James Axtell, "Columbian Encounters: 1992-95," The William and Mary Quarterly, 3rd Series, Vol. LII, No. 4, October 1995.

(Part One)

As a public spectacle, the Columbian Quincentenary proved to be less heinous than even its fiercest critics could have predicted. Protestors had few celebrations to protest, and the media fell all over themselves issuing political corrections. An occasional can of red paint was thrown at Columbus statues and the touring ships' replicas, but an Indian co-marshal of the Rose Parade, peaceful vigils, and saturation newspaper and television interviews around October 12 were more typical of native participation. The city of Berkeley, California, predictable renamed Columbus Day "Indigenous Peoples Day," much as the admiral had claimed Guanahani as "San Salvador." and the United Nations postponed until 1993 its "Year of Indigenous Peoples" in order to devote full attention to the folks Columbus "discovered."

The only atrocity committed was the king's ransom the Dominican Republic--Haiti's relatively prosperous neighbor--paid to build a massive lighthouse to shoot a cruciform beam into the heavens. Other financial ventures were only slightly less ridiculous. One of the replica ships and several of its crew were stuck in New York City most of the winter of 1992 for lack of funds to return to Spain. Hollywood sank--the operative word --$95 million into two Columbus movies, whose audiences stayed away in droves. The head of a 311-foot statues of Columbus-- dubbed "Chris Kong"--sits in drydock in Fort Lauderdale and the rest of the body in Moscow and St. Petersburg because no American city--not even one of the fifty named for the explorer--would receive the Quincentenary gift from the republics of the former Soviet Union. The modest $2 million budget of the official United States Jubilee Commission produced little more than a comic book, Adventures on Santa Maria; the commissionţs unpaid chairman, a Republican fundraiser appointed by President Reagan, was fired and investigated by Congress for fiscal and ethical improprieties involving the leasing of souvenir concessions to close friends. Considering the extreme paucity of sales of Quincentenary kitsch, the friendship may not have survived the indictments.

Ironically and fortunately, the Quincentenaryţs public pratfalls ensured that educational and scholarly lessons received attention. Throughout late 1991 and 1992, newspapers, national periodicals, and even airline magazines devoted space to substantive issues raided by the Encounter. Newsweek published a special fall-winter 1991 issue on the themes of the Smithsonian's "Seeds of Change" exhibit. Large audiences tuned in--at least initially--to the seven-hour PBS-TV series on "Columbus and the Age of Discovery," narrated by the engaging Mauricio Obregón. Public libraries all over the country mounted book displays or hosted traveling exhibits on Columbian themes, aided in good measure by annotated bibliographies and review essays in library and educational periodicals.(1) Hundreds of colleges and universities sponsored conferences, lectures, and new courses, occasionally on the admiral but mostly on his legacy. And the National Endowment for the Humanities continued its generous support for high school and college teachers interested in translating the new scholarship into their classrooms.

The number of books published on Quincentenary themes was enormous. Indeed, one can safely predict that the most durable legacy of the Quincentenary will not be the mediated events of 1992, no matter how muted or serious, but the tremen- dous flow of scholarship on the wide range of topics encompassed by the now-familiar phrase Columbian Encounters, only some of which was prompted by the historical anniversary. Since my previous review essay in this journal went to press in December 1991, more than 160 English-language books have appeared.(2) The present essay attempts to sketch briefly the contributions this substantial literature has made to our historical understanding of the five hundred and some years since 1492.

The Quincentenary scholarship since 1991 can be sorted into eleven categories: Columbus himself; the character of fifteenth-century Spain from which Columbus and his largely Castilian successors left for new and old worlds; the exploration and gradual definition of the world after Columbus; Spanish conquests and consolidation of empire in the Americas; Christian missions in the Americas; European colonization of the Americas and encounters with native peoples; disease, ecology, and native demography; the imperial implications of writing and the evolution of colonial discourse; the Quincentenary debate about Columbus and the subsequent half-millennium; museum exhibitions and catalogues; and eclectic conference and symposia publications (3). If this anniversary has taught us anything, it has demonstrated that, for sound intellectual, not merely political, reasons, we should no longer restrict our attention to the Admiral of the Ocean Sea--whatever we think of him--but should try to understand the cultural and intellectual world from which he came and in which he continued to operate. We should attend particularly to the short- and long-range consequences of the unification of the globe and of the human, biological, and cultural encounters he inaugurated. This is the tack I take in summing up the scholarly legacy of the Quincentenary.

The major biographies of Columbus by Paolo Emilio Taviani, Felipe Fern ndez-Armesto, William D. Phillips, Jr., and Carla Rahn Phillips, and John Noble Wilford were all published in anticipation of 1992, and subsequent scholarship has tried to reconstruct the admiral's mental world or added details and tidied up facts.(4) Omnigraphics has published an indispensable English calendar and summary of 179 documents from the Genoese notarial archives. These prove beyond a doubt that Columbus was born in 1451 to the Christian family of a Genoese wool weaver and merchant, tavern keeper, and political appointee, that the future admiral made a trip to Madeiras in 1478 to buy sugar for a firm of Genoese merchants in Lisbon, and that his devotion to Genoa was lifelong.(5) Helen Nader provides a short guide to Columbus's Book of Royal Privileges, a compilation of the rights, charters, and concessions the Spanish crown granted him since the famous Capitulations of Santa Fe in April, 1492. Two of the four copies he had made in 1502 were sent for safekeeping to Genoa. The third was entrusted to his son Diego in Seville. In 1504-1505 Diego pled his father's cause at the court of King Ferdinand, first making a copy of key documents from the Book of Royal Privileges--at his father's suggestion--to bolster his arguments. This copy is reproduced in facsimile, transcribed, translated, and introduced by Nader for the John Carter Brown Library, where the manuscript has lived since 1890.(6) It shows Columbus doggedly fighting to be reinstated as admiral, viceroy, and governor of the Americas after his humiliating arrest and removal from office in 1500.

Some of the most useful Quincentenary scholarship cuts down to size extravagant and undocumented claims for Columbus. Rebecca Catz, Christopher Columbus and the Portuguese, 1476-1498, a repackaging of her careful research for a now-canceled volume of the UCLA Repertorium Columbianum, admits not only that "Columbus left not a trace of himself during the years he lived in Portugal" but that "we de not know for certain how or where [he] landed in Portugal" (perhaps at Lagos by washing ashore on an oar after a sea fight). "There is no documentary evidence to support the claim that Columbus ever lived in Madeira" (although he certainly did business there and his brother-in-law was governor). Catz also demolishes the myths of Columbus's Portuguese ancestry and of his work as a secret agent for King Joao II. In an appendix she translates a detailed account of Columbus's audience with Joao in March 1493 on his way home from his American discoveries. After Columbus "accus[ed] and upbraid[ed] the King for not having accepted his proposal" to sail for Portugal, Joao goodnaturedly presented Columbus's indian captives with suits of scarlet grain and silenced the courtiers who suggested "that they do away with him." But the more Columbus talked, the more the king "saw what a garrulous person he was, all puffed up with his own importance, boasting about his abilities, and going on about this Cypango island [Japan] of his with greater fantasy and imagination than substance to what he was saying." (7)

Discoveries of new Columbus documents in Europe have also enlarged our understanding of his plans and achievements and his rhetorical mediations of both. Perhaps the single most important find is a mid-sixteenth-century copy of Columbus's initial postvoyage report to Ferdinand and Isabella, dated March 4, 1493, and written aboard ship in Lisbon. Until the publica- tion of this letter by Antonio Rumeu de Armas in 1989, the world had its news of the discovery from two widely published, nearly identical letters, both dated February 15, 1493, addressed to Luis de Sant ngel and Rafael S nchez, officials at the Aragonese court. (8)

In Reading Columbus, Margarita Zamora translates the new letter and argues convincingly that it actually predates the February letters, which were based upon it but were edited substantially--"sanitized"--by court officials with agendas. Indeed, the court text was "systematically censored on its way to becoming the public version of the announcements." The newly discovered letter contains no mention of the grounding of the Santa María on Christmas Day; it says cagily that "the nao that I bought I had left in Your Highnesses' village of La Navidad, with the men who were using it for fortification." The second caravel, Columbus griped, was also missing because "a man from Palos whom I had put in charge of her (Captain Martín Pinzón) sailed off to collect gold on some island touted by the Indians. In General, Columbus admitted, "the vessels I brought with me were too large and heavy" for island exploration; he preferred "small caravels" but was persuaded by unreasonable and timorous crews to engage larger ships. These details were all excised from the court version, as was Columbus's request for a cardinal's hat for his underage son Diego and the royal bestowal of honor upon himself "according to [the quality of] my service," as per contract. The greatest omission was Columbus's conclusion that, with divine grace, "in seven years from today I will be able to pay Your Highnesses for five thousand cavalry and fifty thousand foot soldiers for the war and conquest of Jerusalem, for which purpose this enterprise was undertaken." The crusade theme is prominent in Columbus's writings from the third voyage on; this letter makes clear that he had discussed the plan with his sponsors well before the first voyage. (9)

The New York Public Library has tried to take advantage of the Quincentenary market by reproducing in facsimile and translation its unique copy of the first (Barcelona) edition of the court letter of February 15. There is actually no need for such a sumptuous, oversized, vanity publication of so-called Columbus Papers because editions and better translations of the one printed document are available. Obregón's lengthy summary of Columbus's first voyage in the NYPL volume adds nothing new, and the color reproduction of the Catalan Atlas (1375), a Ptolemaic mappamundi (c. 1490), and Juan de la Cosa's world map (c. 1500) do not justify the hundred-dollar price tag.(10)

Valerie I. Flint's The Imaginative Landscape of Christopher Columbus, on the other hand, is worth its weight in New World gold because it carefully reconstructs, in medieval terms, "the Old World which [Columbus] carried with him in his head." From a penetrating examination of medieval mappemondes, Columbus's reading of classical and medieval sources as revealed in his marginal notes, and the sea stories he knew or must have known (including those of Sinbad and St. Brendan), Flint shows that a surprising number of Columbus's descriptions of what he found in the New World were "influenced by, and reflect, particular expectations." "Scenes reenacted, as it were, behind his eyes, were reenacted before them, and were then reported to the admiral's sovereigns with all the imaginative and emotional intensity which drives the visionary." Flint argues persuasively that "certain of the most apparently fantastic of Columbus's ideas"--the location of the Terrestrial Paradise at the end of the east, for example, and a vast unknown land lying south of it -- "were precisely the ones which allowed him to make the most important of hi real discoveries," namely, the South American continent.(11) This learned and readable book will remain indispensable to Columbus studies for a long time; its consistent eschewal of anachronistic moralizing is exemplary.

Wider ranging but less valuable is Djelal Kadir's Columbus and the Ends of the Earth: Europe's Prophetic Rhetoric as Conquering Ideology.(12) Although Kadir claims to explore "the culture and context that engendered Columbus," he restricts himself to Columbus's sometime belief in his divinely appointed role as "Christ-bearer" and to evidence from Judeo-Christian typology and eschatology in gauging the prophet's role in history. As Flint's nuanced portrait shows, these limitations truncate Columbus. Kadir's major contribution is a comparative analysis of the political uses to which both Spanish Catholics and New England Puritans put a crusading ideology similarly derived from the late medieval rhetoric of prophecy that Columbus helped shape.

Another approach to Columbus's life and world is 1492: A Portrait in Music, an entrancing one-hour video produced by the University of Oklahoma for PBS-TV. It featured the "voice" of Ferdinand Columbus reading from his biography of his father as the camera explores in loving detail the art and architecture of their Spain. As the scenes move from Granada and Cordoba to Salamanca, Seville, and La Rabida, the Waverly Consort performs period music from Moorish, Jewish, and Christian traditions. Many of the songs come from scores in Ferdinand's extensive library, the remains of which are located in Seville Cathedral. One of the most evocative, "Ayo visto lo mappamundi," an Italian song popular at the Aragonese court of Naples around 1450, celebrates the wonders of nautical maps and their many islands.(13)

For small libraries that wish to catch up with the Columbus industry, the Library of Congress has reproduced on microfiche 505 titles from its collections, 235 of them in English. The mostly nineteenth- and twentieth-century novels, poems, biographies, and monographs in this collection enable students to research virtually every aspect of Columbus's life and legacy, including the various ways different countries have commemorated the centennials of his initial voyage.(14)

Just as we cannot understand the "discovery" of America without knowing Columbus, so we must know something of Columbus's Iberian world to make sense of the explorer and the Spanish who followed him to the Americas. A collection of six essays on The World of Columbus, edited by James R. McGovern, makes a beginning by treating briefly the pictorial art, science, navigation, and music of the age. The most useful essay is Richard L. Kagan's, which corrects several misconceptions about "The Spain of Ferdinand and Isabella."(15) John Lynch's expanded and substantially revised Spain, 1516-1598: From Nation State to World Empire (formerly volume one of Spain under the Hapsburgs) is a comprehensive treatment of the Spanish economy, politics, and society from Columbus's death to Philip II's. Lynch's explanations of the price revolution fueled by American silver and of Spanish military success in Mexico and Peru are particularly cogent.(16)

More directly pertinent to Columbus is Peggy Liss's astute and nonflatering portrait of Isabel the Queen, the intelligent, militarily pious, and vengeful ruler of Castile who gave Columbus his main chance. Liss firmly lays the origins of the Inquisition (1478) and the expulsion of the Jews (1492) at the feet of los Reyes, Isabel's no less than Fernando's. Isabel's quest for moral reform and political consolidation condemned the Muslims to defeat and the Jews to exile. Her order of expulsion, Liss argues, was "an extension of a war-nurtured ruthlessness" and "a recognition that the presence of Jews made Spain look old fashioned and heterodox" in the eyes of Christian Europe, just as her realm was assuming primacy. When Granada fell, the Jews' fate in Spain was sealed, and the great majority, who chose not to convert to Christianity, left the country, just as Columbus was preparing to leave for the Far East with Their Majesties' support.(17)

The subsequent history of the Sephardic diaspora is told in engaging detail by Paloma Díaz-Mas in Sephardim: The Jews from Spain. After describing the major beliefs and rituals of Sephardic Judaism, Díaz-Mas narrates the exiles' wanderings, settlements, and cultural manifestations from the fifteenth century to the present. Although Judeo-Spanish or Ladino is fast disappearing, it was before World War II a distinct and vital language with many regional dialects worldwide and oral and written literature that often retained a nostalgic affection for the Spain the Sephardim had left behind. While Díaz-Mas is interested primarily in literature and language, Jan S. Gerber's The Jews of Spain: A History of the Sephardic Experience is more roundedly historical and devotes five of nine chapters to Jewish life in Spain under the Moors and during the Reconquista. The remaining chapters chronicle the first and second diasporas to Islamic lands, Europe, and the New World and the gradual return of some 20,000 Jews to Spain after the Second World War.(18)

Spain and the Jews: The Sephardi Experience, 1492 and After, a collection of nine scholarly essays edited by Elie Kedourie, follows the same format. Henry Kamen's analy- sis of the expulsion is the most controversial. Kamen argues that the decision to expel the Jews came less from the Catholic Kings than from the Inquisition, which from its founding in 1478 was convinced of "the great harm suffered by [mostly New] Chris- tians from the contact,intercourse and communication which they have with the Jews, who always attempt. . . to seduce [them] from our Holy Catholic Faith." While Jewish communities were increas- ingly segregated from Christian, the Inquisition bore down on baptized Christians, not their Jewish tempters. Kamen emphasizes that the March 1492 decree of expulsion had "conversion, not expulsion, as its motive," and possible half of Castile's and Aragon's 80,000 Jews did convert. Spain suffered economic consequences, not from the expulsion of the Jews (a small and disadvantaged minority), but from the persecution and emigration of Christian conversos between 1480 and 1492. The crown did not profit substantially from the Jewish expulsion, and "those who returned were given back their property in its entire- ty."(19)

In the same volume, Angus MacKay describes the check- ered career of medieval Spain's 1000,000 Jews (less than 2 percent of the population). In the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, Christians lived cheek-by-jowl with Muslims and Jews in a spirit of convivencia (coexistence). But MacKay cautions that "at all times the fundamental religious issues which divided Christians and Jews were present" and that "Christians combined hostility towards the Jews with a certain degree of grudging tolerance." Toward the end of the thirteenth century and during the fourteenth, convivencia broke down, leading to the bloody pogrom of 1391 and violent waves of anti-Semitism.(20) Convivencia: Jews, Muslims, and Christians in Medieval Spain, the illustrated cata- logue of a major exhibition at the Jewish Museum in New York, synthesizes the scholarship on the cultural fusions and tensions that characterized the Iberian world from which Columbus sailed. Seven experts analyze the intermingling of cultures on the peninsula, even in difficult political circumstances, as mani- fested in poetry, literature, science, architecture, and material culture. All chart the ways in which "interactions were sharply structured both by ethnic/religious ascription as well as by social class."(21)

Like any fifteenth-century Spaniard, Columbus was also familiar with the Moorish culture of Iberia. Moorish architecture, language, and dress were ubiquitous in Andalusia, and he was certain that the colorful cotton scarves worn by the natives on the coast of South America were almaizares, Moorish scarves.(22) The Quincentenary has provided easy access to this rich heritage. al- Andalus: The Art of Islamic Spain, edited by Jerrilyn D. Dodds, is the sumptuous catalogue of a blockbuster exhibition in the Alhambra and at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York in 1992. At 464 pages with 373 illustrations (324 in color), al-Andalus contains sixteen synthetic essays on the history and arts of Moorish Spain from 711 to 1492. Some 136 items--from delicate filigreed marble and ivory carvings to stunning textiles and illuminated manuscripts of the Qur'am--are described in detail. Intricate brass astrolabes from the taifa period in the eleventh century remind us how crucial Arabic technology and astronomy were to the success of European explorers in search of old and new worlds. Bells from Christian churches remade into mosque lamps after Moorish victories suggest that convivencia took many forms during the eight centuries before the Alhambra was surrendered to Ferdinand and Isabella, an event that Columbus witnessed with considerable self-interest.(23)

Richard Fletcher's short, learned, almost conversational treatment of Moorish Spain sorts out the political successions, religious disputes, and cultural legacies of the waves of Islamic invaders from North Africa who put an indelible stamp on Spanish culture. A hardheaded chapter on convivencia argues that Christians and Muslims were fundamentally hostile, discriminated against and enslaved each other, and kept apart as much as possible. But the demographic needs of the fourteenth century, particularly after the Black Death, dictated that Christian conquerors retain Mudejar colonists on the land, so the cultural mixing and oscillations of tolerance and persecution continued.(24)

In three elegant and erudite lectures entitled Cultures in Conflict, Bernard Lewis charts the linked fates of Christians, Muslims, and Jews in the Age of Discovery. Lewis newly contextualizes and closely related the stories of the Reconquista (the West's crusading answer to the jihad), the expulsion of the Spanish Jew, and the discovery of America, all in 1492, through constant reference to the Muslim world and its universalizing ambitions. He reminds us that, while Islam was being pushed back in Iberia, it was making inroads in the eastern Mediterranean. Partly for this reason, the West sought to circumvent Islam's hold on the routes of the Far East by sailing and colonizing westward. Most of the Jews who were expelled from Spain in 1492 and from Portugal in 1496 found refuge in Ottoman Turkey, where "apostasy" from Christianity was a matter of state indifference. Although Christian Europe enjoyed several advantages, "it was above all the discovery of America...that ensured the triumph of Europe over its rivals, especially Islam, and the consequent universal acceptance of European notions and categories" of geography and ethnography.(25)

Two novel approaches to Columbus's world were also pursued in 1992. Lorenzo Camusso's Travel Guide to Europe 1492 describes and illustrated with contemporary maps and art Ten Itineraries in the Old World from such cities as Moscow, Lubeck, Trondheim to Rome, Seville and Istanbul. This history of travel, business and religion makes an apt introduction to the age of maritime exploration dominated by Columbus's Voyages. Equally intriguing is The Guinness Book of Records 1492: The World Five Hundred Years Ago, edited by Deborah Manley and compiled by an international bank of scholars. Augmented by abundant color illustrations, the book presents historical first and noteworthy facts on countless topics, Old World and New. Short entries retail information on such subjects as "Most misnamed bird" (uexolotl or turkey), "First umbrella reported in North America" (belonging to a southeaster cacique who shaded Hernando de Soto with it), and "First European syphilitic patient" (Martin Alonzo Pinzón, the captain of the Pinta, who died from the disease in March 1493).(26)

Columbus's discovery of the American continent by sailing west to Asia accelerated a long process of global exploration, which The Times Atlas of World Exploration, edited by Fern ndez-Armesto, succinctly documents and handsomely illustrates with historical and modern maps and pictures. The folio-sized book covers some 3,000 Years of Exploring, Explorers, and Mapmaking, from c. 2,000 BC in the Graeco- Roman and Chinese worlds to recent satellite imaging from space. Legible reproductions and excellent maps drawn from the book--all in color--form the heart of forty-seven chapters. The text, written by twenty-two experts, and illustrations are enhanced by a long biographical glossary, a reasonably detailed index of place names, and a color-coded chronology of events in each of six major geographical regions. The chapter on Columbus wisely sidesteps the landing site controversy and focuses instead on his knowledge of the North Atlantic wind system to get him to the Caribbean and back. It also notes that "Columbus was as notable an explorer of coasts as of routes."(27)

William H. Goetzmann and Glyndwr Williams (one of the consulting editors of the Times Atlas) have produced a less ambitious atlas that should find regular use in history classrooms. The Atlas of North American Exploration: From the Norse Voyages to the Race to the Pole offers somewhat less legible modern maps, shorter texts, and fewer illustrations in a smaller format to describe eighty-five phases of the exploration of the continent. A bibliography and general index augment the text.(28)

Both atlases could be approached differently after reading Eviatur Zerubavel's Terra Cognita: The Mental Discovery of America. This short volume reminds us that America, like any geographical space, "is both a physical and a mental entity, and the full history of its "discovery" should therefore be the history of its physical as well as mental discovery." Through an effective, if not particularly novel or sophisticated, study of America's evolving (and sometimes "regressive") cartography, Zerubavel probes the psychological discoveries to argue that Columbus did not discover the continent "on a single day" and that not until 1778 were Europeans fully convinced by Vitus Bering's voyage that America was a fourth continent separate from the other three.(29)

It is all too easy, in the Quincentenary climate, to think of exploration and colonization as a Spanish monopoly. A.J.R. Russell-Wood provides a stimulating and palatable corrective in A World on the Move: The Portuguese in Africa, Asia, and America, 1415-1808, which not only places the voyages of Columbus in the context of a portuguese age of discoveries but charts the global flux and reflux of people, commodities, ideas, flora, and fauna the Portuguese voyages set in motion. Nine simple line maps and eighty-four well-chosen black-and-white illustrations orient the reader to this complex portrait on a large canvas, as does a twenty-page bibliography. The beautiful and learned catalogue of a New York Public Library exhibition on Portugal-Brazil: The Age of Atlantic Discoveries, mounted by Wilcomb Washburn in 1990, is an indispensable supplement to Russell-Wood's book. Essays on astronomical navigation, exploring the Atlantic, cultural contact, and the literature of discovery complement 161 catalogue entries and numerous, large, color illustrations magnificently reproduced by Franco Maria Ricci. This tour de force of scholarship and printing should make it very difficult for historians to forget the role of Portugal in the Columbian Encounter.(30)

The Iberian opening and early dominance of the age of discovery is explained by Roger C. Smith in Vanguard of Empire: Ships of Exploration in the Age of Columbus. From archival documents, contemporary shipbuilding and navigational treatises, and wrecks found by underwater archaeologists, Smith meticulously describes the building, rigging, outfitting, manning, provisioning, arming, navigation, and sailing of the small, speedy, and maneuverable caravels and the larger nao that established Spain's and Portugal's lead in global navigation. These two ship types developed from an international spectrum of influences: "Mediterranean carvel hull construction and the use of multiple sails, the Muslim fore-and-aft lateen rig, the Baltic roundship design for long-distance hauling of bulk cargoes, the North Sea sternpost rudder, and the Biscay tradition of seagoing small craft."(31) Columbus was the first to combine square and triangular sails--in a refitting in the Canaries--to take advantage of the northeasterly trade winds and to preserve maneuverability along with "west Indian" coasts, a pattern that became standard in the Atlantic voltas (ocean tracks).

That America was not named for a brilliant Genoese sailor but for a Florentine scholar, sometime pilot, and master of self- promotion is one of history's ironies. The translation and publication of Amerigo Vespucci's six Letters from a New World helps explain why North Columbia, South Columbia, and the United States of Columbia never made it onto the map. This handy edition, which is based on the critical edition in Italian by Luciano Formisano, establishes Vespucci's key role in publicizing the newness of Columbus's otro mundo (other World) and in arguing, on the basis of Vespucci's long voyage down the coast of Brazil, that the continent was not part of Asia, as Columbus continued to think.(32)

The effective Spanish discovery of the North American mainland was the unrewarded task of Juan Ponce de Leon, a veteran of Granada, conquistador, and former governor of a province in Hispaniola and of Puerto Rico. In 1512, the crown authorized him, at his own expense, to seek and conquer the "island of Bininy" somewhere north of Guanahaní. The following year, he failed to find the alleged wealth of Bininy but landed on the coast of Florida, which he named and claimed for Castile. Douglas T. Peck, an amateur historian and deepwater navigator, has reconstructed Ponce de Leon's route from James E. Kelley, Jr.'s expert translation of the ship's log (as digested by Antonio de Herrera in 1601, much as Bartolome de las Casas summarized and abridged Columbus's initial diario) and from Peck's retracing of the route in his own yacht. Contrary to myth, Ponce de Leon was not looking for the fountain of youth (one rival said, to cure his sexual impotence), and he touched land many leagues south of St. Augustine, which claims the discoverer as its own. (33)

In his 1985 book, Spanish Sea, Robert S. Weddle carefully described The Gulf of Mexico in North American Discovery, 1500-1685. He continues the story in The French Thorn: Rival Explorers in the Spanish Sea, 1682- 1762, which traces French challenges to Spanish dominance after La Salle reached the gulf by canoe from the Mississippi.(34) While their focus is on cartography and exploration, both books pay considerable attention to relations with the natives and to the organizational snafus and nautical failures of the numerous voyages along the Gulf Coast. The most famous narrative of Spanish disaster is Alvar NŁ¤ez Cabeza de Vaca's Relación or Naufragios (Castaways), a survivor's account of the ill-fated entrada of P nfilo de Narv ez on the western coast of Florida in 1527. Cabeza de Vaca and three companions, including the black slave Estevancio, made their way to the Texas coast, where Indians enslaved them. By 1536, they had rejoined company and walked to Spanish-controlled Mexico, serving as shamans and healers to grateful native groups en route. Enrique Pupo-Walker has edited a new translation of Castaways based on his critical edition of the 1555 Vallodolid edition. The introduction is skimpy and opaque, the modern paintings by Ettore De Grazia are historically worthless, and the annotations on Indian groups are dated and ill informed. (35) Fortunately, Rolena Adorno and Patrick Pautz will soon publish their definitive edition and translation of the first (1542) Zamora edition of the Relacion with the University of Nebraska Press.

The Quincentenary emphasis on the Spanish colonists and the Black Legend virtually ignored the sixteenth-century encounters of the French in South and North America. In the 1550s, France's short-lived colony in southern Brazil produced two major authors: Jean de Lery, a young Protestant pastor send to tend Nicolas Durand de Villegagnon's settlers, and Andre Thevet, a Franciscan friar on a sightseeing tour of France Antarctique. After a year among the Tupinambas, Lery wrote History of a Voyage to the Land of Brazil, otherwise called America, which Claude Leri-Strauss has called the "Breviary of the anthropologist." Thevet, on the other hand, spent only ten (often sickly) weeks in the French settlement near the bay of Rio de Janeiro but drew on his American experience, wide reading, and imagination to write several weighty tomes of universalist cosmography, just as the genre was fading before the advent of specialized atlases, collections of voyages, and encyclopedias. In Mapping the Renaissance World: the Geographical Imagination in the Age of Discovery, Frank Lestringant laboriously dissects Thevet's controversial methods of compilation--a nearly postmodern anticipation of bricolage in which an indiscriminate Creator-like intelligence juxtaposed "singularities" from a global cabinet of curiosities, ancient fables, and anticipated discoveries.(36)

In Portraits from the Age of Exploration, editor Roger Schlesinger and translator Edward Benson give us twelve Selections from Andre Thevet's Les vrais pourtraits et vies des hommes illustres. Thevet's book, published in 1584, contained 232 biographical sketches of famous people from antiquity to his own day, each illustrated with an engraved portrait. Drawn from his brief travels in Brazil and Canada and from rare oral and archival information to which ha had access as Royal Cosmographer to four Valois kings, Thevet's portraits of the six European explorers and six Indian leaders in this collection--the first of their kind in European literature-- contain unusual ethnographic details and express a Renaissance humanist's admiration for the personal qualities of conquerors and victims alike.(37)

In the chapter on Francisco Pizarro (which sounds uncannily like a modern attack on political correctness), Thevet chides contemporary proponents of the Black Legend for their double standard in not also castigating England's Martin Frobisher for lusting after mineral wealth, ignoring Christian proselytizing, and kidnapping and killing American natives. An ambitious international research project on Frobisher's three voyages on Canadian Arctic (1576-1587) has produced a collaborative volume on Archaeology of the Frobisher Voyages, edited by William W. Fitzhugh and Jacqueline S. Olin of the Smithsonian Institution. Parts of the book are highly technical, but several chapters are accessible narratives based on historical documents. Susan Rowley's essay on nineteenth-century Inuit accounts of the voyages describes several kodlunas (white men) who were shipwrecked on Kodlunarn Island, built a ship and sailed away, but were forced back by ice, and died from the cold while in the care of local Inuits. Further archaeological and archival research in attempting to verity this widespread oral tradition.(38)

Archaeologist Robert McGhee of the Canadian Museum of Civilization provides a lively summary of the latest scholarship on Frobisher and the other northern explorers in Canada Rediscovered. This haute popularisation is well illustrated with artifacts, maps, photographs, and modern drawings related to voyages and native encounters from those of Saint Brendan and the Vikings to Jacques Cartier's and the Basque whalers'. McGhee's coverage of the excavations of Basque whaling vessels in Red Bay, Labrador, and of Viking remains in L'Anse aux Meadows on the northern tip of Newfoundland will be particularly interesting to those who have not seen the pertinent issues of National Geographic. The major omission is a bibliography.(39)

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