"All these are the Admiral's Exact Words"

Este es el primer viaje y las derrotas y camino que hizo el Almirante don Cristóval Colón cuando descubrió las Indias, puesto sumariamente, sin el prólogo que hizo a los Reyes que va a letra y comiença d'esta manera: . . .
(Varela, 15)

This is the first voyage and the courses and the way that the Admiral Don Christóbal Colón took when he discovered the Indies, summarized except for the prologue that he composed for the king and queen, which is given in full and begins this way: . . .
(Dunn & Kelley, 17)

So begins the Diario of Columbus's first voyage, a text whose importance to scholars of the Discovery and lay readers alike would be difficult to overstate. Yet there is no convincing evidence to suggest that anyone since the sixteenth century has seen the complete text of the day-by-day account Columbus himself wrote. The original manuscript, the copy of it made at Queen Isabella's request, and any other copies that may have been made have all disappeared.^[1] Ferdinand Columbus apparently worked from the original or a copy to compose his father's biography, inserting verbatim passages from Columbus's journal throughout his own account of the first voyage. Bartolomé de Las Casas produced a heavily edited summary of the text and later (just when is in dispute) borrowed extensively from it in composing the first part of his Historia de las Indias (1527-c. 1563).^[2] Columbus's diario , therefore, has reached modern readers in fragments, through Ferdinand's biography, Las Casas's history, and the latter's summary, known as the Diario , the most complete version of the original text to have survived to the present day.

For more than four centuries, access to the Discoverer's own

impressions of the first voyage has been possible only through the versions of them created by his son and, especially, by Las Casas. Both men were extremely interested readers of Columbus. Ferdinand was involved in lawsuits pertaining to the succession of the Admiralty and ransacked the diarios in order to highlight the unique and heroic nature of his father's achievements. While composing his summary, Las Casas was immersed in a lifelong political and literary campaign to defend the rights of the conquered and promote their peaceful evangelization.

At one time a colonizer of Española (Haiti) and Cuba and an encomendero who was granted an allotment of Indian laborers for service on his estate, Las Casas experienced a religious conversion in 1514, returned the Indians to the governor of Cuba, and left for the Spanish court to plead for better treatment of the indigenous peoples. Thus began his advocacy of Indian rights, to which he remained committed (some would say obsessed) for the rest of his life. Among his principal political achievements, beginning with his appointment as priest-procurator of the Indies, was his successful lobbying of Charles V's consent to establish "towns of free Indians," where Spanish farmers and natives would work together to create a new Christian society. He promoted sweeping reforms in colonial policy toward the Indians, many of which were enacted under the New Laws of 1542. He even managed to persuade the king to declare a moratorium on new conquests, while their legitimacy was being officially debated by Las Casas himself and others back in Spain.^[3]

In 1547 he returned to Spain from the Indies for good. He would never again see the lands and peoples he continued to champion until his death in 1566. Yet many scholars consider this his most fruitful period. It was certainly his most prolific as a writer. During the final two decades of his life, Las Casas wrote most of two major histories of the Indies, the Apologética historia sumaria (c. 1559) and the monumental Historia de las Indias (1527-c. 1563), the Brevíssima relación de la destrucción de las Indias (completed in 1542, published in 1552), and countless other treatises and petitions on behalf of Indian rights. It is also likely that during this time, around 1552, he undertook the editing of Columbus's Diario and the "Relación del tercer viaje."

Las Casas was intimately familiar with most of what Columbus

wrote. His friendship with the Columbus family, particularly with the eldest son, Diego, who inherited the governorship of Española during Las Casas's residence there, allowed him to consult, copy, and edit materials from the family archive. Many of the texts that passed through Las Casas's hands between the mid-1520s and the early 1550s survive today only in the copies he made. No other readers, with the possible exception of Ferdinand, have had at their disposal the wealth of Columbian sources that Las Casas consulted for the composition of his histories and treatises. Traces of this intimate acquaintance with Columbus's writings are found throughout Las Casas's works, most clearly and profusely in the Historia de las Indias , his history of the early decades of Spanish colonization in the New World. Much of Las Casas's history of the first decade, devoted to Columbus's voyages, was composed through the paraphrase or outright quotation of the Admiral's writings. Indeed, his principal "primary" source is the Diario , his own version of Columbus's diario of the first voyage; almost the entire Diario is paraphrased or quoted in the Historia .

Las Casas's writings, like his political activities, were singlemindedly and without exception committed to liberating the Indians from the abuse of the colonizers and to promoting their peaceful evangelization. All of his writings, both the overtly polemical and the historiographical texts, have a critical, even denunciatory edge intended to undermine the theory and practice of Spanish conquest. One target of his ire was the terminology in which Spanish relations with the Indians were articulated. He condemned, for example, use of the word conquista (conquest) to designate Spanish incursions into new Indian territories because, in his words, it was "un vocablo tiránico, mahometano, impropio e infernal" (a tyrannical, Muhammadan, improper, and infernal vocable) contrary to all Christian teachings.^[4] Due to his influence, the New Laws of 1542–43 discarded conquista in favor of Las Casas's (and Columbus's) preferred term descubrimiento (discovery).^[5] The New Laws, which many believe to have been promulgated as a direct result of Las Casas's instigation, constituted not only a reform of the legal parameters of the practice of colonization but also of the very language officially used to express it.^[6]

The program of reform to which Las Casas had committed himself so completely and the accompanying ideological position he

had carved out in his writings would certainly have influenced his editorial criteria and practice in transcribing Columbus's account of the first navigation. If one situates the edition of Columbus's journal in the context of Las Casas's other works, it becomes clear that the edition was intended, at least in part, to serve as an aide mémoire and citation source for the composition of his histories and treatises. As such, it would not need to have been a complete or even a representative version of the journal. Las Casas would have transcribed passages selectively, with an eye to those that could serve his purposes in future works. The very nature of the Diario , with its clarifying interpolations, marginal commentaries, crossouts, and errors, suggests a deliberate yet hasty, utilitarian, and above all selective method of transcription colored by Las Casas's commitment to the indigenes' cause. On closer examination, it becomes evident that Las Casas produced the Diario through a systematic and comprehensive editorial manipulation of Columbus's account of the first navigation. Yet owing to the disappearance of the original diario and its copies, Las Casas's edition has been allowed to take its place, as if it were a literal transcription of Columbus's exact words.

The textual problems posed by Las Casas's editorial intervention in the transmission of the diario of the first voyage have been studied only partially, usually with the purpose of speculating on the integrity of his version with respect to the lost original and on his fidelity as a copyist. The authenticity of the text, on the other hand, has been debated since the manuscript was discovered at the end of the eighteenth century. Among the most vitriolic attacks against Las Casas are those of Henri Vignaud and Rómulo D. Carbia, both of whom considered much, if not all, of the edition a fraudulent fabrication.^[7] In a defense of Las Casas published in 1939, Samuel Eliot Morison affirmed that the Diario was reliable beyond reasonable doubt, and this view has prevailed in recent studies.^[8] Consuelo Varela and Robert H. Fuson, for example, have pointed out probable lexical, orthographical, and grammatical interventions made by Las Casas in order to emend linguistic errors presumably committed by Columbus, whose command of Spanish was far from perfect. These critics have also identified probable errors committed by Las Casas, especially in the miscorrection of Italian and Portuguese interference in Columbus's Spanish, and in the spelling of certain Arawak terms. However, after pointing out numerous instances of editorial

manipulation in the text, both Varela and Fuson accept the Diario as a faithful and accurate rendering of the original text, although each recognizes that Las Casas's interventions are problematic in isolated cases.^[9]

It is not my purpose here to evaluate the criticism on the Diario but rather to underscore that the vast majority of studies address the text's integrity at the level of content, its historiographical authenticity as the primary source on the Discovery. Yet by reducing Las Casas's role in the transmission of the text to that of a mere copyist, this type of criticism ignores the fundamental consequences of Las Casas's intervention in the transcription of Columbus's journal.^[10] The role of faithful amanuensis is indeed the one professed by the editorial voice in the Diario , but a close reading reveals that Las Casas actually played a much more active part in its composition than is generally assumed. His interventions in the Diario are frequently ideologically charged with the same interests that motivated his writing practices elsewhere, and they go far beyond simple changes to facilitate the faithful transcription of Columbus's words. Las Casas not only summarizes and paraphrases Columbus; he insinuates himself as a new subject into the text by imposing on it an editorial rhetoric that could not have existed in the original journal. Through a selective process of transcription and omission, these editorial interventions altered the original text's content and, perhaps even more fundamentally, also altered the way in which the text can be read. To put it another way, the mediating presence of the editor's voice in the text intervenes in the process of reading and interpretation as well as in the Diario's representation of the Discovery. Thus we must move beyond a historical-philological assessment of Las Casas's accuracy and fidelity as transcriber if we are to appreciate fully the definitive role Las Casas played in the transmission of Columbus's words.

The Editor Speaks

Las Casas insinuates himself as a new third-person subject in the text, and his editorial presence is felt at all levels. Perhaps the most salient intervention is an editorial commentary that assumes two distinct forms—evaluative and nonevaluative—both marked by a grammatical change of person. Among the other operations per-

formed by the new subject are summarizing, expanding (almost always anachronistically), and interweaving the citation or paraphrase of Columbus's words, in the first person, with indirect narrative in the third-person singular. In every instance the intervention consists of a manipulation of the "exact words of the Admiral" through the introduction of a new editorial subject who comments, reorganizes, adds, subtracts, highlights, or subordinates various aspects of the original text.

The editorial commentary introduces a new voice into the narrative, a voice that stands out from what are presented as Columbus's "very words" by assuming a metalinguistic and critical attitude toward them. In the majority of cases this type of intervention is signaled by a change in grammatical person, although sometimes the insertion is marked only by a palpable semantic distance—typically, a detectable anachronism—from the context. In most modernized editions of the Diario , direct quotations appear in quotation marks and editorial interpolations are placed in parentheses. There are no such punctuation marks in the manuscript, however; only the editorial commentary itself signals the shift. Undoubtedly, some of Las Casas's interventions remain undiscernible as interventions.

The most common type of detectable metalinguistic intervention in the Diario comprises the phrases that introduce direct quotations, setting them apart from the indirect discourse. The variants are many ("Todas son palabras del Almirante," "Todo ésto dize el Al-mirante," "Dize más el Almirante," etc.), but their function is always the same—to give prominence to certain passages by setting them in relief against the background of the indirect discourse. Moreover, by identifying them as Columbus's ipsissima verba, the editorial commentary actually privileges these passages through the increased authority the testimonial mode lends them.

The following passage, taken from the account of the exploration of Cuba, is representative of the numerous instances in which the narrative voice moves from third to first person when relating Columbus's impressions of the Indians:

Dixo qu'el domingo antes, onze de noviembre, le avía parecido que fuera bien tomar algunas personas de las de aquel río para llevar a los Reyes porque aprendieran nuestra lengua, para saber lo que ay en la tierra y porque bolviendo sean lenguas de los cristianos y tomen nuestras costumbres y las cosas de la fe, "porque yo vi y co-nozco," dize el Almirante, "qu'esta gente no tiene secta ninguna ni

son idólatras, salvo muy mansos y sin saber qué sea mal ni matar a otros ni prender, y sin armas y tan temerosos que a una persona de los nuestros fuyen ciento d'ellos, aunque burlen con ellos, y crédulos y cognosçedores que ay Dios en el çielo, e firmes que nosotros avemos venido del çielo, y muy presto[s] a cualquiera oraçión que nos les digamos que digan y hazen el señal de la cruz. Así que deben Vuestras Altezas determinarse a los hazer cristianos, que creo que si comiençan, en poco tiempo acabarán de los aver convertido a nuestra sancta fe multidumbre de pueblos."
(12 November; Varela, 54–55)

He said that the Sunday before, the eleventh of November, it had seemed to him that it might be well to capture some people of that river in order to take them to the king and queen so that they might learn our language and in order to know what there is in that land, and so that, returning, they might be interpreters for the Christians, so that they would take on our customs and faith. Because I saw and recognize (says the Admiral) that these people have no religious beliefs, nor are they idolaters. They are very gentle and do not know what evil is; nor do they kill others, nor steal; and they are without weapons and so timid that a hundred of them flee from one of our men even if our men are teasing them. And they are credulous and aware that there is a God in heaven and convinced that we come from the heavens; and they say very quickly any prayer that we tell them to say, and they make the sign of the cross,

. So that Your Highnesses ought to resolve to make them Christians: for I believe that if you begin, in a short time you will end up having converted to our Holy Faith a multitude of peoples.
(Dunn & Kelley, 143–45)

Here, the transition from indirect to direct discourse occurs precisely at the point where the narration of Columbus's intention to take slaves back to Spain ends and the exhortation to the Catholic Monarchs to commit themselves to the evangelization of the Indies begins. The metalinguistic intervention "dize el Almirante" marks the exact start of the testimony on the idealized moral nature of the Indian as a creature living in a moral golden age—a state which, says Columbus, is especially apt for the implantation of the Christian faith. The change signaled here by Las Casas may seem unremarkable at first glance, a parenthetical clarification resulting in little if any interruption in the scanning of the eyes across the page. Yet it constitutes not merely a change of grammatical person but one of voice and tenor, as well. His addition of "dize el Almirante" gives

the utterance that follows new substance and weight, the resonance, as it were, of the "Admiral's" personal authority. The precise timing and timbre of this editorial intervention seem neither coincidental nor arbitrary but tactical and intentional.

Invariably in the Diario the editorial commentary that marks the transition from indirect discourse to the first-person testimonial mode concurrently signals an ideological transition in the text. Typically, the first-person narration describes the Eden-like quality of the new lands and the innocence and gentleness of the Indians. In other words, Las Casas reserves the testimonial mode for the lyrical and idealizing themes, as distinct from the more prosaic and often exploitative aspects of the Discovery. Throughout the Diario , Columbus's exhortations to the Crown to commit itself to a politics of evangelization are rendered by Las Casas as the Admiral's personal appeals, inscribed in the first person.

The metalinguistic commentary also interrupts the third-person narration to reinforce the fidelity of the editorial voice, the narrative posture explicitly assumed by the new writing subject. The third-person passages are filled with brief interpolated phrases ("Dize el Almirante,"' "diz que," "dize él") that periodically interrupt the narrative flow to remind the reader of the testimonial nature of the original Columbian discourse, but even more to underscore the new editorial subject's faithfulness to it.

There are also numerous interpolated comments that appear to have resulted from Las Casas's having carelessly slipped from Columbus's voice into his own without differentiation: the expression "conviene a saber," added for emphasis, so characteristic of Las Casas's writing style; the expressed concern about the integrity of the copy he was working with (e.g., entry of 30 October); anachronisms such as giving the Arawak name of the island of Guanahani before relating the first contact with the natives from whom Columbus would have learned it (11 [sic; 12] October); speaking of Florida many years before it was discovered (21 November); and the comical exclamation of incredulity regarding the ephemeral islands Columbus earnestly was seeking in the vicinity of what only much later became known as Florida.^[11]

But if there is any carelessness at all, it is in the maintaining of the illusion of scribal fidelity, not in any negligent breaching of it. For Las Casas's edition of the Diario systematically violates the integrity of Columbus's words. Such breaks, when they are detect-

able, reveal the fictive nature of the editorial voice and the rhetorical character of the editorial practice it represents. Indeed, Las Casas's manipulation of the Columbian discourse is so extensive and complex that it seems more accurate to describe the Diario as a rewriting, not a transcription, of Columbus's journal. Unless the original is recovered, it will remain impossible to determine with all certainty where and how Las Casas altered the text. However, only a reading that suppressed the editorial voice could arrive at the conclusion that the Diario is essentially equivalent to the original journal of Christopher Columbus. That some readers have done so is both a tribute to Las Casas's dexterity and evidence of these readers' desire (no doubt shared by Las Casas) to suspend disbelief, to read around the cracks in the text, in order to maintain Columbus's authority, the text's integrity, and thus the Diario 's privileged status as the primary source on the Discovery.

As noted, we can identify many of the modifications performed by Las Casas relying exclusively on evidence contained in the Diario , without recourse to Columbus's original text. Far more interesting than the simple identification of these interventions, however, is the consideration of how they affect the process of signification in the edition, that is, how Las Casas's manipulation of the Columbian discourse may have altered the sense of the original, yielding a new account of the Discovery, different from whatever Columbus's may have been.

Once we approach the Diario not as a simple transcription but as an edition, we soon begin to see how Las Casas's editorial presence infuses the discourse with an alien intention, to wit, his own ideological goals. In the process the diario , or "libro de su primera navegaçión y descubrimiento d'estas Indias," as Las Casas called it, becomes Las Casas's Diario of Columbus's first voyage. In using the third-person possessive su to identify the text he was working on as belonging to Columbus, Las Casas himself suggests a distinction between the diario and the text he was in the process of deriving from it. Mikhail Bakhtin explains the decisive role intentionality plays in defining the act of expression this way:

To study the word as such, ignoring the impulse that reaches out beyond it, is just as senseless as to study psychological experience outside the context of that real life toward which it is directed and by which it is determined. . . . As a living socio-ideological concrete thing . . . language, for the individual consciousness, lies on

the borderline between oneself and the other. The word in language is half someone else's. It becomes "one's own" only when the speaker populates it with his own intention, his own accent, when he appropriates the word, adapting it to his own semantic and expressive intention.^[12]

Through his editorial interventions Las Casas not only insinuates himself into Columbus's diario , he takes possession of it, adapting it to his own semantic and expressive intention, as Bakhtin puts it.

Editing as Appropriation

There are at least two layers of writing, two scriptural acts and two intentions, cohabiting in the Diario : Columbus's and Las Casas's. It is conceivable, even probable, that Columbus himself may have done several different redactions, so that the diario was born of accretion and revision rather than of a single creative act. Scribes may also have altered the original by introducing corruptions in the copy Las Casas worked with. Las Casas actually complained of having trouble making out certain passages, attributing the difficulty to scribal sloppiness or error. Royal documents confirm that two scribes, rather than the usual one, were responsible for producing the first copy of Columbus's account. Nevertheless, for readers of the Diario the traces of those scribal pens are hardly detectable. The suspicion or even knowledge that the original text may have been altered several times along the way does not affect the reading process significantly. The Diario acknowledges the presence of only two writings: "the Admiral's" and Las Casas's. Both appear as producers of the text, although Las Casas would have one believe they did so in fundamentally different ways: Columbus was the author, Las Casas only the passive and faithful conduit of the Admiral's words. Yet in his brief introduction Las Casas himself alerts the reader to the contingent nature of the Diario , asserting that it is mostly an abbreviation of another text. The Diario , then, is both derivative and creative. It incorporates Columbus's journal and so is dependent on it for its own existence, but it also modifies it. The relation of the Diario to the journal implies two separate and different acts of writing, Las Casas's and Columbus's, that have been brought together to constitute a single discursive whole. The Diario is not Columbus's journal, nor even its equivalent; it is its substitute, a new text, the

product of the assimilation and transformation of Columbus's words by Las Casas's.

Julia Kristeva coined the term "intertextuality" to argue that all texts are constituted through the assimilation and transformation of one text by another.^[13] From this perspective, every act of writing becomes the reelaboration of something previously read; every text is a reaction to or the product of another reading. This formulation of the text as an intertextual phenomenon threatened to become tautologous in its amplitude and has been refined subsequently by Kristeva herself and others, but it has usually retained two fundamental characteristics: the transformational aspect of the intertextual process and the intentionality that motivates it.^[14] Intertextuality as an essentially creative process transforms the sense of the assimilated utterance in a manner that invariably reflects the intentionality of the new act of writing which incorporates it. Both these ideas, the transformational and intentional aspects of the intertextual process, are essential to understanding the effects of Las Casas's editorial interventions in generating the Diario from Columbus's journal.

The intertextual model generally has been used to identify the presence of assimilated utterances and analyze their function in the signifying process of a text; in other words, to scrutinize how text A is assimilated and transformed in the process of creating a new text B, or how new texts come into being precisely by assimilating other texts. This type of analysis implies an original autonomy of the text and its intertexts which, despite the transformation suffered by the intertexts, continues to be discernible and presumably verifiable by the reader. It is through the semantic tension arising from the initial autonomy of the intertext and its subsequent assimilation—its new formal and semantic dependency—that new meanings are produced. Even a faithful paraphrase or summary of a text involves an interpretation and a selection based on the synopsis-writer's own criteria regarding the importance of certain portions of the text relative to others. As Genette has observed, no reduction is transparent, insignificant, or innocent: "dis-moi comment tu résumes, je saurais comment tu interpretes" (tell me how you summarize, I will know how you interpret).^[15] The same can be said of any expansion, excision, or commentary.

In the absence of Columbus's journal we cannot analyze the spe-

cific character of Las Casas's paraphrase. But a few observations on the nature and purpose of paraphrase as it was understood in rhetorical theory from classical antiquity into the Renaissance will give us a sense of the types of activities Las Casas may have undertaken. In the rhetorical handbooks, paraphrasing is alternately described as the alteration of the form of expression of an idea to achieve the best possible way of conveying it, or as the variation of style with the retention of the sense of the original expression. Three basic modes are identified by classical rhetoricians: elaboration, abbreviation, and transposition. But in actual practice the paraphrased text often differed greatly from the original, retaining only the general sentiment expressed.^[16]

Paraphrase was also used as an exegetical tool, whether as a stylistic rephrasing of authors whose vocabulary was no longer understood (as often in the case of Homer) or as a work with creative literary pretensions of its own. The concept of paraphrase as a creative interpretation that transforms the original text through a change in form, not content, was the theoretical context in which Las Casas's reworking of Columbus's words took place. This is not to say that he was striving for a new literary creation to take the place of Columbus's journal. He clearly understood his task as a historiographical one. But his reconstitution of the Columbian text in the Diario was informed by a rhetorical tradition that emphasized the creative dimension of linguistic expression no matter what the discipline. As the classical rhetorician Isocrates put it:

it is in the nature of language that it is possible to set forth the same subject in many different ways, to make the lofty humble and to lend greatness to what is small, to describe old material in a modern way and to give the patina of age to what has recently happened. Therefore we should not avoid what others have spoken on before, but try to outdo our predecessors. For past actions are the common inheritance of all of us, while their timely use, appropriate formulation and proper verbal expression are the private domain of the cultivated.^[17]

As an editorial practice, paraphrase is inherently evaluative. Even the simplest of selections entails a devaluation of the material chosen for omission and a revaluation of the material that is retained and recontextualized. This process of reconstitution through

selection produces a new discourse, one that depends on the original text for its existence and continually signals its presence and privilege, but in so doing also must differentiate itself from its source. In assuming the role of faithful amanuensis, Las Casas attempted to downplay the transformations suffered by the journal, yet the editorial insistence that what we have in the Diario are "the very words of the Admiral" does not negate the intertextual character of the relationship. Rather Las Casas has rendered the journal an intertext of itself. Thus it may be more precise to characterize the relationship between the Diario and the journal as intratextual, especially since the autonomy of these texts, though evoked and even promoted in Las Casas's edition, is not verifiable in the absence of the original. Historical circumstances have made the point, more poignantly than any theoretical pronouncement could, that the perceived autonomy of the text and its intertexts is fundamentally a rhetorical phenomenon, not an empirical one. Despite the disappearance of the journal as a historical object, it is nonetheless important to readers that the Diario presents it as if it were an autonomous text. The implied integrity and autonomy of the original journal is significant in this intertextual context precisely because the Diario renders its constituent parts in new rhetorical relations.

The following passage from the Diario entry for 6 November is worth quoting at length because it contains the three most striking and most frequently discussed characteristics of the Columbian representation of the Discovery: a mercantilistic discourse typified by observations regarding the possibilities for economic exploitation of the land and people, a poetic discourse idealizing the new human and geographical landscapes, and a hortatory Christian-evangelical discourse etched in a language reminiscent of the Spanish Reconquest.^[18] The narration begins in the paraphrastic mode:

Vieron muchas maneras de árboles, yervas y flores odoríferas. Vieron aves de muchas maneras diversas de las d'España, salvo perdizes y ruiseñores que cantaban y ánsares, que d'estos ay allí hattos; bestias de cuatro pies no vieron, salvo perros que no ladravan. La tierra es muy fértil y muy labrada de aquellos mames y faxoes y habas muy diversas de las nuestras; eso mismo panizo y mucha cantidad de algodón cogido y filado y obrado; y que en una sola casa avían visto más de quinientas arrovas y que se pudiera aver allí cada año cuatro mill quintales. Dize el Almirante que le pareçía

que no lo sembravan y que da fruto todo el año: es muy fino, tiene el capillo grande. Todo lo que aquella gente tenía diz que dava por muy vil preçio, y que una gran espuerta de algodón dava por cabo de agujeta o otra cosa que se le dé. Son gente, dize el Almirante, muy sin mal ni de guerra, desnudos todos, hombres y mugeres, como sus madres los parió. Verdad es que las mugeres traen una cosa de algodón solamente, tan grande que le cobija su natura y no más. Y son ellas de muy buen acatamiento, ni muy negro[s] salvo menos que Canarias. "Tengo por dicho, Sereníssimos Prínçipes," dize aquí el Almirante, "que sabiendo la lengua dispuesta suya personas devotas religiosas, que luego se tornarían cristianos, y así espero en Nuestro Señor que Vuestras Altezas se determinarán a ello con mucha diligençia para tornar a la Iglesia tan grandes pueblos, y los convertirán, así como an destruido aquellos que no quisieron confessar al Padre y el Hijo y el Espíritu Sancto; y después de sus días, que todos somos mortales, dexarán sus reinos en muy tranquilo estado y limpios de heregía y maldad y serán bien resçebidos delante el Eterno Criador, al cual plega de les dar larga vida y acreçentamiento grande de mayores reinos y señoríos, y voluntad y disposiçión para acreçentar la sancta religión cristiana, así como hasta aquí tienen fecho. Amén. Oy tiré la nao de monte y me despacho para partir el jueves en nombre de Dios e ir al sueste a bus-car del oro y esperías y descobrir tierra." Estas todas son palabras del Almirante, el cual pensó partir el jueves, pero porque le hizo el viento contrario no pudo partir hasta doce días de noviembre.
(Varela, 53–54)

They saw many kinds of trees and plants and fragrant flowers; they saw birds of many kinds, different from those of Spain, except partridges and nightingales, which sang, and geese, for of these there are a great many there. Four-footed beasts they did not see, except dogs that did not bark. The earth was very fertile and planted with those mañes and bean varieties very different from ours, and with that same millet. And they saw a large quantity of cotton collected and spun and worked; in a single house they had seen more than five hundred arrobas ; and that one might get there each year four thousand quintales [of it]. The Admiral says that it seemed to him that they did not sow it and that it produces fruit [i.e., cotton] all year. It is very fine and has a large boll. Everything that those people have, he says, they would give for a very paltry price, and that they would give a large basket of cotton for the tip of a lacing or anything else given to them. They are people, says the Admiral, quite lacking in evil and not warlike; [and] all of them, men and

women, [are] naked as their mothers bore them. It is true that the women wear a thing of cotton only so big as to cover their genitals and no more. And they are very respectful and not very black, less so than Canarians. I truly believe, most Serene Princes, (the Admiral says here), that, given devout religious persons knowing thoroughly the language that they use, soon all of them would become Christian. And so I hope in Our Lord that Your Highnesses, with much diligence, will decide to send such persons in order to bring to the Church such great nations and to convert them, just as you have destroyed those that did not want to confess the Father and the Son and the Holy Spirit, and that after your days (for all of us are mortal) you will leave your kingdoms in a tranquil state, free of heresy and evil, and will be well received before the Eternal Creator, may it please Whom to give you long life and great increase of your kingdoms and dominions and the will and disposition to increase the Holy Christian Religion, as up to now you have done, amen. Today I pulled the ship off the beach and made ready to leave on Thursday, in the name of God, and to go to the southeast to seek gold and spices and to explore land. All these are the Admiral's words. He intended to leave on Thursday, but because a contrary wind came up he could not leave until the twelfth of November.
(Dunn & Kelley, 168–70)

For the sake of argument, let us accept the touted fidelity of Las Casas's version with respect to the content of Columbus's journal. A more provocative question is whether the Diario 's sense of the Discovery is, therefore, the same as that conveyed by the journal. Several observations on this topic can be made even in the absence of the original text.

First, one notices that Las Casas's editorial rhetoric in the passage presents the mercantilistic portions of the narrative indirectly, from the third-person point of view. The reader is given a valuation of the land, its flora and fauna and, especially, its fertility in producing marketable commodities. The language in this portion of the passage is characterized by the proliferation of quantifiers (mucho, harto, cantidad, quinientas arrobas, cuatro mil quintales, vil precio ), underscoring the sheer abundance of goods. The quantifying tendencies of this mercantilistic discourse are abandoned in favor of comparative evaluation when the focus turns to the Indians. The idealizing discourse on the moral qualities of the natives is pre-

sented from what seems to be a first-person point of view, although the first-person pronoun that usually signals the testimonial passages in the Diario is not in evidence. The editorial comment "dize el Almirante" apparently is intended to highlight the testimonial character of Columbus's utterance, but since Las Casas never used quotation marks—these were imposed only much later by modern editors—the matter is ambiguous. In contrast, the Christian-evangelical discourse addressed to the Catholic Monarchs is thrice marked as being in the first-person testimonial mode: it begins with a verb in first-person singular; the editorial voice interrupts Columbus's eloquent exhortation to Isabella and Ferdinand in order to underscore its testimonial nature ("dize el Almirante"); and the formulaic phrase "Estas todas son palabras del Almirante" signals the end of the quote. The latter formula serves not only to indicate the end of the quoted material but, more pointedly, to remind readers of the accuracy and authority of the statement. The editorial voice accentuates the authority of these testimonial remarks by announcing that they are Columbus's ipsissima verba, a literal and faithful rendering of the original text, and by inserting comments in the first person into the third-person narrative.

Whether Las Casas's paraphrases are reductive or accurate renderings of the words Columbus himself used and the emphasis he placed on them in his diario , we cannot say. But the indirect discourse is clearly subordinated, rhetorically speaking, in the discursive hierarchy, to the first-person testimonial utterances. Because the Christian-evangelical passages are usually represented in the first person and the mercantilistic ones in the third, the former are endowed with greater authority even if the latter constitute the bulk of the text. The representation of some passages in the first person and others in the third creates a hierarchy of voices in the text that effectively alters the rhetorical homogeneity of Columbus's original utterance. Such a fragmentation of Columbus's homogeneous first-person narrative voice in the journal into distinct voices that represent not only disparate points of view but different acts of writing has important consequences. For in altering the rhetorical homogeneity of the original text, Las Casas lends the different voices he has created an ideological autonomy that places them in an inter-textual relation to one another. Thus the affirmation that the Diario

communicates essentially the same meanings as the journal is impossible to sustain; when viewed from an intertextual perspective, Las Casas's editorial intervention is undeniably evaluative and interpretive.

I would argue further that not only is it possible to do an intertextual reading of the Diario , but that ultimately such a reading is inescapable. The result of Las Casas's editorial intervention is precisely to split or separate Columbus's journal into distinct gradations of writing, as it were—its now discrete parts rendering it effectively an intertext of itself. Las Casas, as the new subject, disrupts the unity and linearity of the original discourse, altering the narrative voice of the journal, which was undoubtedly in the testimonial first-person, through paraphrase, summary, and other editorial interventions. As a result, the commentaries that signal direct citation, as well as the repetition of the first-person pronoun, set in relief against the background of the indirect discourse a new text whose prestige and authority are underscored by its direct link to the original text and the testimonial authority of the Discoverer himself. The passages in which the editor's voice invades Columbus's utterance as an editorial commentary on it constitute a third intertext. Thus the dialogue among the different voices not only breaks the textual unity and linearity but also imposes a hierarchical relationship on the voices or "texts" within the text.

In the new narrative economy of the Diario the first-person passages are assigned the role and acquire the value of the Original Text. The third-person paraphrase plays the part of the "faithful" summation. The metatext, or editorial commentary, articulates the points of transition between the two and determines the nature of their relationship by defining the significance of their interaction. The editorial commentary also controls the reading process insofar as it functions as the reader's guide in passing through the various textual layers. It signals both the points of transition and the new attitude the reader is to assume toward the writing as a result of the transition.

To the editorial voice belongs the most privileged position in the intertextual hierarchy, since it functions as the reader's guide. It orients us in interpreting the text, directing us toward those passages marked by the editorial rhetoric as most important or significant.

We come to depend on the editorial voice to guide and orient our reading. In the final analysis, not only do we read what the editor wants us to read, but also how the editor wants us to read the text.

In second position in the intertextual hierarchy are the passages in the first person. Represented as the ipsissima verba of the Discoverer, this text is imbued with the authority of eyewitness testimony and with the personal prestige of the Admiral of the Ocean Sea. Although Las Casas criticizes Columbus in some of his marginal notes in the Diario , the accent the editorial voice places on those passages that show the Admiral in a flattering light creates a protagonist of heroic proportions.^[19] In turn, the words designated in the summary as exactly Columbus's participate in the prestige the editor has fashioned for him.

The lowest position in the hierarchy belongs to the passages narrated in third person, which constitute the bulk of the Diario . Uttered by the editor, they are not identified as his words. Yet although they are attributed to Columbus, as third-person statements they are divorced from his subjectivity and authority. Not surprisingly, all of the instances of editorial "carelessness," of anachronisms and interpolations that have been detected, occur in the paraphrase. It seems almost as if Las Casas were less respectful of this "text," which was less worthy of Columbus. In effect, the third-person paraphrase functions rhetorically as an anonymous text. Despite the editor's brief interjections assuring the reader of his fidelity to the original words, the paraphrase does not really partake of either Columbus's or Las Casas's authority.

Intertextuality, the generative force that transforms the journal into the Dialio , alters the meaning of the original utterance, whatever that may have been. The editorial rhetoric in the summary privileges the poetic-idealizing discourse and the Christian-evangelical discourse above all others, creating a new sense of the Discovery, a view that is a product of the hierarchical relationship of the texts within the text. The vision of the Indies that issues from the Diario is of a place whose moral and natural attributes affiliate it with the classical Golden Age and the biblical Garden of Eden. It is a predominantly beautiful, pristine, and innocent world—just as Las Casas presented it in the Brevíssima relación de la destrucción de las Indias , the Historia de las Indias , and his other polemical treatises and histories.^[20]

The "Prologue" and the "Book"

A public subject will become private property if you do not idle round the common and open ground nor strive to render word for word like a faithful translator or get yourself in a fix, a cramped imitator, afraid to put a foot wrong out of diffidence or respect for the laws of the genre.
Horace, Ars Poetica

In an earlier essay, " 'This present year of 1492,' " I proposed reading the so-called prologue to the Diario , not as the preface Las Casas claimed it was, but rather as an autonomous textual entity, the Letter of 1492, that Las Casas chose to append to his edition of Columbus's journal. Here, I want to reconsider the effects of Las Casas's having designated the letter as the prologue to his edition of Columbus's diario of the first voyage.

Las Casas's editing of Columbus's journal at the very least privileged, if not outright invented, its prologue through what we may call a metaliterary intervention. Such interventions are the result of an editor making an explicit formal evaluation of a text and assigning to it characteristics that are traditionally literary. There are only two instances of this in the Diario , but they are among the most profoundly consequential of Las Casas's editorial manipulations. The first is found in the brief rubric that heads the text, where Las Casas advises the reader that what follows is a summary of Columbus's account of the first voyage, "sin el prólogo que hizo a los Reyes que va a la letra" (except for the prologue that he composed for the sovereigns, which is given in full). The second metaliterary intervention appears in the journal entry for 11 October: "Esto que se sigue son palabras del Almirante en su libro de su primera navegaçión y descubrimiento d'estas Indias" (Varela, 30; What follows are the formal words of the Admiral from his book on the navigation and discovery of these Indies). Earlier I discussed the type of editorial commentary, evident in these passages, that privileges certain portions of the text. What interests me here is Las Casas's identification of two distinct parts of the Diario , one which he calls a "prólogo" and the other a "libro."^[21]

In fact Las Casas not only labels the two parts—the "book" and its "prologue"—but also underscores the importance of the latter vis-à-vis the rest of the Diario by announcing a special editorial

treatment of it—verbatim transcription instead of summation. The editorial restraint expressed here, as elsewhere in the Diario , is a powerful device for the enhancement of a particular portion of the text relative to its context. In the case of the prologue, however, Las Casas highlights not simply its content, but especially its introductory function with respect to the "libro." In explicitly designating this portion of the text as the prologue to the "libro," Las Casas has prescribed the role it is to play in the act of reading; he has defined the prologue's communicative pragmatics in the context of the greater textual whole of the Diario .

The most immediate effect of this editorial intervention is the creation of one coherent composition out of what had been two autonomous texts, the Letter of 1492 and the day-by-day account of the navigation. To present the Diario as a book with a prologue suggests a degree of coherence, elaboration, and formality of composition that undermines the claims of a spontaneous, immediate reportage made by Columbus in the so-called prologue itself.^[22] But for what purpose? In order to make sense of Las Casas's metaliterary interventions, we need to take a closer look at the prologue genre.

The written prologue derives from the oratorical prooemium , the introductory section of a speech in classical rhetoric. Like its oratorical counterpart, the prologue is typically the site of maximum rhetorical craft harnessed to establish an immediate rapport with the audience. In addition to capturing a reader's good will and attention, a prologue introduces the reader to the text that follows, an orientation that facilitates reading but, more importantly, guides the reader's interpretation of the ensuing text.

Perhaps the most illuminating paradigm for understanding the role of Las Casas's prologue in the Diario is the medieval accessus ad auctores . Originally, the accessus was what A. J. Minnis has called an "academic" prologue: a didactic introduction to an authoritative (canonical) text, composed for the purpose of literary pedagogy—understood in the medieval sense of textual exegesis at the service of demonstrating the link between linguistic expression and the communication of ethical (i.e., Christian) values.^[23] This literary pedagogy was designed to facilitate the use of literature as evidence in the discussion of Christian truths, through the uncovering in texts of intrinsic moral lessons. The auctor was conceived not only as a writer but also as an authority to be respected and believed. Thus

the accessus ad auctores , in introducing the text to the student-reader, typically focused on pragmatic and ethically charged questions, such as the author's intention (intentio auctoris ) and the purpose or usefulness of the text (utilitas ), as well as considering more formal questions about subject matter and stylistic and rhetorical qualities.

The key to understanding Las Casas's intention in turning the Letter of 1492 into a prologue for the Diario , to my mind, is to be found in the ethical didacticism of the accessus tradition. In the Diario and again in the Historia de las Indias —where the Letter of 1492 is reproduced "porque se conciba la intinción de los Reyes y suya" (Varela, 127; so that the intention of the sovereigns and [Columbus's] own may be understood)—Las Casas uses the device of a prologue to emphasize his ideological moralistic concerns.^[24] Although the Letter of 1492 does not follow the form of a typical medieval academic prologue, Las Casas seems to have intended it to function pragmatically as an accessus . By redefining the enterprise of the Indies as a Christian mission, the prologue guides the reader to a Christian interpretation of the ensuing text.

Alberto Porqueras Mayo, who has written one of the most comprehensive studies of the prologue genre, has shown that by the end of the fifteenth century prologues had assumed their definitive generic form.^[25] Among the genre's defining characteristics, Porqueras cites its conventionality, its typographical and stylistic differentiation from the main text, and, especially, its permeability to that text in content as well as form. To his list should be added the prologue's direct communication with the reader on the subject of the main text, that is, the prologue's essentially metatextual character, the reflection it provides on the conditions of its textuality.

The prologue that Las Casas selects for the Diario , however, disappoints our generic expectations. It prepares us for a main text whose ideology, ethics, and diction are commensurate with Christian values and ideals. As I have noted, the prologue defines the enterprise of the Indies exclusively as an evangelical mission to spread the faith among the peoples of the Grand Khan, and it exhorts the Crown to carry on its fight against the infidel from the Iberian peninsula to "all the lands of India." But once we leave the prologue, the Diario 's articulation of the voyage frequently corresponds to the mercantilism and imperialism of the enterprise as defined by the Crown, echoing the stated goals and language of the royal doc-

uments of commission, the "Capitulaciones de Santa Fe" and the "Carta de Merced." Each new island encountered by Columbus is described as extremely fertile, auriferous, and imminently exploitable. The Taíno inhabitants are portrayed as easy marks for establishing a trading relationship much more favorable to the Europeans and as incapable of resisting even minor military force.^[26]

Contrary to the prologue's emphasis on evangelization, the conversion of the Indians is rarely mentioned in the Diario . The first reference to evangelization in the itinerary of the voyage proper does not appear until the entry for 11 October:

"Yo," dize él, "porque nos tuviesen mucha amistad, porque cognosçí que era gente que mejor se libraría y convertiría a nuestra sancta fe con amor que no por fuerça, les di a algunos d'ellos bo-netes colorados y unas cuentas de vidrio que se ponían al pescueço, y otras cosas muchas de poco valor, con que ovieron mucho plazer y quedaron tanto nuestros que era maravilla.
(Varela, 30)

I, he says, in order that they would be friendly to us—because I recognized that they were people who would be better freed [from error] and converted to our Holy Faith by love than by force—to some of them I gave red caps, and glass beads which they put on their chests, and many other things of small value, in which they took so much pleasure and became so much our friends that it was a marvel.
(Dunn & Kelley, 65)

Thus begins by far the longest sustained first-person quotation in the text, which Las Casas allows to run uninterrupted by paraphrase until the entry for 25 October. Placed at the very beginning of the earliest testimony on the Indians, it sets the tone and tenor for the rest of the quoted section, in which evangelization is mentioned only twice, and then only in passing.

Moreover, a careful reading of the passage cited above leaves the unsettling impression that the clause about conversion may have been added as an afterthought or perhaps even as an interpolated product of a later revision (by Las Casas?). At the very least, the passage expresses two quite dissonant purposes. The offering of cheap gifts to win the Indians' friendship and whet their appetite for trading is perfectly consistent with the commercial goals of the enterprise; indeed, later in the text Columbus remarks on the ease

with which Europeans would be able to exploit the Indians, who accepted the trifles offered them "as if they were the greatest treasure in the world." Yet if, as the passage asserts, the purpose was to encourage the natives to become "friendly" to Christianity, the gifts seem a vulgar, indeed contemptible, offering.

The significant discursive discontinuity in this passage is marked grammatically by a clause that is semantically anomalous in its context. Such incongruities are typical of the Diario 's treatment of the evangelical dimension of the enterprise, which is usually introduced somewhat arbitrarily and abruptly, and then only sporadically, into the account of the voyage through the Indies. Nevertheless, it is precisely this aspect of the text that Las Casas's editorial manipulations seek to privilege, as we have seen. By designating the Letter of 1492 as the prologue to the Diario , he tried to predispose readers to interpret the entire narrative of the voyage as the prologue defined it—the account of an evangelical Christian mission to the Indies of the Grand Khan—despite the paucity of references to religious conversion in the account.

Las Casas's assessment of the prologue in the Historia collapses the roles of addresser and addressee that define the pragmatics of the Letter of 1492. In suggesting that Columbus and the Catholic Monarchs speak as a united voice, with one and the same intention, Las Casas effectively erased the exceptional rhetorical and ideological character of the Letter of 1492 as Columbus"s corrective response to the prediscovery documents issued by the Crown. This univocality could only be figurative and retrospective, of course, for at the time Columbus wrote to Isabella and Ferdinand they had not yet made an explicit commitment to proselytizing in the Indies. Nevertheless, as an editorial tactic, Las Casas's comment has the important effect of rendering the prologue part of the postdiscovery rather than the prediscovery family of writings, a piece composed after the fact as an introduction to the specific historical action the Diario relates. Such a tactic was essential to establishing the prologue's metatextual role as reader's guide and interpretive paradigm for the Diario .

In setting Columbus's and the Crown's presumed Christianizing intention in relief, Las Casas also, through his editorial "voice," imbues that intention with a new purpose of his own: to render the idealizing dimension of Columbus's testimony on the peoples of the

New World as the moral paradigm for the proper way Christian Europeans should behave in the Indies. With the goal of reforming Spanish colonial policy, Las Casas uses the prologue, like an accessus , to establish the exemplariness of Columbus as an auctor —an authority to be trusted and emulated. In the aftermath of legal battles between the Columbus family and the Crown, during which the Admiral's reputation was tarnished considerably, Las Casas was not only Columbus's first editor but also the rehabilitator of his good name. It is Las Casas who ensured Columbus's canonical stature by rendering him the scriptural authority on the Discovery.

I do not mean to suggest that Columbus himself could not have had a similar Christian vision of the Discovery in his unedited diario . There is simply no way of knowing. We can with certainty, however, conclude that the sense of the Discovery presented in the Diario is to a large degree the result of Las Casas's editorial manipulations. It is undoubtedly not coincidental that the Diario complements and supports the evangelical revolution of Spanish colonial policy that Las Casas advocated in his other works.^[27]

Las Casas's voice is omnipresent in the Diario . Not a line in the text is unaffected by his editorial intent, including the first-person passages in which he decides to let Columbus speak for himself and quotes "the Admiral's very words." Even quotation, recontextualized, is a form of rewriting, as Borges's character Pierre Menard reminds us in his remarkable verbatim rendition of Don Quijote . Interrupting and interrupted by the editorial commentary, the paraphrases, the metaliterary evaluations, and other editorial manipulations, Columbus's voice is not exclusively his own. He speaks through, and for, Las Casas.

And yet traces of the long-missing diario of the first voyage can be glimpsed in the palimpsest Las Casas published as the Diario . That lost original version appears to have constituted a disjunctive discourse on the Discovery that was idealistic and poetic and, at the same time, mercantilistic and imperialistic. The Diario 's editorial rhetoric subordinates the latter and enhances the former, in an attempt to resolve the tensions and contradictions residing in the Columbian text into a coherent Christian discourse. Whether or not this was also Columbus's intention in the original, as Las Casas claimed, will remain an open question as long as the missing diario of the first navigation remains lost to us.