On 19 May 1504, almost every fit man aboard the Capitana and the Bermuda left Columbus to muster on a hill above the village of Maime, a quarter league from the ship-fortresses. The Admiral sent a final offer of terms, but the impossibility of peace was obvious to everyone, and Porras began his all-out assault by attacking the messengers. The fight was short-lived, but its place in Hernando’s mind is suggested by the lengthy and gruesome details he provides of the battle wounds. Foremost in his memory were those of Pedro de Ledesma, who had displayed heroism by swimming ashore to the besieged settlement of Belén, but had later joined the mutineers. Ledesma had fallen down a cliff face during the battle and lain there abandoned for two days and a night. He was found by the Taino, who, thinking him dead, poked at his wounds with a stick: his brain was open to the air, his arm hung by a thread, and his leg was cut near through. When the broken body spoke, the Taino fled, only to return later and tend to his wounds as he lay writhing in a sweltering and mosquito-infested hut. This brutal scene was what Hernando remembered of the battle, and his traumatic memories of Ledesma’s suffering cast a pall over what the Admiral saw as another divinely sanctioned victory. The debilitated loyalists had triumphed, capturing Porras and putting the rest of the mutineers to flight. When, a little over a month later, the rescue ships finally arrived in Santa Gloria Bay, Columbus was once more de facto commander of his men, and ready to give the official account of what had happened on his latest voyage of discovery.
* * *
At this moment Hernando brought his father’s life abruptly to a close. Though Columbus would live another two years, they were not happy ones, and Hernando’s mercy to his father is to pass over in silence most of the indignities he suffered in his last days. The loyal son could not resist recording his fury at Governor Ovando, who greeted their arrival in Hispaniola “with a scorpion’s kiss,” feigning delight at seeing Columbus safe and lodging him in his house on the new Calle de Fortaleza, but at the same time freeing Porras. Hernando’s first stay in the town his family founded was to be dogged by the disdain of the overweening governor. A ship was prepared to take the Admiral back to Spain, but a later document records how Ovando made them pay for every last thing themselves. Even the two ships supplied at their own expense proved faulty, with the mainmast of one splitting two leagues out of port, and of the other when they were on the high sea, hobbling Columbus’s final return voyage in the same way as his First.
The bedridden Admiral directed repairs from where he lay, and with a jury-rigged lateenyard mast made from the dismantled forecastle they landed at Sanlúcar de Barrameda on 7 November 1504. The news reached them shortly thereafter that Isabella, Columbus’s most steadfast supporter, had just died in the palace facing the Plaza Mayor of Medina del Campo. Gaspar Gorricio had been at her side in her final days and taken down her will from her dictation. Peter Martyr, who accompanied the corpse from Medina to the Alhambra (where it would await the completion of the Chapel Royal), noted the skies opened as they traveled and neither sun nor stars were seen during all of this time. Columbus set himself anew to his perennial task of asserting the rights that had been granted to him in January 1492 outside the walls of Granada, acting now through his sons as proxies at the court. But this was a forlorn hope: the Admiral was broken, bedridden, and the money he felt was owed to him from his New World simply failed to make its way to Spain. He was abandoned by everyone other than a few fellow explorers, such as Amerigo Vespucci, who took turns sitting with him. Hernando’s friend Bartolomé de Las Casas was later to comment on Hernando’s silence over the insult offered to his father when the New World he discovered was named, by quirk of cartography, after this Amerigo, but perhaps Vespucci’s loyalty during this period of abandonment reconciled Hernando to the injustice.10
In this desperate solitude Columbus clearly felt the weight of his earthly affairs and wrote repeatedly to his elder son, Diego, imploring him to cherish and protect his younger brother in later life. Columbus also added a new codicil to his will. Though he had included a legacy for Hernando’s mother in his will of 1502, written before departing on the Fourth Voyage, this had left her a mere ten thousand maravedís a year—one one-hundred-fiftieth of what he bequeathed to her son. Revisiting this decision in his final days, Columbus wrote instead that his heir should give Beatriz the means for an honest life,
as a person to whom I owe so much. I am doing this as bidden by conscience, because it weighs so much on my soul. It is not permitted that I should record here the reasons for this.
As Columbus mentions shortly beforehand that Beatriz is mother to his son Hernando, it cannot be their illicit union that weighs on Columbus’s mind; more likely, perhaps, it was not their shared sin but Columbus’s sole guilt at having abandoned the young woman to a world unforgiving of female indiscretion, in large part because she was an inconvenience at his moment of glory. The whole truth is likely lost forever, but provides some depth to the emotional legacy of the relationship between Hernando’s mother and father.11
Hernando dutifully stayed with the court and received instructions from his father, who tried to keep up with the swift progress of the royal households, but couldn’t. The great explorer last coincided with the court when it arrived in March 1506 in Valladolid, but it moved on and he was too ill to follow. He died there on 20 May that year. The hollow created in Hernando’s life by the death of his father would become apparent in the decades to come, as he slowly removed the Admiral’s weakness and madness from the historical record, allowing his own life to become like a New Testament to Columbus’s Old, changing its patterns and its meanings. But to salvage his father’s reputation as a maker of epochs, Hernando would have to embark on an era-defining project of his own.
PART II
A
LANGUAGE
of
PICTURES
* * *
* * *
VI
Shoes & Ships & Sealing Wax
On 15 August 1509, five years after leaving the New World, Hernando found himself once again at Santo Domingo, celebrating his twenty-first birthday in a room of the Governor’s Palace on Hispaniola’s first street. The house on the Calle de Fortaleza, which runs from the fort overlooking the River Ozama to where the administrative buildings were being raised, was the same one Hernando and his father had recuperated in from their Jamaican ordeal. Though many of the earliest structures of Santo Domingo have now disappeared, replaced by imposing stone structures as Spain attempted to make its rule a solid reality, Hernando’s room has been preserved like a fly in amber by his compulsion to list. Looking around his quarters shortly after his birthday, he drew up an inventory of everything he had brought with him for his life in the New World, descending from his most prized possessions to the inexpensive but still precious goods he needed to prosper in this environment. This glimpse into the things that lay around in Hernando’s room has few parallels from so far in the past: most inventories of this period survive in the form of wills, which list only those treasures the deceased felt worth passing on, and understandably overlook the vast majority of objects that came to hand in this world. But Hernando’s vision, in this as in all things, gloriously failed to exclude things most people thought unimportant, and in listing them he has left us a still life of the early colonial Caribbean replete with clues about that world and the life he planned to live there.1
At the bottom of the list, written in Hernando’s neat and minuscule hand, are: molds for making gunshot, eight pairs of canvas shoes, some blades with handles and sheaths, a helmet with faceplate, white and dun thread, a padlock with two keys, a large number of nails, and some tools (a hammer, a chisel, wood-turning instruments, an adze, an auger, and four hatchets, two large and two small). Strange as this assortment of ironmongery seems among the possessions of a gentleman, Hernando would have learned the value of the metal during the years of his first voyage, when he saw his father save even nails from worm-eaten ships before abandoning them. Though the Spaniar
ds visiting the New World were obsessed with finding pure, soft gold, it was really the worked iron they brought with them that made the difference between life and death in the Caribbean. The image we get, from this end of the list, of preparing for hardship, danger, and a life constructed from the ground up, gives place as we work our way up the list to more refined instruments. We see: four dozen quills, a ball of fish resin the size of a small apple, strings for a clavichord, a chunk of sulfur and colors for painting, and some bowstring. It is unclear whether the bowstring was intended for defense or to make some small effort in the field of hunting—an arena in which Hernando never succeeded in interesting himself, to the chagrin of some contemporaries—but the other materials make clear he intended to cultivate in the New World not merely plants and profits but also his own artistry. Further to this end he also had in his quarters two paintings by “Viñola”—which seem to be the first recorded European paintings to be taken to the New World, likely by a member of the northern-Italian Vignola dynasty of artists—and three sheets of his own painting, as well as two booklets of models for painting.2
Hernando also records six booklets containing forty-seven pages of music (not counting blank ones); though we cannot be sure, there is the mouthwatering possibility that this was an early version of the Cancionero de la Colombina, one of the two greatest songbooks of early modern Spain, which entered Hernando’s collection at an unknown time. Next on the list is an array of papers, ranging from loose writings by the Jewish astrologer Abraham Zacuto (whose work had allowed Columbus to predict the eclipse in 1504), writings by the Spanish theologian Torquemada, as well as maps, writings on geometry, grammar, and heraldry, recipes for medical concoctions, and sheets upon sheets of verses, which may have been written by Hernando (who had already tried his hand at poetry for The Book of Prophecies) or copied from elsewhere. Pride of place at the top of the list, though, goes to Hernando’s 238 books, contained (as was common for book storage in the period) in four chests with various identifying marks. Remembering perhaps the two years of his last voyage, during which he had little to read other than some astrological manuals and The Book of Prophecies, Hernando had come more prepared this time. These books undoubtedly constitute the first collection recognizable as a library in the Americas; they are the books Hernando believed indispensable to founding a civilization in a strange land.
A musical teaching device from the Principium et ars totius musicae, a copy of which was inventory number 3097 in Hernando’s print collection.
No list survives of exactly which books Hernando took with him to Hispaniola—at 238 volumes the collection could still just about be kept in the head, and so perhaps he needed no catalogue. We can be fairly certain about a few of them, including The Book of Prophecies, as well as the cherished volumes his father bequeathed to him: the book of Marco Polo’s travels sent to Columbus in 1497 by the Bristol merchant John Day, Pliny’s encyclopedic Natural History, and two works of history and cosmography, the Imago mundi by the French geographer and theologian Pierre d’Ailly and the Historia rerum by Pope Pius II. These had been the core of Columbus’s small collection of books, and on them he founded his ideas about sailing to the East Indies and about the shape of history. They remained Hernando’s prize possessions, and over time his notes in their margins intertwined with his father’s, but by now they were overwhelmed by his own collection, which despite the lack of a list we can reconstruct with a fair amount of confidence. Once again, we have his ever-increasing obsession with documenting the world around him to thank for this: while from the very beginning of his book buying Hernando had the habit of noting in each volume how much he paid for it and where he bought it, soon after the inventory of 1509 he also began noting the date on which he bought the books; it is reasonable to conclude, then, that most of those with a location of purchase but no date come from the period before he started recording dates. The hundred-odd surviving books in this category demonstrate the extraordinary variety of Hernando’s interests, and how as well as being an ark of civilization in the New World the library was a field laboratory, a survival kit, and a scheme of immense ambition for expanding the intellect of its owner.3
Around a third of these books are spiritual aids—sermons, Bible commentaries, works of theology and religious meditation—which doesn’t suggest any particular piety in a book collection of the period, but may add some slender evidence to later rumors that Hernando’s mission in the New World was to further establish the Christian faith there. Almost as many volumes fall into the broad category of philosophy, with a heavy emphasis on the works of Aristotle and the medieval scholastics who drew on his thinking (Occam, Nicholas of Cusa, Giles of Rome). But there was plenty of the newly fashionable Platonic philosophy as well, including works by the Neoplatonists Marsilio Ficino and Pico della Mirandola as well as Cardinal Bessarion, the great scholar from Trebizond on the Black Sea, who had helped to ignite Renaissance humanism by bringing to Italy Greek learning that had been lost to Western Christendom for a millennium, perishing along with the fragile papyrus on which the Romans wrote but being preserved in the libraries to the east. Hernando seems to have hoped to spend his time among the Taino and the Carib peoples improving his knowledge of Greek, as in addition to two Latin dictionaries he brought with him Johannes Crastonus’s monumental Greek dictionary, widely acknowledged as the most important tool for those who were serious about learning ancient Greek.4
As in philosophy, Hernando’s tastes in literature were divided between the idols of the later Middle Ages, with large amounts of Ovid as well as some Macrobius and Boethius, and the authors beginning to be worshipped by more fashionable intellects back in Europe, with Cicero’s orations and Horace’s satires joined by the hilarious and irreverent comic dialogues of Lucian of Samosata, whose fame was growing even then as the pattern of style for the likes of Erasmus and Thomas More. But it seems certain many of the books in the four chests were intended for more immediate practical purposes: there are a dozen medical books in this group, gathering the best of classical and medieval physiology and pharmacology, and nine astronomical treatises, which cannot be separated from the handful of volumes that deal with farming and with geographical techniques, both of which would have relied heavily on a knowledge of celestial bodies. Two books he certainly had with him were the manuscript treatises on alchemy given to him by a fellow traveler on board the ship Que Dios Salve (which brought him to Santo Domingo), books intended perhaps to remedy the perennial shortfall of gold from the New World. There is also a small but significant group of zoological treatises—the works of Aristotle and Albert the Great on animals—which might help Hernando to extend the observations he had made on manatees, manta rays, peccaries, and spider monkeys during his first voyage.5
Yet it would be a mistake to draw too firm a line between practical books for use outside of the library and scholarly ones for use inside: the foundation of humanist thinking, which Hernando absorbed from his tutor Peter Martyr, was that all learning could be bent toward life in the world. Who is to say, then, whether the fifteen-odd works of (mostly Roman) history in this collection were designed to make him an expert in classical history or to guide him and his brother in constructing the new version of the Roman Empire their father envisioned spreading outward from Hispaniola? The truth is that Hernando, like many of his contemporaries, would not have made a distinction between learning and doing, and even dividing the 238 volumes of his first library into different subjects is something we do reflexively as users of modern libraries, and not something Hernando necessarily did himself. To begin with, it would have been unclear in which category a great many of the books belonged: Should books of astrology and medicine go together, given the influence heavenly bodies were believed to have on human health, or should astronomy go with mathematics and music, since all three relied on numbers and proportions? What about sermons and books of philosophy, which often dealt with the same questions about the nature of existence and the ethical way to behave
? And perhaps tracts about the animal world should go with those as well, given that many argued God’s plan could be read in the Book of Nature. It would make sense, then, that many of the works of classical literature should also be included in this category, since Cicero and Horace are also often concerned with ethics. Their value as sources on Roman history, however, probably meant they should go with the works of history, which should also include the books of law that were founded both in classical and church history. By this point it becomes clear all 238 books might simply belong in a single category, and it might be easiest to leave them together, as one can (for now) just about keep each of them in mind without having to use classification to help locate a single volume. Though Hernando and his contemporaries did have ways of dividing up knowledge—most notably into the seven liberal arts, as in the Marriage of Philology and Mercury by Martianus Capella, which Hernando had with him—this culture saw all things of the world as integrally linked and did not think of these as separate fields of thought. Indeed, an ideal was beginning to emerge in Italy, in the works of Angelo Poliziano and Pico della Mirandola, of a man who contained all knowledges within himself and made himself universal in doing so. As a model for this, Hernando would have read in his father’s Pliny of Eratosthenes, an ancient Greek who had been the first to calculate the circumference of the earth and had produced a miraculous method—a “sieve”—for winnowing out prime numbers from all the rest. What was more, he had done all this while serving as librarian to the great, lost bookworld of antiquity—the fabled library of Alexandria. Little was known of this vanished kingdom of books, but both its vast ambitions and the tragedy of its disappearance loomed large over Hernando’s own project, and fragments of the Alexandria catalogue could still be found in a great medieval encyclopedia called the Suda (which Hernando owned in its first printed edition).6
The Catalogue of Shipwrecked Books Page 12