The Catalogue of Shipwrecked Books: Young Columbus and the Quest for a Universal Library. Edward Wilson-Lee

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СКАЧАТЬ would have confronted the stark questions that were driving intellectual debates: whether learning should be directed towards a place in heaven or a triumph on earth, towards the eternal or the present, the metaphysical or the physical, and whether its materials should be Christian only or should take in the thought of other, pagan worlds.5

      Some maternal comfort in this overwhelmingly male world might have been provided by the Infante’s nursemaid Juana de Torres y Ávila, who as well as being one of the only female members of the household was another staunch supporter of the Columbus faction. She was over the years to be the recipient of a number of Columbus’ letters to the court, and many of those not directly addressed to her were nonetheless carried back to Spain by her brother, Antonio de Torres, who was to serve as a trusted go-between during Columbus’ long absences from the court. The first of his letters from the New World reached court as early as April 1494, only a few months after Hernando had arrived there – though they had already moved on from Valladolid to Medina del Campo. Having crossed the ocean with seventeen ships this time, and having quickly established reliable shipping routes between the Iberian peninsula and the Caribbean archipelago, the Admiral could now maintain a reasonably frequent correspondence with the court. While this meant Columbus could continue to provide encouraging reports to the Catholic Monarchs on their new territories, and could in turn ask for supplies that could not be sourced on that side of the ocean, the new communication links were fraught with danger for the Admiral. Unlike the First Voyage when, despite the efforts of his rival Pinzón, Columbus had been able to disappear, reappear and provide the only report of what had happened in between, the returning fleet of twelve ships in April 1494 brought a number of letters and eyewitnesses to the New World. As would quickly become clear, it was no longer possible for Columbus to control the narrative of events beyond the sea.6

      Indeed not even the court itself could wholly contain and control public understanding of the New World any more. Among the first letters sent back from the Second Voyage was one from Dr Chanca, the chief physician of the new settlement, addressed to the city of Seville and evidently intended for wide public circulation. In the great trade fair at Medina del Campo, Hernando would find a growing book fair among the long-standing markets for silver, paintings and Castilian wool returning to Spain in the form of Flemish tapestries, as well as the currency exchange that drew crowds of merchants from across Europe and connected this dusty outpost with the great banking centres of Lyons, Antwerp and Venice. In the immense market square, alongside books from Salamanca, Barcelona and Seville, Hernando found works from the centres of European print – Venice, Basel, Antwerp – perhaps including foreign editions of his father’s letter of 1493 reporting his discoveries. But by now Columbus’ accounts were not the only ones on the market, and it may have been in these bookstalls that Hernando first sensed the cacophony of printed voices competing to hold the public’s attention. While Dr Chanca’s letter repeats Columbus’ official reports about the perpetual springtime of the islands, he is not quite as deft as the Admiral in moving swiftly from the vegetal riches of the New World to the mineral ones that will surely follow, as (for instance) when Columbus instructs Antonio de Torres to report the abundant evidence of spices that can be found by simply standing on the shores of these islands, without any effort to penetrate inland, which surely was proof of the unlimited riches within – and the same, he reasons, must be true of the gold on the new islands he has found:

      Dominica

      Mariagalante

      Guadeloupe

      Santa Cruz

      Monserrate

      Santa Maria la Redonda

      Santa Maria la Antigua

      San Martin

      After recognising in the first-named island the auspiciousness of their making landfall on a Sunday (Domingo) and paying tribute to his flagship the Mariagalante, Columbus named these islands after the chief pilgrimage sites in Spain. Dr Chanca’s letter, however, marks a departure from the party line – noting for instance the exotic fruit that some of those on the fleet, perhaps trusting to the Edenic reports they had heard, attempted to taste, only to be rewarded for nothing more than a lick by grotesquely swollen faces and a raving madness.

      The first cloud may have been cast for Hernando upon his father’s golden world by the succession of reports that slowly revealed the macabre fate of La Navidad, Columbus’ original fortress-settlement in the New World. Though Columbus attempted to gloss over this in his communication of January 1494, even the child Hernando might have noticed something amiss in the fact that his father’s letters were addressed not from La Navidad but from the new settlement of La Isabela. Readers of Hernando’s later account of events might have had a premonition of this disaster, given how often he insists upon the care with which his father recorded the place where he had left thirty-nine men from varied backgrounds, including an Englishman, an Irishman from Galway and a relation of Hernando’s on his mother’s side. But when the fleet of the Second Voyage finally made their way back to Hispaniola, they hardly had need of Columbus’ directions. On a riverbank near the first landmark of Monte Cristo they found two corpses, one with a noose around his neck and another with his feet tied, though some may have deceived themselves that these bodies, too decomposed for identification, were not those of men who had been left behind in La Navidad. Hernando meticulously recorded further details of this scene: one of the men was young and the other old; the noose was made of esparto grass and the strangled man’s arms were extended, his hands tied to a piece of wood like a cross. The hope that these were not Spaniards became harder to sustain when, the next day and further up the river, they came across two more bodies, one thickly bearded – in a land of natives without facial hair. When they finally anchored off La Navidad, reluctant to come closer to shore for fear of grounding as the Santa Maria had, a canoe bearing envoys from Guacanagarí approached, its men wearing masks that they then handed to Columbus. They initially reported all was well but were finally pressed to admit that a few of the settlers of La Navidad had died of disease and fighting. Guacanagarí himself, they said, could not come to greet Columbus because he was lying in his hut, gravely wounded after having battled with two other caciques – Caonabó and Marieni – who had attacked La Navidad.7

      Hernando’s account of these events, which draws upon Columbus’ lost expedition diaries but must also have been coloured by his own memories, shows all the signs of trauma as it recounts the disintegration of Columbus’ idyll. Hernando describes the further bodies that were found, with an estimate of how long they had been dead, and the story that unfolded piece by piece of how a party of settlers had broken with the rest and embarked on a course of rape and pillage, leading the cacique Caonabó to march on them and put the stockade to the flame. Yet there were discrepancies in the stories told by Guacanagarí and his men, and the belief the Taíno were simply and naively honest became harder to sustain. After narrating this bloodcurdling episode, Hernando turns strangely to his father’s pleasure when Guacanagarí gave him a gold belt, crown and grains worth four gold marks, in exchange for items valued at only 34 maravedís (equivalent to less than 1/2,000th the amount). It is unclear whether Columbus was truly so cold-blooded in his mercantile calculations at this moment or if he was desperately grasping for positive news in the face of a massacre for which the real guilt was unlikely ever to be determined. Similarly, Hernando’s recording of this exchange in his biography of his father, shortly after what must have been a brutal childhood memory, has the feel of those misdirections often prompted by trauma.

      Hernando’s presence at court made him an eyewitness to the competing interpretations of these events. Dr Chanca’s account of the La Navidad affair played into a dawning belief in the deceitful bloodiness of these new Spanish subjects, something that would have been reinforced by reports of a further disaster for Spanish Atlantic expansion that also arrived in April 1494. In an attempt to СКАЧАТЬ