Todorov on Columbus
In his 1982  The Conquest of America, Tzvetan Todorov has given us a most interesting recent reading of Columbus and several others of the most important 16th century Spanish commentators on the New World. One point Todorov makes is that Columbus, unlike most of those Spaniards who followed him, was certainly not a modern European. This short excerpt is meant to give a couple instances illustrating how that's so.

    ...the Spaniards' perception of the Indians will be my sole subject....
    There are two justifications--which I discerned after the fact--for choosing this theme as a first step into the world of the discovery of the other. First of all, the discovery of America, or of the Americans, is certainly the most astonishing encounter of our history. We do not have the same sense of radical difference in the "discovery" of other continents and of other peoples: Europeans have never been altogether ignorant of the existence of Africa, India, or China; some memory of these places was always there already--from the beginning. The moon is farther away than America from Europe, true enough, but today we know that our encounter with it is no encounter at all, and that this discovery does not occasion surprises of the same kind: for a living being to be photographed on the moon, an astronaut must stand in front of the camera, and in his helmet we see only one reflection, that of another earthling. At the beginning of the sixteenth century, the Indians of America are certainly present, but nothing is known about them, even if, as we might expect, certain images and ideas concerning other remote populations were projected upon these newly discovered beings. The encounter will never again achieve such an intensity, if indeed that is the word to use: the sixteenth century perpetrated the greatest genocide in human history.
    But the discovery of America is essential for us today not only because it is an extreme, and exemplary, encounter. Alongside this paradigmatic value, it has another as well --the value of direct causality. The history of the globe is of course made up of conquests and defeats, of colonizations and discoveries of others; but, as I shall try to show, it is in fact the conquest of America that heralds and establishes our present identity; even if every date that permits us to separate any two periods is arbitrary, none is more suitable, in order to mark the beginning of the modern era, than the year 1492, the year Columbus crosses the Atlantic Ocean. We are all the direct descendants of Columbus, it is with him that our genealogy begins, insofar as the word beginning has a meaning. Since 1492 we are, as Las Casas has said, "in that time so new and like to no other". Since that date, the world has shrunk (even if the universe has become infinite), "the world is small," as Columbus himself will peremptorily declare; men have discovered the totality of which they are a part, whereas hitherto they formed a part without a whole....

    ...toward the end of this second expedition, we are shown a famous and grotesque scene in which Columbus definitively renounces verifying by experience whether or not Cuba is an island, and determines to apply the argument of authority with regard to his companions: all disembark on land, and each one swears an oath asserting that "he had no doubt that this was the mainland and not an island, and that before many leagues, in navigating along the said coast, would be found a country of civilized people with some knowledge of the world.... A fine of ten thousand maravedis [Spanish currency] is imposed on anyone who subsequently says the contrary of what he now said, and on each occasion at whatever time this occurred; a punishment also of having the tongue cut off, and for the ship's boys and such people, that in such cases they would be given a hundred lashes of the cat-o'-nine-tails, and their tongue be cut off" ("Oath sworn regarding Cuba," June 1494). A remarkable oath, whereby one swears that one will find civilized inhabitants!
    The interpretation of nature's signs as practiced by Columbus is determined by the result that must be arrived at. His very exploit, the discovery of America, proceeds from the same behavior: he does not discover it, he finds it where he "knew" it would be (where he thought the eastern coast of Asia was to be found). "He had always thought in his inmost heart," Las Casas reports, "whatever the reasons for this opinion [it was by reading Toscanelli and the prophecies of Esdras], that by crossing the ocean beyond the island of Hierro, after traversing a distance of seven-hundred and fifty leagues more or less, he would end by discovering the land". When seven hundred leagues are covered, he forbids navigating by night, for fear of missing the land, which he knows to be very near. This conviction is quite anterior to the voyage itself; Ferdinand and Isabella remind him of this in a letter that follows the discovery: "That which you had announced to us has come true as if you had seen it before having spoken of it to us," (letter of 16/8/1494). Columbus himself, after the fact, attributes his discovery [to] this a priori knowledge which he identifies with the divine will and prophecies (actually quite slanted by him in this direction): "I have already said that for the execution of the enterprise of the Indies, reason, mathematics, and the map of the world were of no utility to me. It was a matter rather of the fulfillment of what Isaiah had predicted" (preface to the Book of Prophecies, 1501). In the same way, if Columbus discovers (in the course of the third voyage) the American continent strictly speaking, it is because he is seeking in a quite concerted manner what we call South America, as is revealed by his annotations in Pierre d'Ailly's book: for reasons of symmetry, there must be four continents on the globe--two in the north, two in the south.... Europe and Africa ("Ethiopia") form the first north-south pair; Asia is the northern element of the second; there remains to be discovered, no, to be found in its rightful place, the fourth continent. In this way the finalist interpretation is not necessarily less effective that the empiricist: other navigators dared not undertake Columbus's voyage because they did not possess his certainty.
    This type of interpretation, based on prescience and authority, has nothing "modern" about it. But as we have seen, this attitude is balanced by another, much more familiar to us: the intransitive admiration of nature, experienced with such intensity that it is freed from any interpretation and from any function.

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