Columbus's Gift: Representations of Grace and Wealth and the Enterprise of the Indies

At the start of Spain's colonial enterprise, the itinerant court of Ferdinand and Isabella was the first stage where travel accounts and specimens of all kinds coalesced and where the New World "yielded wonder on top of wonder."¹ In May 1493, upon returning from his first voyage, Columbus presented at the royal court in Barcelona a procession of naked Indians adorned with gold and accompanied by multicolored parrots. This spectacle previously astonished crowds in Lisbon and Seville, and a similar display would follow his second voyage. After spending three years in La Española, in October 1496, the explorer brought to Burgos a cavalcade of Indians and mules loaded with gold objects (Bernáldez 600, 678). Inscribed as wonders—that which exceeds the ordinary—and inserted in the ambiance of court spectacles, these subjects and objects represented the fertile lands, great mines of gold, and the thousands of other valuable things that the Admiral listed in his writings and professed to have discovered in the New World. As the physical extension of these texts, New World wonders carried with them the sense of unmediated experience and the irrefutable proof of financial success. Praised and admired for their visible and tangible connection with the New World, wonders functioned as pars pro toto, shards that reconstructed the new territories piece by piece in a carefully edited depiction of what the West Indies might be (Mason 1-22).

Barcelona, Burgos, and Medina del Campo were also the stages where Columbus created situations of pleasure exclusively intended to satisfy the monarchs' taste for wonder. His intentions were to advertise his mistaken landfall in the Caribbean as success, fulfill the financial expectations of his royal sponsors, and buy some time in order to reach India and find gold. At the royal palace, New World wonders not only depicted wealthy and exotic lands, but also were constituted as minimal representations of a boundless gift bestowed upon the Spanish sovereigns by the Lord and retrieved by Columbus.² Displaced from their original location and environment, Amerindian people, along with their crafts and pets, became objects that circulated between Columbus and the monarchs serving as profane tokens of holy grace and wealth. The theatrical presentation of New World wonders in Spain was at the center of a complex network of ceremonial exchange that stemmed from a complicated narrative of obligations and expectations between the explorer and his sponsors. In Columbus's writings this initial circle between the monarchs and the explorer becomes secondary; the language of property and that of benefit are integrated within a discourse of providential grace that rewards the Spanish monarchs' efforts to expand Christianity with a title of property to the New World, and appoints the Admiral as its elected envoy.

Generosity, grace, and obligation relate Columbus's texts to the practice of gift exchange as an essential relational mode used in both medieval and early modern Europe. In his seminal work The Gift, Marcel Mauss studies gift exchange—with its blend of reciprocal giving, persons, and things—as a permanent part of social life. Drawing from Mauss's model, Georges Duby also contributes to scholarship on gift exchange in his depiction of medieval European society as a world of war and giving: "Society as a whole was shot through with an infinitely varied network for circulating the wealth and services, inspired by 'necessary obligation'" (48). The plundering of goods was turned into the orderly collection of the gift of tribute; war booty was distributed to followers as rewards and benefits, and to the church as offerings; magnates rivaled each other in gift presentation at the royal court in order to seek royal favor and protection (48-57). In Spain such social organization defines the world of the conquistador and provides a model that bridges the takeover of Al-Andalus and the conquest of the Americas.

Both...