How Chivalry Formed the Myth of California

In 1862 Edward Everett Hale announced his find that the name California derived from a Spanish romance of chivalry, the Sergas de Esplandián. ¹ Reading the old book, authored by Garci Rodríguez de Montalvo and published in 1510, ² Hale had come across the following passage: "Know, then, that, on the right hand of the Indies, there is an island called California, very close to the side of the Terrestrial Paradise, and it was peopled by black women without any man being among them, for they lived in the fashion of Amazons" (266; Hale's translation). Two years later Hale published translations of the relevant portions of the romance in the Atlantic Monthly, and since then this supposed origin of California's name has become a factoid--a commonplace that historians and literary scholars have accepted and repeated without, however, exploring the ramifications of the literary linkage.

In this study I propose to reexamine the text of the Sergas, usually classified as the fifth in the series of Amadís de Gaula narratives. These romances, widely read throughout Europe as late as the sixteenth century, are generally thought to have been precursors of the modern novel that were killed off by Cervantes' Don Quijote, whose satire mocked their fantasy. Historians and literary scholars today persist in dismissing them as the awkward attempts of early writers to create a secular literature; critics judge them artistically unworthy in light of the novels that eclipsed them. The chivalry their stories are thought to teach is dead, so their lessons do not seem important. Graduate students learn of the books' historical importance without having to read them. ³

Lately, the romances have received renewed interest because of their perceived influence on the first explorers of the New World. Those who affirm this connection particularly emphasize how literary experience with the marvelous (e.g., reading of mythological creatures and exaggeratedly beautiful maidens) prepared these men for understanding strangeness in America. ⁴ I argue, rather, that the stories of the Sergas are realistically constructed, built around international politics. ⁵ Beyond the courtly love and marvelous locales, information about politicoreligious, gender, racial, and class distinctions importantly shapes the text. Geographic and military considerations, character portrayals that are less-than-idealized versions of manhood and womanhood, provide detail. Grounded in fifteenth-century realities in the Mediterranean, the Sergas could easily have been applied to evolving events in the Americas. Thus one can hypothesize another way in which the Spanish conquerors read the romances--literally, so as to fit America into already existing paradigms about the known world and to instruct them in the encounter.

Hale's rediscovery of a Spanish classic in the midst of a New England Renaissance of letters and the strife of the Civil War, and his subsequent use of its lessons of chivalry to explain California statehood, are important evidence of another generation's reading of the book's politics. That Hale's discovery has fallen through the cracks of territorial scholarship, however, is a warning. Students of U.S. history, trained as they are in English-language materials, have mainly noted Hale's find and then gone in the direction of tracking down the etymology of the word California. ⁶ Spanish and Mexican historians have perfunctorily included Hale in their accounts because he solved a major puzzle as to where the word came from. ⁷ But then, perhaps because Hale's reputation was largely made in the context of a territory lost to Mexico, they have excluded him from their national stories. ⁸ Scholars of U.S. literature have considered Hale primarily as the author of the short story "A Man without a Country" and, in studying his eastern roots, have ignored his contribution to California legendry. Students of Spanish and Spanish American literature continue to remark that California has its roots in the Sergas de Esplandián, but Hale's work, or the...