in making manifest the ways violence operates in texts. Texts clearly carry material implications insofar as they may unchain terror, persecution, and torture (acts of war generally), but also consider the benevolent discourse that denounces all violence while constituting one exclusive form of thought, what in Spanish is referred to as “el pensamiento unico,” which in English would translate as “the only valid thought.” If “democracy” and neoliberal economic policies reign today, Catholic universality constituted a most lucid antecedent. Indians in the sixteenth century could not afford to refuse the acts of love by missionaries and bureaucrats.
Writing that Discovers
Those involved in the exploration and conquest of the Americas were expected to write about their findings and significant events, and provide exhaustive descriptions of the lands and peoples they invaded. I prefer the term invasion to that of encounter in that the later often diminishes the violent nature of the exchanges, tending to suggest a peaceful gathering of cultures that examine each other in symmetrical power relations. This might seem a truism, but it must be emphasized that the explorers and conquistadores of the sixteenth century approached the native cultures they came in contact with the intent of subjecting them politically, if not by military means. This conceptualization necessarily entails asymmetrical power relations insofar as the indigenous cultures were oblivious to the conquering aspirations of the Europeans. In order to carry out this political objective, Europeans counted on firearms, horses, and the ability to draft armies consisting of thousands of Indian allies. But writing constitutes a technology that enabled Europeans to record information regarding natural and cultural phenomena, but also to create a memory of the expeditions. Over the course of the sixteenth century the Spanish crown devised a series of laws and ordinances, ordenanzas, which were intended to rationalize expeditions as well as to structure the communities that settled in appropriated territories. These laws were intended to systematize the acquisition of knowledge and to regulate the behavior of those participating in the discovering enterprises. Note that discovery is bound to appropriation to Spanish rule and that Columbus, in his contract with the Spanish crown, was granted the titles of Admiral of the Ocean Sea, as well as that of governor and viceroy of all the lands he would discover. Discovery also uncovers, makes manifest what had not been visible before, hence the insistence on mapping and description. Discovery in its most elemental mode amounts to the act of having seen first, in fact, of having reconnoitered the territory for the first time without actually visiting the lands and even less established settlements. Claims will be bitterly disputed by other European nations, who challenged Spain’s possession with arguments that only territories with permanent settlements could be considered legitimate possessions. Needless to say, for indigenous peoples discovery is a fraught concept, but we need to account for the ways Indians return the gaze of the intruders by which they circumscribe them to their worlds.
For Columbus the act of discovering is inseparable from taking possession. Writing in this regard does not just constitute an ideological justification of territorial claims and the eventual wars of conquest, it also constitutes devices for the appropriation of peoples and natural resources. Laws and the definition of religious motivations can obviously be unmasked as offering ideological alibis, but the question of ideology can also be pursued in the examination of the categories used in recording information. As early as Columbus’s first voyage, his Diario produces a textual place in which the new lands would be mapped out; indeed, he speaks of creating a new map of the world and of a detailed inventory of natural resources. His systematic recording of data and descriptions of the lands under survey continues to surprise us today:
Also my Lord Princes, besides writing down each night whatever I experience during the day and each day what I sail during the night, I intend to make a new sailing chart. In it I will locate all of the sea and lands of the Ocean Sea in their proper places under their compass bearings and, moreover, compose a book and similarly record all of the same in a drawing, by latitude from the equinoctial line and by longitude from the west. (Columbus, 1989: 21)
Writing the discovery entails a systematic ordering of the world on a blank page. It is a textual production that intends to locate the new lands within a new picture of the world. Writing has as its objective “to compose a book,” but also a visual representation that would “record all the same in a drawing.” The location of places in their “proper places” (propios lugares) carries 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
