The Tropics of Empire. Why Columbus Sailed South to the Indies (review)

A longstanding tradition in modern historiography has held that it was Christopher Columbus's aim in his first trans-Atlantic voyage to reach the east by sailing west, and that he died believing that he had landed in Asia. Many of the questions that have resulted from this understanding—about what it means to 'discover' something; about what sort of legacy (or rewards) the unwitting 'discoverer' of America should be entitled to—reach back to Columbus's own time. Most perplexing for modern students and teachers has hereby been the question of why Columbus could assume that the land that he had reached was for his and his monarchs' taking, if he had indeed believed it to be Marco Polo's "East"—the fabulously wealthy and powerful empire of the Grand Khan. In his meticulously researched and lavishly illustrated book, The Tropics of Empire, Nicolás Wey-Gómez resolves many of these questions by appreciating the fact that Columbus had traveled not only west but also south on his transatlantic voyages. Therefore, Wey Gómez argues, Columbus's entire enterprise must be understood not only in light of European ideas about the east but also (and primarily) in light of ideas about the south; that is, "the systemic role that terrestrial latitude [the north-south separation in degrees between any given place on the globe and the equator] . . . played in both the planning and the execution of the Indies enterprise" (43). The debates taking place in Spain between Columbus and his detractors at court preceding his voyages, Wey Gómez shows, revolved around questions concerning not only the circumference of the earth but also the place of (and spatial relationship between) the known world (oikoumenē) and the cosmos at large. Whereas his detractors maintained that the oikoumenē was an unrepeatable island surrounded by water, and that the habitable world was confined to the temperate zone, Columbus and his supporters argued that the inhabited world extended beyond the temperate zones, either on the three known continents or on other, as yet undiscovered, lands. Moreover, Columbus, drawing on such authorities as the Catalan cosmographer Jaume Ferrer de Blanes, was convinced that he was "bound to find ever-greater quantities of coveted resources as he sailed further south" (40), due to the increasing power of the sun, which was believed to play a vital role in the 'growth' of gold in the earth. However, Columbus's 'southing' enterprise was from the beginning fraught by political issues and therefore remained oblique during his first trans-Atlantic voyage. In the Treaty of Alcáçovas (Toledo, 1479–80), Castile had recognized Portugal's claim to all territories south of the Canaries; it was for this reason, Wey-Gómez suggests, that Columbus repeatedly compares the Caribbean Natives to the Canarians in skin color in his log and generally presents his area of interest as lying on a due-west trajectory, even though he was well aware that he had significantly veered to the south and come close to the Tropic of Cancer.

In his first chapter, Wey Gómez attends to the close connection between geography and politics in the "world machine" of scholastic and early modern European cosmography, as evident in the writings of Albertus Magnus, Pierre d'Ailly, Jean Gerson, Bartolomé de las Casas, as well as Columbus, all of whom had inherited a rich and varied array of traditions from older authorities as diverse as Plato, Hippocrates, Aristotle, Vitrivius, Pliny the Elder, Ptolemy, Albumassar, Avicenna, and Averroës. Wey Gómez highlights the important role that these ancient geographic traditions still played in the sixteenth-century debate about the legal status of the Indians within the colonial order, particularly, with regard to the scientific connections that early modern thinkers drew between a geographic place and the moral and political character of its inhabitants. He hereby accords a crucial place to Las Casas not only for his...