I Discover "I Discover Columbus"

 

                I Discover Columbus … Robert E. Lawson

                     1941 (First Edition; library covered)

“A True Chronicle of the Great Admiral & his Finding of the New World, narrated by the Venerable Parrot Aurelio, who Shared in the Glorious Venture. Set Down and Illustrated by Robert Lawson”

“This Book is the Property of the Georgia State Board of Education and is Furnished to Okefenokee Regional Library. DISCARDED.”

The second of Lawson’s American histories as told through the eyes of an associated animal, this one is feigned to have been told to the author and illustrator while he was recuperating from a fever on the island of Santa Margarita in the Caribbean by the ancient and talkative parrot Aurelio.

Aurelio himself was born in Central America and was a brisk young sixty-five-year old when a hurricane blew him all the way to Spain. In his efforts to return he fortuitously meets Columbus (Don Cristobal Colon) and manipulates the grifting, drifting Genoese into getting the Spanish court into funding an expedition back to the parrot’s home with the hopes of great wealth.  

Aurelio has little good to say about Columbus himself, seeing him as a vain and ambitious man, dreaming of glory and given to seasickness when finally tricked on board for the expedition. Most of the parrot’s praises are reserved for Queen Isabella and for her maid Dona Maria Mercedes d’Acosta (an entirely imaginary character, as far as I can tell) who, in a romantic subplot, joins the journey in the guise of a cabin boy to be near her man, Don Manuel Nicosa (also a hero).

The journey ends when Aurelio is safe back at home, waving good-bye, Columbus, as the Admiral heads back to the Old World with a few handfuls of gold and pearls and the news of a New World to exploit. But the bird has been returned happily to his native land, and isn’t that what really matters? At least as far as Aurelio himself is concerned.

Just a note: although some species of parrot can live up to 100 years, Aurelio’s reputed age of 500 or so is pushing the envelope well into fantasy. But then so is a thinking parrot, I guess.