Although he discounted the first method, given the difficulty of sailing in a straight line while at sea, and the last two are dismissed on the basis that eclipses are too rare and observations of celestial bodies too hard, the idea of measuring longitude using time differences in different parts of the globe, drawing on the method used by Nebrija and others that Hernando used in the Description, is more intriguing—in part because this is precisely the method that would solve the puzzle of longitude more than two hundred years later. Hernando’s “fluent instrument” is, essentially, a clock of sufficient accuracy to allow one to measure the different times of high noon in each spot and anticipates by decades a similar suggestion by Gemma Frisius, who is often given credit for having come up with the idea. But the problem was—and would remain for two centuries—that the clocks available were simply not accurate enough. Hernando concluded it would be impossible to force the other side to accept one’s conclusions using any of these methods, allowing anyone who wished to (in his lovely phrase) to tergiversate—to object endlessly and play for time.5
The opening of the conference showed Hernando’s predictions were entirely correct. After a ceremonial meeting on the bridge between the two towns in early April, the Portuguese caused an immediate delay, moving to strike Simón de Alcazaba from the Spanish delegation on the grounds that he was a Portuguese subject and that his presence as a Spanish witness was an insult to King João. Much to Hernando’s annoyance, Charles accepted this request and Alcazaba was duly removed from the panel. Then there was further contention, before any start could be made, over exactly where was the Tordesillas Line: the treaty set it down as 370 leagues west of the Cape Verde islands, but had not thought to specify which of the Cape Verde islands was the starting point. The Spanish insisted it should be the most westerly (the Isla de San Antonio), while to the Portuguese it was clear it should be the easternmost Isla de Sal. Each degree farther west the line went, of course, dragged the corresponding line on the other side of the world further west as well, holding out the hope for the Spanish that they could give up more of the empty Atlantic in return for encroaching upon the Far East. When on 23 April they were finally to meet to decide on this point, as well as on two other fundamentals—whether to draw the line on a flat map or on a globe, and on the precise longitude of the Cape Verde islands—the Portuguese lodged a further objection over the distance between the eastern and western tips of the Cape Verde islands. Because of all these issues, the starting points of both sides were more than 60° of longitude apart—a sixth of the world. Discussions were thus further delayed until 4 May, though it must have seemed almost certain they would forever be mired in intractable quibbles. A charming story that did the rounds at Badajoz gives a sense of the absurdity of this quest to fix lines on maps: the Portuguese commission, wandering by the Rio Caya, were confronted by a small boy whose mother was washing clothes and who, exposing his buttocks, asked the Portuguese if the line between them might be the one they were looking for.6
In the absence of a solid base of evidence, Hernando and his team were thrown back upon the only tactic they had left: turning the very testimony of the opposition back against them. First, Hernando pointed out that the Portuguese had, at one point, produced a map on which they had moved the Tordesillas Line from 370 leagues west of the Canaries to somewhere east of those islands; that another of their maps showed only a few locations in the Indies and not the full extent of their discoveries; and that they had even presented a globe showing the Cape Verdes precisely where the Spanish had claimed them to be, only to withdraw it rapidly when realizing it put the Moluccas in the Spanish zone. All of this, Hernando argued in his report to the king, showed they were acting in bad faith, in the knowledge that if they showed their full hand, it would prove the Spanish right. While it was more likely that the Portuguese did not want to divulge classified nautical information during the negotiations, they were forced to fall back on claims that the confusion arose from the sheer number of lines crisscrossing the map—black, green, and red plumb lines giving the cardinal compass bearings. In the end, the Portuguese insisted that maps and globes were insufficient to determine such a point and suggested the two sides move on to astronomical arguments.
Determined not to be waylaid again by intractable disagreements—especially when the talks had been allowed a maximum of two months—the Spanish instead followed Hernando’s advice and steered away from astronomy and back toward the evidence of authorities ancient and modern. Once again, given that either side could cherry-pick evidence to suit its case, the emphasis was on making the other side argue the Spanish case for them, an area where Hernando’s growing and increasingly powerful library came into its own. In addition to evidence from travel narratives by the Venetian Luis Cadomosto and a letter to his father from Jerome de Santistevan, Hernando produced a printed translation of Portuguese travel reports and pointed to the precise chapter in which they themselves gave the measurement from Lisbon eastward to Calicut as thirty-eight hundred leagues (almost 270° away on Hernando’s “narrow earth”). The Spanish also submitted that, despite the great Portuguese secrecy over maps, which (the Spanish suggested) was designed to avoid acceptance of Spain’s rights, “certain Portuguese and Castilians” had nevertheless managed to bring these strictly guarded maps out of Portugal. Possibly a veiled reference to Hernando’s clandestine mission to Portugal in 1518, it was also a way of embarrassing two members of the Portuguese delegation—the master cartographers Pedro and Jorge Reinel—who had been in Seville in service of Magellan’s voyage and who probably were instrumental in giving up the secrets of the Portuguese maps. A further series of pilots and mapmakers was marched out to testify that, in their experience and knowledge, the Portuguese maps shortened the distance east to the Moluccas by at least 25°. Lastly, but most damningly, perhaps, the Spanish showed that a member of the Portuguese delegation itself—Pedro Margalho, a professor of philosophy at the premier Spanish university at Salamanca—had recently published a volume in which he openly stated the Moluccas were within the Spanish half of the globe.7
Though it must have been clear that there was little chance of the other side conceding, Hernando had warmed to his theme. He produced editions of Pliny and Ptolemy printed in 1508 that included modern measurement tables not only agreeing with the Spanish placement of Malacca in Malaysia (a key reference point) but suggesting the Strait had been visited by Europeans before the expedition by Diego Lopes de Siqueira, a member of the Portuguese delegation at Badajoz who claimed the distinction of having been there first in 1509. Hernando also pointed out the Portuguese were out of step with the rest of the world, who largely followed Ptolemy in putting a degree of longitude at 62.5 miles, whereas the Portuguese used a figure of 70 miles. This, Hernando said, would gain them 2,600 miles in a complete circuit of the globe, or forty-three Ptolemaic degrees—almost precisely the amount they differed from the Spanish count. In fact (Hernando suggested), the situation was even worse, as the Ptolemaic mile was only eight stadia, the stadia being the measurement of distance a man can run without breathing. Hernando then produced a passage from Pliny in which a messenger from Alexander the Great walked twelve hundred stadia in nine hours and pointed out that if the Portuguese notion of a stadia was correct, the poor man would have had to maintain a walking pace of almost seventeen miles an hour for the entire distance—an impossible speed, he drily noted, to walk for a single hour, much less nine in a row. (The fastest modern marathon runners manage just under thirteen miles an hour, and then for just over two hours.) Until accurate methods for measuring longitude could be developed, the greatest weapon in the fight for universal empire—as Hernando’s withering point-scoring on the Portuguese delegation made clear—was an ability to navigate and make use of the library, where that world was represented in miniature.
* * *
Needless to say, when the conference broke up in mid-May, it had achieved no progress whatsoever in resolving the issue of the Moluccas. Hernando wr
ote repeatedly to the jurists nominated by Charles, and to Charles himself, arguing the legal case for Spain to reduce the Portuguese claim to west Africa alone, and insisting on the Spanish right and destiny to conquer Persia and the Holy Land. The emperor thanked Hernando for his advice and efforts and dispatched a number of further expeditions in an attempt to secure accurate measurements of the longitude of the islands, but the matter would have struggled for the attention of the emperor and his council: not only were large sections of the German Habsburg lands now in open revolt, but the Ottomans looked set to advance into central Europe after conquering Hungary in 1526, and early in 1525 the perennial struggle with France for control of northern Italy took a surprise turn. The pact between Charles and Henry VIII to quell the ambition of Francis I, which had been sealed during the imperial visit of 1522 and had since seen a number of small victories in Lombardy, gained an unexpected coup at Pavia, where France was not only routed but King Francis was taken prisoner and brought to Madrid, a feat that allowed Charles to impose the harshest terms in return for the French sovereign’s eventual release. Charles married his sister to the king of Portugal in the year after Badajoz, and with his mind on the balance of power in Europe, he soon afterward let it be known he was willing to concede Spanish claims over the Moluccas in settlement of Catherine’s marriage portion, something he could better afford than ready funds needed for deployment in Germany and Italy. The islands were finally recognized by the Spanish as belonging to Portugal by the Treaty of Zaragoza in 1529, and the political drive to establish an accurate measurement of the earth’s circumference evaporated.8
It is as well that accurate longitudinal measurements were never made: even measuring from the version of the Tordesillas Line most favorable to the Spanish, the Moluccas are in reality a good 25°—more than fifteen hundred miles—within the half of the globe claimed by the Portuguese. But there was no way of knowing this at the time, and Hernando was right from the outset that, in the absence of agreed measurements, the issue could only be contested by demonstrating the argument of the opposition to be contradictory and duplicitous. To this end he had produced printed evidence that suggested one of the Portuguese party was lying about being the first European to visit Malacca, that another had published a work that supported the Spanish case, and that the Portuguese accounts of their own voyages lent weight to Spanish arguments. What was more, the technology of print lent this claim a particular force. That Hernando could point to the specific edition of the work to which he was referring, and to the exact sections in that work, meant the Portuguese could not claim he was falsifying evidence: anyone in Europe who cared to check could simply locate a copy of the book and verify what he was saying—printed evidence was in the public domain and beyond recall.9
This way of proceeding was not foolproof—indeed, the chapter number Hernando so triumphantly cited was wrong, owing to a printer’s error in the copy he was using. Early printed books could—and did—not only have faults but also differences within the same editions. But it becomes clear in reading Hernando’s reports on the conference that the real weapons he took with him to Badajoz were the catalogues of his library. Here it was not so much the alphabetical list of authors, or the registry of books, which was crucial—after all, these could only provide him with titles and publication dates—but rather his newest project, which made him such a formidable adversary. The catalogue in which he noted his departure for Badajoz on 25 March would become known as the Book of Epitomes, and it represented yet another leap forward in Hernando’s ambitions and in his inspired confrontation with the world of books. The alphabetical catalogues to the library had become necessary once the number of tomes expanded beyond the ability of any person to remember, forcing the creation of an external memory that could easily be navigated by the user. But if Hernando could not even remember the titles and authors of each of his books, how would it be possible to remember their contents?
The feeling of being overwhelmed by the flood of books issuing from the printing presses of Europe was widespread: in an addition to his Adages published in 1526, Erasmus was to ask plaintively, “Is there anywhere on earth exempt from this swarm of new books? Even if, taken out one at a time, they offered something worth knowing, the very mass of them would be an impediment to learning.” Hernando’s proposed solution to this, begun around 1523, was to distill the contents of each volume in his library down to a slender epitome—a Greek word meaning “to cut through.” The idea of the epitome was not new—it had been common practice since the second century to provide shorter summaries of longer works, and Hernando may have been directly inspired by the model of his compatriot Isidore of Seville, the great medieval encyclopedist—but no one had attempted to manufacture them on anything like this scale before. Just as with the Description, the scale of the task facing Hernando led at an early stage to the employment of a number of sumistas, scholars employed for the specific task of cutting through the immensity of the library to produce these distillations. By 18 January 1524, the Book of Epitomes already had 1,361 entries. Most of these managed to compress the ideas in the volume to hand into seven or eight lines, though sometimes a little more was required, as in the thirty-page entry (#1444) that summarizes the works of Plato—even then, something of a miracle of compression.10
Hernando’s epitomizing project had both practical and visionary elements. Just as some of the earliest catalogues had been developed to ensure the same books and printed images were not duplicated in the rapidly expanding library, so the Book of Epitomes was in part designed to circumvent a fatal flaw that had been introduced by the market for printed books. Owing to the peculiar nature of books—which are ingested over days, weeks, and months and cannot be effectively trialed during a trip to the bookshop—unscrupulous printers and publishers had from an early period realized that the sale was more to do with what the title page promised than what the book contained. Without a journalistic press to review books—a seventeenth-century innovation that was itself corrupt almost from birth—customers had to take the claims of the title page at face value. “There are many books,” Hernando’s librarian would later recall, “with grandiose and swollen titles that afterward treat nothing of what they promised, something the printers do to increase their profits.” Hernando’s Book of Epitomes, however, would allow those in the library to bypass the vainglorious names given to these books and get to the heart of the matter, meaning less time would be wasted on irrelevant material. In moving from the surface appearance to the interior, he was putting into practice the lesson he had learned from the manatee off the coast of Hispaniola, which hid its mammalian secrets in its entrails.11
Although the stated purpose of the Book of Epitomes was to extract the ideas of each volume by summarizing the arguments, it is delightful that (as with the geographical notes for the Description) this desire for objectivity is quickly hijacked by expressions of the experience of reading, making the Epitomes a form of early book review. Among the list of terms used to describe various authors’ styles are
wordy, learned, to-the-point, conversational, clean, ornate, compendious, diffuse, diligent, elegant, not-unlearned, not-unuseful, delicate, resplendent, pedestrian.
The sumistas, doomed forever to digest the world of print for the greater good, would have known better than most that there was no separating an author’s thoughts from the manner of saying them. But Hernando’s ambitions were not limited to foiling the schemes of duplicitous publishers. As Erasmus had suggested in his Adages, the very volume of printed material was in itself an enemy to understanding: even if one were to weed out all of the detritus of the publishing world, the industry had no means or motive to converge on a single, definitive account of any one subject. Instead, the book market was incentivized to pump out endless iterations of the same thing, each with minor variations but also grand declarations that the former versions were now obsolete. As Hernando’s collection grew, he seems to have conceived a misery familiar to all lovers of lear
ning: the feeling that for every step one advances, a million paths to further understanding open up—a world of opportunity, of course, but also something that makes a mockery of the pathetic progress you have made so far. The infinite library (like the one imagined by Jorge Luis Borges in a famous short story) is worse than no library at all: it will have an infinite number of (ever so slightly different) biographies of Hernando Colón by people named Edward Wilson-Lee, for instance, meaning you could never master even that one topic. The universal library to which Hernando aspired was perhaps not quite so impossible to navigate as the infinite one imagined by Borges, but it may often have seemed there was little difference. Yet Hernando was not one for surrendering, even against seemingly insuperable odds. While his librarian’s memoir noted that it weighed upon his employer that there were so many books of law and medicine in the world, Hernando nevertheless believed it possible to create one book of medicine designed to cure all illnesses, one primer with the perfect method of teaching grammar, and one book of laws—or at the most, say, four—capable of ruling the world. The Book of Epitomes was the first step toward this, reducing each book to its essentials so that theoretically the books could, in turn, be grouped together by subject and distilled further until one had a single book that treated that subject in its entirety.12
The Book of Epitomes was also the first sign Hernando was beginning to think about the universality of his library in terms of shape as well as size. It was all very well for the library to grow to gigantic proportions by the constant acquisition of books, but beyond a certain point its size stood to make it less, rather than more, useful. The mission to epitomize the books in the collection—and the desire beyond this to reduce each subject to a single book—was a very different vision of universality, one in which the sum total of human knowledge was confined within a limited space, growing denser rather than larger over time. Like the globe under debate at Badajoz, an unbounded world, of indefinite size, was a terrifying thing that crippled attempts to navigate within it: only once the circumference had been fixed could it then be further reduced, divided, and charted, replacing an ambition to extend the bounds of knowledge with one that sought to grasp what was there more firmly. The plan, however, had something missing from it. If one were to reduce the knowledge of man to a small number of encyclopedic volumes, what would the title of these books be? What are the subjects into which the sum total of knowledge can be divided? And where do you draw the bounds of each subject? It was easy enough to talk about a single book of medicine or law, but even in the small collection Hernando had taken with him to Hispaniola in 1509, the boundaries were hard to discern—medicine bled into astrology on one side and botany on the other; law needed history as a foundation, which in turn required a knowledge of the realia of those historical periods: their grammars and vocabularies, their coinages and weights and measures. Choosing where to cut through knowledge was of the utmost delicacy and gravity, as dividing in the wrong place could from thenceforth sever some essential means for understanding things on either side of the divide. This conundrum would occupy Hernando for the fifteen years that remained of his life.
The Catalogue of Shipwrecked Books Page 25