In Search of Columbus: The Sources for the First Voyage by David HenigeReview by: Pauline Moffitt WattsThe American Historical Review, Vol. 97, No. 4 (Oct., 1992), p. 1181Published by: Oxford University Press on behalf of the American Historical AssociationStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/2165522 .

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General 1181

Norbert Elias, Keith Thomas, Mary Douglas, Michel Foucault, and Robert Darnton, among others. Some theoretical context having thus been established, he traces the intellectual roots of modern animal advo- cacy, beginning with Bentham, Kant, and Rousseau, as well as its institutionalization, proceeding through the nineteenth-century anticruelty and antivivisection movements, to the recent disruptive protests of the Animal Liberation Front and its allies.

Most of the ground Tester covers in the course of this survey, which relies on secondary works and readily available primary sources, will be familiar to the growing number of historians interested in the subject. The concluding discussion of the radical wing of the current animal advocacy movement in Britain, which has in recent years moved from confronting fox hunters to burning laboratories and setting car bombs, is, however, a fresh contribution.

HARRIET RITVO Massachusetts Institute of Technology

DAVID HENIGE. In Search of Columbus: The Sources for the First Voyage. Tucson: University of Arizona Press. 1991. Pp. xiii, 359.

On his return from the first of his four voyages to the Americas, Christopher Columbus presented his log, or diario, to his regents who arranged to have it copied. Both the autograph and the copy presumably made have been lost. The diario survives only in the collection of excerpts, digests, and notes made by Bartolome de Las Casas; these were probably revised over a period of several decades in the first half of the sixteenth century, as Las Casas worked on the Historia de las Indias. Las Casas's version of Columbus's diario disappeared for some centuries but was recovered in 1791 by the Spanish scholar Martin Fernandez de Navarrete, who printed it in 1825 in his Colecci6n de los viages y descubrimientos que hicieron por mar los Espainoles. In 1892, Cesare de Lollis published an authoritative edition of the text in volume 1 of the Raccolta di documenti e studi pubblicati della R. Commissione Colom- biana. More recently a cluster of editions and transla- tions that supplement the Raccolta edition in various noteworthy ways have appeared. These include Man- uel Alvar's Diario del descubrimiento (1976), Oliver Dunn and James E. Kelley, Jr.'s The Diario of Christo- pher Columbus's First Voyage to America (1989), and Consuelo Varela's Diario del primer y tercer viaje de Crist6bal Col6n, in Obras completas de Fray Bartolome de Las Casas (vol. 14, 1989).

It is the complex fortuna of this text known as the diario that is the subject of David Henige's volume. The book is divided into two parts. Part 1, "The Documents," sifts through the sediments of problems and issues that have accumulated in the transcribing, editing, and translating of this vexing piece. Henige painstakingly contextualizes the diario in several ways that will engage specialists. These include an intricate

tracing of the alterations made by Las Casas himself to his own manuscript and a comparison of the diario with two important contemporary sources, Las Casas's aforementioned Historia and Ferdinand Co- lumbus's biography of his father.

Part 2, "The Historiographical Debate," grows out of the latter chapters of part 1, which examine complex questions regarding the inconsistencies in observations and figures recorded by Columbus at various stages of the first voyage. In the main, this section consists of an exhaustive presentation of the landfall debate, which only the most indefatigable aficionados are likely to navigate completely and suc- cessfully. Unless definitive archaeological evidence surfaces, the issue is likely to remain unresolved.

The extraordinary and fascinating detail of Heni- ge's book and its technical scaffoldings are likely to make it inaccessible to all save specialists. The full import of its arguments cannot be grasped without (at the very least) the publications of Alvar, Dunn and Kelley, and Varela at hand. Yet the author unremit- tingly postures adversarial relationships between his study and the sources and products of collective scholarly endeavor that make it possible in the first place. Put somewhat differently, the line between constructive grapplings with this protean text, be- tween Henige's self-avowed stance of "pyrrhonist skepticism" and tilting at windmills, can be thin indeed.

It is difficult to imagine that any scholar who has even cursorily examined the diario could remain unaware that we lack the autograph, that we know it only in Las Casas's version. While the issue of author- ship may have been blurred by some who work with the text, this tends to occur in less-rigorous editions and translations, surely not in the ones mentioned above. So what seenjs to be one of the underlying stances of the book-that the confusion or conflations of Columbus's words and those of Las Casas is wide- spread-seems somewhat overstated. So, too, the implication that scholars who work on Columbus and the late-medieval and Renaissance cultures out of which he emerged are unaware of the vagaries and complexities of manuscript traditions. Such scholars know only too well that "pure" texts are illusions, that what we have to work with are always pastiches, palimpsests of the gradual painstaking accretions of collective endeavor. By way of ending, I offer Henige some words from Caroline Bynum's introduction to her Fragmentation and Redemption: Essays on Gender and the Human Body in Medieval Religion (1991): "the writing of history must come to terms gracefully with the incomplete ... I suggest that the pleasure we find in research and storytelling about the past is en- hanced both by the awareness that our own voices are provisional and by confidence in the revisions that the future will bring" (p. 10).

PAULINE MOFFITT WATTS

Sarah Lawrence College

AMERICAN HISTORICAL REVIEW OCTOBER 1992

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