For more than three centuries after Columbus' voyages to America, Europeans pondered how the Old World's encounters with the New World affected European sensibilities and intellectual horizons. In this book Anthony Pagden examines some of the varied ways in which Europeans interpreted these encounters with America. Pagden explores the strategies used by Columbus and the early chroniclers of America to describe a continent and its inhabitants so unfamiliar to Europeans. He looks at how, in the 17th and 18th centuries, Europeans reacted in different ways to these descriptions. Some, like the Prussian explorer and naturalist, Alexander von Humboldt, declared that scientific understanding before the ocean voyages had advanced by slow steps and that encounters with America had invigorated Europeans, while others argued against the process of colonization and acculturation in the Americas. In an exploration of these and other responses, Pagden throws light on the intellectual consequences of Europe's encounter with the Americas.