Creole Zones

Benedict Anderson

  • The First Americans: The Spanish Monarchy, Creole Patriots, and the Liberal State, 1492-1867 by D.A. Brading
    Cambridge, 761 pp, £55.00, March 1991, ISBN 0 521 39130 X

In the early hours of 12 October 1692, a lookout on the Pinta shouted in Latinic-Spanish to his captain and fellow seamen: Tierra! Tierra! The answering choral roar from below was, it appears, the Arabic-Spanish Albricias! That is to say, ‘Rewards!’[*] Since the last centennial commemoration of this operatic, multicultural exchange, its sonorities have profoundly changed. A hundred Years ago, tierra sounded fortissimo, and Cristoforo Colombo’s landfall in the Caribbean was generally understood as a world-historical event, which, following on the heels of Bartolomeu Diaz’s rounding of the Cape of Good Hope, opened an Age of Discovery during which the whole planet became known for the first time to a single, powerful civilisation. Read as a triumph of science and reason over what Washington Irving, in his biography of the Discoverer, called ‘the long night of monkish bigotry and false learning’, it seemed also to presage the eclipse of the Old World and the lasting ascendancy of the progressive New. Today, this providentialism, which took on cousinly forms in Protestant North and Catholic South America, is still quite audible, notably during wars and election campaigns, but albricias more and more carries the tune.

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[*] Columbus by Felipe Fernandez-Armesto (Oxford, 218 pp., £16.95, July, 0 19 215898 8). The themes of this review make it impossible to do justice to this elegant brief book, which witheringly skewers a swarm of Colombophile fantasts, both academic and ‘lay’. Particularly brilliant is Fernandez-Armesto’s setting of Colombo’s activities within the networks of Genoese merchants, bankers and seamen who, from bases in Lisbon and Seville, pushed explorations, slave-trading, plantations and settlements down the African coast, through the Madeiras and Azores, and eventually to the Caribbean and Brazil. He is also very good on the state of scientific knowledge in Colombo’s era and the millenarian mindset of the Franciscan Order with which the Discoverer had such long and intimate ties.