1. Fernando de Rojas, Celestina , ed. Dorothy Sherman Severin, trans. James Mabbe (Warminster: Aris and Phillips, 1987): 18-19.

2. The Crown expressed its confusion in two letters, dated the same day, one from Isabella, the other from both of the sovereigns, to Columbus. Both letters requested clarification and more information, as I discuss in "Voyage to Paradise," later in this volume.

3. For examples of such studies, see the entries in the bibliography for Hayden White, Nancy Struever, Hans Kellner, Enrique Pupo-Walker, and Dominick LaCapra.

4. In his recent book on Latin American narrative, Roberto González Echevarría takes a similar approach to the development of the modern novel; see his Myth and Archive: A Theory of Latin American Narrative (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990).

5. The complete text of this letter and my English translation appear in the Appendix. The letter was recently published for the first time by Antonio Rumeu de Armas, in Libro Copiador de Cristóal Colón: Correspondencia inédita con los Reyes Católicos sobre los viajes a América , 2 vols. (Madrid: Tes-timonio, 1989), and is reprinted here by permission of the Spanish Ministry of Culture. I am indebted to David Henige for bringing it to my attention.

6. The date given in the postscript is 14 March but, as Rumeu's recent publication of the letter of 4 March indicates, the postscript was in error.

7. According to Ferdinand Columbus, his father kept a journal, or diario , for each of the four voyages to the Indies. None of these day-by-day accounts have survived. The Diario is Las Casas's edition of Columbus's diario of the first voyage.

8. On this point see Barbara Herrnstein Smith, Contingencies of Value: Alternative Perspectives for Critical Theory (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1988).

1. He strapped another barrel with like contents to the ship's stern (Varela, 127). Ferdinand Columbus, in his account of the first voyage, quotes his father's words regarding this first letter announcing the Discovery:

escribí en un pergamino, con la brevedad que el tiempo exigía, cómo yo dejaba descubiertas aquellas tierras que les había prometido; en cuántos días y por qué camino lo había logrado; la bondad del país y la condición de sus habitantes, y cómo quedaban los vasallos de Vuestras Altezas en posesión de todo lo que se había descubierto. Cuya escritura, cerrada y sellada, dirigí a Vuestras Altezas con el porte, es a saber, promesa de mil ducados a aquél que la presentara sin abrir. A fin de que si hombres extranjeros la encontrasen, no se valiesen del aviso que dentro había, con la avidez del porte. Muy luego hice que me llevaran un gran barril, y habiendo envuelto la escritura en una tela encerada, y metido ésta en torta u hogaza de cera, la puse en el barril. Y bien sujeto con sus aros, lo eché al mar, creyendo todos que sería alguna devoción. Y porque pensé que podría suceder que no Ilegase a salvamento, y los navíos aun caminaban para acercarse a Castilla, hice otro atado semejante al primero, y lo puse en lo alto de la popa para que, si se hundía el navío, quedase el barril sobre las olas a merced de la tormenta.
(Fernando Colón, Vida del Almirante Don Cristóbal Colón [Mexico: Fondo de Cultura Económica, 1947], 123, chap. 37)

I wrote on a parchment, as briefly as the state of things required, how I had discovered those lands as I had promised to do; the length of the voyage and the route thither; the goodness of the country and the customs of its inhabitants; and how I had left Your Highnesses' vassals in possession of all I had discovered. This writing, folded and sealed, I addressed to Your Highnesses with a written promise of 1,000 ducats to whoever should deliver it sealed to you; this I did so that if it should fall into the hands of foreigners, they would be restrained by the reward from divulging the information it contained to others. I straightway [sic] had a great wooden barrel brought to me, and having wrapped the writing in a waxed cloth and put it in a cake or loaf of wax, I dropped it into the barrel, which I made secure with hoops and cast into the sea; and all thought this was an act of devotion. I still feared the barrel might not reach safety, but as the ships meanwhile were drawing closer to Castile I lashed a similar cask at the head of the stern, so that if the ship sank, it might float on the waves at the mercy of the storm.
(Fernando Colón, The Life of the Admiral Christopher Columbus by His Son Ferdinand , ed. and trans. Benjamin Keen [Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1978], 92)

2. According to the Diario , Columbus would have been off the coast of the Azores on 15 February 1493, not the Canaries, as the 15 February letter claims. The patent discrepancy supports the argument that the text could not have been written by Columbus or, at least, must have been altered after leaving his hands.

3. Ferdinand Columbus's Vida del Almirante and Bartolomé de Las Casas's Historia de las Indias .

4. For the background on this copy, see Rumeu, 1:19-20. Rumeu considers the manuscript an authentic sixteenth-century transcription, perhaps two or three copies or more removed from the original and containing a few insignificant errors. For another evaluation of the authenticity of the Libro Copiador , see P. E. Taviani, C. Varela, J. Gil, and M. Conti, eds., Relazione e lettere sul secundo, terzo, e quarto viaggio (Nuova Raccolta Colombiana), 2 vols. (Rome, Istituto Poligrafico e Zecca dello Stato, 1992), 1:163-

82. The authenticity of the manuscript is likely to be a topic of debate in years to come, however, as more specialists have the opportunity to evaluate it.

5. Demetrio Ramos Pérez, La primera noticia de América (Valladolid: Seminario Americanista de la Universidad de Valladolid, 1986). The value of this study, which has not yet received the attention it deserves, is enhanced by Ramos's inclusion of a transcription and facsimile of the archival copy of the letter of 15 February addressed to Santángel.

6. The extent and consequences of Las Casas's editing is the subject of "All these are the Admiral's exact words," later in this volume.

7. See Ramos, La primera noticia de América , 74-86. He further argues that there was no letter addressed to Sánchez, but rather that the translator of the Latin version, the only one that names Sánchez as an addressee, confused him with Santángel.

8. I disagree with Morison's translation of cielo in this context as "sky," rather than "heaven"; both the 4 March and 15 February letters imply that the Indians took the Spaniards for divine beings, venerating them and making offerings to them as such.

9. The letter was published in Rome, Florence, Barcelona, Basel, Paris, and Amsterdam.

10. See Ramos, La primera noticia de América , 62-67.

11. On the evolving importance of Jerusalem within the Columbian articulation of Discovery, see "Voyage to Paradise," later in this volume.

1. Las Casas in fact did much more to his source than simply summarize it. I discuss his editorial role in the Diario more fully in the next essay.

2. For example, Henri Vignaud, Histoire critique de la grande entreprise de Christophe Colomb , 2 vols. (Paris: H. Welter, 1911) and Le vrai Christophe Co-lomb et la légende (Paris: Picard, 1921), or Emiliano Jos, "La génesis colombiana del descubrimiento," Revista de Historia de América 14 (June 1942):1-48.

3. Here I am paraphrasing Hayden White's contrast between "communicative" and "performative" discourses. I have substituted "informative" for White's "communicative,'' since the latter term could be misleading. All discourses are communicative; the fundamental differences are to be found, it seems to me, in the manner in which they communicate. See White, The Content of the Form: Narrative Discourse and Historical Representation (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1987), 39.

4. Sebastián Horozco de Covarrubias, Tesoro de la lengua castellana o española (1611; rpt. Madrid: Ediciones Turner, 1984). s.v. antiguo and simple .

5. A third (unlikely) possibility is that the text was wholly fabricated by Las Casas. Even if that were the case, however, it would not alter the implicit textual pragmatics or, therefore, the basic terms of my argument.

6. On the ars dictaminis , see Ernst Robert Curtius, European Literature and the Latin Middle Ages (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1953); James J.

Murphy, Rhetoric in the Middle Ages: A History of Rhetorical Theory from Saint Augustine to the Renaissance (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1974); Charles B. Faulhaber, "The Letter-Writer's Rhetoric: The Summa dictaminis of Guido Faba," in Medieval Eloquence: Studies in the Theory and Practice of Medieval Rhetoric , ed. James J. Murphy (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1978), 85-111.

7. On the rights and privileges conferred upon Columbus by Ferdinand and Isabella, see Samuel Eliot Morison, Admiral of the Ocean Sea (Boston: Little, Brown), 360-67.

8. The phrasing is somewhat confusing as to whether the "libro" and the "pintura" are part of the same whole or two separate entities. The word pintura appears on one other occasion in the Diario , in the composite "pinturas de mapamundos." Presumably, then, "por pintura'' would refer to its common nautical acceptation—cartographic illustration—but perhaps not exclusively; one of the books that influenced Columbus, John Mandeville's Travels , was generously illustrated with noncartographic images of the lands, peoples, and other creatures described in the account of the journey.

9. See Curtius, European Literature and the Latin Middle Ages , 88.

10. My arguments from this point on are a critical response to ideas I expressed earlier in "El prólogo al Diario de Cristóbal Colón," Insula no. 522 (June 1990):16-17.

11. The other prediscovery documents issued by the Crown in preparation for the expedition were: "Carta real de provisión ordenando a los marineros de Palos aportar dos carabelas...." "Carta real de provisión a los Concejos y Justicias 'de la costa de la mar del Andalusía' ...," "Carta real de provisión mandando suspender el conocimiento de causas criminales...." "Sobrecarta dando comisión al contino Juan de Peñalosa para que se trasladase con plenos poderes a la villa de Palos...." and "Sobrecarta dando comisión al contino Juan de Peñalosa para el exacto cumplimiento de la cédula de 30 de abril, ordenando a las autoridades de la mar de Andalucía prestar la máxima colaboración a Cristóbal Colón ...'' The first three documents are dated 30 April 1492, the other two are from 20 June 1492. For the text of these documents see Rumeu de Armas, Nueva luz sobre las Capitulaciones de Santa Fe ... (Madrid: Consejo Superior de Investigaciones Científicas, 1985), 239-46. For English translations of the prediscovery documents issued by the Crown, see Morison, 27-36.

12. I originally proposed the possibility of reading Columbian writing in the context of Columbus's dialogue with the Crown in a paper delivered in April 1988 at the Kentucky Foreign Language Conference. In that talk I focused on the ways in which Columbian discourse can be understood to complement that of the "Capitulaciones de Santa Fe." The main points of that argument are developed and refined in the final essay of this book, "Gender and Discovery." The rewards of rereading Columbian writing pragmatically, in the context of that dialogue, are far from exhausted, however, as the contrastive strategy employed in the present essay demonstrates.

13. Rumeu, Nueva luz . The complete text of the "Capitulaciones" ap-

pears on pages 52-53 of that volume. For an English translation of the document, see 1492-1992: Re/Discovering Colonial Writing , eds. René Jara and Nicholas Spadaccini (Minneapolis: Prisma Institute, 1989), 383-86, and Morison, 27-29.

14. For the text of this pardon, see Rumeu, Nueva luz , 243-44.

15. For the complete text of the "Carta de Merced," see Rumeu, Nueva luz , 239-41. It has been translated by Morison (29-30).

16. The Spanish Crown's sovereignty over the newly found territories was confirmed by Pope Alexander VI in a papal bull, "Inter caetera," dated 3 May 1493.

17. One version of the "passport" Columbus presumably carried suggests in rather vague terms that he was on some sort of diplomatic mission of a religious character: "Mittimus in presenciarum nobilem virum Christoforum Colon cum tribus caravelis armatis per maria oceania ad partes Indie pro aliquibus causis et negotiis servicium Dei ac fidem ortodoxe concernentibus" (Jane, 1: lxx). However, the "passport" does not mention an evangelical intention to the mission. The likeliest purpose of this diplomatic document would have been to help shield the emissary from any hostile actions by foreign governments. Another version of the passport, quoted and translated by Morison, does not mention any religious purpose whatever: "Mittimus in presentiarum nobilem virum Xpõforum Colon, cum tribus carauelis armatis per maria oceana ad partes Indie pro aliquibus causis et negotiis.'' "By these presents we send the nobleman Christopher Columbus with three equipped caravels over the ocean seas toward the regions of India for certain reasons and purposes'' (31). This completely ambiguous phrasing is characteristic of the other prediscovery documents issued by the Crown.

18. Juan Manzano Manzano is the most notable and recent exception; see his Colón y su secreto: El predescubrimiento (Madrid: Ediciones Cultura Hispánica, 1982).

19. Perhaps some of the imaginary or legendary islands typically depicted in the western Atlantic on portolan charts of the period. For a discussion of Columbian cartography, see J. B. Harley, Maps and the Columbian Encounter (Milwaukee: Golda Meir Library of the University of Wisconsin, 1990). I discuss the textual consequences of this cartography in "Voyage to Paradise," later in this volume.

20. The phrase that appears in the "passport," "ad partes Indie" (toward the regions of India), could refer to almost any place in the Far East as it was understood in the oriental geography of Columbus's time. Only Columbus's explicit identification of his destination as the kingdom of the Grand Khan resolves the ambiguity found in the royal documents.

21. In contrast, the positions taken by Vignaud, Rómulo D. Carbia and, more recently, Alejo Carpentier (in his historical essay-cum-novel El arpa y la sombra ) attribute many of the inaccuracies in the Columbian texts to deliberate falsification by Las Casas and/or Columbus himself; see Carbia, "La historia del descubrimiento y los fraudes del Padre Las Casas," Nosotros 72 (1931):139-54.

22. Two of Spain's best-known early poets were so employed: Gonzalo de Berceo (1197-1264) served as notary in his monastery, and Juan de Mena (1411-1456) was secretary for Latin letters to King John II of Castile.

23. For a description of metonymy and its functions, see J. Dubois et al., A General Rhetoric , trans. Paul B. Burrell and Edgar M. Slotkin (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1981), 120-22.

24. This spatiotemporal paradigm has a figural counterpart in the Ebstorf map, where the body of Christ (representing the Christian community) encompasses the disparate parts of the world, thus rendering them a coherent whole. I discuss the Ebstorf map in relation to Columbian writing in "Voyage to Paradise," later in this volume.

25. Columbus employed the term negocio to refer to both the commercial and the spiritual dimensions of his project, as Milhou notes in Colón y su mentalidad mesiánica (Valladolid: Seminario Americanista de la Universidad de Valladolid, 1983), 289:

El "negocio" o la "negociación" de las Indias tiene, como la palabra "empresa,'' unas connotaciones dobles: una mercantil, la del mundo de los ''negocios" en que se crió Colón, pero también otra religiosa, la del negotium crucis de los cruzados al cual equiparaba su "negocio" ultramarino.

The "business" or the "negotiation" of the Indies has, like the word "enterprise," dual connotations: one mercantile, pertaining to the "business" world in which Columbus was raised, but also a religious one, the negotium crucis of the crusaders to which he compared his ultramarine "business."

1. "There is some reason to believe, however, that the original Journal was still in existence at the end of the last century; it may even be in existence today." Such was Samuel Eliot Morison's opinion in 1939. See his curious anecdote, offered as supporting evidence, in "Texts and Translations of the Journal of Columbus' First Voyage," Hispanic American Historical Review 19 (1939):236-37.

2. Las Casas refers to his source as the "libro de su primera navegaçiñn y descubrimiento d'estas Indias" (Varela, 30; book of his first navigation and discovery of these Indies). There is no internal evidence in his summary that suggests when he did the transcription. Scholarly opinion ranges from shortly after Las Casas's arrival in Española (Haiti) in 1502, to 1552, the date of his visit to the material collected by Ferdinand Columbus in Seville. The weight of opinion seems to favor the later date, and in the absence of compelling arguments to the contrary I accept it here.

3. The bibliography on Las Casas's life and works is immense. Texts essential to an understanding of the man and his writings include: Marcel Bataillon, Etudes sur Bartolomé de Las Casas (Paris: Centre de Recherches de l'Institut d'Etudes Hispaniques, 1965); Lewis Hanke, All Mankind Is One: A Study of the Disputation Between Bartolomé de Las Casas and Juan Ginés de Se -

pülveda on the Intellectual and Religious Capacity of the American Indians (De Kalb: Northern Illinois University Press, 1974); Juan Friede and Benjamin Keen, Bartolomé de Las Casas in History (De Kalb: Northern Illinois University Press, 1971); and Marianne Mahn-Lot, Bartolomé de Las Casas et le droit des Indiens (Paris: Payot, 1982). For an influential dissenting opinion, see Ramón Menéndez Pidal, El padre Las Casas: Su doble personalidad (Madrid: 1963).

4. Las Casas, "Memorial de los remedios," in Obras escogidas , ed. Juan Pérez de Tudela y Bueso (Madrid: Biblioteca de Autores Españioles), 121.

5. Columbus refers to his enterprise as a descubrimiento , a term I discuss at length in "Voyage to Paradise," later in this volume. In the Diario the term conquista appears only in reference to the Holy Land, when Columbus urges the Catholic Monarchs to finance the "conquest" of Jerusalem with the wealth that would be obtained from the enterprise of the Indies. Conquista also appears once in reference to the first voyage, but as a paraphrase of a statement made by the King of Portugal, who interviewed Columbus immediately after his return to Europe.

6. New Law #38, for example, placed the "discoveries" under the authority of the Audiencia, the juridical arm of colonial government, and required every "discoverer" to be accompanied by religious; see Bataillon and Saint Lu, El Padre Las Casas , 29.

7. See Rómulo D. Carbia, "La historia del descubrimiento y los fraudes del Padre Las Casas," Nosotros 72 (1931):139-54; Henri Vignaud, Le vrai Christophe Colomb et la légende (Paris: Picard, 1921) and Histoire critique de la grande entreprise de Christophe Colomb (Paris: H. Welter, 1911).

8. Morison, "Texts and Translations of the Journal of Columbus' First Voyage," 239. For a dissenting opinion see David Henige, In Search of Columbus: The Sources for the First Voyage (Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 1991).

9. Robert H. Fuson, "The Diario de Colón : A Legacy of Poor Transcription, Translation, and Interpretation," in In the Wake of Columbus , ed. Louis de Vorsey, Jr., and John Parker (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1985), 51-75; Varela, ix-xxiii.

10. Challenging the predominant view that the Diario is "a privileged eyewitness document of the discovery ... an accurate ethnographic record," Peter Hulme prefers to see it as the "first fable of European beginnings in America" ( Colonial Encounters: Europe and the Native Caribbean, 1492-1797 [London: Methuen, 1986], 17-18). But even in his salutary skepticism regarding the unlikely privilege of a text that is "a transcription of a copy of a lost original," Hulme, like Varela and Fuson, considers the Diario 's mediated transmission a contingent rather than essential problem, secondary to what he has identified as the presence of the pristine discourses of ''Oriental civilization'' and "savagery" in the text attributable to Columbus. Clearly, in my argument, no aspect of the Diario is left untouched by the presence of the editorial voice.

11. The entry for 21 November reads:

Para creer qu'el cuadrante andava bueno, le movía ver diz que el norte tan alto como en Castilla. Y si esto es verdad, mucho allegado y alto andava con la Florida; pero ¿dónde están luego agora estas islas que entre manos traía? Ayudava a esto que hazía diz que gran calor, pero claro es que si estuviera en la costa de la Florida que no oviera calor, sino frío; y es también manifiesto que cuarenta y dos grados en ninguna parte de la tierra se cree hazer calor si no fuese por alguna causa de per accidens , lo que hasta oy no creo yo que se sabe.
(Varela, 61)

To see the North Star as high as in Castile would persuade him, he says, that the quadrant was working well. (And if this is true he would have been near and traveling in the same latitude as Florida. But where are these islands that he had at hand?) It helped him to this conclusion, he says, that it was very hot. (But it is clear that if he were on the coast of Florida it would not be hot, but cold; and it is also manifest that in 42 degrees latitude nowhere on earth is it thought to be hot, if it were not for some accidental cause, which up to now I do not believe is known.)
(Dunn & Kelley, 163-65)

Dunn and Kelley have added the parentheses to their translation in order to signal Las Casas's interventions, but, as noted earlier, Las Casas silently and seamlessly embedded his observations into the third-person paraphrase.

12. Mikhail M. Bakhtin, The Dialogic Imagination , trans. Caryl Emerson and Michael Holquist (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1981), 293-94.

13. Julia Kristeva develops her basic theory of intertextuality in Le texte du roman (Paris: Mouton, 1970) and in Sémiotiké, recherches pour une sémanalyse (Paris: Seuil, 1969).

14. See, for example, Laurent Jenny, "The Strategy of Form," in French Literary Theory Today , ed. Tzvetan Todorov (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1982), 34-63; Jonathan Culler, "Presupposition and Intertextuality," in his The Pursuit of Signs (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1981), 100-118; Gérard Genette, Palimpsestes: La littérature au second degré (Paris: Seuil, 1982).

15. Genette, Palimpsestes , 286.

16. My discussion of rhetorical paraphrase is based on Michael Roberts, Biblical Epic and Rhetorical Paraphrase in Late Antiquity (Liverpool: Francis Cairns, 1985).

17. Quoted by Roberts, Biblical Epic , 30.

18. These three discourses are also evident in the letter to Luis de Santángel (15 February 1493), which appears also to be a summary of the journal, although it differs substantially from Las Casas's Diario in that it emphasizes the economic aspects of the enterprise and is homogeneously testimonial in point of view; see Varela, 139-46.

19. I discuss Las Casas's marginalia in the Diario in the next essay, "In the Margins of Columbus."

20. Las Casas's later manipulation of the Diario when he assimilated it

into the Historia bears out this tendency to subordinate (or suppress) the less savory aspects of Columbus's account and enhance those that place the Indians in a favorable light. David Henige's detailed comparison of the Diario and its version in the Historia demonstrates that Las Casas showed a liberal hand in further editing and revising his own edition as he incorporated it into the history; see Henige, "To Read Is to Misread, To Write Is to Miswrite: Las Casas as Transcriber," Hispanic Issues: Amerindian Images (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1992).

21. Columbus refers to a "libro" in the letter/prologue, but it was not what we know today as the Diario . Presumably it was to have contained maps and/or drawings; see Varela, 17. If he ever managed to compose it, it has not been found.

22. Columbus wrote of his intention to describe in his journal "todo este viaje muy puntualmente, de día en día, todo lo que yo hiziese y viese y passasse" (Varela, 16-17; this entire voyage very punctually, day by day, everything that I would do and see and experience).

23. On the "academic" prologue, see A. J. Minnis, Medieval Theory of Authorship: Scholastic Literary Attitudes in the Later Middle Ages (London: Scolar Press, 1984 On medieval literary pedagogy, see Minnis's volume and Judson Boyce Allen, The Ethical Poetic of the Later Middle Ages: A Decorum of Convenient Distinction (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1982).

24. On Las Casas's treatment of other aspects of the Diario in his transcription of the text in the Historia , see Henige, In Search of Columbus , 54-64. The question of intention in literary analysis has become problematic in contemporary literary theory. For a sober critical summation, see Annabel Patterson, "Intention," in Critical Terms for Literary Study , ed. Frank Lentricchia and Thomas McLaughlin (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1990), 135-46. Paul de Man put it this way: "the subject remains endowed with a function that is not grammatical but rhetorical, in that it gives voice, so to speak, to a grammatical syntagm. The term voice , even when used in a grammatical terminology . . . is, of course, a metaphor inferring by analogy the intent of the subject from the structure of the predicate" (quoted by Patterson, 145).

25. Alberto Porqueras Mayo, El prólogo como género literario: Su estudio en el Siglo de Oro español (Madrid: Consejo Superior de Investigaciones Científicas, 1957).

26. Even the Caribs, later described as fierce, are written off as formidable only in contrast to the absolute timidity of the Taínos. I examine this aspect of the Diario more fully in "Voyage to Paradise."

27. See, for example, the polemical treatise Las Casas presented in 1550-51 at the Valladolid debate on the nature of the Indians, Del único modo de atraer a todos los pueblos a la verdadera religión (Mexico: Fondo de Cultura Económica, 1942), and the Historia de las Indias , where the log becomes an intertext in the common sense of the term. In the prologue to the Historia Las Casas affirms his ideological intentions and his goal in writing the book:

quise . . . librar mi nación española del error y engaño gravísimo y perniciosísimo en que vive y siempre hasta hoy ha vivido, estimando destas océanas gentes faltarles el ser de hombre, haciéndolas brutales bestias incapaces de virtud y doctrina.
([Madrid: Biblioteca de Autores Españoles , 1957], 15)

I wanted . . . to deliver my Spanish nation from the grave and pernicious error and self-deception in which it lives and has always lived to date, believing that these oceanic peoples lack humanity, making them out to be brutish beasts incapable of virtue and instruction.

Columbus's log is employed by Las Casas precisely to subvert this pejorative vision of the Indians.

1. The very proliferation of notes suggests that in Las Casas's mind they played an important rhetorical role in underscoring the portions of the text he felt were especially significant.

2. Anthony Pagden has noted that the Historia is heavily text-dependent and argues that Las Casas fills its pages with an overwhelming number of citations in order to display his erudition and thus buttress the authority of his own eyewitness testimony about life in the Indies; see his " Ius et Factum : Text and Experience in the Writings of Bartolomé de Las Casas," Representations 33 (Winter 1991):147-62. I will argue further that the citations are not only a rhetorical element but the very stuff of Las Casas's historical discourse, which depends on the commentary of the citations and paraphrases to carry out its "reading" of the Discovery.

3. On the deconstructionist notion of the supplement, see Jonathan Culler, On Deconstruction: Theory and Criticism After Structuralism (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1982), esp. 102-6.

4. On Las Casas as biographer, see Santa Arias, "Retórica e ideología en la Historia de las Indias de Bartolomé de Las Casas" (Diss., University of Wisconsin, Madison, 1990). On the interpolated story in the Historia , see Antonio Benítez Rojo, "Bartolomé de Las Casas: Entre el infierno y la ficción," in his La isla que se repite: El Caribe y la perspectiva posmoderna (Hanover, N.H.: Ediciones del Norte, 1989), 69-104.

5. Pagden, " Ius et Factum ," 157.

6. Arias argues that Las Casas identified with Columbus and that traces of that transference can be found throughout the Historia ; see "Retórica e ideología en la Historia de las Indias ," esp. 86-99.

7. Las Casas, "Memorial de los remedios," in Obras escogidas , ed. Juan Pérez de Tudela y Bueso (Madrid: Biblioteca de Autores Españoles), 121.

8. I am relying to a great extent on Varela's description of the manuscripts in Fray Bartolomé de Las Casas: Obras Completas , vol. 14, p. 12, since I have only been able to consult Sanz's facsimile.

9. I do not include under my definition of "marginal commentary" the corrections to the text itself made by Las Casas. Although they are a useful indicator of how Las Casas massaged the text, they do not constitute a creative contribution.

10. The abbreviation "nõ" was acknowledged by de Lollis only the first four times it appeared.

11. Most of the major translations into other European languages follow this same pattern. On the editing history of the Diario , see Samuel Eliot Morison, "Texts and Translations of the Journal of Columbus' First Voyage," Hispanic American Historical Review 19 (1939):235-61; Robert H. Fuson, " The Diario de Colón : A Legacy of Poor Transcription, Translation, and Interpretation," in In the Wake of Columbus , ed. Louis de Vorsey, Jr., and John Parker (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1985), 51-75; and David Henige, ''Samuel Eliot Morison as Translator and Editor of Columbus's diario de a bordo," Terrae Incognitae 20 (1988):69-88.

12. Of the most recent and important translations, Cioranescu's French version presents a limited selection of Las Casas's commentary in the notes; his prevailing criterion of selection appears to have been geographical. Gaetano Ferro's Italian translation similarly omits some commentary, at times justifying the omission with pronouncements on the commentary's irrelevance. The question such pronouncements immediately raise is, of course, to whom is the commentary irrelevant? Certainly not to Las Casas.

13. In her edition of Las Casas's Colección de obras completas (Madrid: Alianza, 1989), Varela writes: "A primera vista puede que sorprenda la inclusión [del Diario y la Carta] en la Colección , inclusión que se justifica por sí misma: Las Casas no fue sólo un copista fiel de la obra colombina, como se verá más adelante, sino también un anotador del texto en cuyos márgenes dejó muchas apostillas valiosísimas" (14:11; At first glance the inclusion of the Diario and letter in the Colección may be surprising, an inclusion which justifies itself: Las Casas was not only a faithful copyist of Columbus's works, as will be seen shortly, but also an annotator of the text in whose margins he left very valuable annotations). In that case, one is tempted to ask, why weren't the notes alone published in the Colección ? Varela may feel some personal awkwardness here since in her Cristóbal Colón: Textos y documentos completos she (paradoxically, in hindsight) includes both the Diario and the "Relación" and characterizes Las Casas precisely as "un copista fiel, incluso cuando no acertaba a dar con el sentido del pasaje'' (xxiii; Las Casas was a faithful copyist, even when he did not succeed in making the passage make sense).

14. Compare, for example, the Diario entry for 30 October in Fernández de Navarrete's Colección de los viages . . . (Buenos Aires: Guaranía, 1945) and in Colección de documentos y manuscritos compilados por Fernández de Navarrete (Nendeln, Lichtenstein: Kraus-Thomson, 1971).

15. J. A. Vázquez has done a valuable preliminary study of the nature and content of the commentary itself; see his "Las Casas's Opinions in Co-

lumbus's Diary," Topic 21 (Spring 1971):45-56. Note, however, that what I am proposing here is significantly different—that the annotations and the main text be read organically. This, of course, requires that the text be published integrally, precisely as it appears in the manuscript.

16. Rumeu de Armas has argued that Las Casas was working with an already-summarized version of the Columbian text, to which he then added his own commentary and corrections. This, of course, would make the Las Casas text at least twice removed from the original. See Rumeu, "El Diario de a bordo de Cristóbal Colón: El problema de la paternidad del extracto," Revista de Indias 36 (1976):7-17.

17. An assimilated version of the Columbian texts, apparently derived from a somewhat different source than the one used by Las Casas, appears in Ferdinand Columbus's Vida del Almirante , which survived only in an Italian translation; the Spanish original was lost.

18. The generous margins probably served to facilitate annotation as well as to highlight the notes themselves. A possible model or antecedent for Las Casas's treatment of the marginal commentary is the sixteenth-century Spanish practice of annotating official correspondence from the colonies to facilitate reading when the documents circulated through the Council of the Indies. The Council was apparently increasingly concerned precisely with the size of the margins of the documents it received, and legislation was passed at the end of the sixteenth century to ensure they be of generous proportions with respect to the main text; see Antonia M. Heredia, "Las cartas de los virreyes de Nueva España a la corona española en el siglo XVI," Anuario de Estudios Americanos 31 (1974):441-596, and "La carta como tipo diplomático indiano," Anuario de Estudios Americanos 34 (1977):65-95. Las Casas himself appeared at various times before the Council and was undoubtedly familiar with documents similarly annotated. While the purpose of annotating documents at the Council was typically to summarize or record responses to specific petitions contained in the text, Las Casas adds evaluative and critical annotations to Columbus's texts.

19. Varela transcribes "entenderse" in contrast to Sanz's "estenderse." Comparison with the facsimile text leaves little doubt that Sanz was correct.

20. For a striking contrast to Las Casas's reading, see Peter Martyr d' Anghiera's bucolic reading of Columbus in De Orbe Novo decades .

21. Soon after composing this letter Columbus was returned to Spain from Española in shackles by Bobadilla, chief justice and royal commissioner of Ferdinand and Isabella; see Samuel Eliot Morison, Admiral of the Ocean Sea (Boston: Little, Brown, 1942), 562-72.

22. Varela includes the fragments of this lost diario that were excerpted by Las Casas in her Textos y documentos completos (220-42) and considers them part of the "Relación," a text she believes to have been summarized by Las Casas in his edition. Rumeu's recent publication of El Libro Copiador de Cristóbal Colón , containing a copy of the "Relación" that is essentially coeval to Las Casas's transcription, supports my conviction that Las Casas

must also have consulted and extracted passages from a separate account of the third navigation in composing the Historia .

23. The encomienda placed a group of Indians under the control of a Spanish colonist. In exchange for religious instruction and tutoring in Spanish customs and language, the Indians were forced to work the mines and fields. Such was the remuneration Columbus himself claimed he would give to the captives he took during the first voyage.

24. I am working from Las Casas's copy of "Carta a doña Juana de la Torre, ama del príncipe don Juan" as edited by Varela (269-70). The letter is transcribed verbatim, with the marginal notes, in the Historia de las Indias (482-87). A translation of the complete version of the letter, based on the Raccolta edition, appears in Morison (289-98).

25. I am paraphrasing Anthony Pagden's lucid assessment of Las Casas's contributions to the debate on the nature of the Amerindians; see his The Fall of Natural Man: The American Indian and the Origins of Comparative Ethnology (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1982), 119.

26. Antonio Gómez Moriana has done an illuminating comparative analysis of Las Casas's and Ferdinand Columbus's treatment of the same passage from the Diario in their respective histories of the Discovery. He argues that Ferdinand does an economic reading of the Columbian text, in contrast to Las Casas's missionary reading—an analysis that supports my argument here that Las Casas's rewriting of the Columbian texts subordinates the commercial dimension of Columbus's discourse in favor of its Christian dimension. See Gómez Moriana, "Narration and Argumentation in the Chronicles of the New World," in 1492-1992: Re/Discovering Colonial Writing , ed. René Jara and Nicholas Spadaccini (Minneapolis: Prisma Institute, 1989), 97-120.

27. Quoted by Alejandro Cioranescu, "La 'Historia de las Indias' y la prohibición de editarla," Anuario de Estudios Americanos 23 (1966):363-76. Cioranescu suggests that Las Casas's intended audience may have been only his fellow Dominicans at the convent in Santo Domingo. Given the scope, tone, and tenor of the text, this possibility seems highly improbable. Since Las Casas entrusted to the Dominicans the preservation of the manuscript and its publication, there is good reason to believe, as Cioranescu also suggests, that he hoped they would come to advocate his positions after his death.

1. A notable exception is Mary B. Campbell's chapter on Columbus's "Letter to Sánchez" (i.e., "Letter to Santángel") and "Journal" (i.e., the Diario ) in The Witness and the Other World: Exotic European Travel Writing, 400-1600 (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1988). Campbell considers these texts to have been informed by the literary genre of the romance.

2. Hayden White, Dominick LaCapra, and Hans Kellner, among others,

have shown how the study of the historical text is enhanced by considering it as a story about the past. See, for example, the works by these three authors listed in the bibliography.

3. Paul Carter, The Road to Botany Bay: An Exploration of Landscape and History (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987), 69.

4. A similar notion is proposed by Michel de Certeau, who argues that stories constitute "symbolic languages of space" ( The Practice of Everyday Life , trans. Steven F. Rendall [Berkeley: University of California Press, 1984]). I prefer Carter's formulation here because of its greater specificity. De Certeau's argument that every story is a travel story—"a spatial practice"—erases what to my mind is a fundamental distinction between stories that are about journeys and those that are not.

5. "Christoferens," from the Latin fero (to carry, to speak of, to endure, to spread abroad). Alain Milhou offers a detailed assessment of the ideological context that, he argues, explains the significance of Columbus's assumption of this particular name; see his Colón y su mentalidad mesiánica en el ambiente franciscanista español (Valladolid: Seminario Americanista de la Universidad de Valladolid, 1983), esp. 55-90.

6. The classical paradigm is the errant geography of Herodotus, the traveler-geographer of the fifth century B.C. , not Erathosthenes of Cyrene, who wrote a geographical treatise in the third century B.C.

7. Michel Butor, "Travel and Writing," Mosaic 8 (1974):1-16.

8. Samuel Eliot Morison, quoting Franco Machado, reminds us that in the fifteenth-century Portuguese literature of exploration descobrir could mean any of the following: to find a land of whose existence one had previous knowledge, albeit vague or erroneous; to find a place not known to exist (the predominant modern sense); and to explore territory previously found ( Portuguese Voyages to America in the Fifteenth Century [Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1940], 143-44). All these connotations, we may note, entail the acquisition of knowledge about a place initially constituted as an enigma. Thus, in the literature of exploration to write about a place is to make known what was essentially unknown by inscribing it into the cultural discourses that render it familiar and thus "thinkable." Naming is above all a way of thinking about a place by setting it in context with and in relation to other names and thereby rendering it, in Paul Carter's words, "a place that could be communicated."

9. The literature on the Discovery is dominated by discussion of what Columbus thought about his findings, whether he realized the land to be a "new world," and what that phrase actually meant in his day. In contrast, I am concerned with the Discovery as it was written , and my essay proposes a reading, not the history of an idea. Thus, I will not be claiming that Columbus wrote about a destination known to him (as some have argued) but rather, and this is an essential distinction, that Columbian writing articulates the destination as if it were already known.

10. Mikhail M. Bakhtin, "Forms of Time and of the Chronotope in the

Novel: Notes Toward a Historical Poetics," in The Dialogic Imagination , trans. Caryl Emerson and Michael Holquist (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1981), 84-258. Bakhtin holds that the chronotope is responsible for generating meaning, by defining the spatiotemporal characteristics of genre and thereby the conditions for process and event in the text.

11. The phrasing is borrowed from Steven Hutchinson, Cervantine Journeys (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1992), 84.

12. A similar notion of time is evident in the nonreligious travel literature of the Spanish Middle Ages, such as Clavijo's Embajada a Tamorlán or Tafur's Andanzas , as Barbara W. Fick has noted in El libro de viajes en la España medieval (Santiago de Chile: Editorial Universitaria, 1976).

13. Pierre d'Ailly's text and Columbus's marginal annotations are available in a bilingual Latin-French edition, Ymago Mundi , 3 vols., ed. Edmond Buron (Paris: Maisonneuve Frèes, 1930). The copy owned by Columbus is preserved in the Biblioteca Colombina, in Seville.

14. Samuel Y. Edgerton, Jr., "From Matrix to Mappaemundi to Christian Empire: The Heritage of Ptolemaic Cartography in the Renaissance," in Art and Cartography: Six Historical Essays , ed. David Woodward (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987), 10-50.

15. For a general assessment of the influence of Ptolemy on Columbus, see George E. Nunn, The Geographical Conceptions of Columbus: A Critical Consideration of Four Problems (New York: American Geographical Society, 1924), esp. 54-90.

16. David Woodward, "Medieval Mappaemundi ," in The History of Cartography , ed. J. B. Harley and David Woodward (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987), 1:2-86-370.

17. On the relation between the portolan chart and the portolano , see Armando Cortesão, History of Portuguese Cartography , vol. 1 (Coimbra: Junta de lnvestigações do Ultramar, 1969).

18. Tony Campbell, "Portolan Charts from the Late Thirteenth Century to 1500," in The History of Cartography , ed. J. B. Harley and David Woodward (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987), 1:371-463. For an excellent summary of the development and significance of portolan cartography, see Yoko K. Fall, "Les cartes a rumbs et leur utilisation au XIV et au XV siècle," Studia 47 (1989):23-39.

19. Morison, Admiral of the Ocean Sea (Boston: Little, Brown, 1942), 286. A portolan chart at the Bibliothièque Nationale in Paris has been attributed to Columbus, but the attribution is not generally accepted; see Harley and Woodward, History of Cartography , 1:452. Various remarks in the Diario suggest that Columbus made or directed the making of several "cartas de navegar"; see, for example, the prologue to the Diario (Varela, 17), and the Diario entries for 25 September and 3 October (Varela, 24, 26). Several contemporaries of Columbus testified that they had seen a Columbian chart of the voyage to Paria on the South American mainland; among these witnesses was the navigator and cartographer Alonso de Hojeda, who captained the

later expedition, in which Vespucci participated, to the same area. See Paolo Revelli, Cristoforo Colombo e la scuola cartografica genovese (Genova: Consiglio Nazionale delle Ricerche, 1937), 227.

20. Juan de la Cosa served as pilot on Columbus's first and second voyages. For a reproduction of his map, see J. B. Harley, Maps and the Columbian Encounter (Milwaukee: Golda Meir Library of the University of Wisconsin, 1990),60.

21. Quoted by David Woodward, "Medieval Mappaemundi ," in The History of Cartography , 287.

22. have borrowed the term "textual cartography" from Tom Conley, "Montaigne and the Indies: Cartographies of the New World in the Essais , 1580-88," in 1492-1992: Re/Discovering Colonial Writing (Minneapolis: Prisma Institute, 1989), 223-62.

23. Evidence of Columbus's involvement in the cartographic trade is abundant. Oviedo, in the Historia general , explains that the Admiral had once made his living by drawing navigational charts (bk. 1, chap. 4). Ferdinand, in chap. 7 of the Vida , notes that his father had once sent Toscanelli a small sphere to demonstrate his geographical theories. Las Casas also underscores Columbus's cartographic abilities, citing evidence found in the Columbian texts. Revelli refers to the eyewitness testimony of several contemporaries who had seen Columbus's portolan chart of the third voyage; see Revelli, Cristoforo Colombo , 227. Hojeda, who apparently used Columbus's directions for his own voyage to the mainland, described the chart as a "carta de marear los rumbos y vientos por donde [Columbus] había llegado a la Paria" (Revelli, 227; chart for navigating the rhumbs and winds by which [Columbus] had arrived at Paria). This chart is probably the same one Columbus promised to send the Crown in the "Relación del tercer viaje" (Varela, 219).

24. Revelli, Cristoforo Colombo , 226.

25. See Morison's Portuguese Voyages and Admiral of the Ocean Sea , chap. 4, and also Avelino Teixeira da Mota, O essencial sobre Cristovão Colombo e os portugueses (Lisbon: Imprensa Nacional-Casa de Moeda, 1987).

26. Alonso de Chaves y el libro IV de su "Espejo de navegantes ," ed. P. Castañeda, M. Cuesta, and P. Hernández (Madrid: Industrias Gráficas España, 1977).

27. G. Pereira collected these rutters in Roteiros portuguezes da viagem de Lisboa a India nos séculos XVI e XVII (Lisbon: Imprensa Nacional, 1898).

28. For a summary of Veen's instructions, see João Rocha Pinto, A viagem: Memória e espaço (Lisbon: Livraria Sá Da Costa Editora, 1989). 64-65.

29. O manuscrito "Valentim Fernandes ," ed. António Baião (Lisbon: Academia Portuguesa da Historia, 1939). See also Avelino Teixeira da Mota, Evolução dos roteiros portugueses durante o século XVI (Coimbra: Revista da Universidade de Coimbra, 1969).

30. Garcie's text was not printed until the early 1500S. David W. Waters describes it as "an outstanding piece of objective, factual, scientific writ-

ing," in The Rutters of the Sea: The Sailing Directions of Pierre Garcie (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1967), 9.

31. Campbell notes an interesting contrast between the Columbian journal, which emphasizes the psychological aspects of description, and Marco Polo's account of his travels in the Far East (a text Columbus read and annotated profusely), where description assumes an annunciatory form; see Campbell, The Witness and the Other World , 194.

32. Duarte Pacheco Pereira, Esmeraldo de situ orbis (Lisbon: Imprensa Nacional, 1892). For Ca' da Mosto's "Navegações," and Usodimare's "Carta," see As viagens dos Descobrimentos , ed. José Manuel García (Lisbon: Editorial Presença, n.d.), 73-146. Ca' da Mosto's account was first published in 1507, Usodimare's not until 1802.

33. In his prologue, Pacheco describes his work as a book on "cosmografia e marinharia" but one that also discusses "a natureza da jente desta ethiopia & ho seu modo de viver & asy direi do comercio que nesta terra pode haver" (4; the nature of the people of this Ethiopia [Guinea] & their way of life, & likewise I will tell of the commerce that may be obtained in this country).

34. It is unlikely that these early-sixteenth-century voyage narratives would have been influenced by the Diario or its source, which undoubtedly did not circulate for security reasons. The Diario and the Historia de las Indias , which contained many and lengthy direct quotations from it, were not published until the nineteenth century.

35. For a study of the tendency to temporalize spatial relationships in the development of scientific theories of space, see A. M. Amorim, "Temporalização do espaço versus espacialização do tempo," Revista da Universidade de Coimbra 29 (1984):259-70.

36. The temporalization of space was, of course, commonplace in historical writing, but it was clearly a new phenomenon in the nautical travel writings of the late-fifteenth and sixteenth centuries.

37. Alvise Ca' da Mosto, "Navegações," in García, As viagens dos Descobrimentos , 73-138.

38. References to the Diario in Ferdinand's Vida del Almirante also confirm its filiation with the roteiro .

39. Campbell, The Witness and the Other World , 27. It is just this distinction that compels me to disagree with Rocha Pinto's argument that simply the introduction of a strict chronology in nautical writings of the mid-sixteenth century constitutes a "temporalization of space" absent in earlier texts.

40. Walter J. Ong reminds us that the earliest writing known, the cuneiform script of the Sumerians (C. 3500 B.C. ), is predominantly account-keeping. In contrast, the earliest written narratives are biblical texts, which, though also intended as records, are not fashioned as lists but as reconstitutions of coherent sequences of events. Ong argues that narrative's origins are oral, unlike the list, which seems to have originated with writing; in-

deed, script seems to have arisen precisely to make lists possible. His theory is supported by narrative's capacity, whether oral or written, to communicate events as the experience of those events. Whereas the list is a form of preserving information, narration, in establishing coherent relations among events, is a form of recording and of understanding experiences; see his Orality and Literacy: The Technologizing of the Word (London: Methuen, 1982), 99.

41. Letter 71 (5 September 1493) in Fernández de Navarrete, 2:131-33.

42. Las Casas worked with a copy of the original text. His source is unclear, but in all likelihood he had access to a copy in the Columbus family archives (Varela, xvi-xvii). The text is plagued with anachronistic interpolations, whether introduced by Las Casas or someone else is impossible to determine in the majority of cases. See two earlier essays in this volume, "This present year of 1492" and "All these are the Admiral's exact words" for a discussion of this problem.

43. The first mention of the existence of an autonomous daily pilot's log in diary form, according to Rocha Pinto ( A viagem , 127), is the testimony of an anonymous Portuguese pilot (c. 1531-1550) that "Noi pilotti portoghesi abbiamo un libro ordinario , dove notiami a giorno per giorno il viaggio que facciamo, e per qual vento, e in quanti gradi di declinazion è il sole" (his emphasis, quoted from Giovanni Battista Ramusio, Navigazioni e Viaggi , 6 vols, ed. Marica Milanesi [Torino: Giulio Einaudi Editore, 1978-80]; We Portuguese pilots keep a book in which we write daily about the voyage and the route, the winds we sail by, and the degrees of declination of the sun). Note, however, that the term "libro ordinario" closely resembles Las Casas's terminology, "libro de navegación y descubrimiento," and the Crown's more general "este vuestro libro'' in referring to Columbus's much earlier text. Thus the anonymous Portuguese example hardly seems conclusive to establish the characteristics or dating of a new genre. Most likely the old Portuguese term livro a navegar referred to a type of text that shared many of the technical characteristics of the later diario de bordo . The Dicionário da linguageni de Marinha antiga e actual (Lisbon: Centro de Estudos Históricos e Cartografia Antiga, 1990) defines the "livro a navegar'' as a book in which the quarter officer registered information relevant to the navigation observed during his four-hour vigil, such as directions, distance traveled, time, and lands sighted.

44. Rocha Pinto concludes that the systematic organization of navigation along chronological lines characteristic of the diario de bordo was a mid-sixteenth-century development. Clearly, the evidence of Columbus's Diario either refutes this claim or, if Rocha Pinto is correct, must be considered an unprecedented innovation and an anomaly in the context of nautical literature. Perhaps a more plausible explanation for the apparent contradiction is that all the texts prior to the mid-sixteenth century that Rocha Pinto examined which did not keep a strict chronology of the navigation were concerned with the Indian voyages carried out by the Portuguese primarily in coastal waters and often within sight of land. A systematic chronology

in nautical writing is more likely a product of the need to record regular fixes during extended periods of navigation on the high seas. Unlike his Portuguese predecessors, of course, Columbus navigated in midocean, out of sight of land.

45. Revelli (226-27) noted the Diario 's uniqueness in this respect, calling it the earliest diario known to exist.

46. For example, consider the "erroneous" locations given in the Diario , which placed Española and Cuba at 26° N, on a line with Hierro island in the Spanish Canaries, rather than at 20° N, the correct longitude but closer to Portuguese territories. Clearly, as Henige has observed, political expediency, not geographical accuracy, dictated this location; see Henige, In Search of Columbus , 115.

47. Pintar in this context means "to draw on a map or chart." Similarly, pintura was synonymous with "map" or ''chart" in the nautical terminology of the Mediterranean basin; see Dicionário da linguagem de Marinha antiga e actual .

48. While roteiros contained detailed and specific sailing directions, including information on landmarks, depths, shallows, and currents, livros de marinharia (books of seafaring) were "heterogeneous compilations resulting from notes accumulated by pilots, to record all information which might be worthwhile in the practice of their professions" and livros de armação contained the record of the goods or equipment carried on board; Portugal-Brazil: The Age of the Atlantic Discoveries , ed. Max Justo Guedes and Gerald Lombardi (Lisbon: Bertrand Editora, 1990), 227.

49. The unusual hybrid nature of the Diario suggests that it may have been an amalgam of various different types of texts originally written on board and later synthesized by Columbus to form the "Libro de su primera navegación y descubrimiento" that Las Casas worked into what we know today as the Diario . In this respect the Diario is reminiscent of Pacheco Pereira's Esmeraldo and Ca' da Mosto's "Navegaçães," neither of which, however, would have been available to Columbus prior to 1492-93.

50. There is some controversy regarding the authorship of the "Carta a Luis de Santángel" (which also exists in an almost identical version addressed to Rafael [sic, for Gabriel] Sánchez). See "Reading Columbus," earlier in this volume.

51. Prior to Rumeu's publication of the Libro Copiador in 1989, the only known eyewitness accounts of the second voyage were those of Michele de Cuneo, an old friend of Columbus's, Guillermo Coma, a gentleman volunteer, and Dr. Diego Alvarez Chanca, the expedition's physician, who sailed with the fleet in 1493. The four relaciones from the second voyage are dated January 1494, 20 April 1494, 26 February 1495, and 15 October 1495. From this period there are also three petitions by Columbus, "Memorial a Antonio Torres" (30 January 1494), "Memorial de la Mejorada" (July 1497), and an undated "Memorial a los Reyes sobre la población de las Indias." With the relaciones , they comprise the most complete statement available on the early development of a colonial policy for the Indies.

52. For the text of the instructions to Columbus for the second and fourth voyages see Morison, 199-202 and 307-10.

53. The Letters of Amerigo Vespucci and Other Documents Illustrative of His Career , trans. Clement R. Markham (London: Hakluyt Society, 1944), 42.

54. The Italian text reads, "questa mia ultima navigatione he dechiarato, conciosa che in quelle parte meridionala el continente io havia retrovato de più frequenti populi et animali havitato de la nostra Europa o vero Asia o vero Affrica, et ancora l'aere più temperato et ameno che in que banda altra regione da nui cognosciute, como de sotto intenderai"; quoted by Edmundo O'Gorman, The Invention of America (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1961), 166.

55. Several explorations of the mainland found by Columbus in 1498 were conducted prior to Vespucci's letter claiming to have discovered it, including the Ojeda (1499), Yañez Pinzón (1500), and Cabral (1500) expeditions. The latter resulted in the discovery of Brazil. One of the members of the Cabral crew, Pero Vaz de Caminha, described it to the king of Portugal in a letter dated 1 May 1500.

56. The letter was written circa 18 October 1498. The translation is from O'Gorman, The Invention of America , 100.

57. The most elaborate argument for denying Columbus the "discovery" of America is O'Gorman's in The Invention of America .

58. Explicit references to the Indies as the site of the Terrestrial Paradise are made in the Diario entry for 21 February and in the "Relación del tercer viaje."

59. Cf. Hutchinson, "It goes without saying that places aren't inert physical shells, but localities of experience or of being where interaction not only 'takes place' but also 'makes place' " ( Cervantine Journeys , 84).

60. In the Diario the noun appears once—"quando venía al descubrimiento" (15 January)—but this is in Las Casas's third-person paraphrase, and it is impossible to determine what the original form may have been. Dunn and Kelley have translated it as "when he came (on the voyage of) discovery" (341), but a more idiomatic translation would be ''when he came to discover." Note that here descubrimiento , despite its nominal form, plays an adverbial and not a substantive function.

61. The Life of the Admiral Christopher Columbus by His Son Ferdinand , ed. and trans. Benjamin Keen (Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1978), 16-17.

62. An English translation of the document appears in Jara and Spadaccini, 1492-1992: Re/Discovering Colonial Writing , 397.

63. Wilcomb E. Washburn is one of the few historians to acknowledge Columbus's extensive use of metaphor and appreciate its potential significance for the study of the meaning of "discovery." See his "The Meaning of 'Discovery' in the Fifteenth and Sixteenth Centuries," American Historical Review 68, no. 1 (October 1962):1-21.

64. Quoted by Campbell, The Witness and the Other World , 52, from The Christian Topography of Cosmas, an Egyptian Monk , trans. J. W. McCrindle

(London: Hakluyt Society, 1897). For an appraisal of Cosmas's work, see C. Raymond Beazley, The Dawn of Modern Geography (New York: Peter Smith, 1949), 1:273-303.

65. An example of Columbus's use of negocio in its spiritual sense occurs in the Diario entry for 14 February. In the midst of a terrible storm, he consoles himself with the following thought:

Y como antes oviese puesto fin y endereçado todo su negocio a Dios y le avía oído y dado todo lo que le avía pedido, devía creer que le daría complimento de lo començado y le llevaría en salvamento.
(Varela, 127)

And (he writes here) that, since earlier he had entrusted his destiny and all of his enterprise to God, Who had heard him and given him all he had asked for, he ought to believe that God would grant him the completion of what he had begun and would take him to safety.
(Dunn & Kelley, 369)

Although the English translation does not reflect it, salvamento has the connotation of saving from physical peril as well as salvation in the spiritual sense.

66. According to Claude Carozzi,

si on lit dans l'ordre chronologique les documents relatifs á l'Au-delà du XI-XIII siècle, on se rend compte que progressivement apparaissent des paysages et des itinéraires concrets et qu'une cosmographie de plus en plus cohérent vient structurer cet ensemble de lieux visités par les voyageurs.

("La géographie de l'Au-delà et sa signification pendant le haut Moyen Age," Popoli et Paesi nella Cultura Altomedievale 2 [1983]:424)

if one reads the documents concerned with the Other World from the eleventh through the thirteenth century in chronological order, one realizes that concrete lands and itineraries appear ever more frequently, and that an increasingly coherent cosmography structures the places visited by the travelers.

Such a phenomenon appears paradoxical to us because we have lost all sense of the immanence of the sacred so profoundly felt by people in the Middle Ages.

67. See Cesare Segre, " L'Itinerarium Animae nel duecento e Dante," Letture Classensi 13 (1984):9-32.

68. See Beazley, Dawn of Modern Geography , esp. 1:190-96.

69. Kirkpatrick Sale's recent popular assessment is especially shrill in its contention that Columbus was mad: "By the time he was ready to spell it [the discovery of the location of Paradise] out, in his summary letter to the Sovereigns two months later, it fairly exploded, page after page, in a very long and muddled mishmash of theology and astronomy and geography and fantastic lore, rambling, repetitive, illogical, confusing, at times inco-

herent, self-serving, servile and vainglorious all at once—and quite loony"; Sale, The Conquest of Paradise: Christopher Columbus and the Columbian Legacy (New York: Knopf, 1990), 175. Only a reader unfamiliar with the medieval world view and its modes of discourse would be so bewildered by Columbus's assumption that Paradise lay in the vicinity of the Indies.

70. On the background of Columbus's spirituality, see Milhou, Colón y su mentalidad mesiánica ; Pauline Moffitt Watts, "Prophecy and Discovery: On the Spiritual Origins of Christopher Columbus's 'Enterprise of the Indies,'" American Historical Review 90, no. 1 (1985):73-102; Delno C. West, "Wallowing in a Theological Stupor or a Steadfast and Consuming Faith: Scholarly Encounters with Columbus's Libro de las profecías ," in Columbus and His World , ed. Donald T. Gerace (Fort Lauderdale, Fla.: Bahamian Field Station, 1987), 45-56; and Djelal Kadir, Columbus and the Ends of the Earth: Europe's Prophetic Rhetoric as Conquering Ideology (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1992).

71. For a discussion of how flawed Columbus's calculations were deemed to be by most of his contemporaries see Morison, Admiral of the Ocean Sea , esp. chaps. 6 and 7.

72. The parenthetical "says he" appears in the Spanish but was omitted without explanation by Dunn and Kelley from their translation. I have inserted it to avoid confusion.

73. The people of these lands, Columbus adds, "cavan el oro y lo traen al pescueço, a las orejas y a los braços e a las piernas, y son manillas muy gruessas, y también ha piedras y ha perlas preciosas y infinita espeçería" (Varela, 55; they dig for gold and wear it on their necks, on their ears, on their arms and legs, and the bracelets are very heavy; also there are precious stones and pearls and infinite spices).

74. For Columbus's source on the location of Paradise, see Pierre d'Ailly, Ymago Mundi (Louvain, 1480 or 1483) and the numerous annotations in Columbus's hand contained in the margins of his own copy of the text, preserved at the Biblioteca Colombina.

75. For an analysis of the literal inconsistencies of the Diario , see David Henige, In Search of Columbus: The Sources for the First Voyage (Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 1991). Henige demonstrates, through a rigorous and comprehensive examination of the text, that the Diario is riddled with lacunae, anomalies, and obvious computational errors in its recording of navigational data. For example, he notes that the text even fails to mention in which direction Columbus sailed when he departed from San Salvador (Guanahaní), how far or how long he sailed, or the bearings of his course to the next island on the itinerary, Santa María de la Concepción.

76. On the significance of Jerusalem in the Franciscan tradition within which Milhou situates Columbus's ideology, see Colón y su mentalidad mesiánica , esp. chaps. 3-4.

77. I disagree with Juan Gil, who argues for a literal interpretation of Columbus's use of the biblical phrase "nuevo cielo y tierra" to support his case that Columbus was Jewish; see Gil's "Nuevo cielo Y nueva tierra: Exé-

gesis de una idea colombina," Homenaje a Pedro Sainz de Rodríguez (Madrid: Fundación Universitaria Española, 1986), 2:297-309.

78. On the importance of the prophetic discourse of the Libro de las profecías to Columbus's articulation of his enterprise, see Milhou, Colón y su mentalidad mesiánica , esp. 199-230, as well as Djelal Kadir, "Imperio y providencia en el Nuevo Mundo: Colón y El libro de las profecías (1501)," Revista de Crítica Literaria Latinoamericana 14, no. 28 (1988):329-35, and especially his recent Columbus and the Ends of the Earth .

79. A quotation in the Libro de las profecías explains the literal and figurative senses of Jerusalem:

Quadruplex sensus sacre Scripture aperte insinuatur in hac dictione: Ierusalem. hystorice enim significat civitatem illam terrestrem, ad quam peregrini petunt; allegorice significat Ecclesiam militantem; tropologice significat quamlibet fidelem animam; anagogice significat celestem Ierusalem, sive patriam, vel regnum celorum.
(de Lollis, 2:77)

The fourfold interpretation of Holy Scripture is clearly implicit in the word Jerusalem. In a historical sense, it is the earthly city to which pilgrims travel. Allegorically, it indicates the Church in the world. Tropologically, Jerusalem is the soul of every believer. Anagogically, the word means the Heavenly Jerusalem, the celestial fatherland and kingdom.
(West & Kling, 101)

80. In the "Relación" he explains:

no porque yo crea que allí, adonde es el altura del estremo, sea navegable, ni agua, ni que se pueda subir allá; porque creo que allá es el Paraíso Terrenal, adonde no puede llegar nadie salvo por voluntad divina."
(Varela, 216)

not because I believe that there, at the highest point, it is navigable, nor [that it is] water, nor that it is possible to go up there; because I believe that the Terrestrial Paradise is there, and no one can reach that place except with divine permission.

81. Among the most famous such voyages were those of St. Brendan and Owein. For a study of the genre and its influence, see Segre, " L'Itinerarium Animae nel duecento e Dante."

82. The Travels of Sir John Mandeville (New York: Dover, 1964), 200-202. The book first appeared in the late fourteenth century.

83. A long fragment of this diario corresponding to the period 30 May-31 August 1498 survives in Las Casas's Historia (chaps. 127-49 are devoted to the third voyage). Varela (220-42) has edited the fragment as if it had been part of the "Relación del tercer viaje." Yet Las Casas appears to have blended passages from a rutterlike account with passages bearing a strong resemblance to the erudite, treatiselike account of the third voyage found in the "Relación." Compare, for example, the literal treatment given the

topic of Paradise in the entry for 17 August (Varela, 241) and the highly mystical, figurative treatment of the same topic in the "Relación" proper.

84. Leonardo Olschki, Storia letteraria delle scoperte geografiche (Florence: Leo S. Olschki, 1973), 1-9.

85. After this essay was completed, a translation of a research proposal by Michel de Certeau, "Travel Narratives of the French in Brazil: Sixteenth to Eighteenth Centuries," appeared in Representations 33 (Winter 1991):221-25. Although de Certeau's subject matter is not Columbian, the methodology he outlines for studying these travel narratives as combinations of the "practices of scientific investigation and their figurations in a literary space-time" complements my approach. It is regrettable that de Certeau did not live to bring his intriguing proposal to fruition.

86. Columbus attributes this passage to Seneca's Medea in his Libro de las profecías .

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

13. The earlier portion of the passage in question reads

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

1. The Spanish, "y no fue contradicho," has the sense of "without resistance or opposition" and implies in this context that there was no verbal or physical opposition to Columbus's taking of possession.

2. I have here translated Rumeu's transcription literally, though it does not make sense. My best guess is that there was either a copying error in the original or a transcription error by Rumeu. It probably should read "e así nombre nuevo" (and [to the others] likewise a new name); cf. an almost identical passage in the letter to Santángel, which reads "e así a cada una nombre nuevo" (Varela, 140).

3. This is probably an allusion to the accounts of Marco Polo and to the papal embassies to the Far East in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries by Plano Carpini, Rubruck, Monte Corvino, and Pordenone. Pordenone's account was distilled in John Mandeville's Travels , a book Columbus knew well.

4. I have translated this passage literally, but I believe it contains several errors that result in ambiguities and apparent contradictions in Columbus's predicament and actions. Compare it to its counterpart in the letter to Santángel:

y al cabo de muchas leguas, visto que no havía innovación y que la costa me levava al setentrión, de adonde mi voluntad era contraria, porque el ivierno era ya encarnado [y] yo tenía propósito de hazer del al austro, y tanbién el

viento me dio adelante, determiné no aguardar otro tiempo, y bolví atrás fasta un señalado puerto.
(Varela, 140)

and after [sailing] many leagues, having seen nothing novel and that the coast was taking me northward, where I did not want to go, because it was already winter [and] my purpose was to make from it to the south, and moreover the wind pushed me forward [to the south], I decided not to wait for a change in weather, and I turned back to a notable port.

5. Columbus sailed with two caravels (Niña and Pinta ) and a larger nao , the Santa María , which ran aground on a reef on the night of 24–25 December. This portion of the text is underscored in the manuscript.

6. This passage appears to be an allusion to Martín Alonso Pinzón, who throughout the voyage had a tendency to disregard Columbus's orders and strike out on his own.

7. The Spanish, "naos y navíos," refers to two types of vessels larger than the caravels Columbus preferred.

8. This king must be Guacanagarí, who befriended Columbus and came to his aid when the Santa María ran aground. La Navidad fort, erected to house the Spaniards who remained on the island, was at least partly constructed with lumber from the Santa María. Agí , a hot red pepper, was one of the very first Taíno words to be introduced to Europeans.

9. I have translated cielo as "heaven" (rather than "sky") because the context would seem to imply that the author believes that the Indians saw the Europeans as beings of divine origins.

10. Rumeu includes whatever fragments of the mutilated passages he could decipher. In most cases, I have translated the fragments. Here, however, the three damaged lines do not provide sufficient context for translation.

11. None of the Spanish connotations of quadra make sense in this context. In Italian, the word means "quadrant," which also seems anomalous in this context. So I have based my translation on quartum , which is used in an almost identical passage in the Latin version of the letter of 15 February addressed to Sánchez (see Major, 11).

12. Variant spelling of Española .

13. The literal meaning of señorío (seigniory) is "feudal lordship."

14. A fusta is a small vessel of Moorish or Turkish origin; see James J. Pontillo, "Nautical Terms in Sixteenth-Century American Spanish" (Diss., State University of New York at Buffalo, 1975).

15. Pedro de Villacorta, a member of the crew of the first voyage and among Columbus's favorites.

16. Later renamed San Juan de Puerto Rico by Columbus.

17. The Diario puts Columbus in the Atlantic just off the coast of Portugal, near Lisbon and the mouth of the Tagus River, on 4 March 1493.