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

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СКАЧАТЬ (and there is no other), he had resisted the nearly mutinous opposition of his crew almost single-handedly. He did this through a combination of threat and encouraging interpretations of the signs, which Hernando was later to record in detail:

      a mast adrift, strange behaviour of the compass needle, a prodigious flame falling from the sky, a heron, greenish weed, a flock of birds flying west, a pelican, small birds, a junco de rabo, a whale, gulls, songbirds, crabs, a freshness in the air, reef fish, ducks, a light in the distance

      A less determined person would have seen this as a jumble of flotsam rather than signs of approaching land. Columbus also practised downright deception, intentionally giving his sailors a significantly lower figure than his true estimation of the distance travelled, in order to limit the blank fear they felt at being further and further from the world they knew. In what he saw as a reward for his resilience, he found land precisely where he had predicted it to be, at 750 leagues west of the Canary Islands, exactly the distance to east Asia estimated by his calculation of the number of degrees and using al-Faragani’s figure of 56⅔ miles to the degree. (No one was aware at that point that al-Faragani was using an Arabic mile significantly longer than the European one, so that his figure was not in the least confirmed by the voyage.) In the view of Columbus and most others, he was the first man to have sailed west to reach the other side of the known world, reaching the island of Cipangu (Japan), for which the local name was ‘Cuba’. For the first time in history someone had broken the bounds of Ocean, and had closed the circle of the globe within the compass of human knowledge. What was more, he had on arriving there met a people who – despite (or because of) his inability to speak to them – he was able to make conform to European notions of prelapsarian innocence, a people who did not know the shame of nakedness or the use of iron or the worth of gold, and who (by extension) must live in or near some version of Eden, as confirmed by the perpetual and uncultivated fertility of those lands. Given the deeply ingrained beliefs of the time the only possible conclusion was that Columbus had triggered an event not just of geographical and political expansion, but one in the providential history of the world: a beginning of the return of man to paradise and the end of secular history.

      Yet if Columbus’ First Voyage in some ways could be neatly shoehorned into a narrative of Christian providence, it was harder to square with the existing worldview in other ways. If the voyage confirmed the claims of Ptolemy and Marco Polo, it also proved them unquestionably wrong in other respects, exploding the notion of a world neatly bounded by the uncrossable Ocean Sea, and made it hard to argue that St Augustine was right to doubt. The observations on these voyages and those that followed were increasingly incompatible with the writings of Pliny, Aristotle, Plato and others. If they had been wrong about this – the very shape of the world – what else might the ancient authorities have been wrong about? Nor did the native people conform entirely to expectations: for all their Edenic nature they seemed not to understand any of the ancient languages spoken by the converted Jewish interpreters Columbus had taken with him. What knowledges might these people have outside the ambit of classical thought? More troublingly, although Columbus spoke with great enthusiasm about the natural piety of the people he had met and their readiness to be evangelised and converted to Christianity, it was clear they had no existing notion of the Gospel. What could be the plan of a God who had kept humans in the dark for a millennium and a half over the secrets that would promise them salvation and eternal life?

      These questions, unavoidably provoked by Columbus’ discoveries, would take European thinkers decades to articulate and hundreds of years to answer to their own satisfaction. In the meantime, Columbus and his patrons focused on more immediate and pressing practical matters, successfully petitioning the recently installed Spanish Pope, Alexander VI (Rodrigo Borja, the first Borgia pope), for bulls that conferred upon Spain the same legal rights (and spiritual duties) over their ‘discovered’ territories as those given to Portugal over its new colonies in west Africa and the Atlantic islands. Furthermore, the Catholic Monarchs seem to have employed a painstakingly secret process to copy the exceptionally detailed logs of Columbus’ First Voyage, spreading the pages among a large number of scribes so no one of them could leak the information to other interested parties (particularly the Portuguese). This process took so long Columbus received back his copy of the log only three weeks before his departure for the Second Voyage on 25 September 1493, in a packet that also contained a letter from Isabella conceding that everything he had predicted regarding the location of the Indies had been proved true and urging him on to complete his map of these western lands so that any remaining territorial disputes with the Portuguese could be settled once and for all.12

      When Hernando stood on the dock in Cadiz in his first-recorded memory, then, he was looking at a man who had made the world anew, a man setting off in triumph to secure the victorious conquests that seemed to be within his grasp. His father was going to rejoin his mother’s cousin, Diego de Arana, who had been left as one of those in charge of the first city in the Spanish New World – La Navidad – and they would be joined in turn by his uncle Bartholomew Columbus, who had heard the news of his brother’s triumphant return while in Paris, on the way back from England to deliver the rival offer from Henry VII. Hernando himself was, through his father’s ambitious manoeuvring at this the dawn of his influence, set to join his brother Diego as part of the household of the heir apparent to the throne, the Infante Juan, placing him right at the centre of the kingdom God had chosen to transform the globe.

      II.

       In the Chamber of Clean Blood

      Whatever roles the child Hernando had played by the time his father left for his Second Voyage – son to his mother, younger sibling, natural child to a father who was rarely present – none of them would have prepared him for his arrival at the court of the Reyes Católicos early in 1494. Though he and Diego were officially joining the household of the Infante Juan, there was nothing homely about this institution. The heir to the throne, at sixteen, still followed the itinerant court of his parents around their kingdoms, but he nevertheless had a personal following of several hundred people, each of whom had a distinct office relating to one of the prince’s needs. This household was constantly on the move, and mostly did not live in palaces owned by the crown but were billeted in the mansions of the local nobility, always shifting, reshuffling to make the household hierarchy fit each new royal residence. Hernando probably first joined this outfit in the austere Castilian town of Valladolid, a centre of royal power whose bare and imposing character must have seemed even less hospitable during the biting winter months after Hernando’s arrival. The weather may not have been the only thing adding a chill to the reception. The hauteur of northern Castile, derived in part from boasts about their early victories over the Muslim invaders, often led Castilians to treat Andalusians like Hernando with suspicion, given their longer history of mingling with the Islamic residents of the peninsula.

      Hernando’s first home in Valladolid was perhaps the Palacio de Pimentel, a short walk from the Palacio de los Vivero where Ferdinand and Isabella had been married in 1469 and where the itinerant Castilian government was just beginning to put down its first roots. These solid, square structures, unadorned on the outside and set around plain colonnaded courtyards, were a world apart from the wilful asymmetry of Hernando’s home town of Cordoba, with its warren of streets slinking between the houses towards the cathedral, where a forest of horseshoe arches provided a constant reminder of its long history as a mosque. If the houses of Valladolid were rather spare, though, Hernando would have found some relief looking out of the windows of the Palacio de Pimentel to where, across the street, the art of the Flamenco-Spanish high Gothic was reaching its apex. For the newly completed façade of the Colegio de San Gregorio and the adjoining Iglesia de San Pablo, the master masons Simón de Colonia and Gil Silóe had created riotous sculptural marvels, whittling the local stone until it became СКАЧАТЬ