The title of this book derives from the fifteenth-century endeavours of a sequence of navigators sponsored by both Portuguese and Spanish monarchs who stumbled upon, and described, peoples within the Atlantic basin whose cultures had not been conceived of by the authors of classical ethnographical works and of Christian canonical texts. This happenstance forced the navigators and their associates, as well as those who reflected on their exploits, to provide explanations for the existence and condition of all such ‘discovered’ peoples. David Abulafia explains how those who responded to this challenge did so initially in terms that could most readily be accommodated within received wisdom whether this was of classical, Christian, mythological, or historical provenance. He then describes how their task became more difficult after Amerigo Vespucci, a Florentine explorer and publicist, demonstrated that what Columbus, his accomplices, and contemporaries had exposed to Christian scrutiny was a continent previously unknown to Christians and inhabited by people who had enjoyed a historical existence completely separate from that of the inhabitants of the Old World.

In the light of such irrefutable evidence, it seemed that educated Christians would have to reflect upon, and perhaps even reconceptualize, what they had previously known and taught concerning the origin of the world and the origin of mankind. However Abulafia also shows that as spiritual and civil leaders sought after explanations that could be reconciled with fundamental Christian tenets, particularly those relating to the Creation, the Fall, and the Redemption, Christians of a more practical bent were busily exploiting these previously unknown places and people for material advantage. Exploitation proceeded so rapidly that what had been discovered had been all but destroyed and certainly debased before any fresh moral directives on how to deal with this novelty had been decided upon. Therefore when clear guidelines came to be issued they could be formulated logically within the old paradigm, and without challenge to prevalent orthodoxy, because the peoples and societies that were now to be accommodated into the known world could be represented as primitive. This meant that the people could be categorized as ‘natural slaves’, as Aristotle had understood this term. This implied that because of their base or depraved condition these newly discovered peoples would have to be inducted by their cultural superiors into a disciplinary framework of government that would also be educative. The positive dimension to these guidelines was that they stipulated that all creatures of human shape, regardless of their social, educational, and cultural attainments, should be regarded as human beings endowed with souls. This ruling meant that church and civil leaders were morally obliged to provide for their protection and evangelization. In practice, as Abulafia makes clear, these stipulations involved no more than the appointment of some clergy to preach the Christian message to previously benighted people, and the creation of a legal framework – normally the Encomienda system – which would make certain that their rights under, and their obligations to, their Christian overlords would be defined and enforced. More originally it was decreed that any explorers who might encounter further previously unknown people would be obliged to engage in the ritual known as El Requirimiento, ‘The Requirement’, that involved the explorers pronouncing publicly in Castilian to these uncomprehending people that they were to become Christians and, on doing so, would become subjects and vassals of Ferdinand and Isabella. It was to be made equally clear to them that if they refused to comply they would be subjected to Christian conquest.

This sad narration has frequently been relayed, and the present author breaks new ground principally by showing that the formulae proposed for the resolution of the Christian moral dilemma created by the ‘discoveries’ had been worked out during the years of the Columbian encounter and not, as is frequently suggested, after the overthrow of the Aztec civilization in the valley of Mexico by Hernán Cortés. Indeed, as David Abulafia suggests in his concluding pages, the Spanish overthrow of Aztec society during the 1520s, and of the Inca civilization in Peru two decades later, followed by the absorption of the survivors of both conquests into the Encomienda system for the purposes of labour and revenue extraction, had already been rehearsed on the islands of the Caribbean. More particularly he shows that this strategy was justified by the arguments that had then been advanced by the church and the agents of the Spanish monarchy to legitimize those actions.

The book, as its subtitle indicates, is principally about Christopher Columbus and most of its pages are devoted to a reconstruction of the mental world of Columbus and of his actions in the Caribbean. This has been achieved through a close reading of all texts written by Columbus himself and his natural son Ferdinand Columbus, and also by the Dominican missionary Bartolomé de las Casas who had both known and served with Columbus and persisted as his apologist even when he bewailed subsequent Spanish actions in the Caribbean. Moreover Abulafia is also concerned to demonstrate that the response of Columbus to the society and problems he encountered in the Caribbean was little different from that of other Christians from similar background and experience who were confronted by the same problem. He does this convincingly and originally through an analysis of the texts composed by other authors employed in Spanish and Portuguese service who came in contact either with Caribbean or Brazilian coastal societies during those same decades, and also to the close of the sixteenth century. Abulafia contends that their responses to what was alien to their previous experience were similar, if not identical, to that of Columbus. He explains this commonality of response by suggesting that they had shared similar ethnographic knowledge and opinion, ranging from that expounded by Aristotle and Pliny to that narrated by Gerald of Wales and John Mandeville. More particularly he shows that all knew of the most recent Iberian colonial endeavour, the conquest of the Canary Islands, which had been in process for the previous 150 years. This episode, as Abulafia makes clear, was still being concluded and legitimized while the deeds of Columbus in the Caribbean – the New Canaries – were being enacted.

In thus explaining how experiences at colonization on the islands in the eastern Atlantic prepared Iberian adventurers for subsequent colonial efforts in the New World, Abulafia is revisiting an approach first attempted by the distinguished Belgian historian Charles Verlinden during the 1950s and 1960s, and that has continued to find favour with several Portuguese historians interested in the overseas exploits of their countrymen. But when Verlinden and his disciples argued that the islands of the Atlantic served as convenient stepping-stones over which to convey Christian people and practices from the Mediterranean to the Caribbean, they made reference principally to methods of fortification, sugar cultivation, and slavery. Abulafia, on the other hand, is identifying a more fundamental thread in Iberian methods of conquest, and in the justifications that made conquest possible. The importance that Abulafia establishes for the intellectual dimensions to the conquests of both the Canary Islands and the islands of the Caribbean is thus the crowning achievement of The discovery of mankind. David Abulafia is particularly successful in demonstrating how, regardless of place and time, a succession of Christian authors arrived at very similar conclusions when they sought to comprehend, explain, and recommend on the reform of those ‘stone age’ peoples, who had endured into their own time. And his second success is in explaining how these additions to Christian knowledge were communicated to the educated elite of their own world by some of the leading humanist scholars of each generation: by Giovanni Boccaccio and Francesco Petrarch in the case of the Canaries and by Peter Martyr in the case of the Caribbean.

One problem that Abulafia identifies from his study of these humanist texts is that opinion remained divided over whether the primitive peoples encountered were innocent survivors of a lost golden age who would readily be made into Christians by gentle persuasion, or whether they were people who had fallen into the thrall of Satan and were therefore inveterately dedicated to unspeakable vices ranging from incest to the eating of human flesh. However (and this is the weakness of this book) David Abulafia is not satisfied with being a first-class historian of ideas but proceeds further to establish what basis in fact existed for the negative reporting that gave rise to the pessimistic view of some humanists. For this he employs the method of comparing the testimony presented by observers on the ground with the knowledge of these long-lost cultures that has been gleaned by archaeologists and interpreted by anthropologists over the past number of decades.

In the case of the Canaries this exercise leads to the plausible conclusion that a distinct people inhabited each of the principal islands of the Canaries and that each had devised a habitat and society appropriate to the very different physical environments that confronted them. However Abulafia's endorsement of the view of the fifteenth- and sixteenth-century eyewitnesses that the inhabitants of the Canaries divided neatly between gentle Taínos and man-eating Caribs is less persuasive and makes but selective use of recent work by archaeologists and anthropologists most of which points to a population of diverse origins and with varied skills inhabiting each of the Caribbean islands. This literature suggests also that, if it was practised at all, cannibalism played but a limited ritualistic role in the culture of but some of the pre-Columbian inhabitants of the Caribbean. Moreover when he draws upon appraisals of the Tupinambá Indians of Brazil composed in the second half of the sixteenth century by authors as diverse as André Thevet, Jean de Léry, and Hans Staden, and assumes that the culture of this population was similar to that of the Caribs of a half-century before, Abulafia is deviating from his own insistence that texts must always be analysed within the context of the time and place in which they were produced. Thus while one can sympathize with Abulafia's sneering dismissal of the unproven assumptions of some post-colonial theorists that cannibalism is a mental construct of westerners to justify their exploitation of less-technologically accomplished people, he runs the risk of having his excellent close study of links between colonization in the islands of the Eastern and Western Atlantic being similarly dismissed because of his too ready acceptance that cannibalism was indulged in extensively by some of the pre-Columbian inhabitants of the Caribbean.