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

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СКАЧАТЬ survey begins with a description of the Taíno sky-deity and his five-named mother, and their belief that mankind emerged from two caves, Cacibayagua and Amayauba, guarded by a man named Marocael (‘without eyelashes’) who was turned to stone for failing to guard the caves. The description then relates a story of how the first female humans disappeared to an Island of Women, leaving behind children whose cries turned into the croaking of frogs; the men who remained, like the Christians who first arrived from the sea, were a people without women, ones who took what they lacked. Pané records the two caves, from which the sun and moon emerge, contained two stone cemi idols named Boinayol (‘son of the serpent-formed storm-god’) and Maroya (‘cloudless’), as well as the Taíno belief that dead men roam the earth without navels, endlessly seeking to embrace the female Coaybay (‘absent ones’). His account of native culture ends with a description of their ritual chants (which he likens to those performed by Muslims), their shamanic witch doctors, and the way their idols were made, from trees that move from their rooted spot and reveal to the shaman the form they wish to take during a psychotropic cohoba trip. Perhaps Hernando would have felt some sympathy with the frogs central to Taíno culture, who were once children left by their mothers and whose croaking is the sound of them calling out to the parent they have lost.

      Many of the stories that Hernando transcribed from Pané are jumbled and very difficult to understand, and Pané modestly admits the limitations of his account, noting he did not have enough paper to write on and was forced to attempt to memorise everything in order, and that furthermore the linguistic and cultural barrier prevented him from understanding many things fully. But this humility should not distract from the system quietly imposed by Pané on what he heard, which proceeds from an account of the Taíno gods, through their story of the creation of man, to their understanding of the shape of the cosmos and of the afterlife, and finally the social institutions that are an expression of their way of seeing the world, from their rituals and sacred objects to the way in which they believe bodies can be healed by their form of medicine. This European way of describing ‘exotic’ peoples, moving from religious beliefs to social practices, was not an invention of Pané’s, and indeed since Pané it has become so naturalised that we are in danger of missing the argument that it contains. Hernando may well have recognised that the description of the Taíno follows the form set down by classical works including Pliny’s Natural History and transmitted through the Middle Ages by Isidore of Seville’s Etymologies: both Pliny and Isidore attempt to describe the entirety of the world as it is known to them, and one might be tempted to see their encyclopedias as merely randomly ordered lists. Closer inspection, however, reveals a very clear organisational principle based on Aristotelian philosophy, moving (as one description has put it) from ‘the original to the derived, and from the natural to the artificial’. As in Pané’s description of the Taíno, this creates order by starting with the things from which the world is seen to come (the gods, Creation) before moving on to the things created (man) and in turn the things created by these creations (religious ceremonies, medical practices, etc). This seems a reasonable enough way of proceeding, but in practice it allows the Christian reader to dismiss the entirety of another culture on the basis of an incorrect belief in God: if the premises on which the culture is based are false (i.e. their notion of God), all practices, beliefs and customs derived from those premises must also be false. Tellingly, Pané’s document ends with an account of his part in the first New World conversion to Christianity, of the attempts by a violent opponent of the Christians (the cacique Guarionex) to destroy the Christian icons, and the public burning of Guarionex’ men by Bartholomew Columbus.11

      The pattern of Hernando’s life at court, and of learning about the New World through his father’s letters, was interrupted by the sudden return of Columbus in 1496, after an absence of three years, almost half the life of his younger son. Joyful as the reunion must have been for Hernando, the Admiral was not returning in triumph this time, and no fanfare greeted him on his arrival at Cadiz in June nor when he was received by the Reyes at the Casa del Cordón in Burgos. The proliferation of different accounts of the New World at court had given substance to increasingly widespread and urgent complaints regarding the conduct of the Admiral as governor of the new territories, and that of his brother Bartholomew during Columbus’ extended absences for further exploration. The charges focused not on the tyrannical exploitation of the native population but rather on the high-handed treatment of the Spanish settlers who had come to Hispaniola, with the anti-Columbian party deriding the New World as a place of harshness and violence only made worse by Columbus’ leadership, and the Admiral responding that the troubles were largely produced by the viciousness of the Spanish settlers and their needless provocation of the native population. Though the judicial commission didn’t find against Columbus, the Admiral seemed to have sensed his long absence from court was allowing those who opposed him to fill the silence this created.12

      Columbus was reunited with his children at Burgos during a particularly tumultuous period, one in which a less talented showman might have failed to make his case heard over the cacophony of things competing for the Monarchs’ attention. Ferdinand and Isabella were in the process of restructuring their court to strengthen the position of their heirs, transferring the Infante Juan to a household of his own, strategically located at Almazán on the border between Ferdinand’s province of Aragon and Isabella’s of Castile. They had also arranged a double marriage that would link their house solidly to the ascendant House of Habsburg, betrothing their children to the heirs of Maxmilian I, the Holy Roman Emperor. Shortly before Columbus arrived at court an armada of 130 ships, bearing an estimated twenty-five to thirty-five thousand passengers, had departed from the Basque country to take the princess Juana to Flanders, where she would marry Duke Philip of Burgundy, and to bring back on the return trip Maximilian’s eldest daughter Margaret. For the princess’ private retinue of three thousand, they stocked two hundred cows, a thousand chickens, two thousand eggs, four thousand barrels of wine and nearly a quarter of a million salted fish. The fleet’s size was not only an expression of the great importance of the event: it was a necessary defence against aggression from the French, with whom Spain was at war as both countries sought to secure and extend their control over the Italian peninsula. The nuptial celebrations party had turned to horror, however, when as many as ten thousand of the Spanish party died of cold and illness during the harsh Flanders winter of 1495–6.13

      If Hernando sensed his father’s showmanship was wearing thin when, presenting another assortment of wonders from the New World, he could offer only a small amount of gold ‘as earnest of what was to come’, the Admiral nonetheless found a way to use his peculiar talents to bring himself to the fore. Both Columbus and Hernando were later to recall in writing how in March 1497, during the fleet’s return from Flanders bearing Juan’s intended bride Princess Margaret, Columbus had convinced the worry-stricken Monarchs not to move with the rest of the court to the inland town of Soria, but instead to stay behind in Burgos to be nearer to Laredo, the port at which he predicted the fleet would dock, even forecasting the exact day they would arrive and the route they would take. This unusual mode of turning a portolan – the sailor’s description of the routes and distances between ports – into a form of prophecy served Columbus well, and both he and Hernando were over the coming years to exploit the almost mystical authority it conferred on them. As Hernando would later learn, the Italian polymath Angelo Poliziano even had a word for this practice, calling it a mixed science, falling halfway between the ‘inspired’ knowledge that came from divine revelation and the practical kind that comes from human invention.14

      The wedding of Princess Margaret to the Infante Juan was celebrated in Burgos on Palm Sunday, 19 March 1497, after which the Monarchs moved quickly to secure further alliances, with Isabella leaving shortly after to celebrate the marriage of their eldest daughter Isabel to King Manuel of Portugal. The nuptial joy was to be short-lived. Juan fell ill while Isabella was away, and died soon after in the arms of his father, who tried to comfort his son by telling him God had reserved greater realms for him in the hereafter than those he would now never inherit СКАЧАТЬ