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

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      The fleet that left from Cadiz on 9 May 1502 consisted of four ships, each of which would become a character in the months ahead. References to them can sometimes be hard to sort, given that those on the voyage called them by different names, some proper to the ships themselves, some related to their point of origin and some related to their crew. These four square-rigged caravels were: the Capitana, referred to as such because it was the flagship that carried Columbus and Hernando – its proper name, if it ever had one, is lost to history; the Vizcaína, from Biscay; the Santo or Gallega, from Galicia; and the Bermuda or Santiago de Palos, from Andalusia. Only three of the four ships could carry a full complement of supplies, as the Bermuda (captained by Bartholomew Columbus) drew so low in the water that waves washed on to the deck under full sail. A shipping manifest survives, giving a list of what was stocked for the crew of 140-odd men:

      2000 arrobas of wine (c. 5,000 gallons)

      800 quintals of hardtack (ship’s biscuit, c. 36 tons)

      200 pork bellies

      8 pipes of oil

      8 tuns of vinegar

      24 cows’ worth salt beef

      960 fillets of salted mullet

      720 other salted fish

      2,000 wheels of cheese

      12 cahizes of chickpeas (c. 340kg)

      8 cahizes of beans (c. 225kg)

      mustard

      rocket

      garlic

      onions

      4 fishing nets, plus lines and hooks

      20 quintals of tallow (c. 900kg)

      10 quintals of pitch (c. 450kg)

      10,000 nails

      20,000 carded goods (blankets, caulking oakum, hemp)

      To these, listed roughly in descending order of volume, can be added a few things we deduce from later references: maps, nautical instruments, paper for logs and letters, and the Book of Prophecies. These swiftly dwindling supplies would be the only familiar things to populate Hernando’s world over the coming months and years, and they were slowly replaced with new and unheard-of things accumulated along the way. The superbly detailed account of this journey he later wrote was no longer simply reliant on the documents and reports he could gather: this was a record of personal experience, which, as the exquisite observations and interpretations show, laid new foundations of thought in the thirteen-year-old boy and would later shape the order he would bring to the world around him.1

      If Hernando expected to leave the familiar behind after weighing anchor at Cadiz he must have been disappointed. The fleet stopped first at Santa Catalina then crossed in front of the Pillars of Hercules (also known as the Strait of Gibraltar) to north Africa, where they coasted along until they reached the town of Arcila, in modern Morocco. Hernando may have imagined himself on the verge of a chivalric encounter when approaching this place, as Columbus had intended to provide aid to the Portuguese besieged there, relieving them from the onslaught of the Barbary Moors. Sadly for Hernando, by the time they reached Arcila the siege had been lifted, and the whitewashed town rising up a hillside from behind its cove and sea wall may have seemed little different to the many settlements the Muslims had built along the facing coast of Spain. Hernando did briefly disembark to visit the town’s wounded captain, only to find himself surrounded by Portuguese relatives of Columbus’ first wife, Filipa Moniz. From Arcila the fleet crossed to the Canary Islands, passing Lanzarote and Fuerteventura, then docking at Maspalomas on Gran Canaria for the customary final resupply of wood and water, before pushing out into the open ocean. Finally, on the night of 24 May 1502, they set sail on the west-southwesterly course that by now Columbus had mastered.2

      Experienced sailors of the fleet would have been pleased with the crossing, which at twenty-two days was the fastest westward passage Columbus had yet achieved. In just a few years the Admiral had, through his usual mixture of nautical skill and extraordinary luck, established sea routes between Europe and the Caribbean that were hard to better, and which would remain in use until the coming of steam. But the experience of three weeks without sight of land must have been an astonishing one for the novice Hernando. He would later write affectingly of the First Voyage’s experience of the featureless water, and though he may have been drawing on his father’s notes the description must also have brought back his own first crossing of 1502:

      Because all the men on the fleet were new to this type of voyage and danger, and saw themselves so far from any help, they did not hold back from murmuring; and, seeing nothing but water and sky, they fixed on every sign that appeared to them, being men who were further from land than any had been till that time.

      The moment of panic when considering the distance from land, unrelieved by any sight to break the flatness of the ocean, and the descent into paranoia, suspicion and conspiracy as the bored, scared and enervated mind scrabbles for something to interpret: these reactions are unavoidable among those at sea, and cannot have been entirely quelled by the fact of the routes being now well established and some of the crew experienced in Atlantic crossing. Columbus had, of course, also interpreted signs on his First Voyage – albeit in ways designed to confirm his pronouncements that they were nearing land – but Hernando would later recast his father as the exception to this rule, figuring his calm confidence in the threefold logic of his crossing (reason, authority, report) as what set him apart and allowed him to trust in his navigational measurements and projections rather than being pulled about by the promise of every flock of birds or knot of seaweed. Perhaps during his crossing Hernando first sensed the need for such a buttress against the paranoid imaginings of the mind at sea.3

      The experienced sailors on Columbus’ voyages had little reason to share his confidence in his navigational measurements: in the absence of reliable methods for measuring longitude, the Admiral was almost entirely dependent on ‘dead reckoning’, using a compass, measurements of time and estimates of speed to chart the ship’s course. Though in retrospect СКАЧАТЬ