Word of Portuguese voyages drew all sorts of people to Lisbon, including Columbus,
whose story provides examples of all the themes important to post-colonial scholars
and whose ideas were the beginning of the “invention of America.” Columbus had
grown up in the Italian port city of Genoa, where he had spent time as a boy listening
to mariners and merchants and seeing the wealth that trade could bring in boxes
and chests on the Genoese docks. He joined the crew of a merchant ship as a teenager,
and while in his twenties settled in Lisbon with his brother, making maps to support
himself. He married a woman whose father was one of Henry the Navigator’s captains
and a governor of the Portuguese colony of Madeira; the couple lived on Madeira for a
while, and Columbus visited many other islands and the Portuguese trading posts on
the west coast of Africa. Here he saw the possibilities for wealth and trade that overseas
colonies could offer.
In Portugal, Columbus also got to know the group of geographers and astronomers
that Henry the Navigator had brought together, but he apparently did not listen
very well to what they were saying. Instead he paid more attention to what he was
reading, which included works by ancient geographers and medieval travelers, both
actual and armchair. He read Natural History , written by the fi rst-century Roman
offi cial Pliny, which included quite accurate descriptions of the peoples, animals, and
landscape of Africa and west Asia, combined with reports about cannibals, dog-faced
boys, and people with feet so big they used them as umbrellas. He read the Geography
of the second-century Greek scholar Ptolemy, which stated that the size of the earth
was about one-quarter smaller than it actually is, and that Asia stretched out for half
the circumference of the earth, when it is actually just a little more than one-third.
He read the Travels of the thirteenth-century Venetian merchant Marco Polo detailing
his trip to the court of Kublai Khan, which also retold the story of Prester John. He
read the Imago mundi , written in 1420 by Pierre d’Ailly, the bishop of Cambrai and
chancellor of the University of Paris, an encyclopedic account of the inhabitants of the
world. From these books, Columbus developed his ideas of “the Indies”: full of gold
and beautiful landscapes, but also of men who might be cannibals or women who
might be Amazons.
Figuring out what most literate early modern people may have read is purely conjectural,
based on what they refer to in their own writings or what was likely to be in
circulation in the places they lived. In Columbus’s case, there is much less guessing
involved, for the actual copies of many of the books he carried in his sea chest have survived,
with annotations and marginal notes in his own hand. We know that his copy of
Pliny was in Italian, printed in Venice in 1489, his copy of Ptolemy was printed in Rome
in 1478, and his copies of Marco Polo and Pierre d’Ailly were also printed versions from
the 1480s. We thus have a clearer understanding of what shaped his preconceptions
than we do for almost any other early modern person. Some scholars of the Protestant
Reformation have wondered whether Luther’s message would have had much impact
had the printing press not been available to spread it, and we can ask a similar question
about Columbus – would he have left Lisbon had printing not given him access to all
of these ideas?
He may very well have done so, because he was also infl uenced by direct contacts
with at least a few contemporaries who thought as he did. The most important of
these was Paolo dal Pozzo Toscanelli (1397–1482), a well-connected Florentine humanist,
physician, astronomer, and mathematician. From his reading and his calculations,
Toscanelli became convinced that the distance between Europe and Asia sailing westward
was only about one-third of the globe. In this he was particularly infl uenced by
Ptolemy, whose work was unknown in Europe before the fi fteenth century, but, given
the respect Renaissance scholars felt toward the ancient world, had quickly become a
classic. Toscanelli shared his opinions, and a map based on them, with a cleric friend
in Lisbon, who he hoped would take them to the king; Columbus heard about this,
and asked for a copy, which Toscanelli sent shortly before he died. The map has disappeared,
but part of the letter, in a copy in Columbus’s own hand, has survived, and in
it Toscanelli enthusiastically reports of the spices, gold, silver, and people with “great
feelings of friendship for the Christians” that would greet a voyage westward.
Toscanelli’s ideas had no impact at the Portuguese court; nor did Columbus’s attempts
to get backing for a voyage west based on them, for the king’s council knew
that almost all geographers thought the distances were much longer, so that a trip west
would be far too costly. Columbus next tried the Spanish court, where for many years
he got the same reaction, for the same reasons: his calculations were wrong, and it was
too expensive. Their “Most Catholic Majesties” Isabella and Ferdinand grew more interested,
however, once Columbus indicated he planned to use the wealth gained from
his trip to recapture Jerusalem from the Muslims. He asserted that he was destined by
God to spread Christianity, a destiny he saw as symbolized by his fi rst name, Christofero,
which means “Christ carrier” in Latin. (Columbus often signed his fi rst name
using the Greek symbols for Christ.) In 1492, Spanish armies conquered Granada, the
last act in the centuries-long reconquista , and Spanish soldiers no longer had a mission
on the Spanish mainland. Several weeks later, Columbus received the support of
Queen Isabella, and later that year he left Spain with three ships and about ninety crew
members. He carried Chinese silk in his sea chests along with his many books, and an
Arabic-speaking Spaniard as a translator, fi guring that someone at the Chinese court
certainly spoke Arabic.
About fi ve weeks after setting sail from the Canary Islands, Columbus’s ships landed
at an island in the Caribbean, which, as we have seen, he named San Salvador, Spanish
for Holy Savior. He was certain that he had reached an island off Asia, and called
the inhabitants, who were members of the Taino people, “Indians.” Looking for Japan
or the Asian mainland, he explored numerous islands for several months, then set off
again for Spain, taking several captured Tainos with him.
Columbus was greeted in triumph, but his subsequent expeditions were not uniformly
successful. The second was huge, with over a thousand men, but most of these
were treasure-seekers who went home disappointed after a few weeks. Columbus and
his brothers governed different island colonies, never very successfully, and on his third
voyage in 1498 he could fi nd so few willing men that Ferdinand and Isabella had to
release prisoners to serve as crew. On this voyage he explored what is now the coast of
Venezuela, fi nding the mouth of the enormous Orinoco River, which made him realize
this had to be a large land mass and not just an island. (Islands do not receive enough
rainfall to allow large freshwater rivers to form.) He wrote in his journal that he had
found a “very great continent … until today unknown,” and that God had made him
“the messenger of the new world.” This was the fi rst time that he used the words “new
world” ( mondo novo ) for what he had found, though he still believed that Asia was just
World History
