The land Columbus loved : the Dominican Republic

Abstract

THE morning of discovery is timeless. Under the same limpid sky, in a blaze of sunshine, the implausibly blue waters of the Caribbean that once greeted Columbus roll in white-spumed surf against the island necklace off Florida, Yucatán, and Venezuela. To sail that turquoise sea, or to view it from aerial heights amid tufts of snow-white clouds, is to recapture an ineffable moment in humanity’s procession: the white man’s arrival in the Western World. Naively it was called the New World, though civilizations existed here to match anything the better-known continents had to offer. The name America created the illusion of a hemisphere’s birth, though actually only a phase is marked thereby upon an ancient continent’s calendar. The arrival of Columbus did not bring to life a new continent; it raised the curtain upon a great drama, the American Age, to be staged against an old but hitherto unexplored backdrop.