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

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СКАЧАТЬ even recording in his library a map that was presented to Henry VII and the verses that were written on it; but he saw further evidence of God’s manifest hand in the fact that Bartholomew arrived too late with Henry’s offer of support, leaving Spain to reap the rewards. And while it was later to be claimed that many prominent Spaniards supported Columbus’ project long before his triumph, Hernando was to depict his father’s time in Spain also as one in which the stubbornness of the learned and powerful left the vindication to his father virtually alone. The image of Columbus as a visionary who was mocked and derided but lived to have the last laugh was one moulded in large part by his son.9

      The verses on the map presented to Henry VII, which Hernando retrieved from the library and copied into his biography, give an abbreviated version of the tripartite argument the Columbus brothers presented to sceptics of his westward passage to Cathay and India:

      You who wish to know the limits of the earth

      can read them in this picture:

      What was known to Strabo, Ptolemy, Pliny and Isidore

      though they did not always agree;

      Yet also here are the lands unknown of old

      but now found by Spanish ships and in every man’s thoughts.

      (by Bartholomew Columbus, in London on 13 February 1488)

      Hernando was later to codify this argument into three parts, namely, the nature of things, the sayings of ancient and modern writers, and reports from sailors. This threefold case brought together the common-sense reasoning that it was possible to circle a round world with thoughts from classical and medieval writers on the likely circumference of the globe, and rumours of promising sightings during voyages in the eastern Atlantic. Columbus’ detailed examination of ancient geographers, mostly through medieval compendiums such as the Picture of the World by Pierre d’Ailly and the History of Eneas Silvius Piccolomini, are strikingly attested to by the dense notes he left in the margins of his copies, which were to be inherited by Hernando and to make his library a site of pilgrimage for those seeking to understand the explorer. Hernando was to portray his father as amassing a vast body of authorities on the circumference of the earth, and to ignore entirely the wilfulness that made Columbus prefer the smallest of the estimates of circumference, following the Arabic cosmographer Alfragan (al-Faragani) – the one that would make his voyage most likely to succeed. To those opposing Columbus Hernando allows only a series of points designed to seem immensely contemptible in retrospect. Among these were assertions that the Ocean was interminably broad or impossible to navigate, and that those sailing back from the west would be going ‘uphill’; and that the great Church Father St Augustine was on record as doubting the existence of undiscovered Antipodean lands, an opinion with which they were satisfied and which it might be heretical to question.10

      The versions of the Columbus story that descended from Hernando – as most do – would pass over the growing body of support for Columbus at the Spanish court and focus instead on a dramatic climax in which the explorer forced the hand of an unwilling world. Neither of the learned gatherings to whom Columbus presented his arguments (in 1487 and 1491) reached a conclusion favourable to Columbus’ design, and Ferdinand and Isabella understandably remained reluctant, given the cost of the war against the Moors and the terms Columbus was demanding, to invest in a venture whose promise rested on the word of an unproven if undoubtedly charismatic stranger. Hernando would portray his father, scorning to beg his destiny from the blind, as abandoning the Spanish court to look for other means of advancing his plans. Only the eleventh-hour intercession of the queen’s confessor, Fray Juan Pérez, gained Columbus a favourable hearing, and the offer of the Secretary of the Exchequer, Luis de Santangel, to front the costs himself seems to have persuaded the Monarchs to come to terms with Columbus. Later accounts of these events were to heighten the dramatic tension, with stories of Columbus being called back even as he rode away from the city, and the queen offering to pawn her own jewels to pay for the expedition.

      This narrative of events in 1491 and early 1492 was later honed to epic perfection by those seeking to paint a picture of Spanish destiny and by the vision of Columbus promoted by the explorer himself and by his faction. The legend obscures many of the mundane and practical contexts that might detract from this messianic version of events. Among these were the Monarchs’ need for new sources of gold now the Moors of Spain would no longer be paying tribute drawn on the north African trade routes, the pressure for European expansion (especially from mercantile nations including the Venetians and Genoese) to look west as the Ottoman Turks began to absorb the eastern Mediterranean regions that had once supplied many of their goods, and the comparability of Columbus’ voyage to many fifteenth-century expeditions that had enlarged the European orbit south down the coast of Africa and west to islands in the Atlantic.

      Another effect of the narrowing of the Columbus narrative to focus on the single Man of Destiny was to obscure his family life, obliterating the personal circumstances of his actions and instead making those around him conform to the patterns of his myth-making. Columbus’ abrupt departure from Portugal after the failure of his bid for King João’s support was attributed to his unwavering focus on his destiny, but may also have been driven by the death of Doña Filipa, who had given him Hernando’s elder brother but whose premature passing abruptly cut his ties to Portugal. It was her relatives who determined where he went in Spain by providing links when he arrived there, especially in Palos, which was to be the launching point for his first expedition. The legend also glosses over the change in Columbus’ name at this point, from the Italian Colombo to the Spanish Colón by which he was known for the rest of his life, though Hernando was later to argue that all of these names were symbolically appropriate to Columbus: ‘Colombo’, ‘the dove’, who like Noah’s messenger reaches out into the flood and brings back evidence of land as a covenant between God and His nation; and ‘Colón’, which in Greek made Columbus a ‘member’ of Christ, an arm doing his bidding, and foretold he would make of the natives coloni, ‘members of the Church’ – though with no small irony this is also the root for the word ‘to colonise’. And the picture of the lonely visionary, pursuing his destiny in the face of blind opposition from the Spanish court, is somewhat complicated by the fact that during his years of lobbying in Cordoba he was also engaged in a liaison with the young orphan Beatriz Enríquez de Arana. Beatriz’ parents had been of lowly station – in fact from the same class of weavers from which Columbus himself derived – but Columbus likely came to know her through the circle of doctors in Cordoba who surrounded her uncle and guardian, Rodrigo Enríquez de Arana. Though Hernando, who was born of this affair, was not disloyal to his Arana relatives, noting the significant role many of them later played in Columbus’ voyages, he did not pause in the narrative of his father’s life so much as to write his mother’s name, and his own birth on 15 August 1488 is passed over in silence, preserving the smooth course of the explorer’s story. Columbus did not mention, in the first draft of the letter he cast overboard in the storm, that both Diego and Hernando during the voyage were under the care and protection of Beatriz in Cordoba, and his triumphant return largely meant for Beatriz that these children were taken from her. Though she was still living in 1506 when Columbus died, the explorer hardly ever mentioned her again in his letters. The anguished way in which her name was spoken in his final testament reflects a pattern in the life of Columbus and his sons, who showed themselves at once to be of tender conscience and yet also coldly willing to cast aside those near them in pursuit of the destiny they believed to be theirs, a trait that saw Beatriz even being largely written out of her own son’s life.11

      It is easy to see, however, how the events of the first voyage drove an already determined man to such extraordinary levels of narcissism. Columbus had sailed west into the Ocean Sea, the body of water thought to surround the landmass of the earth, far beyond any other СКАЧАТЬ