Columbus's Gift: Representations of Grace and Wealth and the Enterprise of the Indies

Abstract

At the start of Spain's colonial enterprise, the itinerant court of Ferdinand and Isabella was the first stage where travel accounts and specimens of all kinds coalesced and where the New World "yielded wonder on top of wonder."1 In May 1493, upon returning from his first voyage, Columbus presented at the royal court in Barcelona a procession of naked Indians adorned with gold and accompanied by multicolored parrots. This spectacle previously astonished crowds in Lisbon and Seville, and a similar display would follow his second voyage. After spending three years in La Española, in October 1496, the explorer brought to Burgos a cavalcade of Indians and mules loaded with gold objects (Bernáldez 600, 678). Inscribed as wonders—that which exceeds the ordinary—and inserted in the ambiance of court spectacles, these subjects and objects represented the [End Page 201] fertile lands, great mines of gold, and the thousands of other valuable things that the Admiral listed in his writings and professed to have discovered in the New World. As the physical extension of these texts, New World wonders carried with them the sense of unmediated experience and the irrefutable proof of financial success. Praised and admired for their visible and tangible connection with the New World, wonders functioned as pars pro toto, shards that reconstructed the new territories piece by piece in a carefully edited depiction of what the West Indies might be (Mason 1-22).

Cite this work

No public copy is stored for this record, so only the metadata is cited.

Stored only when both papers are in the corpus — 15 citations exist upstream.

Papers that cite the same references — the relational fallback while embeddings are still backfilling.