The Tropics of Empire: Why Columbus Sailed South to the Indies

Transformations: Studies in the History of Science and Technology

by Nicolás Wey Gómez

A radical revision of the geographical history of the discovery of the Americas that links Columbus's southbound route with colonialism, slavery, and today's divide between the industrialized North and the developing South. Everyone knows that in 1492 Christopher Columbus sailed west across the Atlantic, seeking a new route to the East. Few note, however, that Columbus's intention was also to sail south, to the tropics. In The Tropics of Empire , Nicolás Wey Gómez rewrites the geographical history of the discovery of the Americas, casting it as part of Europe's reawakening to the natural and human resources of the South. Wey Gómez shows that Columbus shared in a scientific and technical tradition that linked terrestrial latitude to the nature of places, and that he drew a highly consequential distinction between the higher, cooler latitudes of Mediterranean Europe and the globe's lower, hotter latitudes. The legacy of Columbus's assumptions, Wey Gómez contends, ranges from colonialism and slavery in the early Caribbean to the present divide between the industrialized North and the developing South. This distinction between North and South allowed Columbus to believe not only that he was heading toward the largest and richest lands on the globe but also that the people he would encounter there were bound to possess a nature (whether “childish” or “monstrous”) that seemed to justify rendering them Europe's subjects or slaves. The political lessons Columbus drew from this distinction provided legitimacy to a process of territorial expansion that was increasingly being construed as the discovery of the vast and unexpectedly productive “torrid zone.” The Tropics of Empire investigates the complicated nexus between place and colonialism in Columbus's invention of the American tropics. It tells the story of a culture intent on remaining the moral center of an expanding geography that was slowly relegating Europe to the northern fringe of the globe. Wey Gómez draws on sources that include official debates over Columbus's proposal to the Spanish crown, Columbus's own writings and annotations, and accounts by early biographers. The Tropics of Empire is illustrated by color reproductions of period maps that make vivid the geographical conceptions of Columbus and his contemporaries.

Genres: History, Nonfiction, Academic

616 pages, Hardcover

First published June 13, 2008

Reviews

[Leanne · Rating 5 out of 5]

Sailed south? What is going on here? I thought Columbus "sailed west to get to the east?" Right? Can we believe anything anymore? Was absolutely everything we were told in our childhoods totally wrong? You would think that nothing new could possibly be said about Christopher Columbus. But you would be wrong; for Nicolás Wey Gómez has written an absolutely brilliant new interpretation of Columbus and his voyages. 

I came to know of Wey Gόmez's book after I heard him give a Watson Lecture at Caltech last year. These prestigious public lectures have been put on at Caltech for nearly 80 years and they are always fully attended. Wey Gόmez's lecture blew me away! It was one of the most elegant and persuasive talks I have ever attended. And, I should say that I was not predisposed to agree with everything Wey Gόmez had to say since I had long believed that the Europeans of the time never expected to find much of anything in those high Atlantic waters where Columbus had set sail. In fact, the Columbus that Wey Gόmez spoke about that evening was largely unrecognizable to me. So, I ordered his book the moment I got back home that night. 

Oh, Columbus, who were you?

Just in my own lifetime, he has gone from "rational man of commerce and science" to the representation of all the evils of imperialism and conquest. Seen as a self-appointed messiah (there to liberate Jerusalem from the Saracens), to gold seeker and even as that of totally unremarkable and bumbling man who literally stumbled on the new world---- no man in history (except perhaps Christ) has been interpreted in so many different ways!  

So, then, was he really intending to travel southwest? It is doubtful whether he would have survived a more northerly crossing because of the currents, but in what direction was he, in fact, heading? Historians have always insisted he was traveling east. Aiming for the gold of Japan to raise the money to fund another crusade to liberate Jerusalem. Times were tough since the Moors took back the Holy Land and many believed the end of times was approaching. So, the story goes that Columbus set sail to the east by first going west. But Wey Gόmez has a more complex story to tell.  The Tropics of Empire: Why Columbus Sailed South to the Indies is a story of the books-- and more-- all the glorious maps that informed Columbus' journeys. 

And one antique map that Columbus surely had in mind when he sailed the Ocean Blue, was a version of the medieval T and O map. These T and O maps are much older than the middle ages--and have their roots in the Geographia by Ptolemy. The map was the stuff of legend for a thousand years at least. Dividing the known world into three great continents (Europe, Asia and Africa), the map was surprisingly accurate for the time (so much so that it probably could not have been created with first-hand accounts for some of the geographical features, such as the Bay of Bengal, for example). Liberated from Constantinople in around 1400, the Geographia was promptly translated into Latin. Christians then weaved in countless themes from the Bible onto the map. A tripartite system, each continent was associated with one of Noah's sons (with the sinful one, surprise-surprise, being associated with Africa). Oriented toward the East (Christ was light), the three continents were surrounded by a great sea. So that, whereas Ptolemy was clear that he was only mapping the known world, medieval Christians mistook this for the entire world with no real room in their imagination for an extra continent.

Augustine of Hippo, as one example, adamantly denied the possibility of terra incognito in the antipodes. There were just three continents. Period.

Heading West to arrive in the East, then, Columbus indeed would imagine that the land he reached was the easternmost part of Asia, where many islands were thought to exist, including the coveted spice islands written about by the English knight, Sir John Mandeville, a hundred years before Columbus' voyage. One reason for dropping to the Canaries before heading West was to aim at southern China and Japan, as described by Marco Polo as being south of Cathay where the great Khan ruled.

Reading Wey Gόmez's book, I learned that in addition to the T and O map, there was another tradition of maps that had an equally long pedigree and also held great sway throughout the middle ages --and that Columbus surely had this other tradition with him in mind as well when he set sail. Based on classical Greek geometry and worked out by a kind of mathematical analogy, the ancient Greeks had posited an antipodal landmass in the direct opposite side of the world. In this theory, as you can see in the map below, the world is a sphere divided into five zones or belts. With two polar regions that are inhospitable to human life being frigid cold in extremis, so too is the central tropical belt described as being burning red hot and inhospitable to human life. There remained, then, two temperate zones. The first was the inhabited world as the ancients knew it; while the other was a terra incognito zone in the southern antipodes.

In some versions, however, the tropical zone was red hot and not suitable for agriculture or human life. But in others it was imaged as a land rich in resources--human, plant and mineral.

Like we do when we imagine exoplanets today, the explorers of old were imagining what types of climates or zones could contain resources, and more, could be hospitable to intelligent life. Columbus was no different. And there various schools of thought and competing theories. Some imagined there could be inhabited zones in the antipodes--in extreme places, they imagined monstrous races and following the ancient philosophy of the elements and climates, they played with the idea that warlike people inhabited northern climes, with gentler, childlike races in the tropics. Europeans have a long tradition of imaging various monster races out there in space as well. A new paper came out recently in the International Journal of Astrobiology that argues that rather than imagine extraterrestrial life by analogy, we should work out various scenarios that employ Darwin's natural selection. This is not so different from how Pliny posited various kinds of humans in different climates based on the theory of the four elements. And, the natural slaves of the tropics would make for a particular kind of human resources to be found in Columbus' "southing," argues Wey Gόmez. 

This would, as we know, have devastating consequences for the people of the Americas. And we carry these stereotypes of people in the tropics with us even today. 

Wonderful book and a must-read for all lovers of history and maps!!!!!

[Ellen Z · Rating 5 out of 5]

This book is written by a friend. It's interesting, well-written and beautiful - full of colored ancient maps. I like the politics of this book and the passion in the scholarship.

[Catherine · Rating 5 out of 5]

Everything I thought I knew about the ~descubrimiento~, I am delighted to report, is totally wrong!

(Selección: introducción)