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

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СКАЧАТЬ of Tenerife, the conquistador Alonso de Lugo had refused to accept the surrender of the pastoralist Guanches who lived there and attacked instead, only to be roundly beaten back to the sea with the loss of eight hundred Christian lives. The heart-warming triumph of the natives of Tenerife was sadly short-lived: de Lugo returned the following year with a larger force and captured them en masse, a pattern of hardening attitudes towards Atlantic peoples that was only to worsen in the coming years. The German traveller Hieronymus Munzer was soon to see these ‘beasts trapped in human form’ for sale in Valencia and to note without irony the ‘sweetening effect’ of religion on these slaves, many of whom were put to work harvesting sugar cane. To counter this mounting bigotry, Columbus had a tightrope to walk: even as he attempted to conjure out of nothing a belief in the New World as a gold-paved Eden, he had to admit the settlement was faltering at the outset. In the same breath with which Antonio de Torres was to report that vines and wheat sprang marvellously and untended out of the New World ground, he was obliged to request the Monarchs send supplies from Spain, namely:

      wine, hardtack, wheat, salt pork, other salted meat, cattle, sheep, lambs, male and female calves, donkeys, raisins, sugar, almonds, honey, rice, and medicine

      And all this if possible before the summer arrived. The reason Columbus gave for this want in his land of milk and honey was the poor quality of what had been stocked for the Second Voyage: the wine had been lost through poorly made barrels, the horses supplied by the farrier in Seville were all broken-backed nags, and the fine strapping men he expected to find when they disembarked in Hispaniola turned out to be layabouts who expected simply to feast on manna, gather the gold that was lying about, and return to Europe rich men. They could not survive on the local cassava bread and required the food they were used to in Spain, and they constantly fell ill in that climate. To prove this de Torres carried with him a list of the healthy and a list of the sick. Just as Columbus was quick to blame the fate of La Navidad on the viciousness of some of the men he left there, so the failure of the New World settlements over the coming years was increasingly to be laid (by Columbus himself, and later Hernando) at the feet of men whom the Admiral disdained for not being willing to suffer like him to turn his vision into a reality. But even Columbus’ adherence to the picture of naked innocence among the New World natives was beginning to crumble: not only does he detail the defensive measures he has taken against local aggression, he also in his struggle to make his discoveries profitable proposes a trade be set up in which Spanish cattle be exchanged for New World slaves. Though the Monarchs firmly resisted this suggestion, Columbus continued to push for it in hopes of saving his vision of the New World, being tempted for the sake of expediency into an execrable history of kidnap and enslavement.8

      The letters from Columbus over the succeeding years followed these familiar patterns. Hernando would have learned in his seventh year, during the early months when the court was at Madrid, of his father’s expedition against the aggressor Caonabó in the province of Cibao, where the rivers ran with grains of gold but they faced constant attacks from Caonabó’s warriors. At the same time he would have heard tell of his father’s expedition in search of terra firma, the continental landmass of Cathay, when instead he got no further than the coasts of Cuba and Jamaica, becoming marooned amid a labyrinth of hundreds of islets he named the Jardines de la Reina, ‘The Queen’s Gardens’. There they witnessed flamingoes, pilot fish that hitched rides on the dorsal fins of other swimmers, turtles as big as shields in numbers that blanketed the sea, a cloud of butterflies so large it cast the ship in darkness, and a breeze so sweet the soldiers felt themselves surrounded by roses and the finest perfumes in the world. The Admiral boasted they would have returned to Castile via the East on that very journey, if not for the fact that their supplies were exhausted, as was the Admiral, having not (he claimed) changed clothes or slept in a bed for eight months. On returning to Hispaniola Columbus found his brother Bartholomew, who had finally caught up with him after more than six years, and succumbed to a fever that for five months deprived him of his sight, his memory and his senses.9

      Columbus’ letters and the objects he sent back to Spain with them are witnesses to a mind struggling to put this flood of new things into order, when every day produced some unheard-of wonder, a struggle that is the prehistory to his son’s lifelong quest to organise the world. Insofar as Columbus did attempt to impose a system on what he was seeing, he usually fell back on the worldview of medieval cosmography, in which the oddity of men and their customs showed how far from the centre of the world any given place was, whereas the perfumes of Araby and the abundance of gold were clues that one was approaching the earthly Jerusalem or the boundaries of the lost Eden. Columbus’ New World was to him strangely both of these things, both centre and periphery, both far from the known and approaching man’s point of origin. More often than not his reports of the New World simply never progressed beyond incoherent lists. We should not, however, assume that because the lists lacked order and seemed chaotic, this was a dispassionate and scientific record of what he was seeing: in the tradition of the medieval ennumeratio, the rambling list was often a way of describing God, whose divine incomprehensibility could not be expressed except by the use of dissimilar images. One such list, for instance, described Christ as the

      source, way, right, rock, lion, light-bearer, lamb – door, hope, virtue, word, wisdom, prophet – victim, scion, shepherd, mountain, nets, dove – flame, giant, eagle, spouse, patience, worm …

      Perhaps in imitation of this Columbus most often fell back on protestations of inexpressibility – that the marvellous beauty of the New World was something that could not be put into words but simply had to be seen, to be experienced in rapt admiration. This move at once produced a mystical impression of these new territories and postponed giving them a meaning, leaving Columbus the sole authority, having been the only one to see what could not be properly described.10

      Some observations did manage to breach this defensive wall of conventional interpretation and blank wonder. The bafflement Columbus felt, for instance, at the natives of Cibao province ‘locking’ the doors of their huts by placing single canes across the entry, slender barriers that none of them would dream of breaching, witnesses the effect of a custom that could not be fitted into these schemes. These cane-locks could not be explained by either of the simple narratives used to understand the New World, of Edenic innocence on the one hand or barbaric bestiality on the other; instead, they confronted the viewer with a version of privacy unique to that culture. In time it would be precisely these oddities of custom that would lead European thinkers to wonder if their own customs – of dress, of behaviour, of morality – were not the natural and necessary practices of a civilised people but were equally arbitrary and nonsensical when viewed from outside of that culture. But these awakenings would remain for a long time dormant. In the meantime Columbus and his sponsors at court saw no irony in sending ‘cannibals’ back to Spain to cure them of their sinful appetite for human flesh by converting them to Christianity, membership of which cult they would regularly celebrate by eating the body of the Son of God during Mass. No one appeared to flinch at subjecting the stone cemies or idols of the Taíno to derision and mockery, as mere pieces of wood and stone that the natives thought could speak and to which they made offerings, while renaming Taíno places after statues of the Virgin and saints that had equally proved their blessedness by miraculous acts.

      This growing body of knowledge about the western Atlantic gave rise during Columbus’ Second Voyage to the first systematic attempts to write about this New World, a process in which Hernando played a key part. In response to Columbus’ letters of 1494 Hernando’s tutor Peter Martyr declared his intention to write a history of the voyages of exploration and the lands they had encountered, a task that was to occupy him intermittently for the rest of his life. And a mail packet that arrived late in 1495, as the court toured Catalonia, contained the first attempt to write an ethnographic account of a New World people, in the form of Fray Ramón Pané’s extensive study of the habits and customs of the Taíno, a text that survives only because Hernando copied it wholesale into his writings about his father, and to which we owe most СКАЧАТЬ