of gift giving.11 He also neglected the possibility that the Taino found gold to be as inconsequential as the sailors considered their own “trifles,” or that they attached a metaphorical and ceremonial importance to the glass.12 With stunning confidence in his interpretive ability, he was quick to see this exchange as evidence of economic innocence. Showing that “Columbus reads the Indian system of valuation (whatever it was) as an empty prefiguration of his own,” Joshua Bellin has observed, “a glass bead is worthless and a pearl precious only in systems of exchange value.”13 Echoing Stephen Greenblatt’s comment that this letter epitomizes the European fantasy of “the grossly unequal gift exchange: I give you a glass bead and you give me a pearl worth half your tribe,” Bellin has pointed out that Columbus describes the Indians as “naive consumers beyond Europe’s wildest dreams.”14 The profits of a few sailors suggest the effortless gain of future treasures.
Moral self-congratulation accompanied the coy assessment of potential wealth in this letter. Columbus juxtaposed his sailors’ eagerness to exploit the Indians with his own insistence that they be treated favorably: “I forbad [these trades] as being unjust, and myself gave them many beautiful and acceptable articles which I had brought with me, taking nothing from them in return; I did this in order that I might more easily conciliate them, that they might be led to become Christians, and be inclined to entertain a regard for the King and Queen, our Princes and all Spaniards, and that I might induce them to take an interest in seeking out, and collecting, and delivering to us such things as they possessed in abundance, but which we greatly needed.”15 With this narrative Columbus set in place a vision of intercontinental contact that would unite diverse expressions of European desire.16 Wonder at the Indians’ financial naïveté, concern to save them from injustice and divine wrath, fervent hopes to win their “regard” and hence receive their wealth—all these reactions became central to the discourse of colonialism. Underlining the contrast between unjust sailors and the just admiral who commands them is a distinction between shortsightedness and foresight that is more intellectual than moral. Columbus’s initial insistence on fair trade will, he hopes, encourage the Indians’ excessive reciprocity. It is an investment, promising a payoff in gold and labor. Christian conversion plays a dual role in a vision of reciprocal exchange: fair trade by Columbus will help lead the Indians to Christianity, and Christianity will keep the trade fair. For what except the gospel can match the wealth that the Indians “abundantly possess” but Spain “greatly need[s]”? Christianity is the only commodity that can balance the intercontinental books for Columbus, offering compensation for conquest.
At the core of Columbus’s formulation is this vision of “gold for glasse,” of true wealth bartered for its shiny imitation. This trope of trade became central to descriptions of global exploration. It also acquired a broad metaphorical register in the early modern period, suggesting many forms of poor judgment. After killing his wife Desdemona out of ill-founded suspicions of infidelity, for example, Shakespeare’s Othello referred to himself as
[O]ne whose hand,
Like the base Indian, threw a pearl away
Richer than all his tribe. (5.2.344–46)
Shakespeare’s choice of metaphor, if he did refer to an American Indian here, emphasizes Othello’s gullibility in the face of Iago’s manipulation.17 Stressing his tendency to trust appearance over deeper truth, these lines also link prodigality to naïveté. Othello does not really trade; rather, he throws his treasure away. Instead of focusing on a desire for what glitters, this reference emphasizes a prerequisite eagerness to discard what is more valuable than it seems. Indians toss away pearls because they do not understand their value. Othello, likewise, has tossed away the love of his wife because he was made to distrust its authenticity. The absence of any trade, even for glass, heightens his suicidal sense of loss.
More than a century later Eliza Haywood echoed Shakespeare’s romantic inflection of this trope in The City Jilt (1726), a narrative of love betrayed by greed. Near the end of this story the callous Melladore, who had seduced and then abandoned the heroine Glicera so that he could marry a wealthier woman, finds that Glicera has obtained ownership of the deed to his now bankrupt estate. Throwing himself on her mercy, Melladore writes, “Like the foolish Indians, I have barter’d Gold for Glass, exchang’d the best for one of the vilest that ever disgraced the name of Woman.”18 Although Melladore describes himself as bartering rather than discarding a treasure, the emphasis on poor discernment echoes Othello’s use of this trope. Like Othello, he has judged badly in matters of love, failing to see the value of true gold.
Besides asserting the cost of ignorance, the trope of trade also could suggest the exploitation of innocence. This meaning applied especially when intangible resources were balanced against material ones. John Milton used this image at the beginning of the Civil War in The Reason of Church Government Urg’d against Prelaty (1642). In an autobiographical interlude he pondered the moral burdens that accompany the acquisition of spiritual knowledge, justifying his criticism of England’s bishops as a duty placed on him by the privilege of his education. Those who have received gifts of knowledge should share them, he argued, not hoard them while they sell false treasures at a high price. This autobiographical defense enhanced his attack on the Church of England, because he then contrasted his own generosity with episcopal greed. England’s church hierarchy had failed to meet its duty to the intellectually impoverished, exploiting the common people just as merchants cheat “poor Indians” with cheap trinkets. Expanding on the “burden” of the educated, Milton wrote:
And that which aggravates the burden more is that (having received amongst his allotted parcels certain precious truths of such an orient lustre as no diamond can equal, which nevertheless he has in charge to put off at any cheap rate, yea for nothing to them that will) the great merchants of this world, fearing that this course would soon discover and disgrace the false glitter of their deceitful wares wherewith they abuse the people, like poor Indians with beads and glasses, practise by all means how they may suppress the venting of such rarities, and such a cheapness as would undo them, and turn their trash upon their hands. Therefore by gratifying the corrupt desires of men in fleshly doctrines, they stir them up to persecute with hatred and contempt all those that seek to bear themselves uprightly in this their spiritual factory.19
Overlapping images of global commerce become a vehicle of Puritan attack in Milton’s text. While cheating “poor Indians” by selling them glittering trash, England’s bishops have hoarded the treasures entrusted to them by God, those truths of “orient lustre” that they were supposed to give away. Europe’s exploitation of other lands becomes a symbol of England’s exploitation by its church.
As he applied this trope to the domestic realm, Milton added a spiritual dimension. The suggestion of simony, the selling of religious benefits for material gain, created an intersection between axes of spiritual and material worth. Through this accusation Milton made explicit Columbus’s implied vision of an intercontinental reciprocity involving a payment of Christianity for gold, compensating for the false currency of glass. The “spiritual factory,” the same term Joseph Caryl used thirteen years later to advertise America as the place where the English convert Indians, here condemned England’s ecclesiastical corruption through analogy with the cheating of Indians.20
Other seventeenth-century writers used the trope in similar ways. Robert Boyle, best known for his scientific work, invoked this image in his moral writings. “The Aretology” (1645) one of his (until recently) unpublished essays, notes that “Vertu by an aduantagious Exchange for vs, serves her followers as the [silly] Indians do our Mariners, giuing them for Beads and Whistles and Gugaws, precious wares and substantiall meat.”21 Rather than taking the perspective of the cheated Indians, Boyle focused on the “aduantagious Exchange” that the virtuous enjoy for their avoidance of vice, just as European sailors gain from trades with Indians. The essay “Of Felicity” (1646), by the Interregnum writer John Hall, also used
