With Columbus’s 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’s 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, he was clearly 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 only one of the numberless cities over which the Grand Khan ruled. For his description of Cathay, and the regions of “Antillia” and “Cipangu,” which Columbus believed would make convenient stopping points on the way, Toscanelli was largely indebted to the thirteenth-century travelers 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’s eventual success. Hernando was to acknowledge that the Portuguese were wary of further investment in Atlantic exploration, which 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 that Columbus had dispatched his brother Bartholomew to seek English backing for the voyage, 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 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’s project long before his triumph, Hernando was to reserve the vindication to his father alone, depicting him as a solitary voice against the stubbornness of the learned and the powerful. The image of Columbus as a visionary who was mocked and derided but lived to have the last laugh was one molded 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 skeptics 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 commonsense 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 rumors of promising sightings during voyages in the eastern Atlantic. Columbus’s 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 willfulness 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”; also that the great Church father St. Augustine was on record as doubting the existence of undiscovered Antipodean lands, an opinion that satisfied them and that 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 favorable to Columbus’s 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 favorable 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 that 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’s 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 mythmaking. Columbus’s 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 Herna
ndo’s elder brother but whose premature passing abruptly cut Columbus’s 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’s 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 to colonize. And the picture of the lonely visionary, pursuing his destiny in the face of blind opposition from the Spanish court, is somewhat complicated by his being, during his years of lobbying in Córdoba, in a liaison with the young orphan Beatriz Enríquez de Arana. Beatriz’s parents had been of lowly station—from the same class of weavers from which Columbus himself derived—but Columbus likely came to know her through the circle of doctors in Córdoba 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’s 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 Córdoba, 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 where any other person on record had gone, and according to his own account (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 behavior 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 practiced downright deception, intentionally giving his sailors a significantly lower figure than his true estimation of the distance traveled, to limit the blank fear they felt at being farther and farther 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 562/3 miles to the degree. (No one was aware then 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’s First Voyage could in some ways 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 evangelized and converted to Christianity, they clearly 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’s 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 second 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’s 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 in turn be joined 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 mane
uvering 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 Hernando right at the center 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 center 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 Castilians, derived in part from boasts about their early victories over the Muslim invaders, often led them to treat Andalusians like Hernando with suspicion, given their longer history of mingling with the Islamic residents of the peninsula.
The Catalogue of Shipwrecked Books Page 3