1 - An Old World Before It Was “New”

Summary

Oh God, my father, my mother, Holy Huitz-Hok, Lord of the hills and valleys, Lord of the forest, be patient. I am doing as always has been done … but perhaps you will suffer it. I am about to damage you, I am about to work you so that I may live.… With all my soul I am going to work you.

Christopher Columbus refused to accept that he had discovered a new world, two entire continents of which his own world had been ignorant. He doggedly held that he had discovered a new route to the backside of the known world, the coveted Orient, even the original human home, the garden planted by God eastward in Eden – just as he intended. In his first report penned to Ferdinand and Isabella, Columbus described his island discoveries as immense gardens of useful trees perpetually in foliage, flower, and fruit, flowing with honey and bounded by fertile fields. Significantly, neither Columbus nor his seafaring successors saw their discoveries as empty wilderness. To Columbus, the Edenic landscapes he described were no more pristine than the Europe from which he had sailed. Eden was, after all, a garden, not a wilderness. The paradise he described, whether in origin divine or manmade, was a cultivated artifact, and as Columbus pronounced repeatedly, it was full of “innumerable people.” If America was in fact news to Europe, as Columbus' successors figured out, Europeans also clearly understood that it was by no means new.