"Columbus and the Invention of Discovery"
 
by Frank Graziano
 
in "Encounters" (Autumn 1990, pp. 26-29)
 
     Reality is malleable; the paradigms molding it die hard. 
Christopher Columbus, on the threshold of the Middle Ages'
transition into the early modern period, one foot deep in Christian
tradition as the other lifted outward to test terra incognita,
combined medieval dogmatism with the Renaissance impulse to revise
in accord with its desire.  Within Columbus's design to "buscar el
Levante por el Poniente" (search for the East on behalf of the
West), traditional beliefs were alternately sacrosanct and
challenged, some protected by an impermeable hermeticism. others
manipulated, dismissed, or superseded by new beliefs often equally
ungrounded.  Medieval paradigms exported from Europe to the
"Indies" would erode only slowly.  In Lopez de Gomara's words--
"Experience runs counter to philosophy" and new structures of
inference, now "scientific," and ostensibly based on empirical
data, begin to reshape reality during the colonial process of
assimilation.
     It was accepted during much of the fifteenth century, on the
basis of Aristotelian and Ptolemaic authority, that the regions
south of Ethiopia and Mauritania constituted a "torrid zone"
uninhabitable by man.  However, Portuguese explorations of the
African coast in the 1440s, led by Prince Henry the Navigator,
inevitably dispelled the myth of an equatorial inferno.  Columbus
himself witnessed the perfect habitability of the "torrid zone"
during his 1482-1483 participation in an expedition to the
fortified Portuguese trading post at So Jorge de la Mina.  If the
ancient assertion of a "torrid zone" was incorrect, then it was
conceivable to Columbus--to the Renaissance Columbus--that
traditional notions regarding the westward distance to the Orient
and the navigability of the Sea of Darkness were likewise wrong or
misconceived.  Columbus's pre-1492 voyages thus result in the
recognition that "experience runs counter to philosophy" and
inaugurate his modernist mode of revision and recontextualization. 
Experiential data (perceptions gained on the coast of Africa)
disprove an ancient supposition (existence of the "torrid zone"),
compel its dismissal, and prefigure the revisionism which Columbus
will later repeatedly employ to disavow textual authorities
unfavorable to his enterprise.  These later examples of Renaissance
revisionism, however, are characterized by a mixed metaphor. 
whereas in the case of the torrid zone Columbus substantiated his
revision with empirical data, in all other pre-1492 arguments he
revised traditional beliefs with nothing more than a new collection
of a priori suppositions.  The early Columbus, constructing the
feasibility of his enterprise, merely replaced one ungrounded
belief with another, deposed one myth with another more flattering
to his design.
     The authoritative geographical work at the time Columbus
formulated plans for his voyage was Ptolemy's "Geography." 
Although dating to the second century, the "Geography" had been
lost for centuries and was first reintroduced to western Europe in
a 1410 Latin translation.  The "Geography," an "almost paralysing
discouragement from exploration by sea," as J.H. Parry wrote,
imposed a formidable theoretical obstacle to Columbus's plan, for
there was as yet no seafaring experience to refute it.  Columbus
was determined to break with this tradition.  To establish the
viability (and thus the funding) of his enterprise, however, he
would need to ground an argument in texts counteracting the
inherent damage done to his design by Ptolemy.  He would need to
work retroactively, from his projected faith in the mission's
ultimate success to its a priori textual substantiation or
validity.
     As Columbus's son Fernando has explained, the works of Marco
Polo and John Mandeville, recounting journeys "far beyond the
eastern lands described by Ptolemy and Marinus," became the compass
for Columbus's refutation.  Had their imaginations not so obviously
infused the narratives of their travels, however, Columbus would
have had, as he thought, textual authority grounded in actual
experience.  But Marco Polo and John Mandeville, (the latter in
particular), had a flair for the fantastic.  The unreliability of
their geographical data is implicit in their depiction of the
Orient.  Theirs is an imaginary Orient molded by Christendom's
desire.  All of the predominant European motifs are echoed: a land
of gilded abundance available for the taking, a population awaiting
the messengers of Christendom, a Christian ally in the legendary
kingdom of Prester John, a flanking of the infidels, an ecumenical
unification.  The fantastic then gained expression in geographical
calculations, Marco Polo overestimating the east-west breadth of
Asia and, more dramatically, imagining fifteen hundred miles
between the mainland and Cipango (Japan), thus extending the
Asiatic islands into the proximity, by a westward sail, of Europe. 
Columbus--fired by the idea of serving as Christendom's emissary
to the Great Khan of Cathay (China)--thus concludes that "India
(meaning Asia) neighbors on Africa and Spain.)
     "Scientific" verification of that belief was then solicited
through Columbus's 1481-1482 correspondence with the Florentine
savant Paolo del Pozzo Toscanelli.  Toscanelli, a prominent
physician, mathematician, astronomer, and geographer, was also--
to judge by his descriptions of Cathay--under the sway of
Mandeville and Marco Polo.  His revisions of Ptolemaic geography
were based upon conjecture and influences by his family's interest
in the spice trade and, specifically, in securing a seaborne
alternative to the overland trade routes menaced by the Turks. 
Toscanelli assures Columbus that "There is not a great distance to
be travelled by sea" in a westward sail to the Orient.
     Columbus combined Toscanelli's "scientific" calculations both
with his own hypotheses and with the religious geography of the
French Cardinal Pierre d'Ailley, as expounded by d'Ailley in his
book "Imago Mundi," written in 1410.  This treatise, as fanciful
as it was erudite, departed from all the known sources--Greek and
Arab geography, biblical references, existing legends, and travel
literature--to fashion an argument which Columbus enthusiastically
embraced and also heavily amended.  In one passage (accompanied by
Columbus's marginal notes), d'Ailley observes that "The length of
the land toward the east is much greater than Ptolemy admits."  The
wrapping of the earth by d'Ailley's disproportionately extended
Orbis Terrarum again corroborated Columbus's belief that the ocean
between the western extremity of Europe and the eastern edge of the
Orient "is not of great breadth."  More land meant less ocean. 
Columbus then follows d'Ailley into the fourth Book of Esdras in
which God commands that "the waters be gathered in the seventh part
of the earth," leaving six to the Orbis Terrarum.  Toscanelli's
reduction of the actual 10,600 air miles between the Canary Islands
and Japan to 3,000 miles will now seem an overestimation to
Columbus, who reduces the oceanic expanse to 2,400 miles,
calculated by confusing the Arab mile (1973.5 meters) with
Ptolemy's mile (1481.75).  On the eve of the 1492 voyage these a
priori conjectures, elaborated to suit the predetermined
conclusion, are accepted by Columbus as positive knowledge ratified
by Scripture.  "How much is that space between the last beaches of
Spain and India?," Seneca rhetorically asks in a text read by
Columbus, "the space of a very few days, if the ship is driven by
a favoring wind."
     On August 3, 1492, Columbus set sail in pursuit of the
magnificent Cipango and Cathay as described by Marco Polo and
Mandeville: bursting with riches, eager for Christianity, extending
far into the Sea of Darkness.  The erroneous calculations regarding
the breadth of the sea had situated Cipango and Cathay in the
proximity of the American continents, which were not only unknown
to Columbus and his contemporaries but were also inconceivable--
inadmissable--in the cosmography of the time.  When sailors sighted
land precisely in the imagined vicinity of the East, on the night
of October 12, 1492, Columbus had all the (false) proof he needed
to enshrine his conviction.  He believed (a belief he took to the
grave, despite overwhelming evidence to the contrary) that his
reckonings had at last been substantiated, that Hispaniola was
Cipango and Cuba a peninsula of mainland Cathay, and that the
mockery he had suffered was a token of his genius rather than of
his folly.
     The truth, of course, was otherwise.  Columbus's paradigm
bespoke one reality while the islands before him presented another. 
Rather than the ornate kingdoms described by the travel accounts,
there were natives running around "naked as their mothers bore
them."  The landscape seemed wrong.  There were insufficient signs
of spices.  Marco Polo's "gold in the greatest abundance, its
sources being inexhaustible" was scarcely in evidence among a
people described by Columbus as "very deficient in everything."
     Such juxtaposition of the expected and the revealed was not
unfamiliar to a sailor who had learned that "experience runs
counter to philosophy."  The model of revision rehearsed in 1482-
1483 (and then extended into fanciful calculations) delivered its
masterpiece when Columbus applied it inverted to the Caribbean,
when the philosophy subordinated the experience.  Whereas in the
"torrid zone" Columbus revised a paradigm a posteriori in the New
World, because the unknown continent must be Asian, reality was
revised to fit the paradigm.  Desire debilitates traditional truths
at one turn and fortifies them at another; a malleable reality is
molded, as Hernan Perez de Oliva would put it in 1528, "to unite
the world and to give those strange lands the shape of our own."
     Perez de Oliva's observation inaugurates a recurrent theme in
Columbus scholarship: the "discovery" was characterized by
conceptual manipulation of the New World to suit the European
frames of reference attempting its cognition.  For example, in the
sixteenth century, Bartolome de las Casas, whose "History of the
Indies" constitutes the cornerstone of Columbus studies, observed
that "it is a marvelous thing how whatever a man strongly desires
and has firmly set in his imagination, all that he hears and sees
at each step he fancies to be in its favor."  The same point is
made by almost all subsequent Columbus scholars, among them Antonio
Ballesteros Beretta ("Su mente exaltada por el misticismo le
conducia a conclusiones desorbitadas"), Edmundo O'Gorman ("Under
the sway of his desire reality was transfigured"), Tzvetan Todorov
("There is a definite relationship between the form of his faith
in God and the strategy of his interpretations"; "... all
information is vitiated by the fact that Columbus had determined
everything in advance"), and Beatriz Pastor ("... lleva al cabo una
indagacion que oscilaba entre la invencion, la deformacion y el
encubrimiento"; "no se cancelo el arquetipo sino que se aplazo
simplemente su realizacion plena mientras comenzaba a funcionar
como mecanismo de reduccion, deformacion, y ficcionalizacion de la
nueva realidad").  Even the sometimes apologetic account of Paolo
Emilio Taviani concurs in this ("... reality assumes a purely
subjective value"; "Reality must adjust to what he (Columbus) says
it is"), as does the mythopoetic biography of Washington Irving,
when acknowledging that "The artless manner in which he (Columbus)
mingles the rhapsodies and dreams of his imagination with simple
facts and sound practical observations, pouring them forth with a
king of scriptural solemnity and poetry of language, is one of the
most striking illustrations of a character richly compounded of
extraordinary and apparently contradictory elements."
     The contradictions to which Irving alludes are provisionally
reconciled: Hispaniola is stylized Cipango and Ophir, the newly
encountered archipelago is denominated "Indies" and "Antilles" as
the oriental and mythological interpretations compete, confuse, and
are finally synthesized under the rubric of a conceptual
reorganization which attempts to reconcile each of its
determinants.  This assimilation of the new reality into European
frames of reference gains constant expression.  Trees whose
magnificence are unimaginable to Columbus are described by the
oxymoron "beautifully deformed"; idolatrous natives are described
as "without sect" (that is, predisposed to evangelization); natural
ports are perceived in terms of their capacity for European trade
ships; and later, the continent's vastness is biblitized through
the gloss of medieval mappaemundi poetics as Columbus reshapes the
earth (a pear-shape like "a woman's nipple on a round ball," as he
puts it) placing Terrestrial Paradise on the rise--the nipple--
because the volume of the Orinoco River was otherwise inadmissable
to Columbus's cosmography.
     It is for this reason, borrowing a concept refined by Edmundo
O'Gorman, that Columbus's encounter with the Americas is
characterized as much by invention as it is by discovery.  Use of
the term "invention" in the context of exploration was not uncommon
during the sixteenth century.  Columbus himself mentions it, Las
Casas uses it in conjunction with "discover," and Perez de Oliva
displays it prominently in the title of his "History of the
Invention of the Indies."  This usage of "invention" is in closer
etymological relation to its Latin root invenire (to find) than
contemporary usage.  The early modern "invention" is almost
synonymous with what we now term "discovery."  The meaning of
"invention" in reference to exploration, however, seems to possess
connotations beyond the mere root "to find."  One would be hard
pressed to say "I have misplaced my shoe.  Will you help me invent
it?"  "Invention," in the context of early modern discovery, rather
suggests a compromise between the pure etymological meaning (to
find) and the process of reshaping that characterized cognition of
the New World.  Columbus "finds" something ("discovery") and then
transforms it, instrumentalizes it, into something he can utilize
("invention").
     While Columbus's adventures incorrectly claimed for the
Spanish a westerly route to the Indies, Vasco da Gama's first
voyage revealed a true route--southward around Africa and then east
to India.  Vespucci's 1501 voyage made evident the enormity of
South America and demonstrated to the satisfaction of most
Europeans--Columbus excepted--that the newly found lands were a
"Mundus Novus" having nothing to do with Cipango and Cathay, a vast
continental obstacle between Europe and the East it sought.  Once
Balboa crossed the Isthmus of Panama and chanced upon the Pacific
in 1513, exploration was increasingly directed toward the search
for a strait through the American landmass.  Magellan culminated
the quest when in 1520 he discovered that there was no strait other
than the one that now bears his name, impractical insofar as a
trade route to the Indies was concerned.
     By these increments, Europe thus came to understand that its
discovery of the Indies was an invention.  Columbus remained
faithful to his original conviction as the Spanish seaborne empire
soon consolidated its loss into a gain, transformed the barrier
into booty.  The impetus "to give those strange lands the shape of
our own" remained in force throughout the sixteenth century, but
the sense of "to discover" seeped away from the Columbian
invention, to be pulled increasingly toward its antonym "to cover." 
The colonial agenda of reshaping was implemented more in the realm
of the practical than the conceptual.  It comprised a socio-
cultural, political, religious, and demographic layering of one
civilization upon the ruins of others, a covering over, a
palimpsest meshed under pressure.
 
Reprint permission granted by publisher.