Early Spanish American Narrative

Chapter One. Narrative Accounts of the Encounter and Conquest

Chapter One Narrative accounts of the encounter and conquest The accounts that Spanish conquistadors, clergy, and Amerindians composed to tell of the early years of the conquest, known as crónicas de Indias (chronicles of the Indies ), today exercise a fascination upon both historians and students of literature. Apart from their inherent interest, these writings are a point of reference to which one finds many allusions in literature of later periods. Christopher Columbus, Admiral of the Ocean Sea (1451?–1506; known in the Spanish-speaking world as Cristóbal Colón), is in a sense the first figure in Spanish American writing. While it would seem reasonable to say that the first examples of Spanish American writing are his work, there are some issues complicating the attribution of authorship to Columbus, or at least to Columbus alone. Most probably born in Genoa into a family of weavers (although alternate accounts of his origins continue to thrive), Columbus learned to write only as an adult. He had little formal education and grew up speaking the Ligurian dialect, which would normally exist only in oral form. His Spanish was not that of a native speaker. The gap between Columbus’s historical importance and his shaky grasp of Spanish composition is only one source of the problems surrounding his writings. When Columbus’s writings came into the possession of others, they realized that these texts were of considerable significance, yet were not written the way the recipients would have liked. Here the issue of how well written Columbus’s texts were becomes inextricably entangled with a second issue: whether he had said exactly what the possessors of his papers wished he had said. In some cases, the holders of these texts felt entitled or perhaps compelled to edit and emend them before exposing them to the reading public. (It should be remembered that in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries documents were copied by scribes, who were likely to introduce changes, whether inadvertently or to improve the style.) For example, Columbus’s most important single piece of writing is the ship’s log or diary that he maintained to document for his sovereigns the success of his explorations. Unfortunately, as Margarita Zamora summarizes the situation, “there is no convincing evidence to suggest that anyone since the sixteenth century has seen the complete text of the day-by-day account Columbus himself wrote.”1 Bartolomé de Las Casas (1474–1566), a Dominican known for his advocacy of the rights of native peoples, used a copy of the diary to produce an abridged, edited, and annotated version. The original has been lost. What researchers of Columbus’s diary examine is the abridgement in Las Casas’s handwriting. As Zamora reminds readers, “The most complete source we have on the first and third voyages is not a fair copy or even a copy of a copy, but a highly manipulated version of a copy of whatever Columbus may have written.”2 Las Casas’s abridgement is supplemented with excerpts from the diary that appear in his Historia de las Indias and in a biography of Columbus by the Admiral’s son, Ferdinand . In addition to his diaries, Columbus composed other documents, such as dispatches, personal correspondence, and letters that are essentially petitions defending his actions and seeking recompense. As late as 1989, scholars gained access to transcribed letters from Columbus when Antonio Rumeu de Armas published his edition of the rediscovered Libro Copiador de Cristóbal Colón (Christopher Columbus’s copybook). It is possible that other lost texts by Columbus may come to light. Some of the documents by or attributed to Columbus overlap considerably with others. The repetition between one text and another is fortunate for scholars, who by comparing versions can in some cases identify what has been excised or added. Even so, the painstaking efforts of researchers have not yet clearly ascertained which texts can reasonably be considered to contain Columbus’s own words. In recent times new findings have continued to be published and alter the scholarly outlook upon writings by or attributed to Columbus. Research on the topic is still very active, and scholarly opinion will very likely continue to evolve. The relation between Las Casas and the diary of Columbus is especially fraught with issues. Las Casas wished to cast Columbus in a favorable light and emphasized that the Admiral’s journeys brought Christianity to hitherto pagan peoples. At the same time, this Dominican friar was an opponent of...