No abstract

The earliest 'westerners' known to have set eyes on the Bahamas and Caribbean Basin alternately marveled and shuddered at the nature and culture of an expanse where the sun shone more pervasively than anywhere in Mediterranean Europe. Upon his return to Europe in 1493, the most consequential of these early travelers, Christopher Columbus (about 1451-1506), hastened to inform the court of Aragon and Castile that his maiden voyage across the ocean to the parts of India (so reads Columbus's peculiar passport) had led his armada to a place where the sun's rays rose steeper and shone stronger than back home. This was not just a casual observation by a tourist dazzled by the tropics. Since at least the time of Herodotus (about 489-about 425 BCE), Mediterranean geography had culled such information from itinerants in order to establish at least the general latitude of faraway places like sub-Saharan Africa and the Indian Ocean. But as I am about to suggest, the Discoverer and other early naturalists to the New World also participated, with varying degrees of erudition, in a scientifi c and technical tradition that regarded sunlight and all other forms of celestial radiation as a divine effl ux possessing generative power in the region of the elements. So it should be no surprise that discussions concerning the nature of what came to be called Indias Occidentales crucially alluded to the 'aspect' of the skies over that newly discovered orb; nor that such discussions-in as far as early modern culture thought of itself as nature's culture-should have brought in tow the political lessons