SOURCE: "Kidnapping Language," in Marvelous Possessions: The Wonder of the New World, The University of Chicago Press, 1991, pp. 86-118.

In the following essay—a version of which was originally presented at Oxford University and the University of Chicago in 1988—Greenblatt examines descrip tions by several explorers of European interactions with Native Americans, and discusses the European approach to interpreting the gestures and signs of an alien culture.

On his third voyage to the New World, Columbus found himself anchored off the coast of an island he named Trinidad. A large canoe with twenty-four men, armed with bows and arrows and wooden shields, approached his ship. The sight impressed Columbus; the Indians, he writes, were 'well-proportioned and not negroes, but whiter than the others who have been seen in the Indies, and very graceful and with handsome bodies, and hair long and smooth, cut in the manner of Castile'...