Colonial land claims required notarized public rituals and staged legal performances

Evidence

Thus Columbus relied on papal authority, religious rituals of appropriation, and redemptive invocation, but his claims to the land in the name of the Spanish Crown were taken to be valid only when legally authorized by that sovereign power. Furthermore, Columbus usually insisted on some legalistic recording of discovery by a notary. The rituals of appropriation themselves came to adopt a legal aspect. Thus, a contemporary royal instruction of Spanish origin directed that “acts of possession” be made “before a notary public and the greatest possible number of witnesses”; also, “you shall make a gallows there, and have somebody bring a complaint before you, and as our captain and judge you shall pronounce upon and determine it” (see Greenblatt, 1991:56). — David Theo Goldberg, John Solomos, A Companion to Racial and Ethnic Studies, 220

Categorization

• SHARE: The gallows-and-staged-complaint provision is exactly the kind of grisly procedural curiosity a legal historian or colonial-studies friend would savor.
• XREF: Staged legal performances here echo the performative law-making in the law-merchant notes — the formalities exist to be witnessed and recorded, not merely to settle substance.