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

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СКАЧАТЬ of Jerusalem, the city whose symbolic force had set Columbus on the path of collecting the passages for the Book of Prophecies, and which he announces as the main thrust of his argument in the prefatory letter to Ferdinand and Isabella. While the defeat of the Moors in the Reconquista and the expulsion of the Jews shortly thereafter were already widely seen in Spain as part of God’s plan, Columbus was able to cite specific prophecies, attributed to the medieval mystic Joachim of Calabria, to the effect that someone from Spain would recover the wealth of Zion. There were also passages Columbus saw as linking him personally to this destiny, such as the following from Psalm 115:

      You have separated my chains; I shall celebrate a sacrifice of praise to you, and I will invoke the name of the Lord. I will recite my solemn vows to God in the full sight of all his people in the halls of the house of the Lord, in the midst of you, Jerusalem.

      This must have appealed strongly to Columbus’ heady mix of vanity and paranoia, linking as it did the Chains of Ocean that he saw himself as having broken and the chains in which he had been brought back a prisoner from Santo Domingo in 1500.16

      It is easy with hindsight to write off the Book of Prophecies as an expression of Columbus’ narcissistic insanity. We have the advantage of knowing the world did not come to an end in 1656, and that though the discovery of the Americas was the beginning of an extraordinary expansion of the Christian faith, it was hardly either universal or particularly welcome to all subjected to it. Yet the fact that human culture even today regularly falls back upon apocalyptic predictions – in religious fundamentalism, ecological/medical/technological disaster narratives and stories about clashes of culture – may make us want to pause before passing judgement, not least because many others (including learned clerics like Gaspar Gorricio) found Columbus’ vision of his place in history compelling. Though the dire state of the New World settlements may have meant Columbus had a practical need for just such a narrative, it nevertheless remained the case that the central texts of late-medieval culture provided ample and persuasive evidence that he was on to something. Columbus showed himself able, when medieval certainties about the world had been severely challenged and many might feel themselves adrift in a sea of facts bereft of order, to reassemble the pieces of his culture’s belief into a narrative capable of accommodating the new discoveries. In a world exploding with a seeming chaos of new information, the man who provided a sense of order had a significant claim to power, much like the proverbial one-eyed king of the blind.

      What, then, was the part of Hernando in all this? It was at one time believed by many scholars that the lion’s share of the Book of Prophecies was written in the hand of Columbus’ younger son, though recently more level-headed studies have pointed out the unlikelihood of the twelve-year-old Hernando – however astonishing his later career – being able to draw on such a broad range of reading. An examination of the manuscript also reveals that a majority of the passages are in a script that looks nothing like Hernando’s increasingly distinctive handwriting; these are probably by a professional scribe employed by Columbus. Yet there are sections that are unquestionably written by Hernando, as well as others about which we cannot be certain. The most likely sequence of events, then, was that during the last months of 1500 and the first months of 1501 Columbus began to compile extracts he had already come across in his reading, certainly in the presence of Hernando (who was living with him at the time) if we can be sure of nothing more. We do know, from a letter of Columbus’ included in the Book, that in September 1501 he passed what he had done so far to Gaspar Gorricio, and it seems likely that while Gorricio compiled lists of relevant quotations, the manuscript was then handed to a professional scribe to do the actual work of writing out the texts in question. Gorricio returned it six months later, on 23 March 1502, saying not everything had been copied out but that the Book as it was would serve its intended purpose. In its final pages the Book is a series of cryptic lists, possibly referring to further passages that could be copied into the manuscript when time permitted.

      At some point after this Hernando made his own entries in the Book of Prophecies. Like the Castilian verses quoted above, many of his entries are passages of Spanish verse which celebrate the ‘wide and easy path’ that will be opened to the Man of Virtue, helping to underpin the idea that Columbus’ successful voyages of exploration were the result of God’s special providence. It is perhaps worth pointing out that certain passages, like the verses from Seneca’s Medea, would have been unlikely to feature either in the practical reading of Columbus or the theological reading of a monk like Gorricio, but would certainly have formed part of the humanist curriculum taught by Peter Martyr to Hernando in the household of the Infante Juan. There were several copies later recorded in Hernando’s library which he may already have owned by this stage, including a lost manuscript translation of the plays into Spanish. It is not hard to imagine the young Hernando, daydreaming in the classroom, reading his heroic and absent father into his lessons wherever he could. Certainly the addition from Medea was made at a later stage, and in a hand that belongs to neither Columbus nor Gorricio but might belong to Hernando, though we cannot be certain of its authorship.17

      We can also only guess at Hernando’s private feelings about the wild-eyed claims of a father whom he idolised but must, on the brink of manhood, have recognised as increasingly eccentric and misunderstood by those in power. His surviving entries in the Book are largely of a general, moralising nature and steer clear of the occult identification of the Admiral and his acts with biblical events, characters and prophecies. Yet the experience must have had a profound effect on Hernando, and it is tempting to read the course of his own later life as written also in the Book of Prophecies. One of his most extensive entries, and indeed the last in the manuscript as a whole, is another poem about the paths that open to the Virtuous Man; but it is also a code, an acrostic verse whose first words taken together form a sentence, ‘Memorare Novissima Tua et In Eternam Non Peccabis’ – remember your death and you will never sin. The addition of an apocalyptic context to the life of a pubescent boy with a megalomanic father can hardly have failed to affect him irreversibly.18

      As we shall see, in later life Hernando did much to reduce the role of millenarian theories in the public narrative of his father’s life, turning Columbus from a provoker of the End Times to the first figure in a new world. But Hernando’s attempt to distance himself and his father from these ideas may not tell the whole truth of his role in the Book of Prophecies. Large sections are missing from the Book, one of which bears the following comment: ‘Whoever removed these pages acted badly, for this was the best prophecy in this book.’ This note was almost certainly written during Hernando’s lifetime or very shortly thereafter, suggesting perhaps that the pages were removed by Hernando himself or by those close to him. What is more, both of the larger sections missing from the manuscript, including the one lamented above, are flanked by passages in Hernando’s handwriting, increasing the likelihood that they contained writings by him. The missing prophecies will likely never be recovered, but the question of their contents is one to which there will be cause to return.19

      Whatever part Hernando played in creating the Book of Prophecies, and however he felt about the father who held it up to himself as a mirror, it is clear Hernando was increasingly close to Columbus during this period. The most dramatic evidence of this came when it was decided the thirteen-year-old Hernando would accompany his father on his impending Fourth Voyage back to the New World. There is no sign Columbus ever considered taking his adult elder son and heir Diego with him. There were good practical reasons for this, both to leave someone to argue the Admiral’s case at court and to preserve the dynasty in case of disaster. But Hernando would (both then and in later life) have good reason to feel he had a legacy of knowledge and experience from his father that was worth more than a mere monetary inheritance.

      Gorricio returned the uncompleted Book of Prophecies less than two months before Hernando and his father set sail for the New World, likely prompted by Columbus’ СКАЧАТЬ