The Heirs of Columbus

Epilogue

EPILOGUE ChristoPher Columbus landed in the New World with a striven western gaze that would be overturned in five centuries by the tribal people he saw as naked servants with no religion. "Our Lord pleasing, I will carry off six of them at my departure to Your Highnesses, in order that they may learn to speak," he wrote in his journal. The record of his first stare inscribed the end of peace on the islands and the source of loneliness in the New World. The concise description of the island tribes as naked, with no "clothes, no arms, no possessions, no iron, and now no religion," was the birth ofslavery and crude anthropology in the New World, wrote Kirkpatrick Sale in The Conquest of Paradise: Christopher Columbus and the Columbian Legacy. Crist6bal Co16n, Colombo, Colom, Colomb, or Columbus, has "given his name to more geographic places than any other actual figure in the history ofthe world, with the exception only of Queen Victoria; in the United States he surpasses all other eponyms except Washington," according to Sale. Columbus and his civilization would discover no salvation in the New World. The missions, exploitations, racial vengeance, and colonialization ended the praise of deliverance; the conquistadors buried the tribal healers and their stories in the blood. 184 The consciousness of nurturance was there in tribal cultures, but the West has "tried for five centuries to resist the simple truth," wrote Sale. 'We resist it further only at risk of the imperilmentworse , the likely destruction-of the earth." Columbus arises in tribal stories that heal with humor the world he wounded; he is loathed, but he is not a separation in tribal consciousness. The Admiral of the Ocean Sea is a trickster overturned in his own stories five centuries later. "The novel is born not of the theoretical spirit, but of the spirit of humor," wrote Milan Kundera in The Art of the Novel. "A characteris not a simulation of a living being. It is an imaginary being. . . . The novel is the imaginary paradise of individuals. It is the territory where no one possesses the truth." Christopher Columbus is quoted from translations of his journals that were published in Admiral of the Ocean Sea: A Life of Christopher Columbus, and The Great Explorers, by Samuel Eliot Morison; 1he Log ofChristopher Columbus, translated by Robert Fuson; Christopher Columbus: 1he Dream and Obsession, by Gianni Granzotto; 1he Four Voyages ofChristopher Columbus, by J. M. Cohen; and 1heJournal ofChristopher Columbus, translated by Cecil Jane. Columbus was an originator of New World "descriptions and narration," and on his "texts rests the pile oflaterliterature,,. wrote Mary Campbell in The Witness and the Other World. Columbus "intersects both the political history that enlarged and demythologized the world ofthe travelerand the literaryhistory ofthe travel account." He was a "crucial enabling agent of history." The author considered other sources on exploration and colonial discourse: Columbus, Cortes, and Other Essays, by Ram6n Iglesia;'Discoverers, Explorers, Settlers, by Wayne Franklin; Image ofthe New World, by Gordon Brotherston; and Colonial Encounters , by Peter Hulme. "Columbus sailed from Palos, Andalusia, on August third, with three ships manned by a total company of about ninety. among whom were at least sixJews," wrote SeymourLiebman in TheJews 185 in New Spain. Columbus had no monk or priest with him on the first voyage. "in a time when no venture was undertaken without the presence of a representative of the Church." Kirkpatrick Sale argues that the evidence to support the idea that Columbus was a Jew is circumstantial and "there is no reason to give it credence." Robert Fuson. on the other hand. wrote that there is evidence that he was of "Jewish background. at least on one side of his family. Salvador de Madariaga and Simon Wiesenthal have provided more than enough documentation to convince any objective person. This does not mean that Columbus was anything less than a devout Christian; on that point the Log itself gives eloquent testimony. But a convert. or the descendant of a convert. did not boast of Jewish ancestry in 15th century Spain." The author has made use ofnames and information on Sephardic Jews from The Sephardim ofEngland. by Albert Hyamson. an outstanding history of the Spanish and Portuguese Jewish communities ; and The Secret Mission of Christopher Columbus. by Simon Wiesenthal. "A few months before Columbus's voyage in 1492. Spain enacted the Edict of Expulsion. compelling Jews to leave or...