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

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СКАЧАТЬ a slave. The shackles neatly captured, for Columbus, the disparity between what he had achieved and how he had been rewarded: in the words of a prophecy he grew fond of quoting, he was the man who had broken the chains of Ocean that bounded the ancient world, and yet the chains of a captive were the only thing he had been given in return. This was the reason (Hernando recalled towards the end of his life) he had them set aside as a relic, to be placed in his tomb as a token of the world’s ingratitude. After ordering his release Ferdinand and Isabella asked him to come to them at Granada, and over the coming months Columbus resumed his Sisyphean task of attempting to re-establish the legitimacy of his claims to power and wealth from the New World. The Monarchs were quick to condemn Bobadilla’s treatment of their Admiral, and to appoint a new commission under Nicolás de Ovando to scrutinise Bobadilla’s own conduct, which must have afforded Columbus considerable satisfaction.2

      Columbus was no longer content, however, to attend to these practical and administrative tasks, and during this period of residence in Spain he seems to have devoted increasing amounts of attention to The Book of Prophecies. This was not a sudden development in Columbus’ thinking: after all, he had sought since the earliest accounts of the New World to evoke the Edenic feel of the Caribbean, using its fertile climate and the nakedness of its inhabitants to suggest the enterprise was a step towards a blessed Golden Age (and, by extension, towards gold). But Columbus’ letters of October 1498 and February 1500 marked a significant shift in his thinking. In the first of these he reported his detour, at the beginning of the Third Voyage, around a three-headed island (he christened it ‘Trinidad’) towards another landmass, which he initially named ‘Isla Santa’ but later learned was terra firma – a continent – that the inhabitants of this region called Paria. Columbus’ three-month detour around Paria included some of the most harrowing events to date even for a man whose life had been a catalogue of near-death experiences. First among these was a period shortly after they reached the equator sailing south, during which they were becalmed for eight days in a heat so intense the ships’ holds turned to ovens and the decking planks began to groan and split. Drawing on his father’s logbooks, Hernando later ventured the opinion that had it not been for the relative cool of night and the occasional shower of rain, the ships would have been burned with everyone inside them. When the wind finally rose and they reached Trinidad their relief was cut short as they passed in horror through a sea channel between Trinidad and Paria, one that flowed as fast as a furious river, and in which waves from either end crashed in the middle, causing the water to rise like a cliff along the whole length of the strait. They called this strait at the southern end of Trinidad the Boca de la Sierpe, the Serpent’s Mouth. Their fear increased when they realised they were now trapped in a gulf between Trinidad and the mainland: they could not sail back south against the current of the Boca de la Sierpe, and it became clear their only route back towards Hispaniola lay through a similar channel to the north, to which they gave the twin-name Boca del Drago (Dragon’s Mouth). As if the moment were not fraught enough with danger, the crew had to do without the guidance of their leader: Columbus hadn’t been sleeping again and his eyes were so bloodshot with continual wakefulness that he was losing his sight. For a man obsessed with observing and recording every detail, and convinced he had a God-given sight that revealed things to him before others, this blindness must have been torture. Under these circumstances they took the only option open to them and ran the Boca del Drago. They survived but were spat out at such a pace that they only regained control after being carried on the current for sixty leagues.3

      Though Columbus may have had to rely on the eyes of others on the visit to Paria, he began to believe he had been given a vision of something more. Struggling to fit the extraordinary experiences of Paria into a model he could understand, he reasoned that the ship’s movement had not been determined by simple natural phenomena, but by an irregularity in the shape of the earth. He now saw that the earth was not perfectly spherical: it was shaped like a woman’s breast, globular in form but rising to a peak like a nipple, a peak he reasoned was located at the easternmost point of the equator, and on top of which was to be found the Celestial Paradise. As evidence for this he adduced a number of arguments: the as yet unexplained behaviour of the compass needle in the middle of the ocean, which confoundingly ceased to point exactly to the north every time he passed a certain point 100 leagues west of the Azores; the speed at which they had exited the Boca del Drago, suggesting they were going downhill; and the doldrums where they had baked for eight days, there to ensure (he speculated) that no one could approach the Celestial Paradise without God’s permission. Further to this he pointed to how the people of Paria failed to conform to late-medieval understandings of racial geography, in which the hottest places on earth were supposed to hold the darkest-skinned people, who had been singed by the climate. He not only found people in Paria braver, more astute and more talented than most he had encountered, but they were also lighter skinned – because, he argued, they lived where the earth began to rise to a point, ‘like the stem of a pear’.4

      Columbus had been prevented from developing his theories further at that point by illness and by the immediate urgency of dealing with the open rebellion when he arrived at Santo Domingo. In December 1499, however, he once again found himself stranded aboard a small caravel when, touring Hispaniola during a lull in the rebellion, he was attacked by a band of Taínos and forced to put out to sea without supplies or an adequate crew. On the day after Christmas, weltering in the ocean and staring into an abysm of despair, Columbus experienced the first of a series of visions during which God chastised him for his doubt and told him He would stand by him. On his return to Santo Domingo in February – after forty-odd days afloat – Columbus wrote again to the court, recounting this vision and urging Ferdinand and Isabella to take the discovery of the Indies as a divine signal that they should embark on a last, fatal push to bring about the triumph of the Christian Church, one which must begin with the conquest of Jerusalem.5

      In a sense Columbus was harping on an old theme: he had long been waging a campaign for the Monarchs to think of his western discoveries as part of a wider crusade that would be followed by the subjection of the Indies and the Holy Land. As part of this he stood in fierce opposition to the mainstream reading of the Treaty of Tordesillas, the 1494 power-sharing agreement with Portugal, which had been brokered by the Pope and which divided the world into Portuguese and Spanish zones of activity in an attempt to keep the two nations from going to war over their new discoveries. The treaty granted Spain the right to occupy everything to the west of the Tordesillas meridian – an imaginary line 370 leagues west of the Cape Verde islands – and Portugal everything to the east of this line. This secured for Portugal its possessions in the Atlantic (the Azores and Madeira) as well as exclusive rights to deal with the west African territories (Ife, Benin and the Kingdom of Kongo), and gave Spain a free hand in the New World. In one of the greatest oversights in history, however, the treaty failed, in setting down where the zones of influence began, to make any mention of where they would end. The Portuguese could be forgiven for thinking their zone took in one hemisphere of the globe, ending halfway around the world going east – though it wasn’t remotely clear at the time where exactly ‘halfway’ would be. Columbus, on the other hand, was almost alone in maintaining that the Portuguese zone only covered the area from the Tordesillas Line as far east as they had sailed by the treaty date of 1494 – the Cape of Good Hope – making the Spanish portion stretch west right from the mid-Atlantic all the way around the world and back to the Cape. Crucially for Columbus, this kept the symbolic centres of late-medieval thought – Cathay, India, Persia, Ethiopia and (most importantly) Jerusalem – firmly within the part projected for Spanish expansion.6

      Columbus’ letter of February 1500, however, began to make a theological argument that the discovery of the New World was in itself evidence of God’s apportioning Jerusalem to Spain, and a prompt to begin preparations to take back the Holy Land. On his return to Spain in November of the same year, and now free of the judgments of Bobadilla against him, Columbus had time to pursue these thoughts, and was now in a position to begin to put them into some kind of systematic order, СКАЧАТЬ