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

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СКАЧАТЬ a thousand ducats at the Spanish court. It is the first of the documents key to Hernando’s life that probably sits at the bottom of the sea.

      The letter Columbus wrote from Lisbon not only began his fame but also saved him from the fate of those who come second. Arriving back in the Spanish port of Palos on 15 March, he learned that in fact the Pinta had not sunk in the storm off the Azores, and that its captain Martín Alonso Pinzón had himself gone ahead to Barcelona to break the news of the discovery and conquest to Ferdinand and Isabella. Crucially, Columbus’ luck held out a few days longer, and Pinzón died before he could gain an audience with the Monarchs. The explorer arrived in Barcelona in mid-April, bringing with him eyewitness reports and gifts from the lands (in the words of one contemporary report) ‘where the sun sets in the month of March’: pineapples, cotton, parrots, cinnamon, canoes, peppers four times as hot as those eaten in Spain, a group of natives, and (most importantly) a small amount of gold. The intended effect of this list – the argument it makes without seeming to – is simple: in a land of such varied and unrelated wonders, who can doubt that anything could be true? In this Columbus’ gifts were like the great medieval collection of Jean, duc de Berry, which among its three thousand items contained a unicorn’s horn, St Joseph’s engagement ring, an embalmed elephant, an egg found inside another egg and other such marvels. The force of this argument, of these incomprehensible novelties, seems to have been enough to gain widespread acceptance for Columbus’ claims that gold was marvellously abundant in those regions, even if he had only a meagre sample at present. He knelt before Ferdinand and Isabella, who quickly raised him to his feet and recognised him as the Admiral of the Ocean Sea, going on to reconfirm the rewards that had been promised at Santa Fe in January 1492, which conferred upon him in the event of a successful voyage extraordinary rights over lands he claimed in the Monarchs’ names.5

      In a remarkable display of Columbus’ new status, he then rode on horseback through Barcelona in triumph, flanking Ferdinand with his heir, the Infante Juan. If, as is likely, Columbus rode on Ferdinand’s left side, he would have seen the still-tender scar running from the king’s ear down to his shoulder, a reminder of an attempted assassination a few months earlier. The wide variety of groups suspected of being behind this attack – the French, the Catalans, the Navarrese, the Castilians – was a reminder of the fragile state of Ferdinand and Isabella’s Spanish union, which faced opposition from within the Iberian peninsula and outside it. Isabella had wrested her kingdom not only from the Moors but before that from her half-brother, Enrique IV, and those loyal to his line, then forming with Ferdinand an unlikely but effective partnership to rule over their fractured and restive kingdoms; but the threat of a return to civil war was always present. That the blame for the assassination attempt was eventually pinned on a madman, one Juan de Cañamares who claimed the devil had incited him to kill the king, served, like Columbus’ victorious return, conveniently to distract attention from local difficulties and to recast peninsular affairs as a battle between divine forces of Good and Evil.

      For now Hernando was probably sheltered by his youth from the fact that not everyone shared this triumphal account of his father’s return. There were contemporary mutterings that his stop in Portugal was part of Columbus’ plan to cut a deal with that great exploring nation for even more privileges over the islands he had visited. Peter Martyr d’Anghiera, an Italian man of letters who had come to Spain to fight the Moors and had stayed to join the illustrious court of Ferdinand and Isabella, wrote from Barcelona in May and only mentions in passing ‘a certain Christopher Columbus, from Liguria’ who had recently returned from the western Antipodes and had discovered marvellous things, before quickly moving on to discussing more pressing matters of European politics. It is understandable, perhaps, that Peter Martyr should recall Columbus was a fellow Italian, but the matter of Columbus’ origins, and those of his children, muddied somewhat the waters of this Spanish feat. Similarly, the chronicler Bernáldez, who would later come to know Columbus intimately, first speaks of the explorer as a man from the territory of Milan, a seller of printed books who traded in Andalusia and especially in the city of Seville, a man of great ingenuity yet not well educated, who knew the art of cosmography and map-making well. Hernando was later to defend his father vigorously against this charge of being involved in a mechanical, menial occupation such as selling books. The heroic account of the New World discoveries had to compete, from the earliest days, against the eroding effects of rumour, which attributed to the discoverer an origin that seemed unsuitable.6

      In Hernando’s library the books from his father’s pen were listed under the entry ‘Cristophori Colon’, a firmly Spanish name rather than the Latinate ‘Columbus’ by which the rest of Europe would claim him, or his Italian birth-name, Colombo. As well as modifying his name, Columbus seems to have drawn a veil over his early life, leaving modern biographers to unearth his modest origins in a family of weavers, from whose traditional craft and native region of Genoa he departed at some point in his late teens, and there is clear evidence now that Columbus did get his start in mercantile ventures, notably working in the fledgling sugar trade for the Centurione family of his native Genoa. It is also wholly possible that books were part of his stock-in-trade, a trade for which his son seemed to inherit an instinctive familiarity. But even after centuries of digging, evidence of his activities is fragmentary before his arrival in Lisbon in the late 1470s, when he was around thirty years old. His early years were a blank except when, occasionally and in later life, he needed them not to be.7

      With Columbus’ arrival in Lisbon we begin to know something of his life, and documents from this period start to find their way into the library. Among these may have been the papers and maps Columbus inherited – in Hernando’s telling of it – from the father of his Portuguese wife, a match that not only gave him an heir in Hernando’s brother Diego but also a connection to a Portuguese maritime dynasty: the father of Doña Filipa Moniz Perestrelo had been among those who had claimed and settled the Madeira archipelago in the mid-fifteenth century. Also in the library, copied into one of the books Columbus left his son, was a letter from the Italian geographer Paolo dal Pozzo Toscanelli that may have shaped Columbus’ thinking at this stage. The letter from Toscanelli to a Portuguese priest outlined his ‘narrow Atlantic’ hypothesis, which estimated that the distance from Lisbon to Cathay was approximately a third of the globe – 130 degrees, 26 ‘espacios’, or 6,500 miles. Though the later claim that the as yet undistinguished Columbus was directly in contact with Toscanelli is likely untrue, it is clear he was influenced by the geographer’s theories, as well as the Italian’s mouthwatering description of ‘Zaiton’ (modern Quanzhou), a great port in which a hundred ships’ worth of pepper was delivered every year, and which was only one of the numberless cities the Grand Khan ruled from Cathay. For his description of Cathay, and the regions of ‘Antillia’ and ‘Cipangu’ which he believed would make convenient stopping points on the way, Toscanelli was largely indebted to the thirteenth-century travellers Marco Polo, William of Rubruck and Giovanni da Pian del Carpine, right down to the use of the Mongol word Cathay (Khitai) for China – a name that had not been current in China itself for several hundred years.8

      One of the great achievements of the Columbuses – begun by Christopher but brought to perfection by Hernando – was turning the series of events that followed into a narrative of personal destiny. Where historians today might focus on the grand historical forces that pushed European expansion into the Atlantic, and the coincidences that gave the voyage of 1492 its specific form, the Columbus legend saw it as a moment in which history focused its stare on the explorer and guided his hand at every turn. This was especially true when recounting the series of failed bids for patronage that came before Columbus’ eventual success. Hernando was to acknowledge that the Portuguese were wary of further investment in Atlantic exploration that had so far proved costly and unprofitable (in Guinea, the Azores, Madeira and Cape Verde), but in Hernando’s telling the Portuguese refusal to support Columbus, when he first turned to them for funding, was one of those moments in which God hardened the heart of one to whom He had not allotted victory. Similarly, Hernando acknowledged openly СКАЧАТЬ