Columbus Unbound: Walls, or their Absence, in the Age/Imaginary of Exploration

In late medieval, renaissance, and early modern periods, walls and barriers were envisioned and built, seen and experienced throughout the “Old World.” If there was one aspect that united the cities, city states, principalities, or emerging nation states, it was the near ubiquity of walls, precisely what existed to separate these entities. It was this commonality of walls and barriers that formed the cultural given and spatial experience of those in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries who were the foreground participants in the “Age of Exploration.” Among these was Christopher Columbus. Whether lauded or reviled, Columbus and others of his age and expansionist, imperialistic, and commercial objectives are almost entirely remembered and visualized as “explorers” in relation to where they went and what they sought; much less are they discussed in reference to the walled world from which they came. This paper starts from that latter, walled reality of Columbus and others as it observes the notable absence of walls and barriers in the early modern maps, prints, other imagery, and written reports of their voyages. It was essentially a set of “walled-in,” early modern Europeans who explored the “New World” and were the first shapers and consumers of the information/imagery of those explorations. Discussing the explorers’ destinations and their inhabitants as purposefully "unbound,” this paper explores less what was explored by Columbus and others than what they and their contemporaries purposefully left unwalled as part of their strategy of showing and justifying their expansionist aims over place and peoples.