The Unsettlement of America explores the career and legacy of Don Luis de Velasco, an early modern indigenous translator of the sixteenth-century Atlantic world who traveled far and wide and experienced nearly a decade of Western civilization before acting decisively against European settlement. The book attends specifically to the interpretive and knowledge-producing roles played by Don Luis as a translator acting not only in Native-European contact zones but in a complex arena of inter-indigenous transmission of information about the hemisphere. The book argues for the conceptual and literary significance of unsettlement, a term enlisted here both in its literal sense as the thwarting or destroying of settlement and as a heuristic for understanding a wide range of texts related to settler colonialism, including those that recount the story of Don Luis as it is told and retold in a wide array of diplomatic, religious, historical, epistolary, and literary writings from the middle of the sixteenth century to the middle of the twentieth. Tracing accounts of this elusive and complex unfounding father from the colonial era as they unfolds across the centuries, The Unsettlement of America addresses the problems of translation at the heart of his story and speculates on the implications of the broader, transhistorical afterlife of Don Luis for the present and future of hemispheric American studies.

BEYOND his birth, of poor and respectable parents, we know nothing positively about the earliest years of Columbus. His father was probably a wool-comber. The boy had the ordinary schooling of his time, and a touch of university life during a few months passed at Pavia; then at fourteen he chose to become a sailor. A seaman’s career in those days implied adventures more or less of a piratical kind. There are intimations, however, that in the intervals of this exciting life he followed the more humanizing occupation of selling books in Genoa, and perhaps got some employment in the making of charts, for he had a deft hand at design. We know his brother Bartholomew was earning his living in this way when Columbus joined him in Lisbon in 1470. Previous to this there seems to be some degree of certainty in connecting him with voyages made by a celebrated admiral of his time bearing the same family name, Colombo; he is also said to have joined the naval expedition of John of Anjou against Naples in 1459. Again, he may have been the companion of another notorious corsair, a nephew of the one already mentioned, as is sometimes maintained; but this sea-rover’s proper name seems to have been more likely Caseneuve, though he was sometimes called Coulon or Colon. Columbus spent the years 1470-1484 in Portugal. It was a time when the air was filled with tales of discovery. The captains of Prince Henry of Portugal had been gradually pushing their ships down the African coast and in some of these voyages Columbus was a participant. To one of his navigators Prince Henry had given the governorship of the Island of Porto Santo, of the Madeira group. To the daughter of this man, Perestrello, Columbus was married; and with his widow Columbus lived, and derived what advantage he could from the papers and charts of the old navigator. There was a tie between his own and his wife’s family in the fact that Perestrello was an Italian, and seems to have been of good family, but to have left little or no inheritance for his daughter beyond some property in Porto Santo, which Columbus went to enjoy. On this island Columbus’ son Diego was born in 1474.