Solemn ceremonies have always accompanied the laying of a cornerstone. In ancient cultures, the ceremony might involve the sacrifice of animals or even humans. In early Christian churches, there was often a cavity within the stone to preserve relics of saints and martyrs.
In the image above, St. Ambrose lays the cornerstone of the fourth-century Basilica of Martyrs in Milan, now known as the Basilica di Sant’ Ambrogio. St. Augustine recounts how Ambrose translated the relics of local martyrs to the new basilica (Confessions IX.7).
Sealed inside a copper box within the Cathedral’s cornerstone is a kind of relic – a fragment of stone or, more likely, Spanish brick, a remnant of the church where the Christian faith was first practiced in the Americas, built by Christopher Columbus on his second voyage in 1494.
This post tells the story of how and why this object came to rest in the Cathedral’s cornerstone, followed by thoughts on how we in the 21st century might regard this “relic.”
La Isabela
The fragment within the cornerstone dates from the second and longest of Columbus’s four transatlantic voyages (1493-96), when he traveled to what is now Cuba, Jamaica, Puerto Rico, and the Lesser Antilles – all the while believing he was somewhere in Asia. He set out from Cadiz in September 1493 with a fleet of seventeen ships bearing more than a thousand crew along with building materials, provisions and horses. With colored pennants streaming from their masts, the galleons and caravels in the argosy would have been a stirring sight – unless you were one of the Jews whose property had been confiscated by the crown and mortgaged to fund the voyage.
Arriving at the north coast of the island of Hispaniola in late November 1493, Columbus found the small fort he had built on his first voyage burned to the ground and its occupants vanished. Sailing eastward along the coast, he came upon a site with a suitable harbor, a freshwater lake fed by neighboring mangrove swamps, fertile soil, and an abundance of timber. He set about building a fort, a church, a storehouse for provisions, huts for settlers and a stone house for himself. He named the new settlement La Isabela after the Queen of Castille.
The church – La Iglesia de Santa Maria de la Incarnación – celebrated its first mass on the Feast of the Epiphany, January 6, 1494. Archaeological excavations conducted in the 1980s determined that the church was a “simple, single-naved, monastic-style church with a bell tower, campanario, on one side, a pattern that was to become standard throughout the Spanish frontier mission territories of the sixteenth century.”
The church was approximately fifty feet long and thirty feet wide. The east and west facades were of limestone, the walls of tapia valenciana – rammed earth reinforced with brick, a common building material of southern Spain. The roof was thatched rather than tiled. Today, only the church’s foundations survive.
La Isabela lasted for only a few tumultuous years before it was abandoned, having been decimated by disease, famine, mutiny, quarrels among settlers and battles with the Indigenous Taínos. The surviving settlers relocated to Santo Domingo. The site remained deserted for the next four centuries and acquired a reputation for being haunted. Samuel Hazard, a historian of Santo Domingo, wrote about his visit to the site in 1872:
There was absolutely nothing to repay me for my trouble, the place possessing no natural beauty and the few ruins remaining having no particular form or meaning, being mostly covered with running vines and vegetation. With much difficulty can be made out where has originally run a small village street.
The USS Enterprise Expedition
Hazard’s book, Santo Domingo, Past and Present, was read by George Partridge Colvocoresses, a lieutenant aboard the sloop-of-war USS Enterprise as it cruised off the coast of Santo Domingo in the spring of 1891. As he recounts in his handwritten memoir:
I had seen a notice in a newspaper that it was proposed to send an expedition to the West Indies for the purpose of visiting the places associated with the voyages of Columbus and collecting any relics that might be found. This was to be done by the Latin-American Dept. of the Columbian Exposition, then preparing in Chicago for the 400th anniversary of the discovery of America. Realizing that we were quite near Isabella, I suggested to the Capt. that I be permitted to explore that region for our own satisfaction, and that so doing might possibly forestall the Enterprise having to return for that purpose. Capt. C. cordially approved.
Lt. Colvocoresses conducted an examination of the ruins of La Isabela on May 14-16, 1891, accompanied by a surgeon, a cadet, two volunteers from the Enterprise, and a local wood-cutter who was familiar with the site. The following are excerpts from the report that he submitted to the ship’s commander:
Tradition points to this little plateau as the site of the ancient city and here we found scattered at intervals various small ill-defined heaps of stones, remnants of walls built of small unhewn stones, evidently laid in mortar, pieces of old tiles and potsherds, some of the latter glazed, and fragments of broad, roughly-made bricks. There was a half-dozen or more blocks of dressed limestone that may have been part of the walls of buildings somewhat finished and permanent in character. The trees, matted roots and trailing vines overspread the ground and rendered progress slightly difficult.
It should be stated that the piles of stones that we saw convey very little idea of the forms of the structures to which they belonged and give no indication of their uses.
We overturned all the cut blocks of stone and examined them carefully in the hope of finding some marks or dates, but without success … Of the surface remains at Isabella, it is our opinion that there is nothing of sufficient interest to be removed, except, perhaps, the few blocks of cut limestone, and there is nothing that would convey an idea of the architecture and workmanship of the buildings erected by the first settlers.
The artifacts that the expedition took from the site were not exhibited at the Columbian Exposition. How did one of them make its way to the Cathedral?
Lt. Colvocoresses’s report notes that two volunteers from the Enterprise accompanied him. One of them was Lieutenant Walter McLean. Lt. McLean had a brother in New York City, Malcolm McLean, a medical doctor. Dr. McLean was a member of St. Andrew’s Episcopal Church in Harlem, serving as its senior warden. Both brothers are identified as donors of the fragment in the available documentation. I would speculate that while Lt. McLean was assisting at La Isabela, he collected a few stones as souvenirs and later shared one with his brother, who then gifted it to the Cathedral.
Are we sure that the stone is really from the church and not another building at La Isabela? We are not. The Colvocoresses report makes clear that the expedition could not distinguish specific building types. The details about the church were discovered decades later through meticulous archaeological investigation.
The Columbus Quadricentennial
When the Cathedral’s cornerstone was laid on December 27, 1892, only three months had passed since the October 12 kick-off of the year-long commemoration of the quadricentennial of Columbus’s first voyage. The exuberant celebration was impossible for New Yorkers to avoid, the jubilee so ubiquitous that it was probably inevitable that it would impinge upon the cornerstone ceremony.
Every New Yorker attending the ceremony would have seen the patriotic banners hanging throughout the city or watched one of the parades, or enjoyed one of the musical events, such as the cantata “The Triumph of Columbus” at Carnegie Hall. They would have read flowery editorials in their newspapers and listened to bombastic oratory lionizing Columbus as the embodiment of the American spirit of quest and boldness.
Two views Columbus from New York’s 1892 Columbus celebration. Left: Columbus the great Italian navigator atop a 60-foot column in (where else?) Columbus Circle. Marble. Artist: Gaetano Russo, 1892. Photo: Brecht Bug via Flickr. Right: Columbus the apostle of Spanish Catholicism in Central Park. Bronze. Artist: Jerionimo Sunol, 1892. Photo: NYC Dept. of Parks.
Churchgoers would have heard sermons hailing the Genoese navigator as the apostle who first planted the cross of Christianity in the New World. American Catholics even launched a short-lived campaign for canonization. Rabbis delivered their own laudatory sermons, tactfully sidestepping the quadricentennial of another historic event initiated by King Ferdinand and Queen Isabela – the Alhambra Decree of 1492 that expelled the Jews from Spain.
While New York made merry, Chicago was constructing the Columbian Exposition of 1893, a panorama of America’s progress in science and technology. The exposition’s Great White City was the dawn’s early light of what would come to be known as “the American Century,” when the United States would take its place as a world power on an equal footing with the mighty colonial empires of Europe.
Goodbye Columbus
Brilliant navigator, bold visionary, apostle of Christian civilization – that was the prevailing view of Columbus at the time the Cathedral’s cornerstone was laid. Those present at the cornerstone ceremony would have shared this view and revered the Isabela stone as a kind of relic, for Columbus himself might have touched it.
This bygone view of Columbus persisted through much of the next century. You can see it expressed in the three places his image appears in the Cathedral, all dating from the first half of the twentieth century. You will find him in the Historical Parapet, flanked incongruously by two martyrs of the English Reformation, John Wycliffe and Thomas Cranmer. He appears again in a window in the Chapel of St. James, and in the window of the nave bay devoted to American history (not pictured here).
By the time the Columbian quincentennial arrived in the postcolonial world of 1992, images like the one above had become quaint. A new generation of historians was examining the Columbus narrative from the perspective of the Indigenous peoples that he encountered. In this view, Columbus was merely the first in a series of European adventurers who inflicted slavery, brutal exploitation, and genocidal epidemics on the native peoples of the Americas, facilitated in no small part by the priests and friars who accompanied them.
With Columbus deposed from his saintly niche, how might we regard the Isabela stone today?
We might start by considering why Bishop Potter decided to place it in the cornerstone. Was it merely to capitalize on the public interest in the Columbus quadricentennial? While that may have been a factor, there is good reason to that believe that Potter had a more substantive purpose, one that had nothing to do with the glorification of Columbus himself.
From the time that he revived his predecessor’s intention to build a great cathedral in New York, Bishop Potter sought to distinguish it from the cathedrals of the Old World. He was emphatic that it should have a distinctly American character. By placing a stone from the first church in the Americas within the cornerstone, Potter was branding St. John the Divine as an American cathedral, with core values both Christian and American.
Potter was a proponent of the American value of inclusiveness, as evidenced by his long involvement with the settlement house movement that assisted recently-arrived immigrants. In his 1887 “Letter to the Citizens of New York,” he set forth his conviction that the proposed cathedral should be “a people’s church …. [whose] welcome would be for all men of whatsoever fellowship.” As an “exponent of those great religious ideas in which the foundations of the Republic were laid,” its pulpit would be open to “the strongest and most helpful minds of the age.”
The decision to build seven chapels where immigrants could worship in their native tongues would further distinguish St. John the Divine from Old World cathedrals. Four decades later, the windows of the nave would feature representatives of the trades and professions that funded the construction of the bays rather than the lives of the saints to whom they are dedicated, as was the medieval custom. The nave’s windows thus reflect the bedrock American belief in the dignity of labor and the worth of the common man and woman.
The day after the cornerstone was laid, the New York Times editorialized:
A building on this scale is no longer the work of a denomination; the Episcopalians are merely the initiatory force. It appeals to the whole city, without distinction of sect or religion; nay, to the whole country, for its completion in the most beautiful and splendid way reflects glory on every person who is proud to call himself an American.
Perhaps we should regard the remnant within the cornerstone not as a relic, but rather, a seed that planted in the soil of the Americas yielded a bounty far different from what the Europeans who planted it ever imagined.
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Sources
Carletta, David M. “The Triumph of American Spectacle: New York City’s 1892 Columbian Celebration” in Material Culture (Spring, 2008). ● Colvocoresses, George Partridge. The Personal Recollections of George P. Colvocoresses, v. 1, 1847-1907. Handwritten manuscript accessed via the Norwich University Archives Digital Collection. ● Deagan, Kathleen and Jose Maria Cruxent. Columbus’s Outpost Among the Taínos: Spain and America at La Isabela 1493-1498 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2002). ● Moody, Michael. “Isabela Revisited” in Journal of Popular Culture (Fall, 1989). ● Moody, Michael. “Isabela Revisited” in Journal of Popular Culture (Fall, 1989). ● Ober, Frederick A. In the Wake of Columbus (Boston: D. Lothrop Co., 1893). ● “Report of Lieutenant George P. Colvocoresses to Commander G.A. Converse, USS Enterprise” in Thacher, John Boyd, Christopher Columbus: His Life, His Work, His Remains” (New York: Putnam, 1903). ● U.S. Naval History & Heritage Command. “USS Enterprise” at https://www.history.navy.mil/our-collections/photography/us-navy-ships/alphabetical-listing/e/uss-enterprise–1877-1909-0.html ● “New cathedral planned: Bishop Potter asks the city for aid,” New York Times (June 2, 1887). ● “From the First Church,” New York Times (December 23, 1892).