In Search of Columbus: The Sources for the First Vovage by David HenigeReview by: William F. KeeganThe Florida Historical Quarterly, Vol. 71, No. 1 (Jul., 1992), pp. 90-91Published by: Florida Historical SocietyStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/30148196 .

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90 FLORIDA HISTORICAL QUARTERLY

In Search of Columbus: The Sources for the First Vovage. By David Henige. (Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 1991. xiii, 359 pp. Preface, acknowledgments, tables, maps, appendices, bib- liography, index. $24.95.)

All that is known of Columbus's first voyage comes from a remarkable document called the diario de a bordo. Rediscovered in 1791 in the form of a holographic manuscript in the hand of Bartolom6 de las Casas, the diario was immediately accepted as a faithful transcription of Columbus's personal diary. The orig- inal diary, given to Queen Isabel at the end of the first voyage, and the copy she had made for Columbus both disappeared in the sixteenth century leaving the Las Casas transcription as the last surviving edition. For the past two centuries, the diario has been used by historians and anthropologists to trace Columbus's first voyage and to describe native West Indian lifeways. With few exceptions, the accounts in the diario have been accepted as historical facts. Thus enters David Henige.

Employing techniques from textual criticism, Henige evaluates the degree to which the diario is an accurate record of the events of the first voyage. Through comparisons with the other surviving descriptions of the voyage (Las Casas's Historia de las Indias and Ferdinand Columbus's biography of his father) and with his careful re-readings of modern-language transla- tions, Henige shows that the diario is the work of many writers and the result of many drafts. The additions and emendations began with Columbus, who kept this record to serve personal goals, and continued through Las Casas who forever changed the original diary through the process of abstraction. Even the Las Casas abstraction has been modified in the course of produc- ing modern-language translations.

The first part of the Search clearly demonstrates that the

diario lacks sufficient historical integrity to be read as a map of Columbus's first voyage. The diario is not, as those seeking to identify the first landfall have proposed, an exact record. Instead, it is a political document, an autobiography, and other discourses woven into a single text. The Spanish humanist Ramon Iglesia noted in 1944 that Columbus seemed to be writing the promotion literature of a tourist bureau, which he did with Italian exhuber- ance.

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BOOK REVIEWS 91

Having reached the conclusion that the diario lacks historical integrity, there is no justification for the second part of the Search. Because Henige does not believe that the diario can be used to retrace Columbus's route, there is no point in criticizing efforts to identify the first landfall island that rely entirely on the document. Had Henige stated that the first landfall cannot be determined with the presently available documentation, this would have been an excellent book. Unfortunately, he chose to criticize particular points in some of the twenty-five different re-creations of Columbus's first voyage that have been proposed to date. Admittedly, some of the criticism is warranted. However, Henige often strikes randomly at individual points in particular tracks without due consideration for the broader logic in which these points reside. Even less forgivable is his tendency to dismiss lines of inquiry with which he is unfamiliar, notably mathematics and computers ("crunching the data in the diario on an electronic Bed of Procrustes" [p. 139]). Moreover, Henige fails to complete his task. Having gotten part way into Columbus's track through the Bahamas, the book abruptly ends.

In Search of Columbus suffers the burden of a split personality. On the one hand, the use of techniques from textual criticism adds important insights that make the first part of this book of immediate and substantial interest to all historians who rely on unique texts in writing and interpreting the past. It will be of special interest to those investigating Spanish colonial history, a history illuminated by texts that are similarly structured. On the other hand, Henige's criticisms of landfall-related research lack a coherent foundation and will serve only to confuse the issues further.

Florida Museum of Natural History, Gainesville, Florida

WILLIAM F. KEEGAN

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