The Discovery of Mankind: Atlantic Encounters in the Age of Columbus (review)

In this book, David Abulafia argues that the fate of the native peoples of the Americas rested fundamentally on perceptions of them as articulated by European eye-witnesses, chroniclers, and lawyers of the sixteenth century, who shared common mindsets, and who developed a “consistent series of reactions” (p. 9) to the peoples they encountered.

Abulafia begins with two disturbing analogies. First, he suggests that the European encounter with the native peoples is best imagined as being similar to a hypothetical encounter with Neandertalers today for “we would immediately begin weighing up the human rights of beings less advanced than Homo sapiens” (p. 5). His second analogy suggests that the encounters might be similar to the discovery of “advanced life elsewhere in the Universe” where we, as the less advanced culture, “would presumably have to adjust” to very different “types of civil association, religious belief and codes of morality” (p. 7). With these analogies, Abulafia establishes that the sixteenth-century encounters were between a superior (Christian European) and an inferior (Native American) people, at least in the minds of Christian Europeans. This premise serves as a precarious foundation, for it collapses the historian’s perspective into that of the colonizer.

According to Abulafia, the central question unleashed by sixteenth-century encounters was this: were the peoples of the Americas human? And if so, what rights did they have? Arguing that perceptions of the native peoples of the Americas were shaped by how Christian Europeans already understood “wild,” “strange,” and “other” peoples either living in their midst or on the margins of their world, Abulafia emphasizes the power of written texts to formulate reactions to what was seen and experienced. For example, in discussing a twelfth-century account of Ireland that contrasts a beautiful landscape with its barbarous inhabitants, Abulafia argues that it reveals “an extraordinary consistency in the way medieval Europeans assessed peoples they regarded as less advanced than themselves” (p. 20). Similarly, he notes that from the twelfth century onward, Christian theologians and philosophers argued that to be fully human required Christian baptism, thereby placing Jews “dangerously close to the realm of non-human animals” (p. 22).

This shared thinking, Abulafia maintains, can be seen when the Canary Islands were explored in the fourteenth century and two broad but contending perceptions sought to define the native peoples. The one, exemplified by Boccacio, stressed the innocence and naïveté of the newly encountered island peoples; the other, expressed by Petrarch, commented on their wild, bestial, and solitary nature. Similar perceptions would emerge as Europeans ventured deeper into the Atlantic. So did the European encounter with the Canary Islands set patterns that would be replicated on Caribbean islands and along the coast of Brazil?

Abulafia then reconstructs the New World encounters by relying heavily on Columbus’ letters, logbook, writings, and other documents, Vespucci’s letters, the Pero Vaz de Caminha letter written in Brazil in 1500, and other sixteenth-century chroniclers such as Las Casas, or crown lawyers, such as Palacios Rubios. Two images of Native Americans circulated in these accounts: one essentially positive, the other essentially negative. Nature could be benign or not; native peoples innocent or barbaric. Although the “explorers did not share a learned knowledge of past debates about pagan peoples” and even though “there was no single great lineage of ideas derived from Columbus, let alone Aristotle, Aquinas or Boccacio,” Abulafia argues that Europeans responded in similar ways to the “wonders they uncovered” (p. 285).

While this book is to be commended for its emphasis on the importance of the experience in the Canary Islands, its recognition that patterns in Brazil are also relevant for understanding the early sixteenth-century encounters, and its quest for a synthesis of this crucial time in human history. However, it suffers from a tendency to fall into several unfortunate political quagmires that distract rather than add to the...