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

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СКАЧАТЬ resplendent detail, detail almost unthinkable for most people who lived in his time. This is because Hernando’s books contain within their covers not just an exquisitely detailed map of the Renaissance world, but also a map of his life. In every book he bought, Hernando recorded the date and place of its acquisition and how much it cost, often also noting where and when he read it, if he met with the author, or from whom he received the book if it was a gift. He also responded in many cases to what the books said, though as will become apparent he had his own singular way of doing so. These many fragments, when pieced together, give an account of one of the most fascinating lives in a period filled with entrancing characters; of a man who not only saw more of the world and what it had to offer than almost any of his contemporaries, but also one whose insights into this changing world were astonishingly prescient.5

      To reconstruct Hernando’s life from his books is to find him present at many of the most significant events of the age of Renaissance, Reformation and exploration. But Hernando’s view of these events is rather like one of the deceptive, ‘anamorphic’ paintings of which the age was so fond, in which a picture viewed from another angle reveals something entirely different. This is in part because Hernando’s mind moved ceaselessly from event to system, from a single thing to a general framework into which it could be fitted. This will quickly become clear in the story of his life, for while most biographies start with a list of documents about their subject that need to be set in order, many of the documents through which we know about Hernando are themselves lists: catalogues, encyclopedias, inventories, logbooks, which he compiled obsessively and compulsively. We should not be deceived by the staid and impersonal appearance of these lists, documents which at first seem all fact and no interpretation. To the trained eye, each contains a story: how the list-maker imagines the place for which they have packed the items, their way of seeing the world that lies behind a particular kind of ordering, the secrets being hidden by omissions from the list.

      If Hernando attempted to bring order to his rapidly expanding world by reducing it to catalogue entries and finding ways of organising these lists that seemed logical, he was far from immune to distorting influences, distortions that can be traced to the core of his being. Much of his life can be explained by his desire to become worthy of, perhaps even equal to, the father he worshipped, though this was a father whom he in a sense created, as he slowly and deliberately shaped our collective memory of Columbus into the man known today. In death and in life, many of Hernando’s actions were in conversation with the father he last saw in his youth, but whose voice he continued to hear and record long after. Their relationship, both before and after the explorer’s death, was inevitably affected by the fact that Hernando was not the product of a legitimate union – he was, in the delicate Spanish phrase, a natural son. Although Columbus never paid this distinction much mind, the circumstances of his birth meant Hernando could win legitimacy only by showing himself to be his father’s son in spirit. Hernando’s travels in the realm of knowledge and the new routes he pioneered through it were in a very real sense akin to what his father had achieved.

      For all that he died nearly five centuries ago, Hernando’s discovery of his world bears striking, sometimes uncanny, resemblance to the one we are collectively discovering every day. Perhaps no one has been as helpless in the face of information as those who have lived through the beginning of the twenty-first century: the digital revolution has increased the amount of available information exponentially, and as a result we are wholly reliant on the search algorithms developed to navigate it, tools whose modes of ordering and ranking and categorising are quickly remaking our lives. The invention of print was another such revolution, and the tools developed in response to it profoundly shaped the world until yesterday, during the age of print. The way of seeing things created by the print library has become so natural to us as to be all but invisible; we forget that its form is far from inevitable, that it was the product of specific decisions with immense consequences, consequences which our current age, sleepwalking into new ways of organising knowledge by search algorithms, seems likely to face on an even larger and more pervasive scale. Hernando was, in a sense, one of the first and greatest visionaries of the age of print. If his life has escaped the notice of previous generations, it was perhaps because the power of tools that order our reservoirs of information was not as obvious. To reconstruct his life is not only to recover a vision of the Renaissance age in unparalleled depth, but also to reflect upon the passions and intrigues that lie beneath our own attempts to bring order to the world.

      PART I

       THE SORCERER’S APPRENTICE

      I.

       The Return from Ocean

      Hernando Colón’s earliest recorded memory is characteristically precise. It was an hour before sunrise on Wednesday, the 25th of September 1493. He was standing next to his older half-brother, Diego, looking out at the harbour of Cadiz. Dancing on the water in front of him was a constellation of lamps, on and above the decks of seventeen ships about to weigh anchor, preparing to return to the islands in the west where their father had first made landfall less than a year before. Christopher Columbus was now the ‘Admiral of the Ocean Sea’ and was of sufficient fame that chroniclers took down each detail of the scene in front of the five-year-old Hernando. The fleet was formed of a number of lighter craft from Cantabria in the north of Spain, vessels made with wooden joinery so as not to be weighed down with iron nails, as well as the slower but more durable caravels. On board the ships were thirteen hundred souls, including artisans of every sort and labourers to reap the miraculous and uninterrupted harvests of which Columbus had told, but also well-bred caballeros who went for adventure rather than work.1

      A favourable wind had begun to freshen, and as the dawn grew behind the city the dots of lamplight would slowly have been connected by the cabins and masts and riggings to which they were fixed. The scene and the mood were triumphant: tapestries hung from the sides of the ships and pennants fluttered from the braided cables, while the sterns were draped in the royal ensigns of the Reyes Católicos (Catholic Monarchs), Ferdinand of Aragon and Isabella of Castile, the great sovereigns whose marriage had united a fragmented Spain. The piercing fanfare of hautboys, bagpipes, trumpets and clarions was so loud, according to one observer, that the Sirens and the spirits of the water were astonished, and the seabed resounded with the cannonades. At the harbour mouth a Venetian convoy, returning from a trade mission to Britain, augmented the noise with their own gunpowder salutes, preparing to follow Columbus part of the way in the hope of learning something of his course.

      A Drawing of the City of Cadiz, 1509.

      It is unclear whether, in later life, Hernando could reach back beyond this earliest recorded memory to the rather different circumstances in which, earlier that year, his father had returned from his first voyage across the Atlantic. Columbus had arrived back in Europe with only one of the three vessels with which he had left Spain on 3 August 1492: his flagship Santa Maria had run aground off Hispaniola on Christmas Eve, and on the return voyage he had lost sight of the Pinta during a storm near the Azores. Thirty-nine of Columbus’ original crew of ninety or so had been left on the other side of the ocean, in the newly founded settlement of La Navidad in Hispaniola, a town built from the shipwrecked lumber of the Santa Maria with the СКАЧАТЬ