The Discovery of Mankind: Atlantic Encounters in the Age of Columbus

Abstract

The title phrase, “The Discovery of Mankind,” is glossed in David Abulafia’s preface to refer to Christian Europeans’ gradual experience of the variety and range of human activity and expression “in the age of Columbus,” an age that turns out to have lasted nearly two centuries. The European “discovery of mankind” was a long, and arguably still incomplete, process, but Abulafia’s book focuses rather on the immediate “shock of discovery” (p. xv), a topic he rather oddly thinks has received much less attention than the intellectual adjustments that followed. The book finishes in 1520, well before even the great Spanish debates about the nature of American Indians. It begins in 1341 in order to give full and proper weight to the accounts of European encounters with Canary Islanders in the section “Eastern Horizons: The Peoples, Islands, and Shores of the Eastern Atlantic,” which is followed by equivalent “Western Horizons” and “Southern Horizons.” This provides the book with a cogent organization, even though African encounters are given short shrift and Mexico gets two pointless pages.The Discovery of Mankind demonstrates the strengths and weaknesses of narrative history. A large amount of primary and secondary material is skillfully synthesized in 22 chapters to produce a very readable narrative. The author’s impressive background in Mediterranean history allows him to embed his story with confidence in its larger European context, drawing on materials in several languages. Though pitched at a general readership, the book has a firm scholarly basis and a discreet but full scholarly apparatus (only marred by its unprofessional index). The difficulties begin with trying to match the narrative approach to the book’s announced theme. The focus on the immediacy of contact inevitably means that Abulafia is heavily reliant on eyewitness accounts. He is well aware of the textual controversies surrounding many of these accounts — from Las Casas’s summary of Columbus’s journal to the attempts to reconstruct Ramón Pané’s Relación from its Italian translation — which he summarizes succinctly and accurately. But, with the exception of Bartolomé de las Casas, the writers who pondered the implications of the European discoveries were not those on the colonial front line: seven pages at the end of the book finally address “The Renaissance Discovery of Man,” but the narrative impulse soon reasserts itself over any temptation to offer analysis, with a subheading announcing that “The Encounters Continue” (p. 310).For the most part, The Discovery of Mankind is written in an urbane tone that falters only when it comes to Abulafia’s impatience with the literary scholars who have trespassed into the area of Atlantic encounters with their “post-modernist” and “post-colonialist” approaches; here the author shows little patience and even less understanding as he offers travesties of these arguments. As so often when historians approach Columbus in the Caribbean, much of the discussion focuses on the old chestnut of cannibalism. Abulafia pronounces himself “convinced there were cannibals in the Caribbean” (p. xvi), a conviction reiterated more frequently and more forcefully than the significance of the topic itself would warrant, which leads one to suspect an investment of a different kind.In fact, perhaps surprisingly after this prefatorial show of conviction, Abulafia is properly skeptical of Columbus’s interpretations of what he saw and thought he was told on his first two voyages through the Caribbean. Drawing more than he realizes from deluded postcolonial critics, Abulafia constantly makes the valid point that Columbus was determined to draw a line between “good” Indians and “bad” Indians. Unfortunately the narrative impetus never allows him time to stop to consider just why this division was so important to Columbus, nor to reflect on the fact that it was the “good” Indians who actually wielded power in the Caribbean and whom Columbus proceeded to displace. And least of all does he ponder the peculiarity of Columbus’s binary determination turning out, at least as Abulafia tells it, to match exactly the situation existing in the Carib-bean. Perhaps not surprisingly, for all his heralded conviction, Abulafia can offer no incontrovertible evidence that there were cannibals in the Caribbean, only incontrovertible evidence of how quickly Columbus and his colleagues such as Dr. Chanca moved to interpret ambivalent evidence, such as the presence of bones in huts, as incontrovertible proof of the existence of a people called Caribs, who ate people.