of these new lands and peoples is a holy and worthy cause. As Stephen Greenblatt mentions in Marvelous Possessions, in the absence of gold, Columbus offers the marvelous: “The marvelous stands for the missing gold.”4 The appeal to wonder here becomes an instrument in colonial possession. Wonder is colonized and turned into an exotic object that Columbus and other explorers would exploit in the service of conquest.
Inga Clendinnen explains well the many instances in which wonder and fantasy served colonial purposes, and makes this point in reference to Cortes: “His essential genius lay in the depth of his conviction, and in his capacity to bring others to share it: to coax, bully, and bribe his men, dream-led, dream-fed them. . . . He also lured them to acknowledge their most extreme fantasies; then he persuaded them, by his own enactment of them, that the fantasies were realizable.”5 Or listen to Carlos Fuentes on this same theme: “The two foundations of Buenos Aires clearly dramatizes two impulses of Spanish colonization in the New World. One is based on fantasy, illusion, imagination. The conquistadors were driven not only by the lust for gold . . . but by fantasy and imagination, which at times were an even stronger elixir. As they entered the willful world of the Renaissance, these men still carried with them the fantasies of the Middle Ages.”6
We might see the play on the names of Columbus as illustrating these two themes. Because of the frequency of Columbus’s appeal to the wonder and marvel of the New World, the King of Spain said that Columbus should be known not as Almirante, the admiral, but as Almirans, the one who wonders. And yet, at the same time, Las Casas once noted that the name he had been born with, Cristóbal Colón, sealed him with the mark of a “colon-izer.”7 Columbus’s capacity for wonder coexisted with his dreams of colonization and possession. He is a wonderer and colonizer at once. We might see this duality as the beginning of a history that will endure for centuries in Latin America and claim the lives of millions: the mixture of dreams of paradise with the history of colonization and violence.8
How quickly, then, does wonder assume its part in the history of colonization. We should always remain alert to this possibility, especially as we listen to Columbus’s wonder-intoxicated language. Columbus never tires of the word maravilla. The trees, fish, animal life, the varieties of nature’s loveliness, everything is marvelous:
The fish here are surprisingly unlike ours. There are some the shape of dories and of the finest colors in the world. . . . The colors are so marvelous that everybody wondered and took pleasure in the sight. . . . Flocks of parrots darken the sun and there is a marvelous variety of large and small birds very different from our own; the trees are of many kinds, each with its own fruit, and all have a marvelous scent. . . . Hispaniola is a wonder. . . . This country, Most Serene Highnesses, is so enchantingly beautiful that it surpasses all others in charm and beauty as much as the light of day surpasses the night. Very often I would say to my crew that however hard I tried to give your Highnesses a complete account of these lands my tongue could not convey the whole truth about them nor my hand write it down. I was so astonished at the sight of so much beauty that I can find no words to describe it. . . . But now I am silent, only wishing that some other may see this land and write about it. (C, 65, 70, 83–84)
It is easy to be seduced by Columbus’s portrait of Hispaniola. He can be dazzling when speaking of its wonders and idyllic beauty. And he sounds like a mystic in suggesting how little these wonders can be described, how much they require personal experience. He says that the New World brings him to silence, that nothing comparable has ever been seen. The beauty is so intense and surprising that it brings his mind and tongue to a pause. His language falters. “My tongue is broken,” as Sappho once remarked.9 Columbus tells us what it must feel like to be filled with such awe and delight. He gives us signs, but then warns us, like so many mystics, that it is ineffable. In moments like this, Columbus tastes beauty in all its splendor and expresses himself in ways that any mystic would understand. For many Christian mystics—perhaps the lesson learned from paganism—beauty is a sign of grace, a kind of icon in which the One discloses itself. And for those with a trained eye for this beauty, revelation comes to them in these sensual forms with a force that can leave the soul breathless and ecstatic, undone by so much beauty.
Here Columbus is as close as his shadow to this kind of rapture, to the aesthetical intuitions of the mystics. His invocation of the language of inexpressibility is a key feature of his portrait of wonder, and it appears with regularity when he is at pains to articulate his discoveries. Columbus locates wonder in the gaps and silences of language, beyond the boundaries of what can be said in clear and certain terms. And yet, since the naming of islands is fundamental to taking possession, Columbus—in his guise as Cristóbal Colón—wants to name what is unnamable and, thus, betrays his initial intuition about Hispaniola, that it is wonder that cannot be possessed; or else, is it his other identity that he betrays, his beneficent shadow as the Almirans? Regardless, it is clear that Columbus is a knight of possession and conquest: “Generally it was my wish to pass no island without taking possession of it” (C, 60). With this frank admission, we realize that Columbus’s approach to the beauty of Hispaniola is nothing like reverence—demanding, it seems to me, respect and awe for the integrity of the other—but, instead, voracity, an insatiable desire to consume and own.
His betrayals have many different facets, but consider one incident that Columbus notes on his fourth voyage (1502–4). He writes of an encounter with magicians on an island he calls Cariay. He expects to find confirmation of the people Pope Pius II wrote of in his Cosmographia (a description of the Far East). Columbus writes, “In Cariay and in the adjoining districts there are great and very terrifying magicians who would have done anything to prevent my remaining there an hour. On my arrival they sent me two magnificently attired girls, the elder of whom could not have been more than eleven and the other seven. Both were so shameless that they might have been whores, and had magic powders concealed about them. On their arrival I ordered that they should be given some of our trinkets and sent them back to land immediately” (C, 297). The wonder that Columbus describes here is mixed up with terror and suddenly his tone is noticeably different from when speaking of natural beauty. When speaking of the natives, Columbus begins to tremble and expresses apprehension and foreboding, fear and antipathy. In his perception, these native women are nothing but demons in female form, succubi.
It’s almost as if he had landed on the same island that is the setting for Shakespeare’s The Tempest, a parallel noted by the classic work of José Enrique Rodó, Ariel (1900).10 Remember that this great work of Shakespeare is situated on a mysterious island in the West. Prospero and his daughter find themselves exiled there along with a creature of the earth, Caliban, and his mother, the Algerian witch Sycorax (Caliban is a near anagram of the term cannibal, and in the New World related to the term “Carib”). In this distant and alien world, the characters are at pains to anchor themselves to solid footing. The language of wonder captures the depths of their disorientation in this strange world (the name of Prospero’s daughter, Miranda, suggests the wondrous atmosphere of the island and derives from the Latin mirari, to wonder, admire, or revere). Strange things happen here, none stranger than the occult powers of Prospero, a great and powerful magician who has nature, even death, at his command: “I have bedimmed the noontide sun, called forth the mutinous winds, and ’twixt the green sea and the azured vault set roaring war . . . graves at my command, have waked their sleepers, oped, and let ’em forth by my so potent art” (Tempest, 5.1.41–50). The location of this island somewhere beyond the boundaries of the known world seems to have opened doors to other dimensions of reality and to have invited in the powers of sorcery and wizardry. The uncanny is abundant in this new world.
With Prospero’s potent art in mind, we know that the wonders of this island are wild to an extreme, making for a bewildering experience, engendering fear and anxiety. Caliban is the prime instance and embodiment of these fearful wonders. He represents the wonder of the New World, but in a grotesque form: misshapen, bizarre, strange, ugly, unpleasant, and, above all, monstrous. Everything about this island resembles this grotesque creature and it causes some to want nothing more than
