 1600 and 1624. The popularity of Acosta's account was rare, but it was not sui generis; certain other works also struck a popular chord. See Burke, "America and the Rewriting of World History," 33.

70. Acosta, Naturall and Morall Historie, A3v and A4^v.

71. Valerie Flint, The Imaginative Landscape of Christopher Columbus (Princeton, 1992). See also, Michael T. Ryan, "Assimilating New Worlds in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries," Comparative Studies in Society and History 23 (1981): 519-38, and Anthony Grafton (with April Shelford and Nancy Siraisi), New Worlds, Ancient Texts: The Power of Tradition and the Shock of Discovery (Cambridge, Mass., 1992).

72. Elliott, Old World and the New, 17-24.

73. Acosta, Naturall and Morall Historie, [A4r].

74. Grafton New Worlds, Ancient Texts; Gloria Deak, Picturing America: Prints, Maps, and Drawings Bearing on the New World Discoveries and on the Development of the Territory that is now the United States, 2 vols. (Princeton, 1988); Hugh Honour, The New Golden Land: European Images of America from the Discoveries to the Present Time (London, 1975); Simon Schama, The Embarrassment of Riches: An Interpretation of Dutch Culture in the Golden Age (New York, 1988); Louis Montrose "The Work of Gender in the Discourse of Discovery," Representations 33 (1991), reprinted in Greenblatt, ed., New World Encounters, 179-83; Doggett, ed., New World of Wonders. For another extensive presentation of images, see the catalog of the mid-1970s French museum exhibit, L'Amerique vue par l'Europe (Paris, 1976).

75. The most extensive collection of early maps in any recently published work can be found in Seymour I. Schwartz and Ralph E. Ehrenberg, The Mapping of America (New York, 1980), especially chapters one through four. For essays interpreting early maps see Emerson W. Baker, et al., eds., American Beginnings: Exploration, Culture, and Cartography in the Land of Norumbega (Lincoln, Nebr., 1994); Karen S. Cook, ed., Images & Icons of the New World: Essays on American Cartography (London, 1996); and David Woodward, "Maps and the Redistribution of Space," in Levenson, ed., Circa 1492, 83-87.

76. Lescarbot, Histoire, pictures opposite 206 and 480.

77. "To the Queen Maiestie Title Royall to these foreyne Regions . . ." Cotton Ms., Augustus I.1.iv., British Library.

78. Lewes Roberts, The Marchants Mapp of Commerce. Necessarie for all such as shal be imployed in the publique affaires of Princes in Foraine partes. . . . (London, 1638).

79. For the inclusion of illustrations, see Pedro de Cieça, Parte Primera Dela Chronica Del Peru (Anvers: Juan Steelsio, 1554); and Pedro de Cieça, La Chronica Del Peru . . . (Anvers: Martin Nucio, 1554). For those who did not include illustrations see Pietro Cieza, La Prima Parte Dell'istoria del Peru (Venice: Appresso Andra, 1556); and Pietro Di Cieca, Cronica Del Gran Regno Del Peru (Venice: Francesco Lorenzini, 1560).

80. André Thevet, Les Singularitez de la France Antartique, Autrement Nomée Amerique, & de plusieurs Terres & Isles decouvertes de nostre temps (Anvers, 1558), 20^r (drinking), 70^r (fighting), 75^v (cannibalism).

81. Girolamo Benzoni, La Historia Del Mondo Nuovo (Venice, 1572), 5 (canoe), 8 (hammock), 55 (tending the sick), 57 (making bread), 58 (drinking and regurgitating wine), 104 (dancing), 168 (worshipping the sun).

82. Hieronymo Benzone and Ioanne Lerio, Historia Indiae Occidentalis, Tomis duobis comprehensa ([Geneva], 1586), 90, 186, 193, 218, 252, 266; the arrival of Europeans is depicted on 207. Other editions of Jean de Léry's work also include illustrations; see Historia Navigationis in Brasiliam ([Geneva], 1586), and Historia Navigationis in Brasiliam, 2nd ed. (Geneva, 1594).

83. Ramusio, Navigationi e Viaggi (Venice, 1556), 131 (corn stalk), 136 (pineapple), 411-412 (Cuzco), 446-447 (Hochelaga).

84. Theodor de Bry, Admiranda Narratio Fida Tame, De Commodis et incolarum Ritibus Virginia . . . (Frankfurt am Maim, 1590); idem, Brevis Narratio Eorum Quae in Florida Americae Provícia . . . (Frankfurt am Maim, 1591); idem, Americae Tertia Pars . . . (Frankfurt, 1592); idem, Americae Pars Quarta (Frankfurt, 1593); idem, Americae Pars Quinta (Frankfurt, 1595); idem, Americae Pars Sexta (Frankfurt, 1596).

85. A facsimile of the 1590 edition of Harriot's report was published by Dover in 1972. It should be noted that Acosta provided a corollary to this anthropological scheme. In his opinion, America's natives were once civilized peoples who, having migrated to America and thus away from contact with the old world, degenerated into barbarism; see Naturall and Morall Historie, 77-78.

86. For an analysis of this material, see Bernadette Boucher, La Sauvage aux seins pendants (Paris, 1977), reprinted as Icon and Conquest: A Structural Analysis of the Illustrations of de Bry's Great Voyages, trans. Basia M. Gulati (Chicago, 1981)

87. [Samuel Purchas], Purchas his Pilgrimage. Or Relations of the World and the Religions Observed in All Ages and places discovered, from the Creation unto this Present (London, 1613), 600-601.

88. Parkinson noted that three plants had the capacity to "preserve youthfullnesse." Of these, one (West Indian balsam) was found only in America; a second, the so-called Bezar Stone, could be found in the Americas or the Old World; and a third, myrrhe, came from Africa. See John Parkinson, Theatrum Botanicum, The Theater of Plants or An Universall and Compleate Herball (London, 1640), 1570, 1590, 1595. For earlier works that include the medicinal benefits to be derived from American plants, and which set the tone for much of Parkinson's work, see [N. Monardez], Ioyfull Newes out of the newfound world (London, 1580) and John Gerard, The Herball, or Generall Historie of Plantes (London, 1597).

89. Josephy, America in 1492.

90. For a facsimile with commentary, see James C. Clark, ed. and trans., Codex Mendoza: The Mexican Manuscript known as the Collection of Mendoza and preserved in the Bodleian Library Oxford, 3 vols. (London, 1938).

91. [Purchas], Purchas His Pilgrimes. In Five Bookes., 4 vols. (London, 1625), 3: 1066, 1065 ff.

92. Peter C. Mancall, Deadly Medicine: Indians and Alcohol in Early America (Ithaca, 1995), 19-20.

93. Purchas, Purchas his Pilgrimage (London, 1613), 601.

94. See, especially, Grafton, New Worlds, Ancient Texts; and Burke, "America and the Rewriting of World History."

95. This data is drawn from the first two volumes of the most important source for materials relating to early America: John Alden, et al., eds., European Americana: A Chronological Guide to Works Printed in Europe Relating to the Americas, 1493-1776, 6 vols. to date (New York, 1980-).

96. Edmundo O'Gorman, The Invention of America: An Inquiry into the Historical Nature of the New World and the Meaning of Its History (Bloomington, Ind., 1961).

97. See, for example, Hernan Cortes, Letters from Mexico, trans. and ed. Anthony Pagden (New Haven, 1986); Jean de Léry, History of a Voyage to the Land of Brazil, Otherwise Called America, trans. Janet Whatley (Berkeley, 1990); Bartolomé De Las Casas, A Short Account of the Destruction of the Indies, trans. Nigel Griffin (London, 1992); Roger Schlesinger and Arther P. Stabler, eds., André Thevet's North America: A Sixteenth-Century View (Kingston and Montreal, 1986); Antonio Pigafetta, Magellan's Voyage: A Narrative Account of the First Circumnavigation, ed. R.A. Skelton, 2 vols. (New Haven, 1969). Edward Grimestone's 1604 English-language version of Acosta, The natural and moral history of the Indies, was republished as Hak. Soc., 1st Ser., 60-61a (London, 1880). Purchas's most substantial collection, originally published in 1625, was reprinted in 20 volumes (Glasgow, 1905-1907). Many of the Hakluyts' writings have been edited and published by the Hakluyt Society; the most important of these works are E.G.R. Taylor, ed., The Original Writings and Correspondence of the Two Richard Hakluyts, 2 vols., Hak. Soc. 2nd Ser., 76-77 (London, 1935); Taylor and Quinn, Principall Navigations, Voiages, and Discoveries; and Quinn and Quinn, Discourse Concerning Western Planting. A facsimile edition of Hakluyt's Divers Voyages Touching America, originally published in 1580, was published in Amsterdam in 1967. Ramusio's work, published in facsimile (3 vols., Amsterdam, 1967) has been republished (ed. Marica Milanesi, 6 vols., Rome, 1978-1986); parts have appeared in English over the past four hundred years, but the entire collection has never been published in an English language edition.

98. See, for example, Linda Schele, The Blood of Kings: Dynasty and Ritual in Maya Art (New York, 1986); Galloway, Choctaw Genesis; and Peter Nabokov and Robert Easton, Native American Architecture (New York, 1989).

99. See Josephy, America in 1492; and Peter Nabokov, ed., Native American Testimony (New York, 1979).

100. For an extraordinary example of such careful analysis of visual images, see Louis P. Masur, "Reading Watson and the Shark," New England Quarterly 67 (1994): 427-54.

101. Thus the history of sixteenth-century Ireland, for example, becomes crucial to understanding the experience of English efforts to colonize North America; see especially Nicholas Canny, "The Marginal Kingdom: Ireland as a Problem in the First British Empire," in Strangers Within The Realm: Cultural Margins of the First British Empire, ed. Bernard Bailyn and Philip Morgan (Chapel Hill, 1991), 35-66. For English views of Islam, see one notable contemporary example: Richard Knolles, The Generall Historie of the Turkes, ([London], 1610).

102. Purchas, Purchas his Pilgimage (1613 ed.), 749.

103. John Locke, Two Treatises of Government, ed. Peter Laslett (Cambridge, 1960), 319.

http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/reviews_in_american_history/v026/26.1mancall.html.