Table Of ContentTERRA
COGNITA
TERRA
COGNITA
The Mental Discovery of America
Eviatar Zerubavel
With a new preface by the author
0
Transaction Publishers
New Brunswick (U.S.A.) and London (U.K.)
Second printing 2005
New material this edition copyright © 2003 by Transaction Publishers, New
Brunswick, New Jersey. Originally published in 1992 by Rutgers University
Press.
All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conven
tions. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by
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This book is printed on acid-free paper that meets the American National Stan
dard for Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials.
Library of Congress Catalog Number: 2002027187
ISBN: 0-7658-0987-7
Printed in the United States of America
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Zerubavel, Eviatar.
Terra cognita : the mental discovery of America / Eviatar Zerubavel ; with a
new preface by the author,
p. cm.
Originally published: New Brunswick, N.J. : Rutgers University Press,
cl992.
Includes bibliographical references (p. ) and index.
ISBN 0-7658-0987-7 (pbk. : alk. paper)
1. America—Discovery and exploration. 2. America—Discovery and
exploration—Psychological aspects. 3. Geography—History. 4. Geogra
phy—aspects. I. Title.
E121 .Z47 2002
910'.9—dc21 2002027187
To Yael
My companion on
this long voyage of
discovery called life
C O N T E N T S
Preface to the Transaction Edition ix
Preface xv
Acknowledgments xix
Introduction i
CHAPTER one
Did Columbus Discover America? 11
Pre-Columbian Discoveries of America 11
What Is America? 23
What Is a Discovery? 30
chapter two
The Mental Discovery of America 36
A Single Geographical Entity 38
A Separate Entity 49
chapter three
The Psychology of Discovering America 67
Innovation 70
Denial 86
Ambivalence 101
viii Contents
Conclusion 113
N otes 119
List of Maps 137
B ibliography 145
Index 155
P R E F A C E TO THE
T R A N S A C T I O N E D I T I O N
The landing of Christopher Columbus on the tiny island of
Guanahanf in the Bahamas on October 12,1492 is consid
ered by many a major historical watershed. As is evident from
the way we conventionally label everything that was in
America prior to this date as “pre-Columbian,” 1492 marks
the point where “American” history actually begins.1
Yet 1492 certainly does not constitute a point of historical
departurefoT Native Americans, whose ancestors had lived in
America for thousands of years before it was “discovered” by
Europe. By saying that Columbus discovered America, we
somehow imply that there was nobody there before him,
thereby tacitly suppressing the memory of the millions of
people who were actually living there at the time of his arrival.
One major problem of such a pronouncedly Eurocentric
view of the history of the Western Hemisphere is thus the
fact that, having already been inhabited for thousands of
years before him, America was clearly not discovered by Co
lumbus in 1492. Furthermore, even if it was indeed redis
covered later by people other than its original settlers, he
was certainly not the first one to do so, as Norsemen from
Iceland and Greenland had already reached its shores five
centuries before him.
Preface to the Transaction Edition
My own critique of the conventional 1492 narrative is quite
different, however, as I specifically focus on the European
“discovery” of America after Columbus. Rather than dwell
on the fact that he was not the first one to discover America,
I argue that he was not the last one either! As we shall see,
there were many others (sailors as well as mapmakers and
cosmographers) who, in the wake of Columbus’ physical
encounter with America in 1492, came to play a much more
important role in its wœnta/discovery.
As is quite apparent from both the tide and subtide of
the book, my main contention is that “discovering” entails a
rather critical cognitive dimension, as it implies some under
standing of what one has “discovered.” By giving credit for
discovering the New World to someone who stubbornly kept
insisting that it was part of the Old, we ignore the obvious fact
that he did not actually comprehend what he “discovered.”
Columbus may have been the hero of America’s physical,
but not mental discovery. The unsung heroes of that quite
fascinating story were those who helped Europe understand
where he landed. As the book will make clear, it actually
took Europe almost 300 years from Columbus’ first encoun
ter with the New World to realize that it was indeed fully
detached from the Old. 1492 thus marks the beginning of a
long voyage that was in fact completed only in the late eigh
teenth century.
♦
My main goal here is to capture the cosmographie visions of
sixteenth-century Europeans following Columbus’ historic
voyages to the Caribbean as manifested in the way they are
actually portrayed on their world maps. These maps vividly
document Europe’s various attempts to grapple with the
cosmographie implications of its first encounters with the
“new” lands on the other side of the Atlantic, from Colum-
Preface to the Transaction Edition xi
bus’ own relentless efforts to force practically everything he
found there into the old, tricontinental image of the earth
to the creation of an altogether new image.
Some of these maps capture the pronouncedly conserva
tive attempts to deny the separateness of the New World
from the Old, as they express the desire to maintain some
connectedness between them. The America they portray
is still part of the Old World. The imaginary land bridge
they feature joining Asia and North America is the last
piece of string on which the classical cosmography is still
hanging.
The essence of a New World lies in its being separate and
distinct from the Old, yet establishing the separateness of
any entity from others is often offset by the opposite urge to
preserve some contact between them. The stubborn effort
to deny the separateness of the New World from the Old, as
visually expressed in attempts to depict them as blending
into or partly attached to one another, is somewhat analo
gous to our need to cling to something as we first try to
establish a separate identity of our own. The mythical land
bridge that keeps the young “new” continent attached to
the Old World on some sixteenth-century maps is the func
tional equivalent of the security blankets that help us feel
connected to something as we try to let go of our primal
illusion of being literally attached to our parents in order to
establish some psychological distance from them. The dis
covery of the Bering Strait in the eighteenth century thus
represented the final rupture of the symbolic umbilical cord
that linked the New World to the Old in sixteenth- and sev
enteenth-century Europe’s fantasies.
♦
The story of the mental discovery of America also helps shed
light on the nature of scientific revolutions. As we are re
