These two volumes differ in their creative approach and in the length of the period they address. Jean-Pierre Moreau’s monograph covers a relatively short period and derives from painstaking searches in archives and libraries. Antonio Benítez-Rojo’s work sketches a highly personal vision of five centuries of Caribbean history.
Moreau follows a simple pattern. He divides the years 1493-1635 into three periods. For each he analyzes the known sources, the general environment of western Europe, the state of cartographic knowledge of the Caribbean, the nature of Carib society, and the extent of European penetration. He has located evidence of fairly numerous voyages by non-Spanish European traders and filibusters in the years for which records exist, suggesting that, with allowance for the years lacking, the Caribbean must have received a steady stream of European visitors.
Moreau attacks what he declares to be three false ideas widely held in France: (1) the smaller Caribbean islands had no history from 1493 until the arrival of D’Esnambuc at St. Kitts in 1625; (2) the Spanish neglected the Lesser Antilles; and (3) D’Esnambuc was the first French explorer to show deep interest in the islands. Moreau’s exposition clearly establishes steady interest by subjects of all Western European powers in trade and plunder, as well as continuing contacts with the Caribs that greatly influenced Amerindians and Europeans, Spanish attempts to colonize Trinidad in 1592 and successful occupation of St. Martin from 1634 to 1648, and finally the presence of other would-be colonizers besides D’Esnambuc, who was not the first from France to attempt a settlement. I suspect that the first and third ideas are less widely held outside France—or even within that country, because previous writers have noted the activities of European traders and marauders, although not to the extent that Moreau depicts. His pages on Carib society bring much new description.
Benítez-Rojo’s book is an interpretation of Caribbean history in terms of the Postmodern literary approach, deconstruction, chaos theory, and Freudian psychoanalysis. After sketching the Spanish occupation of the Greater Antilles and Las Casas’ efforts on behalf of the Indians, Benítez-Rojo jumps to a different subject: an interpretation of the plantation that raised tobacco and sugar for the world market as the predominant, unifying form for the history of all the islands—adopting a suggestion of Sidney Mintz. The greater part of the book consists of appreciations of Caribbean writers, especially Nicolás Guillén, Fernando Ortíz (to whom the book is dedicated), Alejo Carpentier, Wilson Harris, Fanny Buitrago, and Edgardo Rodríguez Juliá. Woven into the discussion are references to current European writing by Foucault, Barthes, and others. The value of this work as history is best described as minute; its value for the study of Caribbean literature is more substantial.
