TLS: Why Columbus Sailed South

THE TROPICS OF EMPIRE. Why Columbus sailed south to the Indies . By Nicolas Wey Gomez . 590pp. The MIT Press. Pounds 25.95 (US $39.95).
It is well known that Christopher Columbus sought to reach the East "by way of the West" in 1492. In his erudite, laudably lucid new book, Nicolas Wey Gomez reveals that Columbus also aimed to sail south to the tropics. The Tropics of Empire reconstructs the mental universe in which the navigator operated and shows how his enterprise was propelled by the geographical theories then in vogue.
The prevailing scientific and technical traditions held that place could explain and help to predict the constitution and behaviour of all things. To their natural location in the "world machine", human beings owed their physiologies, characters, manners and predilections. According to one long established view, the temperate climate of Mediterranean Europe was besieged by inhospitable Arctic and Equatorial zones. In a second view, the regions beyond the temperate zone were populated by nature's anomalies and accidents. There was a third, more positive, theory percolating as well. Its adherents maintained that a vast geographical land mass might exist in the tropics, one privileged above all other places on earth. It would be astonishingly productive, teeming with life, and an ideal venue for human flourishing. Only against this backdrop of competing conjectures about the effect of terrestrial latitude on both flora and fauna, Wey Gomez contends, can Columbus's intentions and the route he chose be understood accurately.
Columbus championed the third (and minority) view of the tropics. Its attraction may have originated in his 1482 visit to the Portuguese trading fortress of Sao Jorge da Mina, in modern Ghana. There he experienced a "torrid" zone that contrasted sharply with the unfavourable depictions found in ancient and medieval geographical texts. His navigational feat in the next decade would precipitate a radical revision of these long- entrenched, pervasive theories of what lay beyond Europe. As Wey Gomez indicates, Columbus's first voyage "challenged an established...paradigm that conceived of the inhabitable world as little more than a lonesome island besieged by the watery abyss and by the intolerable heat and cold of the arctic and the tropics". read more

Yet Columbus remained a transitional figure. Some of the contradictory features of his own observations during his transatlantic voyages are attributable to the residues of divergent, irreconciliable conceptions of the tropics which jostled for primacy in his mind. For example, he subscribed to the notion that the people of the Caribbean islands he encountered were "childish" or "monstrous". They could be justifiably converted into subjects and slaves.
Simultaneously, however, he marvelled at their inhabiting a place whose natural wealth and fertility far surpassed that of the temperate latitudes. Only slowly and imperfectly, as the shock and wonder caused by these initial encounters faded, would Europeans recalibrate their understanding of the wider world.
The Tropics of Empire deserves to become a landmark in the study of the inaugural stirrings of European overseas expansion, even though it is underedited and frequently repetitive. A more serious difficulty derives from the problem of fathoming Columbus's own attitudes. Wey Gomez's thesis relies heavily on three sources: Bartolome de las Casas's account of the lost original copy of Columbus's diary; the biography written by Columbus's son Ferdinand; and undated annotations, or "postils", in Columbus's hand, of major geographical works, including those of Pierre D'Ailly. Las Casas and Ferdinand Columbus each had a stake in the spreading of a particular interpretation of Columbus's motives for exploration, and his understanding of what he "discovered". The task of distinguishing Columbus's own ideas from those of his handlers may prove impossible.
The annotations on major geographical works, too, present an insurmountable challenge. It is not known when Columbus acquired, read and annotated the works upon which Wey Gomez's interpretation hinges. Were they read in the months preceding the first voyage? If so, did ideas gleaned from these books exercise a preponderant influence over practical decisions which culminated in an epoch-making event? Or were these texts perused well after his remarkable and history-altering feat, as Columbus strove both to vindicate his enterprise from a barrage of learned criticism and to protect it from a Spanish monarchy inclined to reconsider the extravagant, hereditary concessions it had granted in its new ultramarine dominions to a tenacious and persuasive seaman? These are fundamental questions, not methodological quibbles. Pertinent ideas may have been in the air at the time, and Columbus may have engaged with them. But their ultimate impact on the voyage that Columbus undertook in 1492 is controversial.
Although he proposes and defends an original, even brilliant thesis, Wey Gomez scarcely addresses other, perhaps more prosaic, explanations of Columbus's turn to the south. He vigorously rejects the argument that it represented a solution to a technical problem relating to navigation. Columbus the sailor receives little attention in The Tropics of Empire. Furthermore, the possible routes for his first voyage were limited by geopolitical factors, which receive only superficial attention. The terms of the 1479 Treaty of Alcacovas had swapped recognition of Spain's sovereignty in the Canaries for acknowledgement of Portuguese primacy over the meridional zone, including the west coast of Africa. So long as Columbus depended on the patronage of the Spanish crown, he could not venture directly into the tropics without jeopardizing the fragile peace agreement between the two Iberian powers.
The Tropics of Empire exaggerates the existence of a line of descent between Columbus's turn to the south and the colonial projects which subsequently transformed the globe, tantalizing as the insinuation of such an intellectual lineage might be. It is anachronistic, and misleading, to depict Columbus's enterprise either as part of, or a sinister prelude to, a broader design to conquer and rule over vast tracts of the earth. It is far more plausible, as David Abulafia suggests in The Discovery of Mankind: Atlantic encounters in the age of Columbus (reviewed in the TLS, July 4, 2008), that Columbus was predisposed to establish a trading fortress, modelled on Sao Jorge da Mina, through which huge quantities of gold from the interior of West Africa were brought to Lisbon. The quest for wealth in which Columbus and his crew participated was not guided purely by fantasies of self-enrichment. Instead, a new gold supply would replenish the exhausted treasury of the Spanish monarchs. It would finance wars against Muslim powers in the Mediterranean, a military struggle whose ultimate goal was the recovery of Jerusalem and the redemption of humankind. There were, then, a bewildering array of overlapping and intersecting mentalities, forms of knowledge, aspirations and political projects at Columbus's disposal when he embarked in 1492. With its abundant maps and other illustrations, Nicolas Wey Gomez's book sheds an intense light on the intellectual forces that shaped the European geographical imagination and made it possible, perhaps probable, that Columbus would sail south.