Cristóbal Colón’s journal, Nov. 6, 1492:
“And so I hope in Our Lord that Your Highnesses, with much diligence, will decide to send such persons in order to bring to the Church such great nations and to convert them, just as you have destroyed those that did not want to confess the Father and the Son and the Holy Spirit. . . .”
Problem: The sympathetic depiction fails to hold up. In the letter’s closing gush, the same people who were not “idolators” a few lines before become “idolators” if the king wants them enslaved: Among the commodities available for the king’s pleasure along with rhubarb, spices and gold are “slaves, as many of these idolators as their Highnesses shall command to be shipped.” Timid? Did he say timid? They are now “the most timid people in the world; so that the men I have left could, alone, destroy the whole country. . . .”
This kind of contradiction between simultaneously held ideas is known as cognitive dissonance, and in Colón’s case the contradicting descriptions appear remarkably close together. But there was—it is clear today—historical meaning in the illogic. His spectacular exhibition of this ego-protecting recourse, repeated almost word for word in his journal, accurately predicted a European New World in which the native would be both idealized and exterminated, often enough by the same people, people often enough merely going about their business. It is possible too, in Colón’s defense, that the dissonance points to a difference between personal ideals and what he would have needed to tell a Spanish monarchy with its blood up.
The opening and closing paragraphs of the journal, where he grovels, justify his mission as continuing the momentum from Spain’s victory over the Moors and its religious and ethnic purge. He addresses the royals as “lovers and promoters of the Holy Christian Faith, and enemies of the false doctrine of Mahomet and of all idolatries and heresies.” This is an acknowledgement of Isabella’s responsibility for the Inquisition.
In the introduction, he repeats a fiction always popular in Europe, one that later English Protestant settlers would find helpful as well (see ‘VACANT SOYLE’)—that the “Great Khan,” or somebody, had invited him: “. . . how, many times, he and his predecessors had sent to Rome to ask for men learned in our Holy Faith in order that they might instruct him in it and how the Holy Father had never provided them; and thus so many peoples were lost, falling into idolatry and accepting false and harmful religions. . . .”
But as he closes the journal, his language again turns violent, as at the close of the letter. And here the conflicting ideas merge into a single sentence. Summing up, he repeats his appeal for their highnesses to appoint missionaries to convert the islanders—“just as you destroyed those that did not want to confess. . . .”
Modern historians have tried to explain this seemingly clueless mixing of violence and altruism in different ways. Because he later widened and embroidered his delusions about the Orient and suffered a “fever” that affected his brain, many have decided that Colón was a little crazy from the start. Yet for all the speculations buzzing around the official discoverer of America there is another possibility, unconsidered. The cognitive dissonance disappears if the mixing was not unconscious but intentional and the journal was his ironic comment, written maybe with an inward giggle, on what, for a marrano, would truly have been a deeply ironic set of circumstances.
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