LITMIR.BIZ

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the sense that the proper location gives place to appropriation, to making the lands one’s own by means of knowledge (Rabasa, 1993).

      Too much has been said on how mistaken Columbus was when he spoke of having arrived at Asia. There is clearly a blind spot in his descriptions of the new lands, but blindness and the violence that it introduces continue to haunt us all even today. In denouncing violence we must remain vigilant of treading blindly. That is, unless we want to claim that our generation has finally overcome all blind spots. If it is the case that Columbus died with the conviction that he had arrived at what medieval maps had charted at the farthest regions of the East, we still need to observe that he always imagines himself in the vicinity of Cathay (China) and Cipango (Japan), never fully there, and that along with the intent of reaching China and Japan, his voyage was circumscribed by the project of incorporating into the Spanish crown all the islands and mainland he would discover. When not identified with Asia, these new lands, which Columbus imagined on the borderlands of those thriving mercantile centers that Marco Polo had described in his Il Milione, were imagined in terms that connected them to the conquest of the Canary Islands.

      In Columbus’s writing the description of idyllic lands that he often associates with Terrestrial Paradise (a centerpiece for claiming their newness and ideologically binding his journey and persona to a prophetic tradition) morphs into a systematic inventory of natural resources and a projection of mines, sawmills, and harbors. Here I should remind the reader that the Diario as it has come down to us is a summary by Bartolomé de Las Casas, with the exception of passages in which he quotes, or at least creates the semblance of giving us Columbus’s voice. The passages I will cite from the entry corresponding to Sunday, November 25, 1492 are in the summary version of Las Casas, hence in the third person. I will lay out four moments in the process of exploring and discovering (as in uncovering).

First, Columbus situates the beginning of the day: “Before sunrise he got into the launch and went to see a cape … because it seemed to him that some good river should be there.” I have cut out the indications of orientation and the number of leagues. I am mainly interested in calling your attention to the effect of exploration in which description resembles a cinematographic camera that brings particulars into resolution: “he saw coming toward him a great stream of very pretty water that descended the mountain and made great noise.” We have to be cautious with the adjective “pretty” — given that in linda agua (pretty water) lurks the practical, the eventual projection of tree trunks descending to a sawmill — but let’s go on more slowly. The second moment consists of the identification of “stones with gold-covered spots on them, and he remembered that in the Tagus River, in the lower part, near the sea, gold is found; and it seemed certain to him that this one should have gold.” The prettiness of the stream has been further determined as rich in gold, and as he points out later on in the entry, along the beach he found “other stones the color of iron and others that some said were from silver mines.” In the third moment, the ship’s boys shouted “that they saw pine groves. He looked up toward the mountain and saw them, so large and admirable that he could not praise them [sufficiently] their height and straightness, like spindles, thick and thin, where he recognized that ships could be made, and vast quantities of planking and masts for the greatest ships of Spain.” Las Casas, even if citing in indirect speech, wants us to feel the excitement of the ship’s boys’ cries. The beautiful trees turn into planks and masts in the process of describing them, of discovering, that is, of uncovering a location rich in natural resources. The fourth moment closes this process of transformation by inventorying “a good river and material to make a water-powered sawmills.” Columbus assures Isabel and Ferdinand that the climate is most temperate and that there is “an opening at the foot of the cape … which was very deep and large, and in which there would be room for a hundred ships without cables and anchors” (Columbus, 1989: 171–3).

Native Americans undergo an analogous textual transformation when the initial connection of the term “cannibal” with those under the rule of the Great Khan of Cathay turn into dog-faced monsters and eventually to a group of people, the Caribs, who purportedly practiced cannibalism and terrorized the “peaceful” Arawacs, who have subjected themselves willingly to the Spanish crown (Hulme, 1986). Columbus constitutes the Carib’s future within the new colonial order as slaves, in the best of scenarios, and as subject to extermination, in the worst: “The Admiral told him by signs that the sovereigns of Castile would order the Caribs destroyed, and they would order all of them to be brought with hands tied” (Columbus, 1989: 287). The history of the Americas will reiterate this bad vs. good Indian narrative for the next 500 years. On Columbus’s return to the Island of Hispaniola (the Dominican Republic and Haiti) during his second voyage, he learns that the 36 Europeans he had left behind had been killed — the initial mapping of friendly/unfriendly Indians turns murky. Columbus sent 500 enslaved Arawacs back to Spain, to the horror of Queen Isabel, who demanded that he abstain from enslaving her new subjects; nevertheless, he set the grounds for the systematic subjection of natives under encomiendas (a system of tribute in kind and labor) and the enslaving of resistant Indians. According to the consuetudinary laws governing the rights of victors in war, the defeated could be enslaved. The practice of enslaving resistant Indians remained within the colonial order until the wars of independence. But if Miguel Hidalgo y Costilla and Simón Bolívar eventually called for the dissolution of slavery, not only of Indians but also of blacks, debt peonage has remained a reality up to the present time.

      Writing that Conquers

      In 1511, Fray Antonio de Montesinos delivered a sermon in Santo Domingo in which he exposed the atrocities and condemned those responsible as living under mortal sin. This denunciation led to an ideological crisis that led to the drafting of the Laws of Burgos. In essence, these laws sought to establish criteria for determining when Indians could be subjected to war and, as a consequence, enslaved. The Laws of Burgos gained further solidity when the jurist Juan López Palacios Rubio wrote a legal instrument known as the Requerimiento. The Requerimiento, perhaps, constitutes the purest expression of writing that conquers (Rabasa, 2000: 67—72, 88—94, and passim). After narrating the history of the world from the creation of the earth to the universal rule granted to St. Peter, the first pope, the Requerimiento goes on to explain that a most recent pope had granted sovereignty of the New World to the Spanish crown, and that Indians had the choice of either recognizing Spanish sovereignty over their territories or being subjected to war and slavery. It also points out that those who have accepted Spanish rule live happy and prosperous lives. This document became a standard in the establishment of first contact after 1514 when Pedrarias Davila first read it in the Castilla del Oro. From the start the Requerimiento was cast as a cynical attempt to justify violence; the impossibility of conveying its meaning to a people whose language was unknown was one of the concerns, but also the absurd situation in which it was reputedly read several miles off the coast to people who, for practical purposes, could not have heard it, let alone understood its implications if they did not welcome the invading Spaniards.

      The Requerimiento plays a fundamental role in Hernán Cortés’s Second Letter to Charles V. Having committed mutiny by refusing to follow the instructions of the Governor of Cuba Diego Velasquez, Cortés constantly draws from the Requerimiento to establish the legality of his conquering expedition into the hinterland of Mexico to subdue Motecuzoma in Tenochtitlan:

      And, trusting in God’s greatness and in the might of your Highness’s Royal name, I decided to go and see him wherever he might be. Indeed, I remember that, with respect to the quest of this lord, I undertook more than I was able, for I assured Your Highness that I would take him alive in chains or make him subject to Your Majesty’s Royal Crown. (Cortés, 1986: 50)

Cortés prefaces every contact with people on the way to the basin of Mexico with variations of the Requerimiento. In some instances, he responds with acts of war to negative responses to the demand to recognize Spain’ claims to sovereignty; in other instances Cortés chooses to ignore the negative reply: “So as not to offend him and for fear that some calamity might befall my endeavor and my journey, I dissembled as best as I could and told him that very soon I would have Mutezuma order him to give the gold and all that he owned” (ibid.: 56). This

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