The Catalogue of Shipwrecked Books

by Edward Wilson-Lee

  Like the drawn-out process of leaving Europe, arriving on the western edge of the Atlantic may not have felt like the threshold crossing it was supposed to. Ocean faring was not an exact science, and once land was sighted, the pilots had the complex task of orienting themselves before they could proceed to a known port. When the fleet spotted land on 15 June, they eventually recognized the island as one Columbus had sighted on the Second Voyage in 1493 but had not stopped at or named. They took the opportunity to name it now—“La Matinino” or Martinica (modern-day Martinique)—and Hernando was witness to the strange transformation of the unknown to the familiar by the act of naming. From there they were able to follow the same dribble of islands that Columbus had on the Second Voyage, curving north and west like the side of a basin—Dominica, Guadeloupe, the Carib islands, Puerto Rico—up to Hispaniola.5

  The tension must have been considerable when the Admiral’s four ships anchored off Santo Domingo on 29 June. On the one hand, Columbus was for the first time showing the chief town in the New World he had discovered to one of his sons, a place moreover named after the young boy’s grandfather. On the other hand, Hernando would probably have been aware the Monarchs, while encouraging Columbus to cross the ocean once more, had forbidden him to land on Hispaniola, fearing his presence there would reignite unrest among settlers for whom opposition to the Columbus brothers was still a rallying cry. Columbus had nevertheless decided the problems with the Bermuda, still not able to run under full sail without drawing dangerously low in the water, absolved him of this injunction and made it necessary for him to land at Santo Domingo to exchange the ship for a fitter one. While it is true that a fleet is held back by its weakest craft, and the Bermuda would certainly have struggled on the circumnavigation Columbus was planning if he found the passage to China, one suspects he could not resist the dramatic climax of seeking entry to Santo Domingo, either as triumphant founder or to be spurned by his own creation. In the end, the new governor, Nicolás de Ovando—whom Hernando would have known from his days at the court of the Infante Juan, where Ovando was one of the Ten Choice Companions—refused to oblige Columbus in any way and was even deaf to his pleas to be allowed into the harbor to shelter from the vast storm that was collecting over the Caribbean Sea. Even Job, Columbus would later write, would have pitied his state when the land for which he had sweated blood had closed its doors to him. Yet the local news was far more dire than even this: the Admiral would learn they had just missed another fleet of twenty-eight ships departing on the return crossing, including a ship that carried Francisco de Bobadilla (who had unseated Columbus as governor), the leader of the 1498 rebellion, Francisco Roldán, and a great many other settlers who had participated in the revolt against Columbus and his brothers. While the removal of Bobadilla by Ovando may have seemed a triumph, it may also have given way to a greater catastrophe by allowing Columbus’s enemies to return in great numbers to the court and tell their side of the story in his absence, spurred on no doubt by the president of the Council of the Indies, Juan Rodríguez de Fonseca, who was an implacable foe to Columbus. Ovando further ignored Columbus’s urgings to call this fleet back before the storm hit, though he might reasonably have suspected the motives behind the Admiral’s advice. The hurricane—from the Taino word for “storm”—reached Hispaniola on Wednesday, 30 June.6

  Hernando’s description of that night records how, in the immense darkness, their fleet was forced to separate, with each ship taking the measures its captain thought best, and each convinced the others had gone down in the storm. While the Capitana lay in close to shore to shelter in the lee of the island, the Bermuda ran out into the open sea to ride out the storm there. The captain of the Santo, returning from begging the obdurate Ovando to change his mind, was forced to cut loose the ship’s boat to prevent the swell from sending it like a battering ram into the hull. The crew of the Capitana gathered in the driving wind and rain to curse the Admiral, whom they blamed for their being turned away from Santo Domingo when even complete strangers would have been given merciful shelter. At this moment Hernando presumes to record, in a move unusual not only for his biography but for the very practice of life writing at the time, his father’s unspoken experience of these events, saying that in his insides Columbus felt the misery of his crewmates and indeed felt it worse than them, as the ingratitude and insult were thrown at him in a place he had given to Spain as an addition to its honor and splendor, and moreover at such a fatal time. In the panic and confusion of the storm Hernando had begun, perhaps without thinking, to speak on his father’s behalf.7

  Columbus’s fleet finally began to reassemble four days later, on Sunday, at the port of Azúa farther down the coast of Hispaniola, but a series of reports would transform relief into a rather different feeling. It suggested the nautical mastery of Columbus’s crew that all four of his ships had survived the storm without significant damage, even the Bermuda, the crippled ship that Bartholomew Columbus had brought safely through the hurricane to the great admiration of the other sailors. This began to seem like something more than skill, however, when it was discovered that the fleet heading east had been almost entirely destroyed, with the loss of nearly all of the twenty-eight ships, including the flagship, carrying Bobadilla and Roldán and two hundred thousand gold ducats on its way to Spain. Columbus may have turned with satisfaction to a passage in The Book of Prophecies, which predicted that God would “force a commander to cease his insolent conduct” (Daniel 11). Columbus’s luck was almost too perfect: rumors began to circulate that he had caused the storm by sorcery to wreak revenge on his enemies, and they seemed to receive confirmation when reports emerged that the only ship to reach Castile, and the least seaworthy craft at that, was the one carrying four thousand gold ducats belonging to Columbus. Even Hernando, who usually resisted unworldly explanations for worldly events, saw the hand of God in preventing his father’s enemies from exchanging their false witness for a hero’s welcome at court.8

  The fleet spent two weeks after the hurricane anchored in the port of Azúa, days given over to repairing damage to the ships and restoring the morale of the men, allowing them time to rest and to fish. But Hernando’s mind showed itself restless to interpret the new world in which he had found himself, and he records from this time two sights, one a source of pleasure and the other of astonishment. The first moment—of wonder—came when the Vizcaína’s boat began, unprompted, to jerk erratically across the water, moving first in one direction and then another as fast as a saetta (crossbow bolt). The ship’s crew must have thought themselves for a moment still in the sorcery of the storm. When the craft finally fell still, the mystery was revealed: an animal, “big as half a bed,” had become snagged on the bottom of the boat and had dragged it around the bay as long as it was able. Hernando calls this creature a schiavina because it looked like a cape, and indeed its modern name (manta ray) comes from its looking like a mantle being drawn through the water. Hernando’s second observation was of another kind of “fish” not known in Europe, which the Taino called a manatee, the gentle sea cow that has now been driven by industry from the Bay of Azúa but can still be found in the coasts and estuaries of the island. A story recorded by Peter Martyr even tells of a manatee tamed by a Taino cacique, whom it would let ride on its back; but the manatee distrusted Christians, recognizing them by their clothes, having once been mistreated by them. This maritime creature, Hernando noted, in many ways did not fit the definition of a fish: it was the size and shape of a calf and grazed like one in the shallows; moreover, it tasted like a calf—even better, because fattier—and resembled a cow more than a fish when cut open. Hernando was here following the classification system of Aristotelian zoology, which grouped animals on the basis of what they ate and how they reproduced. These physiological, anatomical, and behavioral features lent weight, Hernando concluded, to those contemporary natural philosophers who believed that every land animal had its counterpart in the sea: the surface of the ocean, then, acted like an im
mense zoological mirror, with everything above water having its equivalent beneath.9

  A 1621 print showing Native Americans riding on a manatee, an animal that confounded Europeans and led Hernando to important early speculations.

  This theory was wrong, but the episodes of the manatee and the ray give a glimpse into the development of Hernando’s mind. While Columbus identified manatees as the “sirens” of legend, noting with disappointment that they didn’t resemble human women, his apprentice Hernando is far more inductive, alert to the significance of what he saw before him. The mystery of the moving boat was a cautionary tale against relying on surface appearances, as it required awareness of the hidden depths for its explanation, and the pleasure this provoked is that of having a veil of ignorance torn away. The lesson seems to have been taken to heart as he observed the manatee: Hernando has not attributed to it fishlike qualities simply because it lives in the water, but has followed up the initial impression (that it looks like a calf) by studying its internal qualities (anatomy, taste) and its behavior (grazing). While the grazing provided a false lead (there are plenty of grazing fish), the tissue and organ structure of the manatee allowed Hernando to reach the entirely correct conclusion that it was a mammal, even if there wasn’t yet a word for that. His speculation on the presence of this cow in the sea was wrong—the mystery of cetaceans’ and Sirenians’ return to the water would wait another 450 years for a solution—but it was not unreasonable: the manatee was evidence of some strange symmetry between land and sea, and as symmetry is one of nature’s most powerful organizing forces Hernando understandably thought this pattern might extend further. Hernando’s father-and-son fishing trip was, then, reflexively absorbed into his obsession with order, in the manatee’s suggestion that land and sea animals could be put in two parallel and symmetrical lists.10

  The fleet departed from Port Azúa on 14 July, sheltering from another storm at Port Brazil farther west along the south coast of Hispaniola, before striking out for Jamaica, where they encountered a string of sandy islets. To these they gave the name Pozze—“puddles”—because though the islets had no freshwater springs the crew still managed to get water on them by digging in the sand. Heading farther west, they encountered another island (Guanaja), where the Bermuda captured a gigantic canoe, made of a single trunk but nonetheless eight feet wide and as long as a galley. It carried twenty-five men from the island, as well as women, children, and baggage, all sheltering under a palm-leaf awning; though they did not know it at the time, the people they had encountered were the tribe that came to be known as the Mayans. To Columbus’s delight, the canoe contained a gazette of the products of the region, causing him to thank God that so much had been revealed to him at once. The canoe held

  cotton blankets

  sleeveless shirts

  loincloths

  shawls—all in different colors and designs

  long wooden swords with flint edges

  hatchets and

  hawksbells—made of copper, with crucibles for melting

  roots

  grains

  chica (maize wine)

  mandorle (cocoa beans)

  Again, in describing this encounter it seems Hernando cannot help attempting to impose some order on what he is seeing, something he achieves by sorting the sights into the common and the unique. So the palm-leaf awning of the canoe is very like the felzi or awning of a gondola in Venice, the shawls worn by the women are similar to the veils worn by Moorish women in Granada, and the maize wine is like the beer drunk in England. (Some of these “shawls” may have been made of bark cloth and inscribed with Mayan characters, a form of book, but too alien for Hernando to recognize as such.) On the other hand, for many things in the canoe he can find no equivalent, such as the ponchos and swords, and in these instances he simply resorts to description.11

  But the most interesting discovery seems to fit neither category. While the mandorle or cocoa beans were not remarkable in themselves, Hernando notes his surprise that when one of the men from the canoe dropped a bean, he forgot his fear of the Europeans at once and (in a phrase recalling the legend of Perseus), scrabbled around the deck after it as if he had lost an eye. In an astonishing moment of insight, Hernando observes that the beans must serve as currency for these people: After all, what else is a currency if not an object to which we assign a value greater than its intrinsic worth, in order that it can serve as a medium of exchange? Though the great value placed upon these beans by the people of Guanaja helps Hernando to think in the abstract about monetary systems, he also sees in it a more general lesson about human nature, in which we forget the merely symbolic value of currency and come to value it more than our physical safety. This, Hernando remarks laconically, is called greed.12

  A page from the Mayan Dresden Codex showing an eclipse, the celestial event that would play a key role in Columbus’s Fourth Voyage.

  What is in many ways more fascinating than Hernando’s observations as he travels through these islands—manatees in Azúa, freshwater puddles in the Pozze, chocolate money in Guanaja—is the principle of organization that is hidden from even Hernando himself: every island, every landing point, is defined for him and his readers by the unique lesson it has to teach the explorers. The idea that one would record what is distinct about a place seems so obvious, so natural, we might easily miss that doing so belongs within a particular, and particularly European, tradition of thought. In part this was a practice made necessary by the lack of accurate measures of longitude: if a landmass could not be assigned specific spatial coordinates, it could only be identified by its unique human or landscape features. But this had unintended consequences: if each island must present a new experience to the observer, the map becomes little more than a record of the order in which the world is revealed to that observer.

  This habit had taken up residence in the European mind at least as long ago as Homer’s Odyssey, in which Odysseus’s ten-year homeward voyage from Troy takes him to a succession of islands, and a distinct lesson is learned on each: the dangers of self-indulgence and oblivion on the Island of the Lotus Eaters, the dangers of greed on Circe’s island, the threat posed by carnal enjoyment on Callisto’s island, and so on. The tendency can also be seen in medieval maps, where the remote regions of the world were filled in with dog-headed men, cannibals, and wonders, never the same thing twice as the drive was less to describe a place and more to define it, to give it a unique property that could then be listed and ordered. The habit would remain, as we will see, deeply embedded in European thought, with narratives from Rabelais’s Quart livre to Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels featuring a sequence of islands, each of which poses a distinct challenge. This was not limited to the stories Europe told about the world. Several projects were begun in the 1520s (one with links to Hernando) to compile isolarii, geographical encyclopedias of every island in the world—even down, as Hernando would later remark, to the Pozze sandbars off Jamaica—noting the distinct features of each. The desire to order the world by splitting it into distinct landmasses that could then be put in particular orders was so strong that imaginary islands were often created, in explorers’ narratives and in the most famous Isolario (by Bordone), to play host to particular experiences. The physical world, threatening to the European mind in its incomprehensible complexity, becomes more manageable when it is an archipelago of different experiences that can be put in order.13

  The importance of this underlying order becomes apparent in the pains Hernando took to correct a later map that had reproduced the Guanaja islands twice—treating Columbus’s visit of 1502 and a subsequent sighting of the islands as evidence of two separate landmasses. The problem this created was not simply that it deprived Columbus of the honor due him as the sole discoverer of the Guanajas (he was, after all, “discoverer” of hundreds of islands), nor even the usefulness of a map as a navigational chart, as until the development of accurate observations of longitude these maps were of limited use in that respect. Rather,
the danger of duplicate islands was that they threw into doubt the entire system of organization, creating the prospect of a map filled with infinite shadow islands, each one produced by a different person’s experience of them.14

  Despite the great wealth contained in the canoe from Guanaja, Columbus was determined not to be distracted from continuing in his search for a passage through to the East. They parted from these traders, nevertheless “detaining” one of them, an old man named Yumbe, who acted as translator in the coming months and who seems to have become a firm favorite with the crew. Their ultimate destination was the region north of Paria, which Columbus had visited on the Third Voyage, where he felt sure the passage to the East would be found. Finding this region, however, was easier said than done, and after reaching the mainland they were forced simply to turn south and coast along “like a man groping in the dark,” stopping only to note the local particularities: Caxinas Point, named after the paradise plum trees that grew plentifully there, where the locals wore armor of woven cotton capable of deflecting a sword stroke; the Costa de las Orejas, where the dark-skinned people ate raw fish and flesh, wore no clothes, painted themselves with “Moorish” designs as well as lions and turreted castles, and stretched holes in their earlobes (orejas) large enough to fit a hen’s egg; Cape Gracias a Dios, which they were thankful to reach after progressing just seventy leagues in sixty days, where the land curved south and the winds turned favorable; the Rio de los Desastres, where the canes were as thick as a man’s thigh and where a ship’s boat was pulled under by a current.