Primitive Divines

The dual construct "civilization and barbarity" has had its most productive laboratory in America's New World. It was given greatest currency in the Latin American tradition by Argentina's national schoolmaster at a time when a Romantic ethos of nascent nationhood wracked the continent with the rhetoric of birth pangs. But the notion of "civilization and barbarity" predates Sarmiento's usage by a few centuries.^[1] Rather than construct of alternatives with mutually exclusive terms, this binary figure rings as the symptom of an ambivalence as early as Columbus. The Admiral's wild oscillation, as recorded in the journal of the first voyage, between seeing the Indians as the domitable Edenic people of a Golden Age and seeing them as the devious cannibals of a barbarous race, also becomes yet another paradigm of the Europeans' ambivalent predicament before the New World. Through the centuries, the rhetorical wordsmiths and cultural

diagnosticians of Europe's colonial discourse will lean enclitically now on one now on the other term of "civilization and barbarity." I say "enclitically" because, in either case, something of the world being characterized becomes elided, and not just by the disfiguring elisions that inevitably accrue to any exercise of representing the other. Rather, these discursive formations entail a willful subtraction in an arithmetic made to construe with an ideology of noble ends and imperious means. Thus, starting out as paradisal ancestor and as feral subhuman at once, the American native will forever be taken alternately as noble beast to beastly conquering nobles and as prehistoric anthropoid in rudimental stirrings toward civilization. French Enlightenment and Romanticism have been particularly productive in the rhetorical turns of this cultural trope and Jean Jacques Rousseau's name has become indelibly inscribed into the ambivalent and ambiguous notions of the noble savage. It was the Baronne Anne Louise Germaine Necker de Staël-Holstein (1766–1817), commonly known as Madame de Staël and universally recognized as enlightened Europe's most signaled culture broker, who would prophesy, not without a tinge of matronizing sufferance, the imminent future, so long prophesied, of the American New World. Upon meeting the New World's perennial fugitive Fray Servando Teresa de Mier, she would proclaim: "You come from a world that soon will exist."^[2] Speaking in revolutionary France, she is, it would appear, proffering her sanctioning benediction on the parturient Latin American continent about to shatter into caesarean nationhoods inhabited by the crossbreed progeny of the noble savages. The attitude displayed by Madame de Staël has changed little since. But her pronouncement was tendered in a postenlightened time when the mythos of the supernatural was duly naturalized and the divine ethos found its human dimension, a process encoded by Thomas Carlyle's Sartor Resartus (1833–1834) as "Natural Supernaturalism." At the time Columbus is depicting his Jobean tribulations on his fourth voyage with the notation at the epigrammatic head of this chapter ("a visión profética se asemeja esto"), and when New England's Puritans, in their time, might have read themselves and the Indians in the

verses cited from II Esdras (4 Ezra) as the wandering remnant, neither the mystery of the supernatural nor the injunctions of the divine had found such earthly redress. And the nobility of the noble savage may have had a pagan gilt in its Golden-Age filiation, but those ungodly linkages would be hermetically bracketed until a less pious age that corresponded to the European culture's French Madame and to Rousseau's sentimental time.^[3] For the still venerable and seraphic epoch of Columbus and the New World divines, whether Franciscan or Puritan, the Indians perforce could still retain a primitive saintliness, one that affiliated them with the primitive divinity of those first Europeans in the New World. Commodianus, that Christian Latin poet himself too peripatetic a pilgrim through the Christian era's third to fifth centuries and through its Middle Eastern geography for scholars to pin him down, had prophesied that the lost tribes of Israel identified in II Esdras would be reunited in time with the rest of God's people. The Indians, as we shall see, become (super)naturalized just so. But first, I should like to rehearse the divine primitivism of Columbus and of those other primitive apostles of New Spain and New England who followed him to reunite God's sheepfold before the World's End. This is the epoch, as I suggested, when Sartor Resartus 's "Natural Supernaturalism" has yet to change vestments from a supernatural naturalism in which divinity still cloaks its numenous cosmic order.

By "divine primitivism" I wish us to understand foremost an immediacy. The immediate carries, by definition, the urgency of desire and the compelling gravity of dire predicament. It implies, too, the unmediated presence of what otherwise would require institutional, ceremonial, instrumental mediation. Such unfettered confrontation with divine presence I designate as primitive in a most literal, as opposed to a historical or developmental, sense. I do so because the encounter between the human and the divine occurs in the "first person," in a primal engagement rather than in one seconded by an intermediary agency. Within the mythological complex of the Judeo-Christian tradition, such immediate primacy corresponds to the role and privilege granted to visionaries and inspired prophets. Such inspiration or vision is

possessed by those who would be possessed, in turn, by divine grace, the holy spirit, the godly effluence that takes the human subject as its elect agent. Under such conditions, human faculties of reason and deliberation become preempted by an intelligence of greater efficacy that transforms the human into its instrument for exalted ends beyond human comprehension. What I describe may echo a description of inspired states one might find in handbooks culled from scripture or hagiographies. If it should be so, it is not due to my diligence. Rather, it is because of Columbus's own, a diligence he clearly exercised to the point of identifying thoroughly with what he read and with what he took as paradigm for his own actions and self-apperception. For what I characterize here as divine primitivism is not an abstract category in human modes of existence but the concrete instance of Columbus as protagonist of his own script and in his own scripture.

Columbus's valuation of "spiritual intelligence" (intelligentia spiritualis ) as his guiding light and his crediting of prophetic commandment as his enabling authority have been pointed out in our third chapter. Also discussed there is Columbus's devaluation of human reason, mathematics, and worldly maps as instruments that made his achievement possible.^[4] He is making these assertions after his third voyage in the 1501 letter to the Spanish Sovereigns that serves as the preamble to his Libro de las profecías . At the end of the previous year, in a letter to Doña Juana de la Torre, governess of the fated Prince Don Juan, Columbus relates his first direct experience with divine revelation (on Christmas day 1499), the second such experience dating from his trying fourth voyage at a moment of greatest tribulation. The latter experience is related in a letter to the king and queen from this his final voyage dated 7 July 1503. All of these key proclamations and experiences postdate his third voyage (May 1498–October 1500). This particular voyage is pivotal in understanding Columbus's self-conception as divine instrument in the eschatological plot of providential history. It might be useful to our scansion of the Admiral's mystical experiences and prophetic writings to recall that the third voyage may have been an even more godly pilgrimage to the prophetic tradition's "ends of the earth"

and its apocalyptic New World than the first voyage. After two years' preparations and a day's delay to avoid the French marauders that lay in wait off Cape St. Vincent, Columbus sailed from Sanlúcar on Wednesday the thirtieth of May 1498. On July thirty-one, the first New World land formation would come into view, three hills on an island he would baptize Trinidad. The next day what would eventually be discerned as the continental mainland of South America was sighted. At first Columbus called the peninsula Graceland ("tierra de Gracia"); the natives told him it was called Paria. On August second, he sailed through what he called the Serpent's Mouth ("Boca del Sierpe"), and on the twelfth he entered the Dragon's Mouth ("Boca del Drago"), exiting the next day, now almost blind, to sight Assumption Island ("Asunción"), so called because of the Virgin's Assumption (August fourteen), today called Grenada. On the day of the Virgin's Assumption, Columbus writes of having discovered "another world" ("otro mundo"), of having arrived at the end of the Orient ("fin de Oriente") where East and West meet, an alpha and omega. He educes ancient wisdom and scriptural insight to conclude that he has arrived in the region of the Earthly Paradise. From that godly promontory, the Earth's nearest point to Heaven ("más alta parte en el mundo y más propinqua al cielo"), Columbus's trajectory will take a bathetic and pathetic dive, literally for him, figuratively in the ledger of history. The sad tale of his administrative troubles on Española, his tribulations on the contentious ground between overweening colonial mutineers and Indian "recalcitrance" that would lead, on Christmas day 1499, to his putting to sea alone in a light caravelle there to be joined by God's own voice, and his eventual degradation and shackling in October 1500 that has him returned from his holiest of voyages in chains, are all too familiar. Upon his arrival in Spain, he would don the Franciscans' garb of apostolic poverty on his way to Granada, where he is received by Their Catholic Majesties on the seventeenth of December 1500, thus closing another peregrine circle by arriving back where his duly chartered pilgrimage began eight years and seven months earlier to the day.

I review these details from the historical record not for their

anecdotal significance necessarily, but in order to sketch the skeletal scaffolding on and by which Columbus builds the rhetorical and prophetic edifice that monumentalizes his divine primitivism and millenarian conviction. Three particular documents suffice to illustrate the case. These are the Admiral's relation of his third voyage, composed shortly after his arrival in Santo Domingo on 31 August 1498 and, therefore, covering only the outward leg of the voyage and the events prior to his being deposed and put in irons; his letter to the governess of Prince Don Juan, written after his humiliating return to Spain; and the letter to the Spanish monarchs dated 7 July 1503 from his fourth voyage, a letter deemed so remarkable by its Italian printer that he entitled it Lettera Rarissima, a designation most often used since to refer to the document.

Columbus may not have belonged to the Order of Tertiary Franciscans, as John Phelan cautiously notes,^[5] though he did take the garb of the Third Order on his way to Granada at the end of his third voyage, as noted, and on his deathbed, not an uncommon practice among pious laymen. Nevertheless, the metaphorical language and commanding arithmetic of Columbus's third voyage is unmistakably trinitarian. To say "metaphorical language," as I do here, could be misleading. For Columbus, metaphor was not merely a figure of speech. His language is figural, but it figures a worldly reality and literal correspondence between that reality as named and as it is envisioned. As with visionaries in general, Columbus finds the filiation of vision, world, and language inalienably continuous and purposively significant, certainly portentous. The world, thus, is read as a book, a book whose script and plot correspond ineluctably to the purposeful masterplot of scripture. And so it is that the world becomes a mirror, a sentient presence, or a speculum as the Medieval tradition had it, of the divine blueprint.

Columbus undertakes his voyages in the name and under the auspices of the Holy Trinity. He certainly declares as much with regard to the first, "partí en nombre de la Sancta Trinidad, y bolví muy presto con la experiencia de todo cuanto yo avía dicho en mano. [I set out in the name of the Holy Trinity and soon

returned with the experience of all that I claimed in hand]."^[6] He asserts the same with regard to his fourth and final voyage in a letter to the Bank of Saint George in Genoa that survives in Columbus's own hand in Genoa's Palazzo Municipale: "Yo buelvo a las Indias en nombre de la Santa Trinidad para tornar luego. [I go back to the Indies in the name of the Holy Trinity, after which I shall return]."^[7] Two days later, 4 April 1502, he likewise informs his spiritual mentor and collaborator on the Libro de las profecías, Fr. Gaspar Gorritio. The letter to the Genoese Bank of Saint George is particularly interesting. In effect it constitutes an improvised form of life insurance policy. Columbus stipulates that the bank is to retain in perpetuity one-tenth of all income from his estate. In turn, it is to assure the welfare of his descendants, "because," he says, as he sets out on his final voyage, "I am mortal [porque yo soy mortal]." During the preparation of his previous and third voyage, Columbus stipulated a guarantee of another, but related sort with the same bank. In his will and testament dated 22 February 1498, Columbus included a clause that would have a portion of the annual income from his estate deposited in the Bank of Saint George as a revolving fund destined for financing the crusade for the liberation of the Holy Sepulcher in Jerusalem.^[8] The clause does not figure in the final will of 25 August 1505.^[9]

But the third voyage, of course, is the most blatantly triadic, one could say tautologically so. Like the journal of his first voyage, Columbus's original letter relating his third voyage to the Spanish sovereigns has not survived. Father Bartolomé de Las Casas did have an original copy that he cites extensively and paraphrases in his Historia (Bk. I. chap. 154). From that extract, the Admiral's own account is constituted. Unmistakable in this report is Columbus's sense of his own apostolic mission and providential election. The Holy Spirit that Columbus hispanisizes as "inteligencia espiritual" has its triune and one personification for him in the figure of the Trinity. As Columbus renders it, the Holy Trinity is more Jahwist (Exodus 31:3) than Johannine (John 14–16) inasmuch as the enabling divine afflatus is more the plenipotentiary presence of the "Spirit of the Lord" than the

auxilary counselorship of the Paraclete. This is the Spirit of the Lord that comes upon and seizes certain individuals elected for special tasks—"And I have filled him of the Spirit of God, with ability and intelligence, with knowledge and all craftsmanship" (Exodus 31:3). In the letter to the Sovereigns on his third voyage, Columbus sees not only himself, but also the Spanish monarchs as possessed by a spiritual intelligence and assigned to the divine task by the instrumentality of the Holy Trinity. Accordingly, his missive begins: "La sancta Trinidad movió Vuestras Altezas a esta empresa de las Indias y por su infinita bondad hizo a mi mensajero d'ello [The Holy Trinity moved Your Highnesses to the enterprise of the Indies and by its infinite goodness made me its messenger]."^[10] Commissioned thus, Columbus takes his ministry to the "ends of the earth [in finis orbis terrae], to the gates of the Earthly Paradise, and to an other world, literally in his calculus, figuratively in its language. And so it is that the integers of Columbus's arithmetic are preponderantly triune, with the topography of the New World in full collaboration. The first land mass to be sighted are three hills on an island dubbed Trinidad; the terrain covered in the first voyage, now recovered in memory's recollection, is three hundred and thirty-three leagues—"descubrí por virtud divinal trezientas y treinta y tres leguas de la tierra firme, fin de Oriente [I discovered by divine virtue three hundred and thirty-three leagues of mainland, end of the East]."^[11] This discovery comes, of course, after a voyage of thirty-three days, the duration of the first crossing, during which, the Admiral tells us, his eyes did not shut a wink, despite which he did not endure the hardship that leaves him well-nigh blind on this, his third voyage, "que bien qu'el viaje que yo fui a descubrir la tierra firme estoviese treinta y tres días sin conçebir sueño y estoviese tanto tiempo sin vista, non se me dañaron los ojos ni se me rompieron de sangre y con tantos dolores como agora [though on the voyage on which I went to discover the mainland I was with no sleep for thirty-three days and I was for that length of time with nothing in sight, my eyes suffered no damage nor did they become bloodshot with so much pain as now]."^[12] the mainland, or "tierra firme," Columbus refers to is not the terra firma

of the continental land mass that now blinds him, but the island of Cuba that his cosmography and wide-eyed clairvoyance on his first voyage dictated had to be the mainland of the Grand Khan.

More visionary than ever, and as close as he comes to the blind Tiresias as seer, Columbus declares his erudite conclusion that he is, in fact, at the gates of the hortus conclusus, the Terrestrial Paradise where, according to the biblical tradition he knew so well, the prophets Enoch and Elias dwell in anxious anticipation of the end of the world so that they could raise their prophetic voices against the Antichrist. Columbus pulls back from the gates of that sacred terrain and from the brink of heretical enthusiasm, demurring just in time "because, there, I believe, is the Terrestrial Paradise where no one can go lest it be by God's will [porque creo que allí es el Paraíso Terrenal, adonde no puede llegar nadie salvo por voluntad divina]."^[13] Nonetheless, all the scientific sources he educes—Aristotle, Ptolemy, Pliny, Comestor, Averroes, Pierre d'Ailly—concur with the divine Church fathers, such as Saint Augustine, Saint Ambrose, and the sacred scriptures he so often invokes—Genesis, II Esdras—as well as their glosses by exegetes such as Nicholas of Lyra. They all concur to convince Columbus that he could be nowhere but East and West of everywhere at once, what "I call the end of the East where end all land and islands [llamo yo fin de Oriente adonde acaba toda la tierra e islas]."^[14] This geographical land's end is indubitably the eschatological and apocalyptic time's end as well, as far as Columbus is concerned. And, in his mind, it is no accident that he should be the one to have led the world to the world's ends since his divine commission as providential minister imbued with the Spirit of the Lord and His Holy Trinity dictates that it should be so: "[B]ecause, it is true that everything passes but not the word of God, and everything He said shall be fulfilled, what he so clearly spoke about these lands through the mouth of Isaiah in so many places of His scripture, affirming that his holy name would go abroad from Spain [porqu'es verdad que todo pasará y no la palabra de Dios, y se complirá todo lo que dixo, El cual tan claro habló d'estas tierras por la boca de Isaías en tantos lugares de su escriptura,

afirmando que de España les sería divulgado su sancto nombre]."^[15] Isaiah is the prophet most often cited in Columbus's Libro de las profecías . Isaiah's prophecy of "new heavens and a new earth" (65:17) is a source Columbus cites repeatedly. We find it in his letter to Doña Juana de la Torre and in the preamble letter to his book of prophecies. In both instances he joins John the Divine to Isaiah as prophets of his own mission and New World enterprise. The connection he forges between those prophetic voices and his project is clearly typological and figurative and his procedure is in keeping with the hermeneutic procedures of the medieval tradition. We have an idea of how licit such connections are, and how pervasive the ideological force authorizing them, from the fact that Father Bartolomé de Las Casas, commenting on Columbus's invocation of Isaiah in his letter on the third voyage, states simply that since Isaiah was a prophet he could have well been prophesying the discovery of the New World (Historia, Bk. I. chap. 127). Columbus was clearly laboring under the aegis of perfectly licit and canonically legitimate criteria. The Admiral's most frequently educed sanction for such a messianic self-conception are the verses of Psalm 19:4 which, as already noted in our second chapter, Columbus invokes no less than five times in his Book of Prophecies .^[16] Convinced that in his apostolic election he has taken the Lord's Word to the ends of the world, the ends of the world scheduled to ensue from that prophetic fulfillment cannot be far behind. Columbus is writing his letter on the third voyage in 1498. Three years later, as we have seen already, he will have calculated that inexorable cosmic peroration with eschatological precision, a proleptic enthusiasm that augurs the apocalyptic arithmetic of New England divines.

Before leaving the letter of the third voyage, I should like to accord even passing mention to the toponymic impulse, the rhetoric of place naming, that runs with such consistent sublimity through the language of the inspired Columbus. Being so close to Paradise, serpents and dragons could not be far at all. Indeed, as already noted, the names Columbus gives to the tidal waves and eddies that buffet his ships and threaten to devour his fleet evoke

the eschatological imagery of John's Apocalypsis (Revelation 12:9; 20:2–3) and the Old Testament sea monster that threatens God's creation (Psalms 74:13–14; Isaiah 51:9; 27:1; Job 7:12). Along with Graceland ("tierra de Gracia"), Trinidad, and the locus amoenus where he was pleasantly entertained by gold-clad natives and which he dubbed Jardines (Gardens) "porque así conforman con el nombre [because they conform thus with the name]," Columbus's Adamic nominalism betrays his prophetic consistency in the face of adversity as well. On entering the Gulf of Paria, Columbus's ships encounter the furious currents of the Orinoco River that come rushing, in four streams, into the Atlantic Ocean. The four branches of the estuary corroborate Columbus's conviction that these are the four rivers of Genesis that must flow, according to tradition, from their source in the Terrestrial Paradise. The fury of the eddies provokes monstrous associations in Columbus's exulted mind. He dubs the tempestuous passage between Trinidad's Punta Arenal (Icacos Point) and the eastern shore of Isla Gracia (Paria Peninsula) "Boca del Sierpe" (the Serpent's Mouth), and a high wave on 4 August 1498 that floats his ships to frightful heights like insignificant jetsam in the Serpent's Mouth produces visions of Leviathan, the tannin, or sea-monster of Isaiah (27:1). On August twelve and thirteen he enters and exist what tidal treachery leads him to call "Boca del Drago" (Dragon's Mouth). Clearly, a divine mission like his to land's and time's ends could not countenance adversarial contests except with foe and tribulation matchingly supernatural and fittingly apocalyptic. Having vanquished such adversity, like the divine agon of Isaiah and Revelation, Columbus is confirmed in his divine role and elect agency. His subsequent writings and personae assumed from their rhetorical delivery will reflect faithfully the spirited experience of this reconfirmation.

In this, as in many other respects, Columbus is a compelling character of his own ideological drama. He is most fascinating as interstitial character, constantly verging on the brink of one or another orthodoxy, without quite managing to free himself from the diverse traditions that exert their claims on him, traditions that range from the prophetic primitivism of the Hebraic patri-

archs to the apocalyptic end-time of Christian millenarianism. An ancient spiritualist, he is also a medieval enthusiast and a Renaissance cosmologist. It is not that he oscillates from one of these poles to another, if these indeed be poles rather than continuities, but that these constellations coexist in him in simultaneity. In this sense he may well be the paradigmatic Renaissance man, if by this designation we understand the personification of multifarious impulses Francis Bacon would encode as the multiplex scientia referred to in our fourth chapter. This is not to say that this diversity harmonizes into stillness in Columbus's persona. There is no such harmony, and Columbus displays the embattled character of the ideological ground he occupies and the grounds that occupy him. The transitions entailed in the passage from the letter of relation on the third voyage to the letter of late 1500 to Doña Juana de la Torre, governess of the crown prince, serve as instructive indices to what Bacon referred to as plurimi per transibut, and those multiplicities in transit swirl and eddy in Columbus's restless and agonic itinerary. The dominant ideological formation that informs the letter we just examined is Jewish paradisal messianism. Having traced it in our third chapter, we have seen that the passage from this messianic paradise to apocalyptic millenarianism is a natural progression. Columbus has plotted his role as providentially elect and prophetically anticipated messenger whose pilgrimage has found its destined way East of Eden and to the Ends of the Earth. He in effect has descried his role, scripted in Isaiah's and David's psalms, as one that typologically prefigures his own apostolic and apocalyptic antitype. In other words, passing from one letter to another, we see that Columbus has emplotted his role as the fulfillment of his own prefiguration. From Old Testament messianic divine, he passes on to New Testament millenarian apostle, the first having made the second role inevitable in typological adumbration. But, for Columbus, this is too linear a trajectory, too reductive a plot. Because, having crossed from one to the other, Columbus crosses himself again, and if the letter to Doña Juana figures as juncture where Isaiah and John the Divine meet, Columbus complicates that intertestamental crossing, making it resonate with the pro-

phetic injunctions of calamitous tribulation and exhortatory deliverance in the Mosaic and Jobean text of the Lettera Rarissima . Let us look at the letter to the Governess first.

The letter in question serves as articulate symptom of the irreducible nature of Columbus as protagonist. He is, in his own eyes, Old Testament messiah, New Testament apostle; but he also depicts himself, as we shall see, as Medieval knight-errant and as Renaissance hero of the romance epic. It is useful to remember that Columbus is writing his letter to Doña Juana de la Torre shortly after his return to Spain in irons, his charter privileges trampled, his writings confiscated, and his position as governor under threat from a bureaucratic inquest. For one who had just come from the gates of the Earthly Paradise and from the earth's closest point to Heaven, his predicament is abject indeed. Under such circumstances, Columbus's own stated criteria by which he should be judged are telling. What these reveal most is the complexity of cultural formations he embodies. The letter opens with the lament of one chastened by the world, and with the affirmations of faith's invincible strength. Rhetorically, this is a masterfully constructed document. The preamble anticipates the letter's narrative with a suggestive prolepsis, a distillation of the author's argument into a terse adumbration of what the tale will tell. It is a tale of woe and vicissitude, as the trying conditions of its composition dictate that it be so. But it is also a tale of divine deliverance through the steadfastness of faith and, in this sense, it is a declaration of perseverance braced by the conviction of sure vindication. The godly victory and deliverance in the tale of the letter become a harbinger and an allegory for the vindication that surely awaits the outcome of the circumstances that necessitated the writing of the letter. The compelling thing is that the hero of the tale in the letter and protagonist of these circumstances now writing the letter are one and the same Christopher Columbus. In this way, Columbus has prefigured himself as his own antecedent, a typological prefiguration, one is tempted to say, to be fulfilled beyond the epistolary narrative in the world of the epistle. This is in part why I began the first chapter of this study by referring to Columbus as a Hermetic character. He is his

own messenger inasmuch as he is the message, the apostolic link and providential instrument that connects this world to the other, the Old World to the New, the New World to the Next, and the Next World to his mission. Accordingly the epistolary tale in the letter's narrative takes place in the New World, the composition of the letter occurs in the Old World, and the animating ideology, the intelligentia spiritualis that enables and validates its process of composition emanates from the powers of the Next World.

The letter begins in the writing. It ends there too. In between these two moments of the writer engaged in the writing is the epistolary narrative whose tale conforms to the plot of a different order of writing, the master script of scripture, whose divine Scriptor has dispensed through His Grace the tribulations and deliverance that have led to the writing of the letter. As I said, this is a tale of woe and of exultation. Thus, the writing frame conforms to that duality. It begins with woe and ends with imperative injunction, a beginning and ending proleptically mirrored in the letter's preludial sentences. Columbus's skill as a writer may well match his sailor's uncanny ability at dead reckoning. And many a seawise adept, including Admiral Samuel Eliot Morison, has waxed hyperbolic on Columbus's seamanship. Here is the letter's proemial paragraph that so suggestively mirrors the letter to issue from it:

Muy virtuosa Señora: Si mi quexa del mundo es nueva, su uso de maltratar es de antiguo. Mill combates me ha dado y a todos resistí fasta agora, que no me aprovechó armas ni avisos. Con crueldad me tiene echado al fondo. La esperança de Aquel que crió a todos me sostiene; su socorro fue siempre muy presto. Otra vez y no de lexos, estando yo más baxo, me levantó con su braço derecho, diziendo: "O hombre de poca fe, levántate, que yo soy, no ayas miedo."^[17]

[Most virtuous Lady: If my plaint against the world be new, the world's wont to abuse is ancient. A thousand combats has it given me and, till now, I have resisted them all, and without advantage of arms or of intelligence. It has plunged me cruelly to great depths. The hope in Him who created all sustains me; His succor has always been prompt. Once, and not so long ago, finding myself most abject, He raised me with His right arm, saying, "Oh, man of little faith, stand up, it is I, have no fear.]

The time "not so long ago" when God raised Columbus "with His right arm" and His divine proclamation is the pivotal event in the rest of the letter that follows. That was on Christmas day 1499, the previous year, when events in Española took the hopeless turn that would eventuate in the "abject depths" from which the letter is written. Surely, then, deliverance by the Grace of divine intervention could mean nothing less than that now; and to propitiate the outcome of that portent Columbus closes his letter with an admonitory jeremiad that invokes divine judgment, decrying most bitterly of all the loss of his writings at the hands of the court officials dispatched to bring him down. Thus, if he is writing this letter to court (the Governess Doña Juana is quite likely a conduit to Queen Isabel) in order to exonerate himself, he is doing so by virtue of necessity, and the letter being written is a compensatory gesture for those writings that would serve his cause most, but of which he has been deprived:

De mis scripturas tengo yo mayor quexa, que así me las aya tomado que jamás se le pudo sacar una, y aquellas que más me abían de aprovechar en mi disculpa, esas tenía más ocultas. Ved qué justo y honesto pesquisidor. Cosa de cuantas él aya hecho me dizen que aya seído con término de justicia, salvo absolutamente Dios Nuestro Señor está con sus fuerças, como solía, y castiga en todo cabo en especial la ingratitud de injurias.^[18]

[My writings I lament most, for he [Bobadilla, the court official] has taken them from me without relinquishing any, and those that would serve me most in my exoneration, those he had most hidden. See what honest and just inspector! Whatever he has done, I am told, has been in the name of justice, but only God Our Lord is absolutely so empowered, as is His wont, and punishes most forcefully especially ingratitude and wrongdoing.]

Inveighing against the Comendador Bobadilla in a letter to Doña Juana de la Torre, Columbus's target of remonstrance and intended epistolary addressee, it seems to me, is really neither. Columbus is aiming, through the scheming functionary and the benign Governess, at Queen Isabel and King Ferdinand, especially the first whom Columbus has always considered a helpmate in divine inspiration, instruments both of the Lord's intelligentia

spiritualis, as he noted in the opening of his letter on the third voyage, and reiterates now in the letter to the Governess. I believe it is because of the putative readers he intends for his lament and protest that in two consecutive passages toward the end of the letter Columbus dictates the terms on which he should be judged, as opposed to the "justice" to which he has been subjected. Here, then, is Columbus adjudicating the terms of Columbus's judgment, betraying in the process an ideal of self-portraiture:

Yo debo de ser juzgado como capitán que fue d'España a conquistar fasta las Indias a gente belicosa y mucha y de costumbres y secta muy contraria, donde por voluntad divina, e puesto so el señorío del Rey e de la Reina, Nuestros Señores, otro mundo, y por donde la España que era dicha pobre es la más rica.

Yo devo [sic] de ser juzgado como capitán que tanto tiempo fasta hoy trae las armas a cuestas, sin las dexar una hora, y de cavalleros de conquistas y del uso y no de letras, salvo si fuesen griegos o de romanos o de otros modernos, de que ay tanto[s] y tan nobles en España.^[19]

[I ought to be judged as a captain who set out from Spain to the Indies to conquer many belligerent peoples of contrary creed and customs, where by divine will I have placed under the sovereignty of the King and Queen, Our Lords, another world, by which Spain, who was called poor, is now the richest.

I ought to be judged as a captain who for such a long time until today wears his armour on his back, without leaving it for an hour, and as one from among real knights of conquest not from those literature, save these be from Greeks or Romans, or others who are modern, of whom there are many and so noble in Spain.]

Columbus's anaphoric emphases, reiteratively enjoining terms of judgment other than bureaucratic, are a poignant reminder of what I noted earlier (in chapter 4) when discussing the Capitulaciones de Santa Fe; that is, that Columbus's knight errantry is overtaken by the sticky web of the Renaissance state and its officious apparatus. Although the terms and privileges patented by his charter still have legitimacy (restitution of Columbus's losses was made by the monarchs, except for his governorship),

ship), Columbus has come to realize through harsh experience that what makes state actions licit are terms and grounds different from those he thought operative when he contracted his charter and sallied "to conquer strange lands and peoples of contrary sects." On that precarious and shifting ground, more treacherous for the chivalric hero than the strange terrain of his conquests, Columbus steadies his course by steadfast adherence to the jurisdiction of ultimate authority. He seeks his sanction, then, in the divine will that ordains all and serves as ultimate arbiter for subjects, states, governors, and princes alike. This is the same divine will that governs as principle in his epistolary narrative. Its godly dispensation determines historical events and its divine grace takes Columbus and the Spanish sovereigns as its anointed instruments. And if the Holy Spirit of the Trinity, as Columbus says, moved Their Highnesses and made him its messenger to the ends of the earth, the scriptural citation that animates the letter to Doña Juana indicates a switch. Between the letter on the third voyage and the letter to the Governess, the focus of Columbus's apocalyptics shifts from paradisal geography to temporal eschatology. What animates Columbus now is the millennium prophesied by John's Apocalypsis and by Isaiah, and their prophetic revelations are finally on the verge of fulfillment through the long-foretold instrumentality of the Spanish monarchs and Columbus, as the latter would have it:

Yo vine con amor tan entrañable a servir a estos Príncipes, y e servido de servicio de que jamás se oyó ni vido. Del nuevo cielo y tierra que dezía Nuestro Señor por San Juan en el Apocalipsi, después de dicho pot boca de Isaías, me hizo mensajero y amostro aquella parte. En todos ovo incredulidad, y a la Reina, mi Señora, dio d'ello el espíritu de intelligençia y esfuerzo grande y lo hizo de todo heredera.^[20]

[I came to serve this King and Queen with profound affection, and I have rendered service never before seen or spoken of. God made me the messenger of the new heaven and the new earth of which He spoke through Saint John in the Apocalypsis, after having spoken of it through Isaiah, and He showed me to that location. There was disbelief in everyone, and Spiritual Intelligence gave to the Queen my

Lady Its inspiration and great power and made her the beneficiary of everything.]

With the intercession of the intelligentia spiritualis, Columbus's enterprise has its providential ally, and what their errand portends is unmistakably proclaimed in the "new heaven and the new earth" God provides through John of Ephesus at Patmos: "Then I saw a new heaven and a new earth; for the first heaven and the first earth had passed away, and the sea was no more. And I saw a holy city, new Jerusalem, coming down out of heaven from God" (Revelation 21:1–2). The realization of God's promised new heaven and new earth in John's apocalypsis has been taken by the millenarian tradition as its own. The vision, as Columbus notes, has its typological harbinger in the words of Isaiah so often invoked by the Admiral: "For behold, I create new heavens and a new earth; and the former things shall not be remembered or come into mind" (65:17). Isaiah's and John's "new world," as already mentioned, had served to animate the millenarian expectations of steadfast believers for centuries before Columbus. Teachings such as the twentieth book of the De Civitate Dei, where St. Augustine seeks to dampen expectancy's fervor by declaring that the millennium is already subsumed in the history of the Church, did not assuage the yearning for a paradisal dispensation in historical time and this side of the day of reckoning. Columbus was clearly an adherent of this millenarian tradition, as traced in our second chapter.

But Columbus's abiding rapport with the other-worldly and with divine intercession did not always have recourse to prophetic mediation and scriptural summons. The Lettera Rarissima of 1503 is the most elaborate instance of Columbus's unmediated communing with the Lord after the uplifting voice and divine "right arm" (cf. Revelation 1:17) that miraculously succored him on Christmas day of 1499. Here is his account of that earlier revelation as recounted in the letter to Doña Juana de la Torre:

Día de Navidad, estando yo muy afligido guerreado de los malos christianos y de indios, en término de dexar todo y escapar, si pudiese, la vida, me consoló Nuestro Señor milagrosamente y dixo:

"Esfuerça, no temas. Yo proveeré en todos: los siete años de término del oro no son passados, y en ellos yen lo otro te dará remedio. "Esse día supe que avía ochenta leguas de tierra y en todas, cabo ellas, minas. El parecer agora es que sea toda una. Algunos an cogido ciento y veinte castellanos en un día y otros noventa, y se han cogido fasta dozientos cincuenta.^[21]

[Christmas day, greatly afflicted by Indians and bad Christians, wishing to leave everything behind and escape, if I could, from life, I was comforted miraculously by Our Lord who said to me: "Have strength. Do not fear. I shall provide for all: the seven years of gold are not over, and in that as in the other there will be remedy." On that day, I discovered that there were eighty leagues of land and in all of it, end to end, mines. It seems now it is all one mine. Some have gathered 120 castellanos worth in one day, and up to 250 castellanos worth have been gathered.]

Teetering between the figurative gold of the seven sacraments and the apostasy of the Golden Calf, Columbus finds godly solace "in the one as in the other." Thus christologically anointed in glided dispensation, Columbus can justly claim to be the divine "messenger to the new heaven and the new earth," as he writes to Doña Juana in the passage already cited. And Isaiah, once more, furnishes the augural precedent: "The Spirit of the Lord God is upon me, because the Lord has anointed me to bring good tidings to the afflicted; he has sent me to bind up the brokenhearted, to proclaim liberty to the captives, and the opening of the prison to those who are bound; to proclaim the year of the Lord's fervor" (Isaiah 61:1). Indeed, Columbus takes Isaiah's words to heart, and although millenarian enthusiasts such as the Patriarch of Byzantium, Gennadius Scholarius, discussed in our second chapter, would take the year 1492 as "the year of the Lord's fervor," Columbus's arithmetic would remove the inevitability of the annus mirabilis to 1665. This does not preclude the possibility of divine intervention, where God's anointed messenger is concerned, before the year of eschatology's plentitude and the end of time, as Columbus's experience on his fourth voyage recorded in the Lettera Rarissima reiterates.

The Lettera Rarissima is the letter of a shipwreck without a bottle. No need for that proverbial vessel in which to seal his

message and commit it to the hazard of the waves. At hazard's most extenuating hyperbole, Columbus turns from the dire to the divine. The record of that encounter on Columbus's final and most desperate voyage spells a recapitulation. Only now, the capitulating parties are not the starry-eyed mariner and the reticent monarchs of a decade and a world earlier. The Capitulaciones de Santa Fe now take on a more literal meaning. No longer a juridical patent and a place-name, Columbus's inaugural charter becomes recapitulated into augural and portentous covenant, now an apocalyptic letter-patent between a clamoring prophet and his vigilant God attending to His helmsman's distress.

The covenantal nature of Columbus's relation to God is so archetypal that students of Columbus such as Salvador de Madariaga use the Lettera Rarissima as evidence of Columbus's Jewish origins.^[22] One is hard-pressed to dispute Madariaga's claims on ideological grounds. As for the question of race, the issue is moot. By Columbus's time, race and ethnicity, or genealogical tribe and cultural identity, are a murky proposition that usually falls to the obsessions of Inquisitors and deluded eugenists. That is not to say that such distinctions are not made. The year 1492 is, after all, the year of the exodus for Spanish Jews. But to say that Columbus is ideologically a Jew is to speak a tautology. His figurative language, his sense of history, his cosmology, and a good deal of his scientific knowledge are necessarily Jewish inasmuch as they are governed by views, ideas, metaphors, and self-sanctioning notions that are scriptural, intertestamental, and prophetic. His reactions in the face of adversity, the element most constant in his life, are biblically preconditioned, as are his reflections on his perseverance and overcoming. So that, when Columbus records the voice of God addressing him in his most trying hour, his testimonial resonates with the timbre and turn of phrase that Hebrew prophets willed to their scriptural progeny. If one were to insist on differentiating attributes of the "New Covenant" from the Old, Columbus would still echo as Hebrew prophet in his covenantal relation to the divinity, but not necessarily to the exclusion of his Christian ethos. Because, al-

though Columbus's "covenant" is an unmediated relation between himself and the divinity whose voice speaks to him, and whereas the references of his testimony are Old Testament figures, Columbus's experience is still an apocalyptic revelation of sacrifice and forgiveness with a Pauline glimpse of glory (2 Corinthians 3: 14–18; here Paul distinguishes between the Old and New Covenants). Most important, however, although the voice heard by Columbus is a divine voice, it speaks of God though it be God speaking. In other words, there is, after all, a level of mediation in that intercession of the Spirit, be it rhetorical or christological, unlike the Lord of Moses who speaks to His people in the first person as in Exodus 20: 1–20. But the theological edges are not really central to our discussion. The point to be made is that Columbus is indeed suffused by the biblical tradition and, as such, the conditions that make the production of his testimonial narrative possible are inevitably Hebraic inasmuch as they are part and parcel of Columbus's culture.

Here, then, is the key passage of the Lettera Rarissima that carries a dateline of Jamaica, 7 July 1503. By the time Columbus reached Jamaica, all four ships of his fleet had to be reached, having become so worm-eaten as to no longer be seaworthy. Columbus and his crew of shipwrecks are to be stranded on Jamaica for a year and five days (25 June 1503 to 29 June 1504). The passage in question follows a long and dramatic description of a storm with endless rains and "boiling seas" that threaten the ships now barely afloat. In the midst of the storm, of a fever, and loss of all hope ("la esperança de escapar era muerta"), Columbus raises his voice to the thundering skies, yelling frightfully into the four winds, all to no avail. He suddenly passes into a different state of consciousness, a hypnagogic swoon, when a voice speaks to him:

Cansado me adormeçí gimiendo. Una voz muy piadosa oí diciendo: "O estulto y tardo a creer y a servir a tu Dios, Dios de todos, ¿qué hizo El más por Moises o por David, su siervo? Desque naçiste, siempre El tuvo de ti muy grande cargo. Cuando te vido en edad de que El fue contento, maravillosamente hizo sonar tu nombre en la tierra. Las Indias, que son parte del mundo tan ricas, te las dio por

tuyas; tú las repartiste adonde te plugo, y te dio poder para ello. De los atamientos de la mar Occéana, que estavan cerrados con cadenas tan fuertes, te dio las llaves; y fuiste ovedescido en tantas tierras y de los cristianos cobraste tanta honrada fama. ¿Qué hizo El más al tu pueblo de Israel, cuando le sacó de Egipto, ni por David, que de pastor hizo Rey en Judea? Tórnate a El y conoçe ya tu yerro: su misericordia es infinita. Tu bejez no impedirá a toda cosa grande. Muchas heredades tiene El grandíssimas. Abraam pasava de çien años cuando engendró a Isaac, ni Sara era moça. Tú llamas por socorro. Inçierto, responde: ¿quién te ha afligido tanto y tantas vezes: Dios o el mundo? Los privilegios y promesas que da Dios no las quebranta, ni dice, después de aver recibido el serviçio, que su intención no era esta y que se entiende de otra manera, ni da martirios por da color a la fuerza. El va al pie de la letra; todo lo que El promete cumple con acrescentamiento. Esto es su uso. Dicho tengo lo que tu Criador ha fecho por ti y hace con todos. Ahora," me dixo, "muestra el galardón d'estos afanes y peligros que as pasado sirviendo a otros." Yo, assi amortecido, oí todo, mas no tuve yo respuesta a palabras tan ciertas, salvo llorar por mis yerros. Acabó El de fablar, quienquiera que fueses, diciendo: "No temas, confía: todas estas tribulaciones están escritas en piedra mármol y no sin causa."^[23]

[Weary, I dozed, moaning. I heard a very pious voice say: "Oh, foolish man, slow to believe and serve your God, the God of all. What more has He done for Moses or for David His servant? Since your birth, He has always cared for you greatly. When He saw you at an age He thought fit, as a marvel He made your name resound throughout the Earth. The Indies, so rich a part of the earth, He gave to you as your own. You disbursed them as you pleased by the power He vested in you. To the mysteries of the Ocean Sea, bound in chains, He gave you the keys; and you were obeyed in so many lands and honored in fame by so many Christians. What more has He done for your nation of Israel when He led it out of Egypt, or for David who, from a shepherd, He made King of Judea? Turn to Him and admit your error, His mercy is infinite. Your age will not keep you from anything of greatness. Great is His inheritance. Abraham was over a hundred when he engendered Isaac, nor was Sara a girl. You call for help. Doubter, answer: Who has caused you so many afflictions so often, God or the world? The promises and privileges granted by God are not forgotten, nor does He say, after services rendered to Him, that He had other intentions to be understood otherwise, nor does He dispense punishments for the display of power. He goes by the letter. He fulfills every promise with a boon. This is His wont. I

have said what your Creator has done for you as with everyone. Now," He said to me, "show the reward of all these trials and dangers you have endured serving others." I, mortified, heard everything. I had no answer to words so sure, but wept for my errors. He finished speaking, whoever He might have been, saying, "Do not fear, trust: all of these tribulations are written on marble stone and not without reason."]

Alain Milhou has painstakingly correlated every key sentence of this passage with its biblical referent or source.^[24] No need to duplicate that conscientious effort here. One important precedent Milhou might have added with relevance to this passage, as well as to Columbus's earlier revelation and divine succor on Christmas day 1499, discussed above, is the second chapter, first and second verses of Ezekiel, whom Columbus cites extensively in his Libro de las profecías: "And he said to me, 'Son of man, stand upon your feet, and I will speak with you.' And when he spoke to me, the spirit entered into me and set me upon my feet; and I heard him speaking to me."

There is, obviously, a strong quotient of contractual bonding in the cited passage. This venerable institution of the covenant functions in Columbus's Lettera on various planes simultaneously. Once more, Columbus aims to achieve a number of ends through the rhetorical formulae of his prophetic testimony. Certainly this is the testimonial narrative of a moving religious experience in which the covenanted parties, God and Columbus, inventory their commitment and service to each other. It is, too, a figural narrative of a mystical experience as tale of trial and overcoming through faith. But it is an allegorical form of discourse also, by whose venue Columbus recapitulates his debits and credits not only with God, but with Caesar as well. One learns not to make any of these possibilities mutually exclusive in Columbus, though some historians have opted to give emphasis to one or another purpose that motivates the Admiral in the rhetorical formulation of this episode.^[25] For someone like Columbus, for whom the worldly and the other-worldly are so inextricably enmeshed, the privileging of the mystic or of the clever impresario does not hold much promise for understanding the multifari-

ous and ambivalent personae he embodies. In his divine primitivism, godly justification and ulterior motives coexist inalienably. The efficient cause for all is tantamount, immediately and most fundamentally, to the Ultimate Cause which, as he Mosaically notes at the end of the cited passage, is "written on marble stone." This is the lapidary contract of a prophetic forerunner who, in his relation to God, echoes the Patriarchs of Mount Sinai and of Mount Horeb (Exodus 20:22–23, 33; Jeremiah 31:31–34). His legacy will resonate, in turn, in the convenantal divines of New Spain's apostolic missions and in New England's enthusiastic Puritans.

Within the apocalyptically revealed terms of this compact, the New World of the Indies figures as God's bequest. Like the lands of the Old Testament that become sanctified as God's blessing for his elect people, the New World real estate forms part of God's inheritance bestowed upon Columbus as covenanting party so that he may disburse it "as you please by the power He vested in you." Lands so sanctified in this Columbian precedent would naturally be claimed as the rightful inheritance by the same God's chosen people when covenantal compacts proliferate, as do the tribal remnants that wander off to stake their claims is blessed territory. Thus, the charters granted to Pilgrims and Puritans alike will also function as blessed corporate compacts between God's worldly representative and his royal subjects, at least as initially intended by the state apparatus and until "compact" and "covenant" become a direct channel between New England divines and their Godly benefactor, thereby foregoing the venue of kingly and state mediation. It did not take very long, in fact, for the introduction of this covenantal emendation that linked divine pilgrims with God's jurisdiction directly, the improvised "Mayflower Compact," for one, being an augural turn in that direction even before New England's godly remnant reached New World shores.

Land becomes the most immediate emolument promised to settlers under the corporate charter, as the charters of both the Plymouth and Massachusetts Bay colonies were called. Under the proprietary charter already discussed in our fourth chapter, land

was held in "royal desmesne," an institution founded by William I, the Conqueror, in 1066 that gave the king ownership of all the land. Now, under the corporate charter, land could be "alienated" from that "desmesne" by those holding the charter and offered, unencumbered with any feudal restrictions, as inducement to potential colonists who, in turn, could sell it freely. This is what I meant earlier when I referred to John Winthrop, in chapter 4, as the founder of one of the first real estate development companies in the New World. But the charter that put Winthrop in business, of course, was preceded by the charter granted to the Plymouth colony on 3 November 1620, and its terms had already blessed such real estate transactions with divine grace and covenantal sanction:

And forasmuch as We have been certainly given to understand by divers of our good Subjects . . . that there is noe other the Subjects of any Christian King or State, by any Authority from their Sovereignes, Lords or Princes, actually in Possession of any of the said Lands or Precincts, whereby any Right, Claime, Interest or Title, may, might, or ought by that Means accrue, belong, or appertaine unto them, or any of them. And also for that We have been further given certainly to knowe, that within these late Years there hath by God's Visitation raigned a wonderfull Plague, together with many horrible Slaughters, and Murthers, committed amongst the Savages and brutish People there, heretofore inhabiting, in a Manner to the utter Destruction, Deuastacion, and Depopulacion of that whole Territorye, so that there is not left for many Leagues together in a Manner, any that doe claime or challenge any Kind of Interests therein, nor any other Superior Lord or Souveraigne to make Claime thereonto, whereby We in our Judgement are persuaded and satisfied that the appointed Time is come in which Almighty God in his great Goodness and Bountie towards Us and our People, hath thought fitt and determined, that those large and goodly Territoryes, deserted as it were by their naturall Inhabitants, should be possessed and enjoyed by such of our Subjects and People as heretofore have and hereafter shall by his Mercie and Favour, and by his Powerfull Arme, be directed and conducted thither. In Contemplacion and serious Consideracion whereof, Wee have thought it fitt according to our Kingly Duty . . . to second and followe God's sacred Will, rendering reverend Thanks to his Divine Majestie for his gracious favour in laying open and revealing the same unto us, before any other Christian Prince or

State, by which Means without Offence, and as we trust to his Glory, Wee may with Boldness goe on to the settling of soe hopefull a work, which tendeth to the reducing and Conversion of such Sauages as remain wandering in Desolacion and Distress, to Civil Societie and Christian Religion, to the Inlargement of our own Dominions, and Aduancement of the Fortunes of such of our good subjects as shall willingly interesse themselves in the said Imployment, to whom We cannot but give singular commendations for their so worthy Intention and Enterprize.^[26]

One clearly recognizes here the juridical precedents of the Elizabethan charters discussed in our fourth chapter. The principle of "effective occupation" by Christian princes, the "vacancy" of the targeted lands, and the "duty" to incorporate the "Saueges" to human civility and to godly ways are the stock components of charter protocols. But there is something novel also in this charter of the Plymouth Company for New England. This is God's complicity and express will manifested in such acts as the "wonderfull Plague," by which is meant "miraculous plague," and the internecine slaughter that leaves the land desolate, and in God's "gracious favour in laying open and revealing the same unto us." By this dispensation, God has created a necessity that compels the English king "to seconde and follow God's sacred Will." And having shown His mercy and grace to the English people, they are obliged now to carry out His divine intention. The conquest and occupation of the New World, thus, becomes a covenantal imperative. Between Sir Humphrey Gilbert's letters patent and this charter, we have the Virginia Company's divine mission and its sanctification by the pulpit campaign of 1609. Clearly, in the decade since that campaign God has worked His will in the duty-bound conscience of the English and in the unbounded desolation of the territories crying for deliverance. No exegete could be more articulate on the underlying suppositions of the Plymouth Company's charter than the Pilgrims' able and persuasive apologist Robert Cushman. His diligent advocacy made the enterprise possible. His Reasons and Considerations Touching the Lawfulness of Removing out of England into the Parts of America (1622) reads as suggestive synthesis of Columbus's testamental epistles and the Virginia Company's

publicist sermons of 1609. Cushman, himself a member of the Pilgrim church that removed itself to Leyden in that same godly year of 1609, actively participated in making the financial arrangements for the migration. Having organized the party that sailed on the Mayflower, he himself boarded the ironically named other ship, the Speedwell, whose unseaworthy condition, or its shipmaster's guile, forced it back to port.^[27] He would sail with a second group he actively recruited in 1621 on the more auspiciously named ship the Fortune, though its return voyage gives the lie to its name since it was pirated by French marauders and stripped of its cargo. Cushman would return to England after a three-week stay in the New World, a sojourn that enabled him to speak with even greater authority and surer persuasion on behalf of the Pilgrims' godly enterprise.

Cushman's Reasons and Considerations could be read justly as apologia for colonization and empire. Certainly the title itself suggests as much. Nevertheless, there is something more compelling and equally urgent in this tract, something in its rationale that textures Columbus's divine primitivism. It elicits readings of Columbus through which, as I suggested already, one could find multiple levels of readability in the Admiral's texts. In this respect, Cushman is as suggestive as some of the Puritans of the Massachusetts Bay Colony, though more repercussive in his writing than the text of the Plymouth Company's charter which he helped secure. According to Cushman, the whole project of "such removals and plantations," as he euphemized "invasion and conquest," aims to "give content to the world."^[28] His Reasons and Considerations, analogously, purveys a reasoned content. It displays, in considered words, the ideological presumptions that condition the production of the New World as world in need of content. That determinate formulation extends Columbus from the incipient sixteenth century into the seventeenth. In doing so, however, Cushman explicitly bares what Columbus's visions, arithmetic, and rhetorical formulations take as données. As presumption, these givens were assumed to be generally understood because of their unquestionable status as ultimate condition for all that occurred. This animating end is the eschatological climax

toward which providential history and its elect agents, such as Columbus himself, are making their way. Columbus's too is a pilgrim age and its teleology crystallizes as the enterprise of the enterprise, the project to ensue from "the enterprise of the Indies": the crusade for Jerusalem, the recovery of the Holy Sepulcher, the rebuilding of the temple, the return to/of Zion. We have seen the millennialist framework subtend Columbus's visionary and ultimate goal that becomes articulated at key junctures in his itinerary. We have traced the tradition and scriptural corpus on which these conditioning presumptions of Columbus rest in our first and second chapters.^[29] In his Reasons and Considerations, Robert Cushman calls up this apocalyptic eschatology but, in doing so, his vision shifts from the divine primitivism of Columbus as Patriarchal prophet and focuses on the final dispensation, the consummation and fulfillment of the new Covenant. Unlike Columbus who communes with his God as Moses or Job in the wilderness of trial and by the fire of vicissitude, even as his sight is set on the promise of the end-time, Cushman owns to a belatedness in eschatological time and convenantal grace that points beyond the past and its present, beyond the world and geography of the Old Testament and its typological realization in the world of the New, toward an other world, less metaphorical than Columbus's "otro mundo," that renders the American New World a transitory way station, a divinely foreordained stopover. In this sense, as with Columbus, the New World of the Indies becomes incidental, a necessary, though expedient, instrumentality on the way to Jerusalem for Columbus the crusader and millenarian, straight to the anagogic, heavenly Jerusalem for Cushman.

Inasmuch as the New World for Columbus becomes a source, or mine, for the means necessary to bring about the millennium by facilitating the mediate step of reconquering the Holy Sepulcher and Mt. Zion, the sine qua non of the Medieval apocalyptic tradition, the New World has a metaphorical value as the new heaven and the new earth of Isaiah and John the Divine. But, for Columbus's prophetic ethos, the New World is also the Old Testament's sacred geography, as we have seen in studying his writ-

ings. There is no inconsistency in this simultaneity. Columbus's typological understanding of history and geography makes this coexistence of the old and the new dispensations continuous. Thus, just as the Old Testament and its world are a typological adumbration of the New Testament and its New Covenant, the New World of the Indies is the typological prefiguration that augurs and engenders the apocalyptic and millennial New World of the prophetic tradition. The neat, sequential delineation, or analogical parallel, is not always so clear since Columbus conflates the multiple worlds he inhabits into immediate simultaneity. The same will be the case to some extent with the more enthusiastic Puritans, because this sort of immediacy and simultaneity are the mark of divine enthusiasm. But with Cushman, the pilgrimage is a straight path, the way stations well laid out, the covenant's terms clear. Columbus, not unlike a number of Puritan enthusiasts of his legacy, inevitably mixed, in the calculus of his cartography and on the abacus of his calendar, visions and divinations. Robert Cushman's arithmetic aims to do its figuring through "Reasons and Considerations," though, of course, these be reckoned by equally urgent promptings of godly ends and heavenly blessings. Even though, according to Cushman, these promptings originate in "examples and precepts of Scriptures," these must now be "reasonably and rightly understood and applied," they "must be the voice and the word, that must call us, press us, and direct us." Because, "God . . . now . . . speaks in another manner."^[30] And just as "extraordinary revelations" have given way to "ordinary examples," the compact between God and His people as binding covenant has a new form. It is the form of a promissory contract pointing to deliverance, but it is also an interim deed until that Last Day dawns:

Neither is there any land or possession now, like unto the possession which the Jews had in Canaan, being legally holy and appropriated unto a holy people, the seed of Abraham, in which they dwelt securely, and had their days prolonged, it being by an immediate voice said, that he (the Lord) gave it them as a land of rest after their weary travels, and a type of eternal rest in heaven. But now there is no land

of that sanctimony, no land so appropriated, none typical; much less any that can be said to be given of God to any nation, as was Canaan. . . . But now we are all, in all places, strangers and pilgrims, travellers and sojourners, most properly having no dwelling but in this earthen tabernacle; our dwelling is but a wandering, and our abiding but as a fleeting, and in a word our home is nowhere but in the heavens.^[31]

The dividends anticipated by Cushman's covenantal investment are clearly other-worldly and postapocalyptic. But, of course, being a pilgrim he cannot stay at home and wait, for home too "is but a wandering." And since the sojourn to that end-time must abide by its errand, God's mysterious and gracious Will has determined, "in his great Goodness and Bountie towards Us and our People," that the faithful make their journey through the "Destruction, Deuastacion and Depopulacion of that whole Terrytorye," as the Plymouth Company's charter has it, that beg to be "possessed and enjoyed by such of our Subjects and People as heretofore have and hereafter shall by his Mercie and Favour, and by his Powerfull Arme, be directed and conducted thither." The ends of the Ends of the Earth compel vigorous means, and if the "barbarous heathens" had any inkling of what those ends entailed, "they would even pluck the kingdom of heaven by violence, and take it, as it were, by force."^[32] Having more than a mere glimpse of Zion's awaiting glory, Robert Cushman is wont to exercise these hypothetical exertions he would impute to the heathen. His Reasons and Considerations, then, is a forceful exhortation to action, and the "reasons" that legitimate the orderly enterprise of the enlightened righteous in the wilderness of the blind are consonant with the sustaining ideology that underwrites every charter since Sir Humphrey Gilbert's, including the charter secured by Cushman's reasoning advocacy for the Plymouth Company. Cushman sums up his reasons thus:

It being then, first, a vast and empty chaos; secondly, acknowledged the right of our sovereign king;^[33] thirdly, by peaceable composition in part possessed of divers of his loving subjects, I see not who can doubt or call in question the lawfulness of inhabiting or dwelling there. . . . Yea, and as the enterprise is weighty and difficult, so the

honor is more worthy, to plant to rude wilderness, to enlarge the honor and fame of our dread sovereign, but chiefly to display the efficacy and power of the Gospel, both in zealous preaching, professing, and wise walking under it, before the faces of these poor blind infidels.^[34]

But these, of course, are the mediate and efficient "reasons," what John Donne referred to as "secondary causes" and John Winthrop called "second causes," as we shall see presently. In Cushman's exhortatory injunctions, there are weightier and ultimate considerations that enjoin Cushman and his countrymen to such actions, and these considerations are, as in Columbus's case, both primal and ultimate at once, resting as they do, simultaneously, on the prehistory of prophetic adumbration and on the posthistory of millennial fulfillment. We have remarked the imminence of the latter in Cushman. As for the first, the justifications advanced simply move those godly warrants from Genesis educed by the Reverend William Symonds on behalf of the Virginia Company in his 25 April 1609 sermon just one chapter ahead. Instead of Genesis 12: 1–3, Cushman invokes Genesis 13: 6, with the self-sanctioning gloss that "as the ancient patriarchs, therefore, removed from straiter places into more roomy where the land lay idle and waste, and none used it, though there dwelt inhabitants of them, as Gen. XIII.6 . . . so is it lawful now to take a land which none useth, and make use of it."^[35] Although such divine precedent justifies taking the land, the ultimate justification is the redemption of the territory from ignominy and the salvaging of the heathens from iniquity, because time is running short for the world's worldly sojourn. Like Columbus, then, Cushman, in the final analysis, sees the enterprise of the Indies as the pressing duty of God's apostolic elect.

If Robert Cushman be the most articulate advocate of the Plymouth Company's Puritan pilgrims, the Puritans of the Massachusetts Bay Colony have their divine apologist in their seventime governor John Winthrop. Like Cushman, Winthrop adheres to the compact of a New Covenant, a primitive apostolic dispensation that derives its ideological sanction from "ordinary examples" rather than "extraordinary revelations." Yet, this invest-

ment in the "ordinary" has no less an expectation of extraordinary, other-worldly, and divine returns: "Though miracles be now ceased, yet men may expecte a more than ordinarie blessing from God upon all lawfull meanes where the worke is the Lords and he is sought in it according to his will, for it is usual with him to increase or weaken the strength of the meanes as he is pleased or displeased with the Instruments and the action; else we must conclude that God hath lefte the government of the world and committed all power to the Creature, that the successe of all things should wholely depend upon second causes."^[36] Like the spokesman of the pilgrim Puritans, Winthrop deliberated and proclaimed at length on behalf of his own Puritan remnant's errand. His deliberations, in which our citation above originates, carry the title of "Reasons to be considered for iustifieing the undertakeres of the intended Plantation in New England, and for incouraginge such whose hartes God shall move to ioyne with them in it." The second part of this exhortation consists of responses to "Diverse obiections which have been made against this Plantation, with their answears & Resolutions." In its cursory, enumerative form, this treatise may well be the most succinct justification of the Puritan enterprise in the New World and, as such, the most overtly revealing with regard to ideological enablements that make the enterprise not only possible but also imperative. Like Columbus, Winthrop is convinced that his and his company's work is "a worke of God." And, as he puts it in the passage cited above, "[t]hough miracles be now ceased . . . the worke is the Lords" and His will is what moves His "Instruments and the action." Necessarily so, lest we be deluded that "God hath . . . committed all power to the Creature, [and] that the successe of all thinges should wholely depend upon second causes." What Winthrop calls "second causes" is explainable in contradistinction to God's will, in other words, human intentions, reason, learning, and actions. These are the faculties and instruments that, as we have seen, Columbus himself confessed did not serve him a wit, crediting, instead, the guidance of divine grace, the intelligentia spiritualis he hispanisized as "inteligençia espiritual," and Winthrop refers to as "more than ordinarie bless-

ing from God." This coincidence, obviously, does not make Columbus a Puritan, nor does it turn Winthrop into what he and Robert Cushman referred to as visionaries of "extraordinary revelations" and "miracles" of the Patriarchal prophets. But these Puritans clearly do have something undeniably powerful in common with Columbus, and this is the inclination to forego the mediating role of human and ecclesiastical institutions in carrying out God's work that has made them its elect instruments. Such commonality is not accidental. The Reformation that energizes the nonconformist enterprise and fundamentalist convictions of the Puritans does have as antecedents the "primitivism" of the millenarian movements and prophetic impetus of such traditions as the "simplicity" of the Franciscan Spirituals and their most visible precursor, Joachim de Fiore. Columbus's direct connection to these traditions has been amply documented, most notably by Alain Milhou, often referred to and cited in our study. Such scholars as Marjorie Reeves, already cited, and Morton Bloomfield have documented the repercussions of these medieval traditions in northern Europe and in England.^[37] The divine primitivism that Columbus shares with Cushman and Winthrop is the apostolic zeal and evangelical simplicity of the early Christian Church. But although Columbus does cast himself, as we have seen, in the role of Old Testament prophet in unmediated commerce with God, an immediacy of revelation and miracle the Puritans disclaim, the precedent invoked by both Cushman and Winthrop is the authority of the same Hebrew texts and prophetic experience of the Old Testament patriarchs so crucial to Columbus. We have already noted this invocation in Cushman. Winthrop's Reasons to be considered, likewise, founds its "reasons and considerations" on the same premises. The most fundamental premise in Winthrop, as in Columbus, is the conviction of divine election, a special relationship compacted with God for the fulfillment of providential ends. For Columbus, this relationship is in large measure personal and individualistic. For Winthrop, it is congregational and collective. He sees his company and "tribe" as God's preferred remnant chosen from an otherwise corrupt and irredeemable humanity. In this sense, Winthrop sees his com-

pany as typological analogue of ancient Israel, the chosen people on a holy mission and the righteous path: "All other churches of Europe are brought to desolation," he notes, "but that God hath provided this place to be a refuge for many whome he meanes to save out of the generall callamity, and seeing the Church hath noe place lefte to flie but the wildernesse, what better worke can there be, then to goe and provide tabernacles of foode for her against she comes thither."^[38] The New World, then, is sacred terrain for the sacred people of the Lord's predilection, provisions both for the fullness of time and the plentitude of eschatology. In this sense, there is indeed something messianic and patriarchal in the covenant Winthrop attests to between his people and the Lord's design. And, though he, like Cushman, would eschew miraculous revelations and prophetic visions, Winthrop is not sanguine about proclaiming the righteousness and special privilege accorded to himself and his company as beneficiaries of God's wondrous blessing and unequaled dispensation:

It appears to be a worke of God for the good of his Church, in that he hath disposed the hartes of soe many of his wise and faithfull servants, both ministers and others, not only to approve of the enterprise but to interest themselves in it . . . Amos 3: the Lord revealeth his secret to his servants the prophetts, it is likely he hath some great worke in hand which he hath stirred up to encourage his servants to this Plantation, for he doth not use to seduce his people by his owne prophetts, but committe that office to the ministrie of false prophetts and lieing spiritts.^[39]

Clearly, Winthrop does "expecte a more than ordinarie blessing from God," though as Cushman put it, "God . . . now speaks in another manner." Winthrop's invocation of Amos 3:7 would still have prophecy as an indispensable part of God's wonderworking on behalf of His people. And, of course, there is no question in Winthrop's mind as to who are God's people and who His rightful prophets in the enterprise of New England's Plantation. As for the rights to "the wilderness" that remains the final refuge for the faithful remnant, Winthrop invokes the same reasons as Cushman and his company's charter, in essence, the same reasons that justified Hostienses and Pope Innocent IV in

the thirteenth century, that is, Genesis: All of the earth is God's dispensation to humanity and all humanity forms part of God's fold. Surely, those closest to His divine grace cannot be denied any part of His domain: "The whole earth is the Lord's garden," says Winthrop, "and he hath given it to the Sonnes of men with a general Commission: Gen. 1:28 increase and multiplie, and replenish the earth and subdue it, which was againe renewed to Noah: the end is double and naturall, that man might enjoy the fruits of the earth, and God might have his due glory from the creature: why then should we stand striving here for places of habitation . . . and in the meane time suffer a whole Continent as fruitfull and convenient for the use of man to lie waste without any improvement?"^[40] Why, indeed? And to assuage any possible objections to such self-evident reasoning, Winthrop introduces a distinction between "naturall" and "civil right," the latter accruing to those who would cultivate and improve the land for assuring the greater glory of God. And those who do no such thing, such as the "Natives in New England, they inclose noe Land, neither have any setled habytation, nor any tame Cattle to improve the Land by, and soe have no other but a Naturall Right to those Countries. Soe as if we leave them sufficient for their use, we may lawfully take the rest, there being more than enough for them and us."^[41] There should be no problem in such accommodation since the lands are well-nigh vacant by God's graces and munificence since "God hath consumed the Natives with a great Plague in those parts, soe as there be few Inhabitants lefte."^[42] As for those who are left, "they have of us that which will yeeld more benefight [sic], then all that Land which we have from them."

Lest this godly enterprise of the righteous remnant be confused with the adventurers of the Virginia Company, especially since so much in Winthrop's "Reasons to be considered" echoes unmistakably the pulpit rhetoric of twenty years earlier on behalf of the Virginia Company's second charter, the Patriarch of the Massachusetts Bay Company hastens to differentiate this Puritan undertaking from the earlier venture: "There were great fundamentall errors in the former which are like to be avoided in this: ffor: 1:

their mayne end was Carnall and not Religious: 2: They used unfitt instruments, a multitude of rude and misgoverned persons, the very scumme of the Land: 3: They did not establish a right forme of government."^[43] The first and seven-time governor of the Massachusetts Bay Puritans obviously should know. To make sure the nature of the divine enterprise he heads is properly understood, he invokes the patriarchal precedent of the prophetic era: "Soe he carried the Isra[e]lites into the wildernesse and made them forgette the fleshpotts of Egipt . . . Deu 8: 3: 16."^[44] Ironically, so intensely zealous and tribally exclusionary was the theocratic government formed by the advanced settlement for the Massachusetts Bay Colony, in Salem since 1628, that Winthrop himself had to spend his first sabbath, the day after his arrival, abroad his ship. He was informed by the Reverend Samuel Skelton, pastor of the Salem church, that not being a signator of the covenant of a gathered New England church, he was excluded from communion with its members.^[45]

Ironic as this telling exclusion might be, there is something fitting about it that construes with Winthrop's now legendary sermon "On Boarde the Arrabella, On the Atlantick Ocean" as "the great Company of Religious people, of which Christian Tribes he was the Brave Leader and famous Governor" made its way to the New England Zion. This is the sermon whose "Citty vpon a Hill" is still invoked on the swamps of the Potomac on occasions most convenient and for ends equally incongruous. Although Winthrop's "A Modell of Christian Charity" is the convenantal paradigm for governance in an age of Patriarchs that harken to Abraham, its proemial paragraph, the opening lines that put forth the sermon's own governing precepts under the heading of "A Modell Hereof," is unmistakably Aristotelian in its hierarchical principles of government. One readily recognizes in this homiletic prolepsis the first book of Aristotle's Politics and the twelveth of the Metaphysics . Midway through the previous century, Juan Ginés de Sepúlveda, the Latin translator of Aristotle and great antagonist of Father Bartolomé de Las Casas's charitable model of Christianity, had invoked the same texts in favor of Spanish imperial and colonialist hegemony over the hea-

then natives. The hierarchical criteria echoed by Winthrop simply transmuted in New England, and they did so even before the Bay Colony's Puritan governor could arrive. The standard for a graduated social ordering now is God's grace and church membership that covenanted the faithful with its blessings, making the blessed "highe and eminent in power and dignitie; others meane and in subieccion," as Winthrop's own words at the head of his sermon put it.