The Colonial and Revolutionary Periods 3logical conclusion and a literal extreme. All his life, Columbus continued to believe
he had discovered the Indies and only had to venture over the next hill or stream to
find the legendary cities of gold and silver described by Marco Polo. When one
discovery after another failed to confirm this belief, Columbus consoled himself
with the conviction that what he had found was, literally, the Garden of Eden. “Each
time I sailed from Spain to the Indies,” Columbus recalled toward the end of his life,
“I reached a point when the heavens, the stars, the temperature of the air and the
waters of the sea abruptly changed.” “It was as if the seas sloped upward at this point,”
he remembered; and the odd behavior of his navigation equipment led him to con-
clude, finally, that the globe was not round. One hemisphere, he claimed, “resembles
the half of a round pear with a raised stalk, like a woman’s nipple on a round ball.”
“I do not hold that the earthly Paradise has the form of a rugged mountain,”
Columbus insisted, “as it is shown in pictures, but that it lies at the summit of what
I have described as the stalk of a pear.” “I do not find any Greek or Latin writings
which definitely state the worldly situation of the earthly Paradise,” Columbus wrote,
“and I believe that the earthly Paradise lies here” just beyond the strange new world
he had found. He did not, he admitted, believe “that anyone can ascend to the top”
and so enter the Garden of Eden. But he was firmly convinced that the streams and
rivers he had discovered “flow out of the earthly Paradise” and that, accordingly, he
had been closer than anyone to the place where “Our Lord placed the Tree of Life.”
The evidence Columbus adduced for associating the New World with Eden was
an odd but, for its time, characteristic mix of scientific and pseudoscientific
argument, biblical exegesis, and imaginative rhetoric. Not of least importance here
was his rapt account of the vegetation and the native inhabitants of his earthly
Paradise. “The land and trees were very green and as lovely as the orchards of
Valencia in April,” he remembered, “and the inhabitants were lightly built and fairer
than most of the other people we had seen in the Indies”; “their hair was long and
straight and they were quicker, more intelligent, and less cowardly.” This is natural
man as innocent rather than savage, reminding Europeans of their aboriginal,
unfallen state rather than inviting conversion. The Indian as savage and the Indian
as innocent were and are, of course, two sides of the same coin. Both map Native
Americans, and the land they and their forebears had lived in for more than thirty
thousand years, as somehow absent from history: existing in a timeless void, a place
of nature and a site of myth. But, in mapping the New World and its inhabitants in
this way, in trying to accommodate strange sights and experiences to familiar signs
and legends, Columbus and other early European explorers were at least beginning
a story of American literature: a story, that is, of encounters between cultures that
leaves both sides altered. If there is one truth in the history of American writing, it is
the truth of process and plurality. The American writer has to write in and of a world
of permeable borders and change. Although he was hardly aware of it, Columbus
was forging a narrative that was neither precisely Old World (because of the sights
he had seen), nor exactly New World either (because of the signs he had used), but
a mix or synthesis of both. Telling of meetings between strangers, oddly syncretic in
its language and vision, it was in its own way an American tale he was telling.GGray_c01.indd 3ray_c 01 .indd 3 8 8/1/2011 7:54:53 AM/ 1 / 2011 7 : 54 : 53 AM