Columbus and Curiosity: Curiouser and Curiouser (With Apologies to Alice)?

14 Thoughts on this Post

1. Mark, I find this post problematic for a number of reasons, but I want to focus on just one. You write, “In deciding how to judge Columbus, it might help to abstract his thinking and decision-making ability and situate it among contemporary persons.” But what you offer is not an abstraction of Columbus’s thinking — is there evidence that he was driven by curiosity of the unknown? That is a later romantic (or Romantic) idealization of his motives — where is that in Columbus’s own thinking?

   The idea that Columbus ventured forth into the unknown driven above all by a desire to know is itself an ahistorical attribution of a more contemporary mindset on an early modern mariner. The rise of “curiosity” as an intellectual or moral virtue can be historicized, as Jamie Cohen-Cole has historicized “open-mindedness” (perhaps a twin of curiosity) as an increasingly valorized notion in the mid-20th century.

   So I don’t think you’ve abstracted Columbus’s thinking here. I think you have taken the statues as “true representations” of his thinking. And I think that’s a mistake.

   N.B., John K. Thornton’s first chapter in A Cultural History of the Atlantic World, 1250-1820 does an excellent job of explaining just how much was known about the currents of the Atlantic by the time Columbus set out on his voyage, the most important piece of knowledge being this: there is a current that will carry you out, and there is a current that will carry you back. No guarantees that your particular voyage will not meet with mishap, but a crucial “constant” of the Atlantic that allowed the Spanish and Portuguese to exploit the Canary Islands and the Azores for decades before Columbus set sail.

   • Lora, thanks for engaging with me. This response is long, but I just want to be thorough. . .

     “N.B., John K. Thornton’s first chapter in A Cultural History of the Atlantic World, 1250-1820 does an excellent job of explaining just how much was known about the currents of the Atlantic by the time Columbus set out on his voyage, the most important piece of knowledge being this: there is a current that will carry you out, and there is a current that will carry you back.”

     The suggestion here is that something known is the key word (rather than the unknown suggested by curiosity)? Tell me if I’m misreading you, but you’re arguing that Columbus was stimulated by what he knew rather than what he thought might be revealed in travelling overseas? By looking at his particular milieu (mediated by the historical documents), his thoughts and desires can be explicated by listing all of the empirical facts, people, and concrete objectives irrespective of the internal drama of memory, fears, longings, etc? This sounds like good empirical thinking (and I agree to those points). I’m not sure we can ever fully inhabit the consciousness of another person to know that definitively, because they were exposed to the environment of certain ideas and facts (glory for Spain, knowledge of wind currents, or conversion of Natives), these ideas necessarily were a major factor (if at all) to why someone performed said action. This may seem counterintuitive to the whole historical enterprise, but surely there is enough repeated behaviors to generalize about some human events. I think all people are prodded into certain actions by a combination of both factors (knowledge and absence of knowledge? Maybe knowledge vs. imagination, for lack of a better opposite—I don’t contend “opinion” is what I’m talking about). In terms of what was driving Columbus, I still argue that possessing free agency, he decided to absorb all of the known factors (maps; currents; topography; religious visions; dreams of gold, spices, and trade; pride; fame) and pursue something that he hoped to discover: whether one could reach China or India by sailing west (again, curiosity seems appropriate, even though it has a history).

     As I mentioned in my post (briefly; maybe too briefly), I offered hypotheticals using today’s “explorers” to help understand why Columbus is both defended and attacked with equal vigor. To met, this suggests (both sides) that they already, implicitly recognize something in Columbus (they can relate to, empathize with, or notice something vaguely familiar). If one views Columbus’s life in its totality, certain observations stand out: travelling on a ship is not fun (concerns about food, disease, boredom, lack of privacy, disgruntled crew); having to beg and cajole for supplies and funding from private benefactors seems unsightly, at best. Again, if there is zero curiosity (even if only 5%), I can’t see how he continues during his wandering years before receiving the go-ahead in 1492.

     Actually, what started this investigation is an undated letter to the Catholic Monarchs, where he explains that “at a very early age I began sailing the sea and have continued until now. This profession creates a curiosity about the secrets of the world.”* This was translated into English from Spanish (I believe); I’d like to know the Spanish equivalent (if there is one) of the word used by Blair Sullivan (translator) Maybe there is none? Regardless, trying to find Columbus’s exact use of this Latin/Spanish term does not seem the only way of interpreting the presence of some curious-type drive motivating his actions. Since some people today are cynical about words in general (they mask some fundamental drive or will-to-power), I’m not sure one could base one’s case strictly on quotes from Columbus; I think the idea is, nonetheless, useful for explaining part of the human condition.

     Of course, one problem with this quote (introduction to his Book of Prophecies) is the justification for writing it, which seems to be about explaining his previous voyages and providing a religious perspective on their significance. Another issue is his chronology of when curiosity (or, again, the Spanish equivalent) reared its head: After becoming a mariner, curiosity was created; it seems to be nourished by a feedback-type loop that persistently drives him on (more knowledge equals more questions equals more knowledge ad infinitum</em/).

     Whether or not Columbus was thinking and acting with procedures displayed in modern forms of curiosity is certainly a debatable proposition. I’m not sure it’s even possible to claim enough epistemological certainty to label Columbus’s motivation as “X” (unqualified) with regards to exploration. It can hazardous (as Locke showed me) to find the appropriate name for a human desire involving the body (a spatially- and temporally-limited object as to where it can be and when) and mind since these terms themselves are linked in a web of associations, but curiosity seems relevant as some component of that “desire to know.” That he kept moving across Spain and Portugal to seek opportunity because he was stimulated by a lack of information about the topography of the globe seems reasonable (as one of many motivations, I might add); from the biographies I’ve read, he is also certainly attempting to find fame, fortune, and love (maybe improve his status?). To suggest that he carried out his actions without any type of wonder/befuddlement/aporia about what lay across the Atlantic seems to reduce him to the oddest of oddities: a mechanized, Hobbesian body driven by basic instinctual drives that remained so foreign to him that the only response available was to do what no one else had done (in other words, what made Columbus different? If sailing, commerce, and fortune-hunting were all commonplace during that time, how best, as professors of history, to explain his unique, subsequent decisions (and I’m certainly not arguing that curiosity is the key) when students ask us: Why him?

     An alternative story is that Columbus unconsciously was attracted to the sea because it called up instances of an “oceanic feeling.” This, rather than a general bewilderment about one’s existential condition and relation to the natural world, is really what launched his expedition—and not just any expedition, but one that was dangerous and potentially a one-way ticket. One could insert talk of a “death drive” here, but again, this seems too reductive.

     “So I don’t think you’ve abstracted Columbus’s thinking here. I think you have taken the statues as “true representations” of his thinking. And I think that’s a mistake.”

     Frankly, I don’t pay much attention to statues (they’re interesting as visual art, but that’s about it for me). Statues could never represent any process of human thinking (particularly the historical understanding concerning “why” questions [Why did Columbus move his physical body to the places he did?]. Even if human statues come with plaques mentioning a few of their deeds, I would never accept those “facts” as the final story. What I’ve tried to do is read some of the relevant documents (portions of his log, quotes supplied by biographers, various primary-source contextual sources) and then ask myself: What is familiar and what is alien? I’ve never had a desire to travel across the seas, but that could be because 1. I’ve never lived right next to the ocean (although I grew up in southern California; we had to drive to the beach) and 2. The world, in my lifetime, was already mapped. Yet, what drives people to the so-called “final frontiers”? Why explore either the vertical dimensions of the waters or the vastness of outer space if some form of curiosity (concern or wonder about an unknown dimension of humanity that leads to certain actions) is not present? In the case of space exploration today, there are indeed will-to-power forms of domination; people have also expressed enthusiasm for leaving the horrendous ecological conditions of planet earth behind. To go back to my comment about STEM students: If you walk into NASA today, how would you explain the motivations of these people to perpetuate a (fairly young) institution devoted to understanding the celestial sphere?

     P.S. I think it’s a fair question whether the type of scientific curiosity historians have found in the early-modern period—demarcated by the “Scientific Revolution”—is really the historical origin of curiosity in general. Ball notes that, “[F]or the Greeks, curiosity was not even a clearly articulated concept. To the extent that it was acknowledge at all, it stands in contrast to its mercurial sibling, wonder.”** On this issue, and after finishing Ball’s work, I will be looking at the works of G. E. R. Lloyd and Toby Huff (both discuss China comparatively). This is just a tentative step for my own research into this phenomenon; by no means is this blog post a polished essay on some definitive conclusion about whether Columbus could (historically speaking) have partaken of this thing called “curiosity.” I only ask because I cannot imagine any human undertaking his voyage without some motivation to explore the unknown (which, as Morison showed me, is quite arduous and was not desired by the majority of people).

     * Christopher Columbus, “Undated Letter to Fernando and Isabel, 1500-1502,” from Roberto Rusconi, ed. and Blair Sullivan, trans., The ‘Book of Prophecies’ Edited by Christopher Columbus (Berkeley: University of California Press, reprinted in Geoffrey Symcox and Blair Sullivan, Christopher Columbus and the Enterprise of the Indies: A Brief History with Documents (Boston: Bedford, 2005), 51.

     ** Ball, 10.

2. Mark,

   From this comment it’s less clear to me than it was before what you are trying to do. I don’t quite understand why you didn’t start with the single line from the primary source you have. And from the “Book of Prophecies,” no less, which is an odd text for lots of reasons, and a suspect text when it comes to clarifying exactly what Columbus was thinking in 1492 (Columbus was at some pains to justify himself and his conduct by 1500, and one of the ways he did this was to interpret his own misdirected voyage as a fulfillment of Biblical prophecy). Regarding that document, after describing Columbus’s fall from the grace of the monarchs, Juan Luis de León Azcárate had this to say in a 2007 article published in Religión y Cultura (a journal out of the University of Salamanca): “In this context, it’s not difficult to understand that Christopher Columbus would attempt to vindicate himself by offering a positive image of himself and the aims of his voyages. The Book of the Prophecies might be a good instrument to accomplish that, but that doesn’t mean that the motivations demonstrated in it were not already present much earlier than its composition.” (My translation — not perfect but good enough.)

   So there’s a possibility of laying this text alongside Columbus’s other works to see just how much “curiosity” motivated him above anything else (or “abstracted” from anything else), but I don’t think you can make a case for Columbus being driven by curiosity from one line alone. But you’re not doing that, I guess — though we are only just now learning what your image of Columbus for the purposes of this post is drawing from in terms of sources.

   In any case, it seems that you’re making a biographical argument that he must have been motivated by curiosity, because what else could keep someone doing such a dangerous thing as being a sailor? There are lots of reasons to explain that persistence, including habit and skill (he had been at sea since he was 10) and success (he was good enough at his work to make a living from it and a keep doing it). But it is romantic retrojection to single out curiosity as the single motivating factor, or most important motivating factor, in his career. Modern childhood was not around for us to plop into it a daydreaming young Columbus, though it may benefit your thought experiment to assume his daydreaming. Instead, we can say with assurance that he went to work at 10 in the most rapidly growing job sector of the day at a time when it was common for 10-year-olds to participate in the workforce, and he learned on the job (both sailing and letters) and became a master of his trade.

   But that’s not evocative enough for you precisely because that’s historical. Instead, you invoke “something transhistorical.” You say, “something transhistorical seems to be in play here.” That is one hell of a claim to bury in the middle of a post at a history blog. Really? Invoking “something transhistorical” is arguing for some Truth outside of time — it’s like a blank Scrabble tile and you can write Hegel’s Geist or the Holy Spirit or Human Nature or Laws of History or whatever on that square.

   In any case, you are considering Columbus as an exemplar of the “transhistorical” desire to know — certainly one thing he has come to symbolize (thanks in no small part to the romanticizing and whitewashing of his own rapacity and greed as well as to the visual rhetoric of numerous portrayals of Columbus in painting, in stone, and in film). There is a history behind Columbus’s coming to stand for the idea of “curiosity in the abstract.” But it is possible to conceive of a thing that does not exist, as Aristotle would counter Plato, and because we can imagine something called “curiosity in the abstract” (a notion that may have attained truth because it is so very useful) and dislocate it conceptually from a particular time and place in human history does not mean that what we are imagining has ever existed or must ever exist.

   What is the use of “temporarily setting aside the obvious ethical questions” so that the reputation of Columbus becomes a referendum on the social value placed on curiosity today? Is it not possible that the idea of “curiosity in the abstract” is a consequence, not a cause, of Columbus’s voyage — that the very notion of “curiosity” as a drive that supersedes all others has emerged along with modernity as a reliable means of eliding “the obvious ethical questions” that surround the practice of plunder?

3. I appreciate your efforts to challenge my views, but I don’t think the intent of my post is being understood (it will fruitfully encourage me to clarify):

   “In this context, it’s not difficult to understand that Christopher Columbus would attempt to vindicate himself by offering a positive image of himself and the aims of his voyages.”

   As I mentioned, reading that particular source was the inception of my thinking about Columbus and curiosity as a unit; it simply got my engine going, so to speak, attempting to link what Philip Ball had said about the contested status of scientific curiosity before the 1600s (before that time, he says it was still frowned upon—linked to Pandora and that sort of thing). I have not found other instances of Columbus actually using this word, but that should not deter any sort of attempt to historicize curiosity by looking at explorers in the Mediterranean during the 1400s and 1500s (it may turn out to be something entirely different; it could be that the emergence of curiosity takes place centuries later (which is what Ball is suggesting, at least, as a positive goal to pursue). I’m not really interested in his post-voyage rationalizations but his pre-voyage mentality.

   “There are lots of reasons to explain that persistence, including habit and skill (he had been at sea since he was 10) and success (he was good enough at his work to make a living from it and a keep doing it). But it is romantic retrojection to single out curiosity as the single motivating factor, or most important motivating factor, in his career.”

   I totally agree that curiosity as a single factor is not capable of explaining his decisions entirely (that’s why I qualified these statements above). It may be romantic to inquire about Columbus and curiosity, but that still doesn’t make the claim entirely false. Most historians look back at the past with a particular lens (be it “romantic” or “realist” or “poststructuralist” or any other kind of movement that has arisen from the past). I don’t think it’s romantic to acknowledge the complexities of historical figures and suggest that a sense of wonder about the unexplored regions might explain (especially to young students who profess enthusiasm to explore Mars) why he went through with his plan to go west.
   “You say, ‘something transhistorical seems to be in play here.’ That is one hell of a claim to bury in the middle of a post at a history blog. Really? Invoking ‘something transhistorical’ is arguing for some Truth outside of time.” It’s like a blank Scrabble tile and you can write Hegel’s Geist or the Holy Spirit or Human Nature or Laws of History or whatever on that square.”

   Not at all (no reason to invoke Hegel or History here). Let me give more examples of what I mean by “transhistorical”: creating music, having children, making and eating supper (and conversing), smiling at a rainbow, feeling overwhelmed by pain, dreaming, worshiping something. To offer a simple observation about common human activities need not induce a questionable and skeptical attitude about the claims they’re making. There seems to be good historical evidence that other people display “curious-like” behavior: in other parts of Columbus’s log, he also describes the Tainos and Caribs coming out in canoes as his ships approaches their coasts. Of course his descriptions of them as “timid” and “childlike” are reflections of Columbus’s own worldview. Yet, are we to assume the Native Americans were not curious about what these ships were carrying? Stories of Prester John and dog-headed tribes might seem ridiculous to us; it’s not the content but the form that interests me: why are they speculating about these unknown (to them) places? What kind of process is taking place here? When Powhatan met John Smith, why did both attempt communication with each other (before things got ugly)? Again, as a heuristic tool for understanding why humans do the things they do, I don’t see any problem with using the word “curiosity” to describe global human behavior across the centuries.

   “What is the use of “temporarily setting aside the obvious ethical questions” so that the reputation of Columbus becomes a referendum on the social value placed on curiosity today?”
   Right now, I wonder about Mars and Saturn. Is there anything out there walking around (I doubt it, but I still wonder)? Is there an ethical component to this kind of inquiry? Maybe after I find out if there is life on these planets. Then, numerous ethical decisions come into play: Should we go? Should we bring earth-made artifacts? What should we say upon greeting Martians? The ethical questions could be endless. The difference with Columbus’s situation is that he is now in the past (maybe this is what you’re emphasizing when you speak of the “reputation of Columbus”). Since we know what ethical situations followed, we have hindsight and can hopefully not repeat his mistakes. However, debating the origin of curiosity in figures such as Columbus, and whether it is a drive, acquired sensibility, or idea that brings negative ideological baggage, should not be discouraged because it is seen as positive today (at least, that’s what Ball is arguing in the realm of science), and therefore (from this line of thinking conclude), nobody in the past who is responsible for unpleasant things can possibly embody something which is viewed as positive (or at least neutral; again, I don’t know what the reputation of curiosity is today). No one is trying to romantically elevate him (back) onto the pantheon of Great Men who “dared to dream” before others. Even Scott’s film is filled with plenty of ethical gaffes committed by Columbus; his film is a hybrid of positive/negative images. I think my original post contains nothing from that romanticized lens.

   I’ll go back to this question from my last post: “If sailing, commerce, and fortune-hunting were all commonplace during that time, how best, as professors of history, to explain his unique, subsequent decisions (and I’m certainly not arguing that curiosity is the key) when students ask us: Why him?”

4. Not directly on the topic of Columbus and his motives (about which I do not have an informed opinion), but for a discussion of the economic context of, and economic forces driving, the European “voyages of discovery” (to use an old-fashioned-sounding phrase), see the opening chapter of I. Wallerstein, _The Modern World-System vol. 1_ (1974). Despite the book’s age, I think the discussion is still valuable. At the end of the chapter there is a brief consideration/contrast of the Portuguese voyages with the Chinese which IW fits into his argument about world-economy versus world-empire. (I’m probably biased because Wallerstein was an outside or external [whatever the right word is] reader of my dissertation, but the book, whatever its flaws [and there are some], deserves its reputation as a classic. The NYT obituary of Wallerstein did not do it justice, imo.)

   Ok, back to Columbus and curiosity!

   • Louis,

     I think the economic context is related to this particular idea (curiosity). I’m not one to hang my hat on a particular “force” for explaining human behavior (desires, consciousness, words, deeds, thoughts are too complex), but (as Lora was saying above), there is an economic context important for understanding this particular era. After Columbus’s first voyage demonstrated there were islands within distance to Spain that might yield a return on such imperial plans, others, as you know, followed with more concrete plans. These latter do not seem to have had the same kind of wonder about the New World (although, in an age of no internet, they probably were curious in some sense).

     My points above were simply to ask how this period fits in with recent histories of curiosity. L. D. suggested this is a romanticized way of looking at Columbus, but I disagree that it either elevates him to some long-lost heroic ideal or attempts a type of ahistoricism. Some people do not wonder or are curious about the items I listed above; some do, and it may be due to temperament/personality.

     • Mark,
       I agree there may be differences in temperament/personality in that respect, and I don’t think pointing out that Columbus might have been motivated by this sort of drive (among others) necessarily romanticizes him. (Perhaps there can be malign curiosity as well as benign curiosity, or more precisely curiosity that ends up having unfortunate or malign effects?) However, I just don’t know enough about Columbus to have a well-formed view on this. Nor am I familiar with Ball’s book on curiosity (or any of the literature specifically about curiosity, for that matter).

       It does seem to me though that if something was more or less “in the cards” for structural and/or economic reasons (as IW’s account of the voyages, for instance. I think suggests), then personality characteristics of particular individuals may be less important in those contexts as causal factors (though they still may be worth exploring).

       In other words, personality and temperament matter more causally in some contexts than others. If Lincoln had a found a general with Grant’s temperament and proclivities earlier, the Union might have won the Civil War a little sooner (maybe, maybe not, but it’s not an outlandish suggestion). On the other hand, if none of the explorers of Columbus’s era had been especially motivated by wonder or curiosity, they probably would have set sail anyway.

       One can still ask “what motivated person X to do Y”? as long as one acknowledges that it may be very likely that Y would have happened anyway irrespective of individual motivations.

5. This is such an interesting, if sharply defined, discussion. However, for a discussion of Columbus and the Iberian invasion of the lands that became America, I longed for some recognition of the extensive scholarship that Spanish- and Portuguese-speaking historians have produced. I think of Germán Arciniegas, a Colombian historian of humanism on all sides of the Atlantic (there are more than two!). In his essay “Don Quijote y la conquista de América” (•Revista Hispánica Moderna• 31 [1965]), Arciniegas argued that Cervantes’s classic novel offers a privileged hermeneutic key for understanding the mentalities of the conquistadores and their patrons. Cervantes’s novel came a century after the conquest, so how could that be? •Don Quijote• summarizes nearly two centuries of writing about chivalry and wandering knights that, Arciniegas demonstrated, the Spanish invaders, not excluding Hernán Cortés, cited frequently in their descriptions of the conquests they effected. They saw themselves following in the footsteps of •Amadis de Gaul• and •Orlando Furioso•, two of the most widely read books in Europe at the beginning of the 16th century. Gonzalo Jiménez Quesada, the founder of Bogotá, wrote •El Antijovio•, one of the best-known predecessors to •Don Quijote• while he was governor of what we now know as Colombia.

   Arciniegas does not mention •curiosity• as a feature of the mentality he describes as governing the invasion and settlement of América. Out of curiosity, I did a search in an electronic edition of •Don Quijote• for variations on curioso, curiosidad, etc. I found twenty uses. My conclusion was that “curiosity” was used in 19 of these instances in purely negative terms to designate a frivolous interest. In one instance (Book 1, chapter LII), the narrator states, “Pero el autor desta historia, puesto que con curiosidad y diligencia ha buscado los hechos que don Quijote hizo en su tercera salida, no ha podido hallar noticia de ellas, a lo menos por escrituras auténticas; sólo la fama ha guardado …” (But the author of this history, with curiosity and diligence sought out the deed that Don Quixote made on his third outing, but he could not find news of them, at least from reliable sources; only his fame has lasted…”). The end point struck me because Arciniegas emphasized that the conquistadores never cared about the who or what they encountered, be they in Mexico, Peru, the Netherlands, Italy, or fighting the Turks. Their goals were “adventure,” “fame,” “glory,” concretized as Sancho Panza understood well into riches and government over base populations forced to kneel before an imperious and imperial will. In contrast, “aventura” appears in the text 269 times, all that I could see used in a positive connotation.

   Of course •Don Quijote• cannot explain Columbus, coming a hundred years later, but Cervantes’s work is particularly useful hermeneutically because Cervantes explicitly ironizes every aspect of the genre. He accepted and honored in the depths of his soul the positive core of the ideas his time invoked through chivalry, but he also understood that the noble essence only had (has) full force in the world of imagination. In everyday affairs, whenever and wherever humans juggle for power and priority, but also seek security and shelter, the results never come close to what the ideals promise. Cervantes’s irony is something we contemporary historians might keep in mind. Like the conquistadores, we live in a world bedeviled by beautiful words like “curiosity,” “enterprise,” “initiative,” “liberty,” “democracy,” “equality,” “justice,” “civilization.” The words invoke for us at this particular moment noble ideals that have historically been inseparable from crimes we all by now should understood as foundational to our national histories. That poses a crazy-making dilemma, with the greater risk being realism turning into nihilism. We need to be careful when we invoke these talismanic terms and use them sparingly, only when the noble core is demonstrable empirically and hermeneutically. I don’t know if Columbus was “curious” and if so if his contemporaries considered that something he ought to keep under control. His quest for fame and wealth is more clearly demonstrable, and those goals his contemporaries likely thought were “virile,” or in more modern language, “natural.”

   • Louis:

     On your point about the contingency of combinations of personality and temperament leading to varied effects, I agree that a case-by-case basis can help explain the “why” factor. This is, actually, one of my questions: Why Columbus? Historians, economists, anthropologists, neuro-biologists will all register slightly different answers. I guess I’m looking through a holistic lens to understand human behavior so a comprehensible narrative can be given to the majority of people uninterested in the aforementioned disciplines (particularly undergraduates who hope to receive a competent “historical” education but also want to know a pragmatic answer (what use is this knowledge to me)?

     “On the other hand, if none of the explorers of Columbus’s era had been especially motivated by wonder or curiosity, they probably would have set sail anyway.”

     From the histories of curiosity (and informative, contextualized histories of science) that I’m looking at, a pattern is emerging that suggests that “inquiry,” “wonder,” and “curiosity” would not have happened unless specific institutions, forces, and thoughts converged in a “perfect storm” type of scenario. On the other hand, I was asking whether “transhistorical” desires/actions such as eating, sleeping, dreaming could also include something akin to “wonder” or “curiosity” (Aristotle’s “desire to know”).

     Richard: Thank you for these sources to consider.

     “Don Quijote summarizes nearly two centuries of writing about chivalry and wandering knights that, Arciniegas demonstrated, the Spanish invaders, not excluding Hernán Cortés, cited frequently in their descriptions of the conquests they effected. They saw themselves following in the footsteps of Amadis de Gaul and Orlando Furioso, two of the most widely read books in Europe at the beginning of the 16th century.”

     This is an intriguing way to understand how linguistic usage can accumulate, over long periods of time, associated ideas (such as chivalry and fame/glory via fictional works). I’m sure that Columbus, Cortés, Las Casas, et al. all carried unique combinations of memories, ideas, and desires (maybe the same general culture, but internalized in unrepeatable ways so as to produce conflicting subsequent events [again, Why Columbus?]). Actually, in a recent history of the Scientific Revolution, David Wootton points out that in 1486 (two years after Columbus’s proposal to reach a known land, China) Fernão Dulmo (whom I had not heard of before) “proposed a quite new type of enterprise [new because seeking something unknown], a voyage westwards across the ocean into the unknown to find . . . new lands. The voyage probably never took place, but it would have been one of discovery rather than exploration. Dulmo discovered nothing; but his concept of discovery was soon to take on a life of its own.”*

     “Like the conquistadores, we live in a world bedeviled by beautiful words like “curiosity,” “enterprise,” “initiative,” “liberty,” “democracy,” “equality,” “justice,” “civilization.” The words invoke for us at this particular moment noble ideals that have historically been inseparable from crimes we all by now should understood as foundational to our national histories. That poses a crazy-making dilemma, with the greater risk being realism turning into nihilism.”

     Yes, the enchantment of words can beguile how we can understand our own selves (let alone a statistical group classified by competing categories). I think the words you mentioned are human-centered in that they describe an after-the-fact, retrospective classification of events that have transpired (a group of people created a democracy; my individual longings and subsequent decisions gave me a sense of liberty (although, the free will debate enters in here). My fascination with curiosity is that it can seem to be both an originating force and a justifying tenet for future actions. How to determine which concepts derive ultimately from the body/biology and which are rationalizations is a fruitful debate. I think historians are ultimately writing about human interactions with each other (both subjective- and objective-leaning varieties) and with the objective, natural world. If humans do not experience any positive fundamental desire/force that can be described as (lead to, artificially or be derived from) “curiosity,” it does leave us (and the historical enterprise) gazing at nihilistic tendencies. I would think that something constructive about the exploration of primary sources/artifacts left by other humans could be viewed as “good” (especially since the humanities is devoted to relaying that information to the general public). Correct me if I misinterpreted your suspicions about the terms you mentioned (“democracy,” “liberty,” etc.).

     Just some points to add:

     In Bushman’s America Discovers Columbus (see above), this new, positive use of “curiosity” seems established (although the context is not always clear in the short paragraphs cited by Bushman). Thomas Prince, in his Chronological History of New-England (1736) notes that Columbus, “[b]eing a skilful Geographer and Navigator, and of a very curious Mind, He becomes possess’d, with a strong perswasion, that in order to Balance the Terraqueous Globe & Proportion the Seas and Lands to each other, there must needs be form’d a mighty Continent on the other Side, which Boldness, Art and Resolution will soon Discover.”**

     John Newbery, the British publisher of children’s books, helped release a volume of discovery-themed books entitled The World Displayed (1759). From the introduction: “Columbus made the daring and prosperous voyage, which gave a new world to European curiosity and European cruelty” (maybe two sides of the same coin?).***

     Historians of science have also weighed in on the impact of Columbus. Wootton’s recent synthesis, The Invention of Science (2015), analyzes the mariner’s impact in Chapter 3, “Inventing Discovery.” Noting that Columbus “had no word” to actually describe his recent experience in the West Indies, Wootton finds that “only Portuguese had a word (discobrir) for ‘discovery’” and Columbus “could not appeal to it because he wrote the accounts of his voyage not in Portuguese but in Spanish and Latin. The nearest classical Latin verbs are invenio (find out), reperio (obtain) and exploro (explore). . . . In modern translations these word are often represented by the word ‘discovery’, but this obscures the fact that in 1492 ‘discovery’ was not an established concept.”****

     He also contends that these post-1492 usages of “discovery” rely on the idea of primary claims or having acted first: “someone who announces a discovery is, like Columbus, claiming to have got there first, and to have opened the way for all those who will follow him. . . . [Like Francis Crick and James Watson’s announcement concerning DNA] Discoveries are moments in an historical process that is intended to be irreversible. The concept of discovery brings with it a new sense of time as linear rather than cyclical. If the discovery of America was a happy accident, it gave rise to another even more remarkable accident—the discovery of discovery.”***** I think Wootton is thinking here of a secular version of linear historical time (Progress); as historiographers know, Augustine’s City of God precedes such concepts by a thousand years (and even further back to ancient cultures such as the Hebrews).

     * David Wootton, The Invention of Science: A New History of the Scientific Revolution (New York: HarperCollins, 2015), 58.

     ** Bushman, America Discovers Columbus, 27.

     *** Ibid., 99.

     **** Wootton, The Invention of Science, 57-58.

     ***** Wootton, The Invention of Science, 60-61.

6. Mark, would you mind sharing with us Wootton’s evidence re: the lack of a word for “discover” in Spanish? The word “descubrir” is the Spanish cognate of the Portuguese term — a language Columbus spoke well enough, surely — and both words come from late Latin, and both words carry the same range of meanings in both languages. Unless Watters has a cite to some etymological study tracing the word from late Latin to Portuguese to Spanish, I’m going to assume the cognates developed in parallel, possibly from medieval science but just as easily from medieval ecclesiology.

   Also, precisely when, per Bushman, is the “new meaning” of curiosity established in re: Columbus (or anybody else)? The examples you cite are from the 18th century, the age of Enlightenment, not the age of discovery.

   You have certainly established that people writing at a later time have developed a conception of curisoity as a virtue in some contexts, and have retroactively made Coilumbus a symbol of that virtue. You seem deeply invested in naturalizing “curiosity” — specifically a search for the unknown — as a human character trait in every age. As Richard suggests above, it’s worth considering what is accomplished — and what is destroyed — by claiming for the time-bound and contingent the unassailability (thanks to the 18th-19th century rise of science) of being “natural.”

   So, I would ask you: why Columbus? Why, when so many Americans and Europeans seem willing to question and challenge and change the common wisdom on what counted for virtue and who gets to stand for it, and when so many statues that celebrate figure who made bank or made a name in various forms of conquest, plunder, and man-stealing — why are you so eager to prop up Columbus in his own time as a figure that can illuminate the workings of curiosity.

   The dude wasn’t curious. He had a wife to appease, a mistress to pay, a family to feed, and debts piling up. The example of Duimo seems more than sufficient to answer your question, “Why Columbus”? The answer: it was an accident. He was looking for a quick passage to the known lands of the far east to turn a nice profit for his sponsors and himself and by miscalculation he stumbled upon something he wasn’t even looking for.

   Why Columbus? He got lucky.

   The Taino, not so much.

   • Wootton also references the older genealogy of this term to Latin, but I’m typing in a place (namely, my at my parents’ house) where I don’t have access to his book (I’ll contact you via alternate channels).

     “Also, precisely when, per Bushman, is the “new meaning” of curiosity established in re: Columbus (or anybody else)? The examples you cite are from the 18th century, the age of Enlightenment, not the age of discovery.”

     Bushman is not interested in the concept of curiosity, but she reinforces Ball’s claim that, after the 1600s, obstacles to curiosity’s negative image (and subordination to “wonder”) were removed, allowing for our current praise of Big Science. However, I didn’t find any specific references to curiosity in her book until the first English-language accounts of Columbus’s life (thus the sources mentioned in the colonial 1700s). I would like to read Columbus’s entire voyage log and look at the translation history because this is a linguistic way of establishing a concept. However, I still believe that human bodies/minds can experience wonder/curiosity without having to verbalize this feeling (obviously, this is a debate that’s ongoing with implications for the history of ideas).

     “The dude wasn’t curious. He had a wife to appease, a mistress to pay, a family to feed, and debts piling up. The example of Dulmo seems more than sufficient to answer your question, “Why Columbus”? The answer: it was an accident. He was looking for a quick passage to the known lands of the far east to turn a nice profit for his sponsors and himself and by miscalculation he stumbled upon something he wasn’t even looking for. Why Columbus? He got lucky.”

     I agree that Dulmo offers another “Columbus” who apparently had similar ideas. I don’t think, however, that these kinds of dudes were common. However, if there were new sources uncovered of multiple Columbus-type figures, it would only transfer my idea that Columbus displayed curious inquiries about the western Atlantic to additional people living in the same vicinity (thinking about the undiscovered portions of the Atlantic).

     I am not saying that Columbus was X (curious) and therefore, he possessed this thing called X for his entire life (this is what Collingwood discredits). However, at some point in his human experience, Columbus shows that he is wondering about things that other people are either: 1. Not wondering about or 2. Wondering about but not to the point of wanting to take actions. So to argue that “Columbus was not curious” because he had other, more satisfying ways of understanding his actions (he had to support people and survive) does not negate the notion that we can re-enact his life more accurately if we imagine Columbus wandering around Spain, Portugal, and other Mediterranean places (as Scott’s film does) thinking about the traditions and ideas he inherited (monsters, cities of gold, Garden of Eden) during these quiet moments when contemplating the stars at night (which was a hell of a lot easier without light pollution) or looking across the seas and letting his imagination wander.

     Collingwood critiques the “substantialist” view of history by Livy and Tacitus because of its problems. After Collingwood locates substantialist thinking in Tacitus, he says (apologies for the lengthy quote): “[W]hen Tacitus describes the way in which the character of a man like Tiberius broke down beneath the strain of empire, he represents the process not as a change in the structure or conformation of a personality but as the revelation of features in it which had hitherto been hypocritically concealed. Why does Tacitus so misrepresent facts? Is it simply out of spite, in order to blacken the characters of the men whom he has cast for the part of villains? Is it in pursuance of a rhetorical purpose, to hold up awful examples to point his moral and adorn his tale? Not at all. It is because the idea of development in a character, and idea so familiar to ourselves, is to him a metaphysical impossibility. A ‘character’ is an agent, not an action; actions come and go, but the ‘characters’ ( as we call them), the agents from whom they proceed, are substances, and therefore eternal and unchanging. Features in the character of a Tiberius or a Nero which only appeared comparatively late in life must have been there all the time. A good man cannot become bad. . . . Power does not alter a man’s character; it only shows what kind of man he already was.”*

     I do not believe this conjecture about curiosity in Columbus’s character/experiences in the years before 1492 leads to a kind of substantialism. Is it possible that, before Columbus left Spain, he was so immersed in his context that he temporally wondered about the types of plants, animals, and cultures either in his imagined China (supplied by empirical data such as Marco Polo, admittedly) or in the ocean itself (Mermaids? Dragons?). It does seem that Columbus eventually became used to his “new world” and the luster of the unknown wore off to a degree. This chapter in his life reveals the tragic unfolding of his well-known decisions to force some Native Americans back to Spain as potential converts and subdue others to mine for gold. This is why some people (including myself) find him interesting. It’s the same reason why people still read MacBeth or watch documentaries about the Holocaust; the tragedy of what happened induces a curiosity to find out why (or, in the case of the former, to watch tragedy unfold). This depends, of course, on whether one finds the initial stray thoughts of Columbus (or today’s astronauts/technicians) attractive: Should one wonder or ask questions about where one hasn’t gone? Just asking that question seems to interrogate current scientific practice.

     Like Collingwood, I aim to re-enact the inner thoughts of historical figures, but, in addition, something closer to the human drama that involves both inner and outer parts. This radical empiricist mode of history would seek to know the dialectical interplay between Columbus’s (to take one example) subjective consciousness and the natural world he experienced (despite my having discriminated between the two, I subscribe wholly to James’s metaphor of the “stream of consciousness” to complicate such a stance; this is not a hard-and-fast dualism). Peter Johnson agrees that there was a problem facing Collingwood’s account of history. Re-enactment is attainable “only if actions are construed as embodying thoughts. But human actions are often inspired as much by emotion as by thought. Thus, if it is the thought the action embodies which makes history possible . . . then the field of history is going to be correspondingly narrowed.”**

     I am interested in Columbus partly because he’s not usually the first person to associate with the ubiquitous (but flawed) idea of a “Scientific Revolution.” With recent studies of particular aspects of “modern science” demonstrating how numerous components were needed to naturalize the aspirations and projects of current scientists (including NASA), I began thinking about what part Columbus played in this shift (which Ball finds in the 1600s, even though he finds Columbus helping to initiate such a change earlier). I have also been stimulated by Stephen Gaukroger’s inquiry as to why science in the Western world became institutionalized with enough authority to place all forms of cognition under its aegis (elevating naturalism, positivism, and empiricism in the process), in contrast to other regions where problems were addressed by scientific methodologies but then abandoned once it served its purpose. His just-completed four-volume examination of “Science and Modernity” has been quite helpful to my research (including an answer as to why some people in the United States could believe that a “science of love” was doable in the first place).

     * R. G. Collingwood, The Idea of History, rev. edition (New York: Oxford University Press, 2005), 44.
     ** Peter Johnson, Collingwood’s The Idea of History: A Reader’s Guide (New York: Bloomsbury, 2013), 24.

     • Heed not the captains, but the currents; heed not the thinkers, but the thoughts.

       https://s-usih.org/2017/10/readings-in-western-culture-martin-luther-500-years-later/

7. I enjoyed this article and the comments are valid. I don’t think anyone would argue CC was curious about the ocean and what was beyond it. However, his actions after arriving in what he thought was Asia show the curiosity took a back seat to the greed and religious fanaticism. The enterprise was about commerce: finding a faster route to he riches of Cathay. I’m sure Elon Musk is curious about space, but his entire enterprise is a scheme to exploit space for financial gain.

   • Brian,

     This might be the crux of the discussion: is curiosity predicated on a complete vacuum (nothing either enters the mind or is pictured therein) about a particular conception of what is out west, which allows the mind to fill in the blanks, or is curiosity a byproduct of known variables (landmass, flora, and fauna already filled in by reading/scanning maps, travel narratives, and listening to sailors’ tall tales) that are being associate in the mind in a Lockean-type fashion? I think that curiosity, as used casually today by space enthusiasts, is something the mind does when various bits of empirical data (Mars, starlight, photos from Hubble, sci-fi movies, pulps by Edgar Rice Burroughs) are arranged in the mind and certain blank spots in the narrative emerge: Why is earth the only known inhabited place when other images suggest a possibility that Star Trek could have the final word?

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