New worlds, imaginary spaces and contingent reality: Columbus and astrology

New worlds, imaginary spaces and contingent reality: Columbus and astrology In this week when it seems the whole world is either mourning or celebrating the arrival of Columbus in the Bahamas some 500 years ago, I have taken some pains to devise a paper which attempts to negotiate the Atlantic squalls which the Columbus quincentenary has been so successful in generating. Last Wednesday, which was 12 October, Quincentenary Day, the Australian carried a story with the headline, 'Ideology hijacks Columbus anniversary', lamenting the attacks on Columbus, the 'Renaissance man' and a 'weaver's son from Genoa' by the liberal establishment and aggrieved native Americans.1 Even Felipe Fernandez-Armesto, whose latest biography of Columbus2 paints a far from flattering portrait of the great discoverer as a 'representative figure of his day',3 feels the countermovement has gone too far. Fernandez-Armesto describes the claim that Latin America was created by a "crime of genocide initiated by Columbus' to be 'a wicked lie'.4 Sydney's own Renaissance M a n and explorer, Jonathon King, has weighed into the Columbus debate in the Australian press, based on his experience as a participant on the recent re-enactment of the Columbus crossing,5 not to mention the published conclusions of generations of Columbus scholars. For King, and the aforementioned scholars and sailors, the wind conditions confirmed that Columbus was a cheat and a liar. Not only did he deliberately deceive the satiors on his original voyage as to the number of leagues travelled, he also concealed the route taken, which was not due west due to the prevailing winds, but south into the latitudes of Portuguese monopoly where he could pick up north-east trade winds. All the media coverage has as an implicit assumption the belief that there is a real Columbus and a real voyage across a distinct spatial route that awaits uncovering. And yet it is just this which is most open to doubt. All 1 The Australian, 12 October 1992: original story by Richard Caseby of the Sunday Times, additional reporting by Philip Wedme and others. 2 Felipe Femandez-Armesto, Columbus, Oxford, 1992. 3 Ibid., p. 21. 4 Ibid. 5 The Australian Weekend Review, 10-11 October 1992. P A R E R G O N ns 12.2 (January 1995) 30 H. M. Carey our information about the first Columbus crossing is riddled with difficult hidden behind layers oftextual,navigational, instrumental, and historical problems. That Columbus may have lied deliberately about the route of the first voyage is really the least of the matters obscuring this peculiarly significant past. To the images of Columbus the cheat and liar, the perpetrator of genocide, and the hero of the N e w World, one might add the multiple other identities concocted for him by scholars, politicians, admirers, and detractors and, not least of all, himself. A m o n g so many images of the discoverer available for construction and deconstruction, can we doubt that w e are in the realm of 'contingent reality', which is in the tide of m y paper? The purpose of m y paper is not to attempt to add anything to the vast flood of Columbus scholarship, both extant and generated for this year of commemorations, but to explore some ideas about the nature of exploration and contingency, both spatial and temporal, in thefirstvoyage of Columbus and in medieval astrology. For some of these ideas, I acknowledge a debt to Paul Carter's seminal study of Australian exploration.6 I thought it might be simplest to begin by demonstrating the various layers of obscurity which overlay thefirstColumbus voyage. I stress, of course, that all of this information is well known to scholars.7 All Columbus scholars struggle with the limitations of the texts. David Henige's monograph on the sources for thefirstvoyage is particularly sceptical.8 This, in brief, is the state of affairs. Columbus's shipboard account of the voyage, both the secret 'daily' log, in which he recorded his own grossly inflated estimate of the distances covered, and the readings he gave out for the supposed deception of the sailors, are no longer extant. Nor is the manuscript of the fine...