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

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СКАЧАТЬ – of wonder – came when the Vizcaína’s boat began, unprompted, to jerk erratically across the water, moving first in one direction and then another as fast as a saetta (crossbow bolt). The ship’s crew must have thought themselves for a moment still in the sorcery of the storm. When the craft finally fell still, the mystery was revealed: an animal, ‘big as half a bed’, had become snagged on the bottom of the boat, and had dragged it around the bay as long as it was able. Hernando calls this creature a ‘schiavina’ because it looked like a cape, and indeed its modern name (manta ray) comes from the fact that it looks like a ‘mantle’ being drawn through the water. Hernando’s second observation was of another kind of ‘fish’ not known in Europe, which the Taíno called a manatee, the gentle sea-cow that has now been driven by industry from the Bay of Azúa but can still be found in the coasts and estuaries of the island. A story recorded by Peter Martyr even tells of a manatee tamed by a Taíno cacique, whom it would let ride on its back; but the manatee distrusted Christians, recognising them by their clothes, having once been mistreated by them. This maritime creature, Hernando noted, in many ways did not fit the definition of a fish: it was the size and shape of a calf and grazed like one in the shallows; moreover, it tasted like a calf – even better, because fattier – and resembled a cow more than a fish when cut open. Hernando was here following the classification system of Aristotelian zoology, which grouped animals on the basis of what they ate and how they reproduced. These physiological, anatomical and behavioural features lent weight, Hernando concluded, to those contemporary natural philosophers who believed that every land animal had its counterpart in the sea: the surface of the ocean, then, acted like an immense zoological mirror, with everything above water having its equivalent beneath.9

      This theory was wrong of course, but the episodes of manatee and ray give a glimpse into the development of Hernando’s mind. While Columbus identified manatees as the ‘sirens’ of legend, noting with disappointment that they didn’t resemble human women, his apprentice Hernando is far more inductive, alert to the significance of what he saw before him. The mystery of the moving boat was a cautionary tale against relying on surface appearances, as it required awareness of the hidden depths for its explanation, and the pleasure this provoked is that of having a veil of ignorance torn away. The lesson seems to have been taken to heart as he observed the manatee: Hernando has not attributed to it fish-like qualities simply because it lives in the water, but has followed up the initial impression (that it looks like a calf) by studying its internal qualities (anatomy, taste) and its behaviour (grazing). While the grazing provided a false lead (there are, after all, plenty of grazing fish) the tissue and organ structure of the manatee allowed Hernando to reach the entirely correct conclusion that it was a mammal, even if there wasn’t yet a word for that. His speculation on the presence of this cow in the sea was wrong – the mystery of cetaceans’ return to the water would wait another 450 years for a solution – but it was not unreasonable: the manatee was evidence of some strange symmetry between land and sea, and as symmetry is one of nature’s most powerful organising forces Hernando understandably thought this pattern might extend further. Hernando’s father-and-son fishing trip was, then, reflexively absorbed into his obsession with order, in the manatee’s suggestion that land and sea animals could be put in two parallel and symmetrical lists.10

      The fleet departed from Port Azúa on 14 July, sheltering from another storm at Port Brazil further west along the south coast of Hispaniola, before striking out for Jamaica, where they encountered a string of sandy islets. To these they gave the name Pozze – ‘puddles’ – because though the islets had no freshwater springs the crew still managed to get water on them by digging in the sand. Heading further west they encountered another island (Guanaja) where the Bermuda was able to capture a gigantic canoe, made of a single trunk but nonetheless eight feet wide and as long as a galley. It carried twenty-five men from the island, as well as women, children and baggage, all sheltering under a palm-leaf awning; though they did not know it at the time, the people they had encountered were the tribe that came to be known as the Mayans. To Columbus’ delight, the canoe contained a gazette of the products of the region, causing him to thank God that so much had been revealed to him at once. The canoe held

      cotton blankets,

      sleeveless shirts,

      loincloths,

      shawls – all in different colours and designs;

      long wooden swords with flint edges;

      hatchets and

      hawksbells – made of copper, with crucibles for melting;

      roots,

      grains,

      chica (maize wine),

      mandorle (cocoa beans)

      Again, in describing this encounter it seems Hernando cannot help attempting to impose some order on what he is seeing, something he achieves by sorting the sights into the common and the unique. So the palm-leaf awning of the canoe is very like the felzi or awning of a gondola in Venice, the shawls worn by the women are similar to the veils worn by Moorish women in Granada and the maize wine is like the beer drunk in England. (Some of these ‘shawls’ may, in fact, have been made of bark cloth and inscribed with Mayan characters, a form of book but too alien for Hernando to recognise as such.) On the other hand, there are many things in the canoe for which he can find no equivalent, such as the ponchos and swords, and in these instances he simply resorts to description.11

      A page showing an eclipse from the Mayan Dresden Codex.

      But the most interesting discovery seems to fit neither category. While the mandorle or cocoa beans were not remarkable in themselves, Hernando notes his surprise that when one of the men from the canoe dropped a bean, he forgot his fear of the Europeans at once and (in a phrase recalling the legend of Perseus), scrabbled around the deck after it as if he had lost an eye. In an astonishing moment of insight, Hernando realises the beans must serve as currency for these people: after all, what else is a currency if not an object to which we assign a value greater than its intrinsic worth, in order that it can serve as a medium of exchange? Though the great value placed upon these beans by the people of Guanaja helps Hernando to think in the abstract about monetary systems, he also sees in it a more general lesson about human nature, in which we forget the merely symbolic value of currency and come to value it more than our own physical safety. This, Hernando remarks laconically, is called greed.12

      What is in many ways more fascinating than Hernando’s observations as he travels through these islands – manatees in Azúa, freshwater puddles in the Pozze, chocolate money in Guanaja – is the principle of organisation that is hidden from even Hernando himself: every island, every landing point, is defined for him and his readers by the unique lesson it has to teach the explorers. The idea that one would record what is distinct about a place seems so obvious, so natural, we might easily miss the fact that doing so belongs within a particular, and particularly European, tradition of thought. In part this was a practice made necessary by the lack of accurate measures of longitude: if a landmass could not be assigned specific spatial coordinates, it could only be identified by its unique human or landscape features. But this had unintended consequences: if each island must present a new experience to the observer, the map becomes little more than a record of the order in which the world is revealed to that observer.

      This habit had taken up residence in the European mind at least as long ago as Homer’s Odyssey, in which Odysseus’ ten-year homeward voyage from Troy СКАЧАТЬ