ABSTRACT
When Columbus set sail in 1492, he expected to find Cathay and the kingdom of the Great Khan, the pearls of Cipangu, species, gold, riches, perhaps the marvels of India, the biblical islands of Ophir, Saba, Tarshish, the distant Taprobana, the Aurea Chersonese and, without being aware of it, he found a new land. He expected to find lions, elephants, unicorns and camels, but instead he found animals no human being had seen before. The story of Columbus’s discovery is a chronicle of deception, of a conflict between marvellous expectations and bare, unsolicited facts. It is also a story of the workings of an imagination which resisted disillusion and strove to create a reality of its own, superimposing on the sun-bathed shores of the Caribbean a golden mirage of aged Oriental civilizations and, on the new but undistinguished animals, a tinge of the fabulous creatures with which the ancients had peopled the East. During the century which followed the discovery, the Europeans who risked facing a different reality – out of greed, desperation or vain hope – would eventually substitute an acceptance of the wonders of the New World for the early image which still had much of the Old in it. This chapter explores the incidents of that long and complex process, which began with Columbus landing on the beach of Guanahaní.
