Inscription on Martin Behaim’s globe of the world, 16th century:
“In the year 734 CE, when all of Hispania was taken by the infidels from Africa, the above island of Antilia, called the Seven Cities, was colonized by an archbishop from Oporto Portugal, together with six bishops and other Christian men and women who fled Hispania by ship with cattle, goods, and belongs. In 1414 a ship from Hispania sailed close to it.”
The Acts of Thomas, 3rd century CE:
“. . . And we divided the regions of the world, that every one of us should go unto the region that fell to him and unto the nation whereunto the Lord sent him. According to the lot, therefore, India fell unto Judas Thomas. . . .”
Cristóbal Colón, letter to Luis de Santangel, 1493:
“. . . In thirty-three days’ time I reached the Indies. . . .”
IT WAS “COLUMBUS”—his traveling name actually Cristóbal Colón—who misnamed the natives of the New World indios (“Indians”). He did so because his area of discovery was, he hoped, a geography already known from Europe’s own legend, myth and history. “Although others may have spoken or written concerning these lands,” he wrote in his first letter home, “none could say that they had seen them. . . .” His official role, then, was just to fill in the map while reassuring his backers that their investment would bring a return.
Europeans thought that (“Doubting”) Thomas, one of Jesus’ disciples, had reluctantly gone to India in the first century A.D., what today is called the “common era” (CE), fulfilling a “Gospel commission” to missionize the world. The tradition lives on; pilgrims still visit his legendary tomb at St. Thomas Mount in Chennai, Tamil Nadu. The Spanish priests who followed Colón and other so-called “explorers,” struggling with a world that was bigger than they had supposed, would try to import the apostle as their Gospel trailblazer here (see, for example, THE LEGEND OF THE MAIR).
Colón must have known the tradition and others like it. His indias (which, over time, became the “West Indies”) were a string of islands—he thought, off the coast of Asia. The best-known European model for distant islands was a legend of “Seven Cities” founded by fleeing Christians in 734, believed to lie about 2,500 miles from Europe, midway between Lisbon and Japan. This much information he shared with other sailors and geographers.
But Colón seems to have had an interior geography as well, one that today’s readers of his letters and journal still puzzle over. What may be the most puzzling feature of this geography of mind and spirit is the disconnect between its physical map and its human map, like two pages torn from different books and crudely pasted together.
A new route to India would have been the best news possible for European merchants and investors like Luis de Santangel, a financial backer of his voyage and the man to whom his first letter was addressed: Europe’s direct way East had been blocked by the (Muslim) Ottoman Empire. Colón’s letter spoke confidently of future trade with “the land of the great Khan,” adjacent, and made wildly exaggerated claims of the islands’ potential for European exploitation. They were, Colón told Santangel, “all more abundant in wealth than I am able to express.” La Española (today’s wretched Hispaniola), the main island, was just “a wonder.
Its mountains and plains, and meadows, and fields, are so beautiful and rich for planting and sowing, and rearing cattle of all kinds, and for building towns and villages. The harbours on the coast, and the number and size and wholesomeness of the rivers, most of them bearing gold, surpass anything that would be believed by one who has not seen them.”
Gold, in fact, (of which he actually found almost nothing) was abundant—good news not only for his investor but for Santangel’s protector, King Ferdinand, who was still faced with paying his army for the expulsion, that same year, of the (African Muslim) Moors from Spain after seven centuries of occupation and bloody religious and ethnic warfare. Española had “extensive mines of gold and other metals,” one town in particular being “well adapted for the working of the gold mines.” This one “hasty” visit, he summed up in a gush, was proof for the royal family that . . .
“. . . I shall give them all the gold they require, if they will give me but a very little assistance, spices also, and cotton . . . and mastic . . . . I think also I have found rhubarb and cinnamon, and I shall find a thousand other valuable things. . . .”
And the people? The missionaries who followed him would be disgusted by the New World natives’ blood sacrifices. They would be challenged by apparent ritual similarities between native religion and their own sacrificial cult of Christianity. Many transplanted Spaniards and Portuguese, especially, in order to confine the found within their known world, would decide that the natives actually were onetime Christians who had allowed themselves to be misled by Jesus’ cosmic antagonist, Satan (aka the Devil) or, what was worse, lost Jews.
For his part, Colón described the people who greeted him in two distinct ways, both outside that context. The islanders were innocents, unspoilt by civilization, who could nevertheless provide “the Church” fresh fodder for recruitment. And as slave material, they were another of Asia’s natural resources, along with “mastic” (in this case, probably rubber) and rhubarb. The only logic that connects these descriptions is utility: Colón’s natives were available for the same kinds of religious and economic exploitation that had made the Old World a place to get away from. The question is, did Colón see anything wrong with the logic?
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