Essays on Literature, Literary / Textual Criticism, and Pedagogy
Editor: Ollie O. Oviedo, Eastern New Mexico University
Assistant Editors: Royal Prentice, Harvey Stanbrough,
Eastern New Mexico University
New World/Old Word or Reading the "Viewed":
Columbus and the "Visionary," Vespucci and the "Verbal,"
De Bry and the "Visual" and the Construction of Text
Oscar Ronald Dathorne
English Department
University of Kentucky
In S/Z, Roland Barthes rightly contended that the "writerly" ("scriptible") text may simply not exist since it is "the novelistic
without the novel, poetry without the poem, the essay without the dissertation, writing without style, production without
product, structuration without structures" (3). As such, it inhabits a pure nether world beyond art and artifice, apart from any
neat interpretations. And since the author is "dead," s(he) cannot establish any sacrosanct position in determining the direction
of the work. Language, with all of its powerful prejudices, imposes its own, albeit at times subtle format, whereby subject and
other become most manifest.1
Any examination of the literature of "encounter" between Europeans and Native Americans reveals how very often language
itself serves as a device for invention. The European language does not merely relate, but creates its own non-European
culture—a savage, a native, a non-Christian, a barbarian.2 And since much of what was written in the wake of Conquest falls
within the purview of a propaganda heavily dependent on narrative codes, these types of "readerly" ("lisible") texts reveal a
great deal about what Jonathan Culler has referred to as the manner through which the text and the reading process are all
linked "within the modes of order which culture makes available" (137)—in this case a European culture.
"America" is loaded with meanings, derived not from the place itself (although this could also be contested in a different
context), but more specifically from what is said, referred to, and defined in the context of a European language. First, there is
the "mythology," in particular Jacques Derrida's "white mythology" that must restore the "sens propre." However, a quandary
occurs in that even when stripped of this through "usure," we are still left with surplus metaphors that accrue to the original
coin.3
Assuming then that at some stage there is a desire on the part of the narrative writers to relate "America," just simply to write
down the word, the European composer is beset with initial difficulties. At the most basic level, the debate over authenticity
begins almost as soon as the current usage is initiated. Sebastian Cabot, as early as 1517, dismissed Amerigo Vespucci's
voyage of 1497 as one "which Americus says he made." Bartolomé de Las Casas condemned Vespucci as a liar, and Peter
Martyr simply omitted him. In 1836, Alexander von Humboldt concluded that the 1497 voyage was impossible, and as late as
1856 no less a personage than Ralph Waldo Emerson regretted that Vespucci "a thief" had placed his name on the continent,
during "an expedition that never sailed" (Morison 306-307).
If "writerly" texts could exist, demanding little reconstruction or evaluation on our part, but simply engaging the reader as a
kind of accomplice, then within the supposed words of a fictitious Vespucci we should be able to find and locate the actual.
But Barthes has warned us that (a) the author is dead, (b) the author is unreliable, and (c) the reader (even one several
centuries removed) must take over and regulate the work, becoming a co-inventor of the text. And since the text is no longer
anonymous, we must read beyond its margins, taking in the multi-faceted ramifications of its intent.
Supposedly Vespucci made four voyages between 1499 and 1501. On the first, he traveled southwest from the Canary
Islands to the Gulf of Paria, north to Haiti, and back. On his second, he journeyed from Europe via Cape Verde and made it
as far south as the northeast corner of Brazil, as far as the Cape of San Augustin. He then traveled west along the northern
coast of Brazil, the Guyanas and Venezuela, north toward Hispaniola, and then returned. On his third voyage, he came first
south to the African coast, then moved down the coast of South America as far as present day Santa Cruz. Finally, during his
fourth journey, he cut across the Atlantic from Sierra Leone, moving partly down the east coast of South America, before
returning directly (Vespucci, xiv, xv). If these accounts are reliable, they show that with time Vespucci was able to utilize
Columbus' experience, especially with regard to the utilization of ocean currents. The further south he sailed toward Africa, the
greater his chances of exploring a larger swathe on the east coast of South America. Columbus' designs are therefore
imprinted on Vespucci's plans, even without Columbus' words or their body of shared beliefs.
This is important when we consider the extent to which the Columbus/Vespucci text bears startling similarities. Essentially their
journey was identical with another journey to a "different" place; Columbus termed it "otro" and Vespucci deemed it "novus,"
but they meant the same. The area was not a version of Europe, but an un-European "other," located at the edge of "place"
and therefore conjuring up representations of distinct opposites in landscape and people. It mattered little what they "found";
the text merely served as a device for justifying the "non-"existent, "non-"reality, "non- "sameness, "non-"entity. "America," in
concept as realization, challenged the very nature of known space and place.
Indeed, as a result of the projection of one type of fancy, Martin Waldsemüller's 1507 world map continued to rely on
Ptolemy for Europe and Asia. For Africa, he utilized what was known through Portuguese travel; for China, he relied on
Marco Polo. But for the New World, he relied on Vespucii. The twelve sheets that constitute the map therefore represent an
"agreed" assembly of images of the world, not just Waldsemüller's. Rodney Shirley comments in The Mapping of the World
that Waldsemüller's map therefore still suggests that this New World region is so remote, so "ultra," so removed from even the
known "other" (Asia), that it deserves its own "legend" (Shirley 128). Out of this cultural desperation, "America" comes into
being and is, in actuality, "discovered."
Vespucci described the people he encountered as follows:
Let me say that after our journey had turned northward, the first land we found to be inhabited was an island ten degrees from the equator; and when we were near it we saw a host of people on the shore looking at us as though at something wondrous. We anchored about a mile from the land, equipped the boats and went ashore with twenty-two well armed men, and . . . the people saw us land and saw that we were different from them in nature . . . .
(Vespucci 9)
In this, the so-called Mundus Novus letter (an English translation from Latin of a lost Italian original), Vespucci indicates the
direction we are attempting to pursue. This journey had presumably taken place between May 14, 1501 and July 22, 1502
and Vespucci had supposedly landed somewhere in the vicinity of Brazil and Venezuela among a people totally different from
the Europeans.
What this early part of the letter does reveal at the sub-textual level is first and foremost that like Columbus, Vespucci had
entered into a no man's land of "uninhabited" places with people, before he came to one that was "inhabited." Additionally,
since this is no ordinary "letter," but indeed a public document that would utilize the new printing press, and would be read and
re-read all over Europe, it takes on the added significance of existing as an anthology about a belief system. As such, returning
briefly to Jonathan Culler to be understood the reading process must make use of "modes of order" of the culture or, put
differently, must be "recuperated" into an order comprehended by the reader of this very readerly text. Thus from the onset
Vespucci evokes the metaphor much beloved by "discoverers" —strange natives gazing with awestruck reverence at the
arrival of Europeans.4
Next, noteworthy is that the "twenty-two well armed men" constitute clear evidence of the not-so-hidden belligerent message
in the text. Here, the reader is told quite clearly of at least one reason why the European is triumphant: not only are "natives"
constantly afraid, but they are also easily controlled by the use of superior European force. This heralds their imminent
suitability for enslavement, kidnaping, torture and death,5 and prepares the way for their total domination by old words in the
new world.
Vespucci's very readerly text continues to fit neatly into Barthes' formula in that, especially in the context of self-affirmation of
values, it "declares itself to be historical" (Barthes, S/Z 32). But this it cannot be, for surely despite Edward Said's anguish
over the need for origins (as seen in his Beginnings: Intention and Method), Vespucci's text is both within and outside history.
Vespucci represents an "origin" in that, for instance, his world is "novus," unexplored, undescribed and only superficially,
explicated. At the same time, his world is "antiquus," existing prior to any new experience, and in a way, "ante," predating even
time itself.
European representations of "different" people are fashioned by this "ante" world, outside of time itself, where a specific
European mind-set has failed to come to terms with the new social realities of a new world. In a few words, what Vespucci
observes is not so much the dialectical opposition of novus/antiquus, but a failure to recognize the projection in terms of one
on the other, the distant on the near, the familiar on the odd, and above all, the safe on the unknown. Out of this failure to
acknowledge an imaginative extension, the text falls back on familiar echoes of ancient reference points, unable to expand into
the new directions of a dramatically challenging experience.6 I am therefore suggesting that both Vespucci and Christopher
Columbus failed to relay New World reality for one major reason only—they saw the "old " in the "new" and were thus unable
to translate one experience into the other, or to completely substitute the "One" for the "Other."
European readers had been fed on palatable tidbits which gave them assurances about the safe condition of their own
Christian world. Vespucci stated quite directly, as he compared his European crew to the people of Trinidad, that ". . . the
people saw us land and saw that we were different from them in nature" (Vespucci 9; emphasis added). "Nature" is an
important code word in this sentence. By 1550, when the disputation between Bartolomé de Las Casas and Juan Ginés de
Sepúlveda took place in Valladolid, Spain, the issue had reached a fevered pitch of excess. Indeed, "nature" established the
basis for heated discussion, violent disagreement, and ultimate dismissal—did Indians have a "nature" that predisposed them
toward barbarism? For Las Casas, Native Americans could not be barbarians, since even if they did not possess a "written"
language, their speech observed certain methodologies which Europeans could appreciate. In rebuttal, Sepúlveda merely
conceded that "they are as inferior to the Spaniards as . . . women to men . . . as monkeys to men" (Hanke 84). I think the
women/monkey analogy is not too far removed from the consciousness of the time.
Both Columbus and Vespucci, almost as if by intentional collusion, fabricated texts which were identical. Thus the reader
becomes a "producer" in this new way: he has helped engineer the final product. He can, for instance, claim common kinship
with ideas that belong not merely to Columbus or Vespucci, but which, through being shared by both, validate the reader's
own. So, even as Columbus in Guadeloupe, in stressing the Ultimate Other, identifies the Caribs as man eaters (Columbus,
Vol 1, 28), Vespucci in Trinidad, "discovered that they [the inhabitants] were of a race called Cannibals" (Vespucci 9). They
were utilizing the commonly agreed in "supertext."
Logic in both instances dictated that the blessings of European Christianization would be accompanied by enslavement.
Columbus reasons that having been saved from their miserable lives, Native Americans "will be better than other slaves"
(Columbus, Vol 1, 92). Vespucci, noting that slavery is indeed no strange custom among the people he sees, suggests that it
supersedes the doubtful benefits of cannibal fare (Vespucci 9).
Regardless of what may or may not have been actual social reality, it is not surprising that the explorers' depictions remain the
same well into the period of eighteenth century Pacific exploration. Indeed, the themes of exploration are so closely
interwoven that the reader obtains the feeling that (s)he is encountering, over and over again, samples of a kind of
proto-readerly text. William Dampier, James Cook and others all embark into the "unknown"; all encounter nubile and willing
"native" women and men; and all discover Paradise in the Pacific.7 This seems a little surprising, especially since they were not
Columbus wannabes, blindly stumbling across the sea, but representatives of the European Enlightenment, whose professed
reason for departure was often connected with scientific observation. Yet their texts had to be informed by and conform to the
expectations of "Home."8 The Plinian and Alexandrian monsters may have disappeared, but Vespucci's "femme sauvage"
(especially in the Age of the Noble Savage) was given a renewed lease of life.9
One should not, and cannot, therefore regard either Columbus' or Vespucci's narratives as personal creations. They are group
compositions, manufactured from the accepted notions of the public. And to make sure that the "text" continues to be a shared
view, components are added to help with our understanding or our willingness to accept. Thus, the process of composition
operates in this way, i.e.,
Verbal (word/text/metaphor)+Visual (image/map/picture)
+Visionary(Religion/Paradise/God/king) = Viewed
Thus the "text" (its words, meanings, connotations) has to be supplemented by maps and pictures, which in turn contribute to,
and bolster up, the "visionary." As a result, the accepted world view is maintained, since the woodblock illustration (much like
an untouched photograph) provides objective analysis.
For us to come to real terms with the literatures of the period, we have to understand that not only is the European verbal
skewed, but the important and missing part of the equation is obviously the "visual." This is where Waldseemüller's map
constitutes such a tremendous aide to the racial memory. It confirms with the single implantation of "America" on the southern
part of the "new" continent, that it was the property of a single European person who had "discovered" and "named" it for an
entire community. The word, the mere act of its creation and reproduction, seems simple enough unless we clearly see, as with
Barthes, that it constitutes one of the "cultural codes [which] are references to a science or a body of knowledge" (Barthes,
S/Z 20). The problem is that here, although this does draw on a body of accepted, known European knowledge, it is still
structuring the culture.
One obvious example, which I shall mention but not discuss in any detail, is the instance of the so-called Aztec codices. One
instance is Fr Bernardino de Sahagún's attempts at transmitting information about the nature of "Conquest" via "native"
informants. Despite the accompanying pictographs, these illustrated chronicles say more about the "conqueror" than they do
about the "conquered." The account, Sahagún tells us, is to make the Indies better known to the Spanish; in so doing he gives
in several books a background of the customs and traditions of the Aztec people, and in Book XII, their confrontation with
the Spaniards.
As scholars have looked closer at the work in question, what has emerged is not only that the indigenous painters and
transcribers have been heavily influenced by a posterior Spanish interpretation of events, but since the pictures are often
drawn after the verbal account, they obviously lack any first-hand authenticity. Add to this the very pertinent fact that the
composers of both the Nahuatl and Spanish texts are at least a generation removed from the events they describe, this
presents us with an additional quandary. This is hardly aided by Sahagún's own words in Spanish which, according to at least
one scholar, mention Cortés much more often than does the Nahuatl text (Lockhart in Schwartz 218-248).
One would naturally have hoped to have seen realized in the codices, particularly the Aztec (earlier versions of which the
enthusiastic disciples of Cortés took such care to destroy), ideal elements whereby the "visual" and "verbal" come together in a
new and revealing way, for us to inspect, evaluate and commend some four centuries later. But the truth of the matter is that,
apart from works that can be authenticated without doubt as "pre-Cartesian," there exists an element of contamination. After
all, even in these "authentic" accounts that post-date the Conquest (and Sahagún's is the most thorough that we possess), what
is essentially being written down is a version of the occurrence for "home" consumption. There are giveaway lines in the text,
such as the parts where the Spaniards are referred to, much as they call themselves, namely "Christians" or "people of Castille"
(Lockhart 238-239). The account itself is hardly a history of the Aztecs or even the Aztec view of Conquest; it remains a
parochial version of events from a rather small part of a people of Mexico (afterwards named the Aztec by Alexander von
Humboldt).
What the visual codices definitely tell us does not guarantee their verbal authenticity. After all, for all indigenous peoples of
Spanish America, according to Enrique Floroescano, Conquest had meant "the annihilation of their historical memory . . . their
past memory destroyed and made anathema" (68). Utilizing our equation, it is evident that the "viewed" is skewed, since the
word/text of the "verbal," the image/picture of the "visual," and indeed even the "visionary" have been filtered through the
controls of an alien manipulator. But we have already noted this with Columbus and Vespucci, and it becomes even more
evident in subsequent accounts well into the nineteenth century as Europeans begin a new exploration for a different Paradise
in the South Pacific.
Being there indeed, in the case of the composers of the codices, is compounded not merely by the transported myths that are
played out in the heads of adventurers as disparate as Columbus and James Cook. Being there, for the sixteenth century
scribes, seems merely to confirm the appearance of authenticity from the "native" viewpoint, whose very status is considerably
compromised by their being "pupils" of the very people for whom they are claiming to write an objective account. One may
even argue that this exists today as one of the major problems for writers who seek to create a "post-colonial" text utilizing the
tools and media of the colonial center.
Adam's task, we are reliably informed, was to name things. To gain "universal" (European) acceptability, the "visual" part of
the equation would have to be present. Sebastian Münster (1489-1552) published his Cosmographia Universalis in 1544; the
verbal helped along the visual and vice-versa. In the 1550 edition, which became the standard geographical "legend" for a
number of years, Münster excelled in verbal description even though, technically speaking, he was more interested in the
visual. What interests us more is how Münster, via the English "translation" by Richard Eden (actually in a "version" of
Vespucci letters), becomes a public spokesperson. Münster/Eden places Vespucci within the Columbus mythology,
describing him as "being sent with Christopher Columbus, in the year of Christ, 1492, at the command of King Ferdinand of
Castille, to seek unknown lands . . . " (Münster, n.p.). This is his supreme validation as "discoverer."
True, the visual is absent, but the basic message of encountering a strange, uncouth Other is very present. The depiction of this
outsider from beyond the circumference of the world also occurs over and over again in Theodore de Bry (1528-95) and his
visual representations. His Historia Americae ran to fourteen vols. and began publication in 1590. With his utilization of
engravings on copper-plate, de Bry was able to illustrate a whole series of peoples and landscapes (which he had never seen),
and which cut across European languages and hegemony, New World boundaries or even the personal proprietorial egotism
of the "discoverers." As a result, the illustrations continued to help unify the European view of the new as different, yet
possessing a samelessness that could be understood. Richard Hakluyt, for one, was quick to utilize on de Bry, realizing that
"he himself was technically incapable of producing illustrated books" (De Bry 10).
De Bry's world confirms the verbal accounts in visual terms, and in this way excludes four of Barthes' codes of actions.
Certainly, the "proarietic" by which action can be organized into narrative patterns is absent, as is the "hermeneutic" by which a
problem may be formulated or solved: there is, after all, no "sequence" and no "problem"—only a statement about the natures
of the "other" world. "Semic" or connotative codes as well as "symbolic" codes abound, and indeed may now be clearly
extricated from the verbal text, stressed, and placed within the narrative for new visual approval. Above all though, the
"(re)viewed" is now uppermost, for the picture now presents the cultural totality of what Ernest-Jean Sarrasine says
everybody knows—at least what Honoré de Balzac says he says. Although Barthes contends that this may well be a
"monster," he admits that "the locus of an epoch's codes forms a kind of scientific vulgate" (Barthes, S/Z 97).
A few examples must suffice of how art was summoned to the aid of audience, how pictures began to serve the illiterate in
understanding their own world, not another, and not a new one. Some of the issues already mentioned were first re-inforced
by de Bry—for example "worshiping the stone as an idol" (De Bry 24), monstrous creatures like hermaphrodites (De Bry 27),
naked women (De Bry 67), cannibalism (De Bry 97), and so on.
De Bry's consciousness that these were indeed self-encounters, perhaps even Freudian in scope, may be realized in his own
remarks which appeared at the end of his volume on Virginia. There are five plates of Ancient Britons, and beneath their
representations, suggesting paganism, monstrosity, nakedness, cannibalism and so on, de Bry has written: "Some pictures of
the Picts which in former times did inhabit a part of Great Britain" (De Bry 89). He continues that he had obtained the
depictions from an "old English chronicle" and that it showed "that the inhabitants of Great Britain have been in times past as
savage as those of Virginia."10
I can think of no single figure of the period who more than de Bry best represents our rather amorphous term, "European."
Not only did his interests make him undertake a multiplicity of enterprises that crossed national and linguistic barriers, but in
the process his work truly became continental, in that it represented no narrow parochial concern, but Europe itself as it would
be defined four hundred years into the future. His work had become such a trans-national undertaking that by 1594 a
Milanese, Girolamo Benzoni, supplied the "words" to de Bry's America Part IV, published in 1594, as part of the
compendium began in 1590. Earlier on, America Part I (1590) was written by English scientist Thomas Heriot, and America
Part II (1591) was composed by a Frenchman who had visited Florida. Wide dispersal was made possible in Europe through
good translation methods: All parts were available in Latin and German; Part I was additionally published in English and
French, and Part IV was so popular that it was also translated into Dutch and French, and published in several editions.
The world of the "new" which De Bry introduced even to literate Europeans was one in which they saw proof of the monsters
they had invented and evidence of their own existence within a primitive background. The landscape was familiar; in one
illustration entitled "The arrival of the Englishman in Virginia," David Beers Quinn has pointed out the "conventionalized"
(Europeanized) "vegetation, figures and ships," adding that both "six or seven varieties of trees" and a conventional
representation of an Indian village were present (Quinn, Vol 1, 413). Side by side then with the "monster" is the "master," and
the juxtaposing by de Bry stresses just why Columbus and Vespucci are utilizing a common backcloth to stress the contrast.
With printing and pictures, association between word and object had seemingly become discrete. Hence, both Columbus' and
Vespucci's first letters were best-sellers, very much like De Bry's Historia Americae. They all gave assurances, especially
regarding the immutability of religious belief, given an era that was certainly a period of anomy. All the old values had been
seemingly questioned, but there needed to exist a degree of assurance beyond what Gerald Prince has termed the
"disnarrated." These are devices whereby narrator and narrative evoke imaginary places in order to express discrepancies in
life, when asleep or awake, and when beliefs or hopes no longer seem justified. If, pursuant to Reformation and Counter
Reformation, "discovery" had the effect of "disnarrating" the steady flow of life itself, its age-old certainties, then the new travel
accounts of Columbus, Vespucci and de Bry could perhaps restore some elementary balance.
The narrators/illustrators could best achieve this result of the new "viewed" as "re-viewed" by ensuring that the texts possessed
little continuity at a time of the seeming cessation of belief, and no closure during a period that lacked finality or certainty.
Instead the text would derive its form from the urgency of the experience, and the new equation of the verbal with the visual
that could more adequately describe, if not the "viewed," then at least the "reviewed" world. In the process, certainly there is
distortion. Self and other are (re)constructed anew, and their New World creation, albeit through old words, has itself
invented its own stereotype—Barthes' "mythologies,"11 from which perhaps we can never free ourselves.
Mythological interpretation becomes, at least for European readers, the complete components of the equation whereby the
"New World" may be viewed. Yet not all exploration had the "visual," and in a way, this over-emphasized the "verbal," since
this could not totally portray the myth in the mind of explorer and audience.
Juan Ponce de León represents a fascinating case. The revitalization of a European myth had made him explore Florida.
Prester John, the legendary Ethiopian emperor, whose face gazed stern-faced from eastern Africa toward the West was the
repository of this belief. His 1165 fictitious letter had described a fountain stating that
whoever drinks of its water three times on an empty stomach will have no sickness for thirty years. . . . A person who can bathe in this fountain, be he of a hundred or a thousand years, will regain the age of thirty-two. (Slessarev 72)
These were, of course, the mythologies of the East as invented by Europe, but they were replanted in the New World.
Thirteenth century travelers, like Giovanni di Plano Carpini, William of Rubruck, and Odoric of Pordenone had identified their
presence in the East, while still not providing substantial proof. In order to ameliorate the ravages of plague within immediate
memory, the quest for eternal youth continued. As late as his Second Voyage, Columbus recalls Prester John as did his earlier
mentor Marco Polo and, of course, Sir John Mandeville.
Ponce de León initiates the process of the utopianization of the American continent—one that would witness the arrival of the
"Mayflower," William Penn's Quakers, Shakers, Hutterites, the Transcendental experiments at Brook Farm, Robert Owen's
New Harmony, and even down through D. H. Lawrence's "Rananim" in New Mexico. Every one of these sought to establish
a break from the old world of Europe and an establishment of a newer and freer order in America. They all failed, because the
perfection they sought, like Ponce's, was located in the heart not the heartland, and because America was continuing to
respond to European mythologizing, partly started by Vespucci himself.
Seeking "utopianism" of whatever variety essentially strips away the physical reality of place. For Ponce de León the quest
was really for an America of the mind, since he had already understood its elusive nature in his earlier sojourn with Columbus.
He understood how the naming of the thing sought often conferred a "reality" which it did not have—so his name is associated
with "Puerto Rico." For Ponce, it seems that the true wealth was within; he was 53 years old when he "discovered" Florida at
Easter (Pascua Florida), a time of death and resurrection, and this is the underpinning of this middle-aged man's faith in the
possibility of restoration.
Antonio Herrera writes that "Ponce went ashore and took possession." At least in Ponce's case he did not merely indicate that
the land was the property of his prince and his government. "Possession" now meant that Ponce could at least take hold and
point with some assurance to his lifework, crystallized in spiritual fulfillment, and once he found a spring which had been
utilized by Native Americans, he felt that success had been achieved, even if somewhat arbitrarily (Fraser 9).
With Ponce de León, Vespucci's "America" therefore assumes a non-worldly, almost spiritual quality. Until Ponce's time,
"America" had to be filled in, its contours flushed out with the imaginative pointers of the rest of the World. Until then
"America" had not existed; the United States (which has practically monopolized the name) was, as Walsemüller noted,
"unknown." In making it "known," these earliest travelers initiated a new process.
First, during the eight years (1528-1536) he spends in North America, Alvar Núñez Cabeza de Vaca rewrites the travel
narrative. True, the equation persists in that the "viewed" is still partly visual, partly verbal and partly visionary, but the
"viewed" has to be perceived from a different "viewpoint." The standard travel narrative is turned upside down. Gone are the
Spanish Christians who conquer and convert native pagans. As treasurer for an ill-fated expedition that was shipwrecked,
Cabeza and his party were forced to assume a totally different role. Now the "Indians" are Spaniards, as the ethnography is
capsized. As he wandered through latter-day Florida, Texas and Louisiana, he alone (of all the conquistadors) must have
clearly known the meaning of what it was to be "conquered." He learns to gesture and sign, to endure the delicacy of horse
flesh and to experience the loss of power. Above all, cut off from his ship, he experiences the aloneness of a man adrift in a
world of uncertainty.
What does keep him and his party alive is that they are able to substitute Ponce's "Fountain of Youth" for a new mythology, a
new faith, in the Seven Cities of Cibola. This remains, however, a mere spiritual hope; all that is real is the tortured nature of
their experiences as they, at times, embrace the Indians and receive their blessings and at other times endure captivity among
the inhabitants of Galveston and the Queuenes. In the process of exploration (true enough while remaining almost firm in their
adherence to God and Spain), the humbling experiences aid them in the process of role reversal and feeling like the other.
Interestingly enough, one of their party is Estebanico, one of the earliest Afro New World explorers. They begin to see
through his eyes—another humbling experience, since as a Moroccan he would have been one of the rulers of Spain, most of
whom were expelled in 1492. They learn a little of what today we would term the multicultural nature of the New World.
Cabeza's world is no longer the neat one of One and Other, West and Indian, Christian and pagan, White and Brown;
instead, because of its many-hued variety, it heralds, indeed anticipates, the creation of modern Latin America.
Within these new experiences of this New World, Cabeza can empathize as the Indians become more humane, more
forgiving, in spite of their own fear of Cabeza's fellow Christians. At one stage, Cabeza movingly writes:
They brought us blankets that they had hidden for fear of the Christians and gave them to us, and even told us how on many occasions the Christians had entered the land and destroyed and burned the villages and carried off half the men and all the women and children, and that those who had managed to escape from their hands were wandering and in flight. We saw that they were so frightened, not daring to stay in any place, and that they neither wanted nor were able to sow crops or cultivate the land but rather were determined to let themselves die, and they thought this was better than waiting to be treated with such cruelty as they had endured until now; and they showed great pleasure in us, though we feared that once we reached the Indians who had a frontier with the Christians, and were making war on them, these others would treat us ill and make us pay for what the Christians had done to them. (Cabeza 107-108)
Here he is certainly no apologist for Empire, a still dormant one, but nevertheless on the rise, with few questions asked about the roles of victors and victims.
I would not wish to suggest that Cabeza is above the pretensions of his age. He is always conscious that he is "Christian," and that there is a difference between his party and the people they encounter. But the gulf is not as wide as that maintained by Columbus and Vespucci, and realized in the work of de Bry. Cabeza's world is one in which an ordered universe, regulated by hierarchy and Spanish control, has broken down. Perhaps this, in more than one way, explains the ease with which Estabanico moves both with Spanish and Indians, with "conqueror" and "conquered." Perhaps, one reading is that as a so-called "slave," he is best equipped (especially given Moorish history), to understand the relationship of Spanish toward Indians. So he himself, almost until the end of the narrative, sees fit enough to act as leader, as guide (in a strange, place unknown to him) with both Europeans and Indians. (Cabeza 111)
Columbus had found an "otro mundo," Vespucci a "nuevo mundo," but for Ponce and Cabeza the spoils seemed less
practical, less worldly and yet more global. The symbol of the Fountain of Youth and the Seven Cities of Cibola would remain
as the El Dorado we all seek as we strive to regain springtime and to live again in a young lifetime where the entrance to
Paradise is not denied, as it had been to Columbus.
For these quests into the places of the heart, men would be disgraced, suffer infamy and die. The fever for fame, for their
fifteen minutes of glory, had driven Columbus and Vespucci, Cortés and Francisco Pizzaro to spend their lives in ceaseless
hassles over alleged wrongs. Estabanico remained in the New World and was finally killed during another expedition while
seeking the elusive Seven Cities of Cibola. Ponce de León kept up his ceaseless search until 1521, when he was also killed by
a Native American attack in Florida. Yet people must pursue the things they dream and if in so doing they die, then their
deaths at least have meaning, for they followed the beliefs of their hearts to the furthest shores, away from "Home" and the
familiar to a land beyond the real, where myths perhaps are realized.
As the dream became less concrete and more idealistic, later conquistadors would pursue its essence. Hernando de Soto,
having become disgusted with Spanish in-fighting and the later murder of Atahualpa by Francisco Pizzaro, returned to Spain.
Francisco Vásquez de Coronado would later be the subject of much official disapproval. But within them, they kept alive the
possibility of the Seven Cities of Cibola, at times called Quivira, no mere quest for gold (although it was that also), but a
search for spiritual fulfillment. But when they encountered the Zuñi and the so-called "Pueblo Indians," they could not claim to
have found the elusive dream.
Perhaps this is what contemporary and indigenous writer Garcilaso de la Vega meant. He stated that had the Spanish
remained in Florida, they would have found not just gold and silver: "For not everywhere are there gold and silver, yet people
do live in all places" (Garcilaso 635). Of course Garcilaso is an apologist for Spanish empire, but often beneath his overblown
patriotism he hints at the possibility not merely of Spanish hegemony, but of a perfect world—"America"—where the ailments
of Europe had been left behind. In such a province, all things become possible: the African, European and Indian may now
co-exist in a place which is both "otro" and "nuevo" and where, because the ancient "mythologies" of caste and class no longer
apply, new dreams are dreamt within the secure walls of the Seven Cities of Cibola where humans live forever, always young
in Paradise.
Notes
1I shall be arguing, with Ferdinand de Saussure, that the association between "signifier" and "signified" is fixed by the primary
language-user. This becomes of great significance when linguistic signs are used to denote oral sounds. But, in the instance of
"codices" we note also how these also operate as "signs" fulfilling, to greater or lesser extent, their roles as icon, index, symbol
and signal. See Ferdinand de Saussure, Course in General Linguistics, eds. Charles Bally and Albert Sechehaye. Trans. Roy
Harris. La Salle, Ill: Open Court, 1986.
2The terms serve as convenient monolithic handles to identify the "other," thus making recognition and generalization easy but,
in the process, depriving the "identified" from any kind of "distinction," one from the other. The only "distinction" established is
between the "Name-Giver" and the "name-receiver."
3My metaphor lays claim, of course, to no originality. I have borrowed the idea of the coin, and its "usure" from Derrida.
4It is, therefore, no accident that long before the fictions of Defoe, the male European as god became standard fare in travel
narratives. In the New World, Columbus can claim first place when he described the attitude of the Taínos towards the "men
from heaven," but he, in fact, was merely following Marco Polo. One can assert that the idea of the god-like European male
was always within the European racial subconscious since the image emerges time and time again, even as early as Pliny and
Alexander the Great. See O.R. Dathorne, Imagining the World (Westport, CT: Bergin & Garvey, 1994) 1-127.
5Then contemporary logic shows how at the highest levels the issue of Native American humanity was brought into question.
See, in particular, the 1550 debate between Juan Ginés de Sepulveda and Bartolomé de las Casas in Lewis Hanke, All
Mankind is One (De Kalb: Northern Illinois UP, 1974).
6One way in which there is an obvious response to what seems like cultural passivity occurs most vigorously in language—in
"english" to be precise. As the study shows, out of the thrown away remnants of "empire," a new post-colonial language is
invented, vastly different from the "English" of the colonial overlord. See Bill Ashcraft, Gareth Griffiths and Helen Tiffin, The
Empire Writes Back: Theory and Practice in Post-Colonial Literatures (London: Routledge, 1989). But it should be stressed
that the dichotomy between english/English, does not hold good for the self-same post-colonial situations arising from French
and Portuguese languages. Few would contend that Leopold Sédar Senghor's French, or Oscar Ribas' Portuguese exist
outside a non-metropolitan, non-European world. Indeed, it is precisely out of the recognition of the artist as "copycat" that he
became known to metropolitan readers. Perhaps, at a certain level too, a similar case may be made for English (but less so for
Spanish) writers. As the writers of The Empire Writes Back themselves admit:
The relation between the people and the land is new, as is that between the imported language and the land. But the language itself already carries many associations with European experience and so can never be 'innocent' in practice. Concomitantly, there is a perception that this new experience, if couched in the terms of the old, is somehow ‘falsified'—rendered unauthentic— at the same time as its value, judged within Old World terms, is considered inferior.
(Ashcroft, et al. 135)
7There is no one satisfactory work that explores the continued pre-occupation with the concept of Paradise. But interested
readers might do well to follow up on at least one aspect of freedom as noted in sexual license. Both Dampier's "Painted
Prince Jeoly" and Cook's Omai, were young men "befriended" by their English "friends." Both were taken to England, where
Prince Jeoly died. Omai, it is said by Cook's biographer, wept bitterly when Cook attempted to return him to his people. See
one study, that takes on Cook as god (like Columbus, Vespucci, Cortés, etc.) and the ultimate feminization of the Pacific
male, Gananath Obeyesekere, The Apotheosis of Captain Cook (Princeton: Princeton UP, 1992) 129. Also see B.R. Burg,
Sodomy and the Pirate Tradition (New York: New York UP, 1984) 123.
8See Mary B. Campbell, The Witness and the Other World: Exotic European Travel Writing, 400-1600 (Ithaca, NY: Cornell
UP, 1988). Campbell establishes a serious understanding for the validity of "Home" in travel writing of the Middle Ages,
showing that how European travelers feared and what they feared, were often anticipated in conceptions of "Home."
9See John Block Friedman, The Monstrous Races in Medieval Art and Thought (Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP, 1988).
Friedman painstakingly shows how Plinian and Alexandrian writing influenced what European travelers saw and experienced.
Unfortunately, he only deals with New World travel in an addendum.
10Perhaps de Bry is hardly as generous as he seems. He was born in Liège, and often saw himself as a self-made man and an
outsider by temperament and religion—he was Protestant. Above all, he knew he was not English (De Bry 8).
11As far as Barthes is concerned, we should develop a mode of reading that goes beyond the language that the text imposes
on us. If we can "unlearn" what is "natural" and "conventional" we can reach for the mythic. This may very often be at odds
with former surface renderings, and would emerge despite the wishes of the "dead" author.
12I can't recall any one book that deals with this in any depth, since I suppose one could argue that the very idea of the perfect
community begins with Plato's Timaeus and Critias, and is, in part, instituted in his Republic. Without much argument, one
could also argue that the "West," accompanied by that most Eurocentric of concepts, "Manifest Destiny" is also part of the
mythical make-up of the American continent. For some initial background on Brook Farm, see Jonathon Beecher and Richard
Bienvenu, The Utopian Vision of Charles Fourier (Columbia, MS: U of Missouri P, 1983). Regarding Brook Farm, see any
of the various editions of Louisa Alcott's Transcendental Wild Oats or Nathaniel Hawthorne's The Blithedale Romance.
Concerning Robert Owen, consult Richard William Leopold, Robert Dale Owen: a Biography (New York: Octagon Books,
1969), especially 29-30; 61-62; 140-41; 252-54; 264-67. Regarding the Oneida community see Spencer Klaw, Without
Sin: The Life and Death of the Oneida Community (New York: Penguin, 1993).
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