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At the start of Spain's colonial enterprise, the itinerant court of Ferdinand and Isabella was the first stage where travel accounts and specimens of all kinds coalesced and where the New World "yielded wonder on top of wonder."1 In May 1493, upon returning from his first voyage, Columbus presented at the royal court in Barcelona a procession of naked Indians adorned with gold and accompanied by multicolored parrots. This spectacle previously astonished crowds in Lisbon and Seville, and a similar display would follow his second voyage. After spending three years in La Espanola, in October 1496, the explorer brought to Burgos a cavalcade of Indians and mules loaded with gold objects (Bernaldez 600, 678). Inscribed as wonders-that which exceeds the ordinary-and inserted in the ambiance of court spectacles, these subjects and objects represented the fertile lands, great mines of gold, and the thousands of other valuable things that the Admiral listed in his writings and professed to have discovered in the New World. As the physical extension of these texts, New World wonders carried with them the sense of unmediated experience and the irrefutable proof of financial success. Praised and admired for their visible and tangible connection with the New World, wonders functioned as pars pro loto, shards that reconstructed the new territories piece by piece in a carefully edited depiction of what the West Indies might be (Mason 1-22).
Barcelona, Burgos, and Medina del Campo were also the stages where Columbus created situations of pleasure exclusively intended to satisfy the monarchs' taste for wonder. His intentions were to advertise his mistaken landfall in the Caribbean as success, fulfill the financial expectations of his royal sponsors, and buy some time in order to reach India and find gold. At the royal palace, New World wonders not only depicted wealthy and exotic lands, but also were constituted as minimal representations of a boundless gift bestowed upon the Spanish sovereigns by the Lord and retrieved by Columbus.2 Displaced from their original location and environment, Amerindian people, along with their crafts and pets, became objects that circulated between Columbus and the monarchs serving as profane tokens of holy grace and wealth. The theatrical presentation of New World wonders in Spain was at the center of a complex network...