1. Michel de Certeau, The Writing of History , trans. Tom Conley (New York: Columbia University Press, 1988), xxv.

2. See, for example, Louis Montrose on this image in Elizabethan writing, "The Work of Gender in the Discourse of Discovery," Representations 33 (Winter 1991):1-41; Hugh Honour, The New Golden Land: European Images of America from the Discoveries to the Present Time (New York: Pantheon Books, 1975); and Bernadette Bucher, Icon and Conquest: A Structural Analysis of the Illustrations of de Bry's "Great Voyages," trans. Basia Miller Gulati (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1981).

3. Djelal Kadir's illuminating analysis of the language of the "Capitulaciones" underscores the proprietary and imperialistic motives the document described and authorized; see Columbus and the Ends of the Earth: Europe's Prophetic Rhetoric as Conquering Ideology (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1992), especially 67-76.

4. Rumeu (1126-31) speculates that the vagueness of the references to Columbus's destination in the "Capitulaciones" and other prediscovery documents may have been the product of a conscious and deliberate attempt by Isabella and Ferdinand to thwart the possibility of rival expeditions by other European monarchies.

5. I have used Las Casas's version of the text of the "Capitulaciones" which appears in volume I, chapter 33 of the Historia de las Indias . The original document, in Spanish and signed by Isabella and Ferdinand, has disappeared, but four well-authenticated early copies are described by Jane (1:27). For an English translation of the "Capitulaciones," see Jane, 1:26-29.

6. Quoted by J. H. Elliott, The Old World and the New, 1492-1650 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1970), 22.

7. Tzvetan Todorov, La Conquête de l'Amérique: La Question de l'Autre (Paris: Seuil, 1982), 48-49.

8. The following passage, from Jane's translation of the "Capitulaciones," gives a sense of the flavor of that document:

Your Highnesses appoint the said Don Christopher their Viceroy and Governor-General in all the said Islands and Mainlands which, as has been said, he may discover or acquire in the said Seas, and that for the Government of each and every one of them he may name three persons for each Office and that Your Highnesses may take and choose the one most suitable to your service, and thus the lands which Our Lord allows him to discover and acquire in the service of Your Highnesses will be better governed. Item, that of all the Merchandise whatsoever, whether Pearls, Precious Stones, Gold, Silver, Spiceries, and other Things and Merchandise of whatever kind, name, or description that may be, which may be bought, bartered, found, acquired, or obtained within the limits of the said Admiralty. . . .
(Jane, 28)

9. José Antonio Maravall explains that Columbus's act of taking possession of the islands he discovered followed the juridical formula of taking possession established in the Alfonsine texts. These texts, the most complete expression of Europe's juridico-political culture prior to the Discovery, according to Maravall, defined a territory not only as space but as a qualitative entity: To take possession of a territory implied an elaborate process of intepreting the relationship of "belonging to," of establishing a right of possession; see his Estudios de historia del pensamiento español (Madrid: Ediciones Cultura Hispánica, 1984), 2:397-99. In essence, this process is what my analysis will elucidate—that is, the terms in which the justification of the relationship of possession and domination mandated in the "Capitulaciones" is articulated in the Columbian texts.

10. Earlier, in the essay "In the Margins of Columbus," I view this phenomenon "from the margins" of the Diario , where Las Casas's criticisms of Columbus's cupidity render these passages antagonical components in a rhetoric of contraposition at the service of Las Casas's condemnation.

11. Las Casas, in his edition of the Diario , often alternates between the first- and third-person narrative voices in these passages, but this is clearly his editorial manipulation. Columbus's original text was undoubtedly narrated wholly from the first-person point of view.

12. In their translation, Dunn and Kelley (69) render "hombres, todos mançebos" as "people—all young." But when applied to a woman, the adjective manceba had a pejorative sense in fifteenth-century Spanish: "Este término se toma siempre en mala parte, por la muger soltera que tiene ayuntamiento con hombre libre" (Covarrubias, Tesoro de la lengua , 784; This term is always used pejoratively, for the unmarried woman who engages in carnal copulation with a free man).

13. The earlier portion of the passage in question reads

Y para ver todo esto me moví esta mañana, porque supiese dar de todo relación a Vuestras Altezas, y también adónde pudiera hazer fortaleza, y vide un pedaço de tierra que se haze como isla, aunque no lo es, en que avía seis casas, el cual se pudiera atajar en dos días por isla, aunque yo no veo ser

neçessario, porque esta gente es muy símpliçe en armas, como verán Vuestras Altezas de siete que yo hize tomar para le llevar y deprender nuestra fabla y bolvellos.
(Varela, 33)

And I bestirred myself this morning to see all of this, so that I could give an account of everything to Your Highnesses, and also to see where a fort could be made. And I saw a piece of land formed like an island, although it was not one, on which there were six houses. This piece of land might in two days be cut off to make an island, although I do not see this to be necessary since these people are very naive about weapons, as Your Highnesses will see from seven that I caused to be taken in order to carry them away to you and to learn our language and to return them.
(Dunn & Kelley, 75)

14. Rare is the occasion when Columbus remarks on an unattractive Indian. When he does so, as on 13 January, he concludes that the man in question must be a cannibal. Physical unattractiveness appears as an exception, significantly linked to a moral aberration: "El cual diz que era muy disforme en el acatadura más que otro que oviese visto: tenía el rostro todo tiznado de carbón.... Juzgó el Almirante que devía ser de los caribes que comen los hombres" (Varela, 114; The Admiral says that he was quite ugly in appearance, more so than others that he had seen. He had his face all stained with charcoal.... The Admiral judged that he must be from the Caribs who eat men; Dunn & Kelley, 329).

15. In the letter to the Crown dated 4 March 1493 an almost identical passage includes an additional element that the Indians lack, private property:

Todos, ansí mugeres como hombres, andan desnudos como sus madres los parió, aunque algunas mugeres traen alguna cosita de algodón o una foja de yerva con que se cubijan; no tienen fierro ni armas, salvo unas çimas de cañas en que ponen al cavo un palillo delgado agudo; todo lo que labran es con piedras; y no e podido entender que alguno tenga bienes propios.
(Rumeu, 2:437)

All of them, women and men alike, go about naked like their mothers bore them, although some women wear a small piece of cotton or a patch of grass with which they cover themselves. They have neither iron nor weapons, except for canes on the end of which they place a thin sharp stick. Everything they make is done with stones [stone tools]. And I have not learned that any one of them has private property.

As André Saint-Lu has noted, lack of clothing appears repeatedly throughout Columbus's writing as a symbol for barbarism; see his "La perception de la nouveauté chez Christophe Colomb," Etudes sur l'impact culturel du Nouveau Monde (Paris: Editions L'Harmattan, 1981), 1:11-24.

16. In a rare moment of generosity (and no doubt self-interest), Columbus qualifies his comparison of the Indians to animals: "que aunquesta gente sean desnudos y paresca al huir que devan ser salvajes y vestias, yo les çertifico [a Vuestras Altezas] que son agudísimos y huelgan de saver

cosas nuevas" (Letter of 26 February 1495; Rumeu, 2:510; although these people may be naked and seem like savages and beasts when they flee, I certify to Your Highnesses that they are very bright and they enjoy learning new things).

17. Stephen Greenblatt, Marvelous Possessions: The Wonder of the New World (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1991), 110.

18. The assertion that the Caribs are not very different from the other Indians, except for their long hair, does not mesh with an observation in the Diario that affirmed their considerable difference in appearance (13 January; Varela, 114). The apparent contradiction can perhaps be explained by the context: that here the similarity between the more aggressive Caribs and the peaceable Arawaks is noted to establish Spanish superiority with respect to both groups.

19. Aristotle, Politics, bk. 1 ch. 5, 1132, in Basic Works , ed. Richard McKeon. Claude Kappler's encyclopedic Monstres, démons et merveilles a la fin du Moyen Age (Paris: Payot, 1980) demonstrates how Aristotelian notions of difference helped define the conceptualizations of monstrosity in the Middle Ages. The medieval mind melded the Aristotelian notion with the Augustinian contribution that monstrosity found its justification in the Divine Plan, to marvel at the plurality of the universe and at the same time feel repulsed by difference as a marker of inferiority.

20. My translation, unlike Dunn and Kelley's (193-95), underscores the suggestion implicit in this passage that not carrying weapons (worthy of the name) is a function of the Indians' extreme cowardice.

21. That this process culminates in the "Relación" of the third voyage is at least partially explained by the historical circumstances. By the third voyage the enterprise of the Indies had fallen into such disrepute that in order to achieve the colonization of Española, the Crown was obliged to offer a pardon to any criminals (heretics, sodomites, and counterfeiters excepted) willing to sail with Columbus.

22. On the symbolism of gardens in classical and medieval literature, see A. Bartlett Giamatti, The Earthly Paradise and the Renaissance Epic (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1966).

23. Some scholars maintain that Columbus did not know Polo's account until he received a copy of it in 1497 from the Englishman John Day. The early Columbian texts strongly suggest, however, that the author was familiar with Polo's text, particularly with its geography, during the first and second voyages, as I argue below. The most recent proponent of the theory that Columbus was not aware of Polo's Travels until the late 1490s is Juan Gil, in the introductory essay to his edition of El libro de Marco Polo anotado por Cristóbal Colón. El libro de Marco Polo: versión de Rodrigo de Santiella . Madrid: Alianza, 1987. (Thanks to F. Provost for pointing out my oversight in the manuscript stage of this book.)

24. The quotations are from The Travels of Marco Polo (New York: Dorset Press, 1987), 290 and 296. Columbus refers to Kin-sai in the Diario entries for 21 October (Quisay) and 1 November (Quinsay) 1492 and in the Letter

of 26 February 1495 (Quisaye) (Rumeu, 2:492-93 and 510). Polo stated that the Khan resided in Cambalic. The paradisiacal-erotic associations of Kinsai may explain, at least in part, Columbus's geographic confusion in substituting Kin-sai for Cambalic as the expressed destination of the voyage.

25. As Catherine MacKinnon observes, eroticization is a primary mechanism of the subordination of women in patriarchal cultures; see her Sexual Harassment of Working Women: A Case of Sexual Discrimination (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1979), 221.

26. Gilberto Araneda Triviños argues that the anti-idyllic, antiparadisiacal vision present in the letter of the fourth voyage destroys and supplants the myth of the Indies-as-Paradise found in the earlier writings; see his ''Los relatos colombinos," Ideologies and Literature 3, no. 1 (Spring 1988): 81-96. In my reading, however, the idealizing and denigrating components are complementary operations in Columbus's interpretation of difference in a gender-specific mode. Helen Carr observes this same conjunction of the positive and the negative in the feminization of the Amerindian in colonial North American culture:

So man/woman, husband/wife, seducer/seduced, rapist/victim, can all be transferred to the European/non-European relationship and the European right to mastery made natural. Secondly, by transferring this difference, all the ambivalence towards woman's unknowable otherness can also be projected on to the non-European. So the first effect of transferral is to naturalize the desire for, and legitimize the right to, possession; the second is to provide a language in which to express the fear of the Other's incalculable potential for resisting and for damaging the would-be possessor.
(" Woman/Indian: The 'American' and His Others ," in Europe and Its Others , ed. Francis Barker et al. [Colchester, Eng.: University of Essex, 1985], 2:49)

27. See Rolena Adorno, "El sujeto colonial y la construcción de la alteridad," Revista de Crítica Latinoamericana 14, no. 28 (1988):55-68.

28. Hélène Cixous and Catherine Clément, The Newly Born Woman , trans. Betsy Wing (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1986), 79.

29. Luce Irigaray, "This Sex Which Is Not One," in New French Feminisms , ed. Elaine Marks and Isabelle de Courtivron (New York: Schocken, 1981), 105.

30. Dunn and Kelley, citing Morison, translate "y tres niños" as "and three children." That these three are not included in the count of the young and adult female "heads" suggests ''boys" as a more accurate translation. Dunn and Kelley have a tendency to opt for ungendered translations, even when the context clearly calls for distinguishing between masculine and feminine; see note 12 above.

31. The quotations are from Antonello Gerbi, Nature in the New World: From Christopher Columbus to Gonzalo Fernández de Oviedo , trans. Jeremy Boyle (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1985), 18. Gerbi himself

underscores, if only implicitly and probably unconsciously, the erotic nature of Columbian discourse, for his impressions are recorded in a sentimental mode filled with sexual allusions, which appear to have affected the English translator in his word choice: "But his [Columbus'] glance dwells lovingly on every detail of the islands.... His pen, at times so dry and energetic, now becomes a brush whose delicate strokes caress the tiny islands.... With a sort of lover's awkwardness he seeks to wax poetic, and produces a flood of warbling nightingales, blossoming springtimes, May meadows, and Andalusian nights" (17).

32. Noé Jitrik discusses the discourse of appropriation in the Columbian texts from a Marxist perspective; see his Los dos ejes de la cruz (Puebla, Mexico: Editorial Universidad Autónoma de Puebla, 1983). However, he does not perceive the fundamental role that feminization and eroticization of the sign "Indies" plays in the texts. When the issue of gender is taken into account, what at first appears as an idiosyncratic dichotomy assumes its full sociocultural significance.

My translation follows Rumeu's transcription as literally as possible, in order to recreate the awkwardness, the clumsiness that characterizes much of the original. Where the literal translation verged on incomprehensibility, I have added a word or phrase in brackets for clarification. Rumeu modernized the punctuation in his transcription, and I have followed his lead.