EXILES AND ARRIVALS IN CHRISTOPHER COLUMBUS AND WILLIAM BRADFORD

Abstract

I will be concerned in this essay with a few key passages in Christopher Columbus's Journal of the First Voyage (1492-1493) and William Bradford's Of Plymouth Planta/ion (1630-1650; pub. 1856) in which the two authors invest their respective plans for a voyage across the ocean with a transcendental significance, linking them to important movements of population caused by religious persecution. In both cases persecution altemately takes on positive and negative connotations: depending on the perspective being adopted, it can be a sign of divine favor or a sign of divine punishment. While Columbus sees the expulsion of the Jews of Sepharad and the fall of Granada's last Moorish king, Boabdil, as an ornen of the discovery of a Christian paradise on earth -the original Garden of EdenBradford sees the exodus of the Pilgrim Fathers through England, Holland, and America as the ultimate test of faith in divine Providence that the English Israel must undergo. In the course of the fifteenth century, as «Israel» and «the Jewish people» acquired the cultural status of the rejected other of Christendom, they also became the symbol of an e1Tant people continually striving for an interpretation of their own deferred destiny. Sixteenth -and seventeenthcentury theories of national election inspired by the Reconquest of Spain and by massive religious migrations often emphasized two interdependent historical time frames , each deploying a different understanding of history and progress, and each promoting also a characteristic sense of purpose. This dual time scheme appears in Andres de Bernaldez, Christopher Columbus, Tommaso Campanella, Robert Cushman, John Eliot, John Winthrop, and Edward Johnson, among others. On the one hand, only the elect people were destined to achieve terrestrial success in this world, their lives being the culmination of a completed cycle