Book Review-ish: Nicolas Wey Gomez, The Tropics of Empire

Confession time: this can't really count as a book review, as what Old Ken read of Nicolas Wey Gomez's The Tropics of Empire: Why Columbus Sailed South to the Indies (MIT Press, 2008) was on airplanes. Thus, it was not with the most assiduous attention possible. Nonetheless, this a provocative book and I thought y'all might want to hear some yappin' about it, no matter how threadbare my account might be.

Basically, what Nicolas Wey Gomez sets out to do in The Tropics of Empire is to call attention to the mostly forgotten fact that Columbus did not simply sail west to reach his Indies. Instead, he was trying to sail south! However wrong this sense of direction may be according to our maps, so our author observes, understanding what Columbus was trying to do is a powerful means of unveiling his cosmology, his world-picture. And in the late medieval geographical tradition upon which Columbus drew, Wey Gomez claims, latitude was far more conceptually significant than longitude.

"How can that be right?" we might ask. Longitude, as several popular books and movies have emphasized, was an elusive, technological riddle that, when it went unanswered, left sailors floundering aimlessly at sea or dead on the rocks. While latitude could be calculated by a few simple celestial observations, the determination of longitude drove the creation of sophisticated observatories, star charts and precision time keeping instruments - - not to mention the king's ransom offered for a successful means of resolving its mysteries.



The answer, Wey Gomez (see above) claims, is in the cosmological realm. "While longitude may have initially represented for Columbus the nightmare of crossing an unknown ocean," he claims, "it was latitude that would tell Columbus again and again - - when he admired the gold ornaments on indigenous bodies and when he gazed overhead at parrot flocks so dense they obscured the sun - - that he had indeed arrived in the Indies, or at least a place that shared the same nature with the old Ethiopia and India." (p. 49) That is, following Ptolemaic principles, latitude determined the nature of all the plants and animals in a region or zone, thus insuring that all life on a given parallel of latitude would be the same regardless of its east or west location.

Indeed, in this cosmology that Columbus inherited from antique and medieval learning, there were three zones of the world all determined by latitude: temperate, torrid, and frigid. Bounded by the Tropics of Cancer and Capricorn, the tropical latitudes were believed to be an infernal wasteland, while the frigid zones were equally inhospitable to life. Because this cosmological view was always also a political view, only those from the temperate zone were believed capable of possessing the mental faculties necessary for governing. Therefore, the author argues, it became necessary for critics of the Spanish colonial project in the American New World such as Bartolomeo Las Casas' to show that " 'the Indies' were more universally temperate than even the most temperate places in the Old World." (p. 96) Las Casas, in other words, was trying to beat Columbus at his own game, utilizing his own knowledge of the Americas to contest the legitimacy of Spanish dominion there.

But, how did Columbus reconcile himself to the fact that the Central American lands and people he saw were not the same as those of Africa or India? He had seen African people on the same latitudes as those he traveled in the Caribbean, and he knew the two to be different. How did this perception of difference not undermine his cosmology? According to Wey Gomez, if Columbus did not actually see the peoples in the Caribbean with the dark skin he associated with "Ethiopians" (i.e. any peoples from tropical latitudes), he came to see cannibalism and facial deformation as a kind of substitute for the tropical inferiority he believed his West Indians to suffer. (p. 220)

What is fascinating about this study is how it takes an episode that is so familiar to peoples of the American hemisphere and show how it was conceived and carried out according to logics that seem extremely far from us. However, so the author concludes in a perhaps slightly "j'accuse" conclusion, the belief that the Northern hemisphere is particularly entitled and able to intervene in the governance of tropical regions is perhaps the longue duree legacy of these largely-forgotten conceptions. Compelling stuff!