Mercedes of Castile, Or, the Voyage to Cathay. Volume 1

Mercedes of Castile, or The Voyage to Cathay is one of James Fenimore Cooper's lesser known historical novels, published in 1840 and built around the first voyage of Christopher Columbus across the Atlantic in 1492. The novel is one of Cooper's most direct engagements with the early history of European exploration of the Americas, drawing on the contemporary documentary sources for the Columbus voyage to construct a fictional narrative that follows both the actual expedition and a romantic plot involving the title character Mercedes and her young suitor.

Mercedes is a Spanish noblewoman whose father has financed part of the Columbus expedition and whose young suitor Don Luis sails with the voyage as one of the gentlemen volunteers. The novel alternates between the expedition itself, with Cooper rendering the Atlantic crossing, the first encounters with the Caribbean islands, and the long return voyage with the kind of nautical detail that his sea novels were known for, and the parallel plot involving Mercedes back in Spain dealing with the various complications of court life and the long absence of Don Luis.

The historical material on the Columbus expedition is rendered with the period accuracy that Cooper was capable of when he was working with sources he respected. The actual journals and letters of Columbus, along with the early Spanish histories of the expedition, provide the documentary backbone that Cooper's fictional treatment is built on. The novel takes Columbus seriously as a historical figure, neither the heroic discoverer of the Victorian American mythology nor the morally compromised colonizer of more recent reassessments, but as a complicated nautical and political figure whose voyage opened up the wider European engagement with the Americas that would shape the next four centuries of world history.

Cooper's prose is in the formal style of his time, which can take some getting used to. The dialogue is long, the descriptions of the Atlantic voyage are extensive, and the political and religious context of late fifteenth century Spain that drives the wider plot would have been more familiar to nineteenth century American readers than it is today. The romance plot involving Mercedes and Don Luis runs alongside the historical material in ways that Cooper's contemporary readers expected and that modern readers may find more or less integrated depending on their patience for the period style.

For Cooper completists, for students of nineteenth century American historical fiction, or for readers interested in how American writers of the Romantic era thought about the early European exploration of the Americas, Mercedes of Castile is worth knowing. The novel is less famous than the Leatherstocking Tales but represents some of Cooper's more thoughtful engagement with early modern European history.