THE DISCOVERY OF THE NEW WORLD

The writings of the first ‘discoverers’ of America at the end of the fifteenth and beginning of the sixteenth centuries convey the amazement, and frequently the awe, of Europeans confronted by a new world. The ship's log of Christopher Columbus, describing the landscape of the Lucayos Islands and of Santo Domingo, and also the Taíno Indians of the region, who gave the Europeans an idyllic welcome, was a splendid opening to a series of reports on a natural world and a race of men hitherto unknown. It was in Columbus' first letter (printed in Latin in Rome in 1493) that the European conception of the New World was born. Other navigators, such as Pigafetta, a companion of Magellan, and above all Amerigo Vespucci (whose publisher Waldseemüller disseminated the expression ‘Terra America’ to give a new name to ‘Las Indias’) in their turn described the coasts, the flora and the natives of these new lands, all presumed to be islands.

This first vision of the New World was soon succeeded by that of the victims of a long series of shipwrecks, who faced less welcoming Indians, like the Caribs or the people of the Gulf of Florida, armed with powerful bows and ‘arrows capable of piercing even the oar of a whaleboat’. This was the new image of America presented in, for example, the Naufragios (Valladolid, 1542) of Alvar Núñez Cabeza de Vaca, an Andalusian gentleman who related his tribulations, lasting several years, among the Indians.