Читать книгу The Catalogue of Shipwrecked Books: Young Columbus and the Quest for a Universal Library - Edward Wilson-Lee - Страница 17

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 encrusted with images – wildmen, pomegranate trees, stars, figures of chivalry – and foliage so delicate in appearance it seems to be carved from eggshell, in defiance of the rough winds of the north Castilian plain. Around the corner from this, in the façade of the Colegio de Santa Cruz by Juan Vázquez, Hernando would have seen the garbled first beginnings of neoclassicism in Spanish architecture. The court would soon pass on from Valladolid, but the art of these master masons would become a constant in the years to come. Hernando would spend the remainder of his childhood years moving between the centres of royal power in northern Spain, a landscape he would later chart in minute detail. Among the most familiar places would have been the red-brick Mudéjar palace on the corner of Medina del Campo’s great market square; russet Salamanca, given its distinctive hue by the rusting iron in the sandstone from León; and Burgos by the gentle river Arlanzon, with its immense and terraced cathedral, strikingly topped by hollow spires of delicate Gothic tracery – the work of the German artist Juan de Colonia – like crowns of paper lace cut from the living stone. In each of these places the household would reconfigure itself like a puzzle-box, and Hernando would have to find order in an ever-shifting world.1

The huge retinue Hernando joined was presided over by a Lord Steward (Mayordomo), who in turn delegated duties for the household finances to a Lord Chancellor (Contador Mayor de Castilla) for major transactions and a Privy Chancellor (Contador Mayor de la Despensa e Raciones) who dealt with the day-to-day expenses and arrangements. Beneath them a Lord Chamberlain (Camarero Mayor) took charge of the Infante’s immediate personal needs, in which task he was assisted by the Ten Choice Companions (five old and five young). In addition, there were other officers including secretaries, chamberlains, Master of the Horse, Master of the Hounds, Master of the Hunt and Lord Privy Seal who were not under the Lord Steward. At the very bottom of the hierarchy were the pages – the rank to which Hernando and Diego were assigned – who were members of the household but who did not enjoy the dignity of having a personal role about the prince’s body.

To make matters even more confusing, many of the duties belonging to these posts were actually performed by other people: the tasks assigned to the Chancellor were usually handed on to his secretary, and while the Ten Choice Companions counted among their official duties waiting upon the prince while he dressed and ate, these tasks were in practice undertaken by a number of trenchermen and attendants. Hernando would have eventually understood that while the official duties of these posts were rather lowly – looking after the Infante’s clothes, his meals, his accounts and even his toilette – the posts were greatly sought after and held by the most powerful nobles in the kingdoms of Ferdinand and Isabella. To be near the body of the heir apparent was not merely a ceremonial honour: it held the promise of influencing the future king of a united Spain in matters of policy and patronage. These grandees could not, of course, be expected to perform the actual physical acts of serving food and folding laundry, so those labours were delegated elsewhere. The power of the political symbolism nevertheless remained: the Infante was of such importance that even his menial chores were performed by great aristocrats, and when one day he assumed the throne they would be bound to him as those who had been his household companions, men who had grown up at the same table. Even lowly pages were the sons of the most eminent noblemen of the kingdom. If for Hernando losing his mother and finding himself at the bottom of a hierarchy of strangers must have been painful and confusing, it nevertheless represented Columbus’ reception among the principal men of the realm. It also meant that Beatriz Enríquez’ child was publicly and royally recognised as a son of the Admiral of the Ocean Sea.

The social advantages of joining the prince’s household were probably of little comfort to the six-year-old boy who entered this forbidding and unfriendly place. As is clear from the writing of Gonzalo Fernández de Oviedo (a fellow page whose later Book of the Royal Chamber of Prince Juan provides us with an intimate and detailed picture of the household), great importance was placed upon the lineage of those who belonged to Juan’s entourage. In his account Oviedo insists repeatedly that everyone near the prince was of ‘clean blood’ (limpia sangre), by which he means there was no hint of Moorish or Jewish ancestry to be found in their genealogies. Even as Ferdinand and Isabella moved into the Alhambra, whose Moorish aesthetic of calligraphy and lemon trees and vaulted baths made one contemporary visitor call it a little peerless paradise, the idea that ancestral heresy remained in the blood was gaining ground. Turning from enemies without to enemies within, the belief became widespread that conversion to Christianity was not enough to cleanse those of Moorish or Jewish descent of the stain of their forefathers. Oviedo asserts with unmixed pride that no one who waited at the Infante’s table, in his pantry or his cellar, nor anyone from the doorman of the palace inwards who exercised any office, was not of pure gentlemanly stock or at the very least an ‘Old Christian’, someone who could trace his lineage back through many generations of high standing. Hernando, of course, could not even establish his descent from his own parents with any legally valid evidence, let alone rest upon the venerable ancestry of a father who seems deliberately to have kept his origins vague. Hieronymus Munzer, a German who travelled in Spain in these years and left a detailed account of what he saw, records the widespread paranoia that all of the principal offices of the realm were held by marranos – Jews whose conversion to Christianity was, he says, a devious pretence – who oppressed Spain’s Christians and taught children to curse them in private. It is hard to imagine Hernando not being included among those ‘two or three’ outcasts at the court whom Oviedo mentions as appointed (as Columbus’ sons were) by the queen before the prince came of age, and who he says were treated as strangers and kept apart from the circle and the person of the prince. The same high genealogical standards were not required, it seems, of the Infante’s piebald dog Bruto, which was an unusual mixture of whippet and mastiff, and which regularly delighted the prince by fetching specific garments and courtiers according to his master’s need.2

Hernando was not the only stranger introduced to the prince’s court by Columbus. Although many of the Taíno people that Columbus brought back with him from Hispaniola had, after a period of evangelisation and instruction, accompanied him on the return to the island to act as translators during further exploration, a few had been left behind to add lustre to the royal court. The oddity of this situation, in which the Spanish court dress must only imperfectly have covered the red, black and white tattoos customary to the Taíno, would have been increased by the fact that they took the names of their Spanish godparents, so that shadowing the court were an Indio Ferdinand of Aragon and an Indio Juan of Castile. The Indio Juan remained in the household of the Infante Juan after Columbus left to return to the Taíno homeland in Hispaniola, and though we know sadly little of his life during the two years this ‘Juan’ survived the unfamiliar climate, the subsequent reports from Hispaniola take on a different tone when we imagine them heard by this unfortunate exile.

If Hernando and the Indio Juan were excluded from the inner circle of Juan’s court there may have been little to regret. While Oviedo’s nostalgic account of life in the household paints it as a centre of virtue in a Golden Age, the humanist Peter Martyr, who was one of the Infante’s tutors, leaves an altogether less flattering picture of the prince as an unprepossessing youth who had no wit and little intellectual curiosity, and who gave his time over almost entirely to hunting. The intensely studious, bookish and solitary character that Hernando was to have in later life may have developed during years in which snobbery and boorishness excluded him from the main activities of the household; though he was an excellent horseman, it seems he looked upon the noble pastimes of hawking and hunting with disdain. The only surviving portrait of Hernando, made late in his life, also suggests his appearance may not have helped him to fit in. His lower lip juts out, perhaps the result of an underbite, his ears are too prominent, his nose is strangely formed at the bridge, and his face seems to slant to one side. It is not clear at what age a child would notice his looks are unpleasing to others, though it could only be too soon. For one reason or another, Hernando likely had time during these years quietly to observe the workings of this complex household and to absorb some of the cultural riches that went ignored by the dullard prince.3

Though it may have seemed a tiresome chore to many, one of the special duties of the pages was distinctly suited to Hernando’s unique predilections: namely, the keeping of the great books of the household, which ordered the myriad possessions of the prince into a series of lists. There were four of these great books, namely:

The Manual or Diary

The Book of Everything or The Book of Jewels

The Great Book

The Book of the Inventory

Juan’s personal tastes were every bit as voluptuous as one would expect from one of the great princes of Europe, as suggested by the shopping list Oviedo copied down from 13 March 1496, in which the Chamberlain was asked to acquire

satin brocade of cloth of gold for a ropa bastarda

crimson silk for doublets

purple silk for doublets

black silk for doublets

crimson velvet for a canopy

black Genoese velvet for my private room

cochineal-dyed cloth for gifts to my grooms [moços despuela]

green woollen cloth for hunters’ hoods and tabards

Dutch linen for my private room

cloths to cover my tables and sideboards

crimson and tawny velvet to decorate my stable

If the pages were to compete with the dog Bruto for the Infante’s affection, they would have to be at least as good as the dog in finding these garments once they had been acquired and stored away. The Manual, which was completed by the page who held the keys to the Infante’s chamber, was used to keep track of everything that came in and went out of the household, while the Book of Jewels was a list of the gold and silver vessels, tapestries, jewels, canopies, curtains, furs and chapel plate belonging to the prince’s household. Moreover, it described each of these things using their various weights, dimensions and the stories depicted on the treasures: in a household that would have had scores of tapestries and hundreds of items of treasure, an accurate record could only be kept by using the distinctive qualities of each piece, which made a thorough knowledge of generic scenes used by artisans essential. A page asked to find for the Infante’s bedroom a tapestry of nymphs bathing might think this a welcome task, but if he could not see the bow of Diana or the horns of Actaeon that made the scene a warning against the dangers of lust, then he was no better than a dog.

The Great Book sought to avoid such confusions by using another inventory method, adopting the tools used by bankers and employing their accounting techniques not only to compile the household accounts but also to reconcile everything that was in the Manual and the Book of Jewels, as well as providing an alphabetical list of entries and a guide to the location of each object described. As with the increasingly complex and manifold financial transactions being undertaken by the great mercantile houses of Europe, there was comfort to be gained in reducing each entry to a docket number or giving it a place on an alphabetic list. The final book, the Book of the Inventory, also used an alphabetical list to register the voluminous incoming and outgoing correspondence of the Infante, and to provide a guide to the ledgers so that old letters could be revisited. From his earliest days, some of the most prized books in Hernando’s world were ones that tamed a wilderness of miscellaneity through the magic of lists, making a curtain and a cup part of the same order by reducing them to name, number, cost and location.

Giovanni Battista Palumba, ‘Diana Bathing with Her Attendants’, c.1500; Hernando’s inventory number 2150.

Life at court not only introduced Hernando to a bewildering variety of people and things but also to a world of complex and often contradicting ideas. He would have attended lectures by the great scholars recruited to train the aristocracy at court, probably from a very early age, like the little boy who, much younger than the rest, kneels at the feet of the great humanist Antonio de Nebrija in a contemporary manuscript illumination of Juan’s court. It may have helped that two opposing camps of ideas were embodied in the two tutors who were in charge of the education of the Infante and (more importantly, given his lack of interest) of the pages of the court. The first of these was the Dominican friar Diego de Deza, a theologian educated at Spain’s greatest seat of learning, the University of Salamanca, who had risen through the church hierarchy as Bishop of Zamora and then of Salamanca itself, even if his duties at court gave him little time for church business. Deza seems to have been among Columbus’ earliest and most reliable supporters, and Hernando would quickly have learned to count him among the faction at the court who spoke well of his father and his projects. Yet Deza’s backing may have been slightly confusing to the young Hernando: the friar was, after all, a staunch Thomist, meaning that he dedicated his scholarly life to championing the work of Thomas Aquinas and his use of Aristotelian logic to understand and explain the mysteries of the Christian faith. An extraordinary addition to Deza’s teachings may have come in the person of Beatriz Galindo, a rare female scholar whose prodigious talents had made her a celebrated Aristotelian at Salamanca, and who was also brought to court to teach, though likely only the princesses and their households. Deza and Galindo taught their charges to read nature firstly as the Book of God, in which the divine was revealed through the order installed at creation. Though as this scholastic kind of learning was focused on the cloister, the university and the library, it would have had less obvious connection to the world of ships and islands inhabited by Hernando’s father.4

The other tutor, however, represented a wholly different attitude to learning: this was Peter Martyr, the letter-writing man of arms who was to become one of the first and most important historians of the New World. Martyr was very much a humanist in the mould created during the Italian Renaissance of the previous hundred years: someone who valued beautiful speech and writing and had little time for the knotty problems of the Thomists, someone who believed in the worth of the active life rather than the contemplative one, and who moved easily between roles as author, tutor, diplomat, soldier and citizen of the Republic of Letters that connected men of the same grain across Europe. His teaching, as suggested by one eyewitness account, consisted of having his pupils recite the poetry of Horace and Juvenal, absorbing by repetition the rhythms and the values of classical Rome. Martyr counted among his chief correspondents the genius of the Roman intellectual scene, Guilio Pomponio Leto, a pioneering humanist whose devotion to the learning of pre-Christian Rome led him to affect classical dress and set up an academy among the ruins of the Quirinal Hill, from which he led his disciples on tours of the half-buried Roman monuments and even under them to the catacombs that had lain hidden for a thousand years. So great was Leto’s success in fostering this culture that his academy was disbanded in 1468 by Pope Paul II amid accusations that would have made their guiding spirit Socrates proud: republican conspiracy, sexual immorality, anti-clericalism and even pagan irreligion. As one of Leto’s disciples, Martyr provided Juan’s household with a direct link to the most daring currents of Italian humanism, from a Rome that would later play a central part in Hernando’s own life. Indeed, Hernando would have seen this neoclassicism springing up all around him, as at Burgos, where inside the miraculous Gothic cathedral the Roman-trained French artist Felipe Bigarny was carving classical buildings into the transept, and across the street where the printer Fadrique de Basilea was switching from Gothic fonts in his books to Roman ones, freshly imported from Italy where humanists copied their letter-forms from the inscriptions on ancient ruins. Peter Martyr in turn directed many of his most important letters on the New World discoveries to Leto, creating a strange symbiosis between the new learning and how the expanding world was written about and conceived. In the persons of his two tutors Hernando would have confronted the stark questions that were driving intellectual debates: whether learning should be directed towards a place in heaven or a triumph on earth, towards the eternal or the present, the metaphysical or the physical, and whether its materials should be Christian only or should take in the thought of other, pagan worlds.5

Some maternal comfort in this overwhelmingly male world might have been provided by the Infante’s nursemaid Juana de Torres y Ávila, who as well as being one of the only female members of the household was another staunch supporter of the Columbus faction. She was over the years to be the recipient of a number of Columbus’ letters to the court, and many of those not directly addressed to her were nonetheless carried back to Spain by her brother, Antonio de Torres, who was to serve as a trusted go-between during Columbus’ long absences from the court. The first of his letters from the New World reached court as early as April 1494, only a few months after Hernando had arrived there – though they had already moved on from Valladolid to Medina del Campo. Having crossed the ocean with seventeen ships this time, and having quickly established reliable shipping routes between the Iberian peninsula and the Caribbean archipelago, the Admiral could now maintain a reasonably frequent correspondence with the court. While this meant Columbus could continue to provide encouraging reports to the Catholic Monarchs on their new territories, and could in turn ask for supplies that could not be sourced on that side of the ocean, the new communication links were fraught with danger for the Admiral. Unlike the First Voyage when, despite the efforts of his rival Pinzón, Columbus had been able to disappear, reappear and provide the only report of what had happened in between, the returning fleet of twelve ships in April 1494 brought a number of letters and eyewitnesses to the New World. As would quickly become clear, it was no longer possible for Columbus to control the narrative of events beyond the sea.6

Indeed not even the court itself could wholly contain and control public understanding of the New World any more. Among the first letters sent back from the Second Voyage was one from Dr Chanca, the chief physician of the new settlement, addressed to the city of Seville and evidently intended for wide public circulation. In the great trade fair at Medina del Campo, Hernando would find a growing book fair among the long-standing markets for silver, paintings and Castilian wool returning to Spain in the form of Flemish tapestries, as well as the currency exchange that drew crowds of merchants from across Europe and connected this dusty outpost with the great banking centres of Lyons, Antwerp and Venice. In the immense market square, alongside books from Salamanca, Barcelona and Seville, Hernando found works from the centres of European print – Venice, Basel, Antwerp – perhaps including foreign editions of his father’s letter of 1493 reporting his discoveries. But by now Columbus’ accounts were not the only ones on the market, and it may have been in these bookstalls that Hernando first sensed the cacophony of printed voices competing to hold the public’s attention. While Dr Chanca’s letter repeats Columbus’ official reports about the perpetual springtime of the islands, he is not quite as deft as the Admiral in moving swiftly from the vegetal riches of the New World to the mineral ones that will surely follow, as (for instance) when Columbus instructs Antonio de Torres to report the abundant evidence of spices that can be found by simply standing on the shores of these islands, without any effort to penetrate inland, which surely was proof of the unlimited riches within – and the same, he reasons, must be true of the gold on the new islands he has found:

Dominica

Mariagalante

Guadeloupe

Santa Cruz

Monserrate

Santa Maria la Redonda

Santa Maria la Antigua

San Martin

After recognising in the first-named island the auspiciousness of their making landfall on a Sunday (Domingo) and paying tribute to his flagship the Mariagalante, Columbus named these islands after the chief pilgrimage sites in Spain. Dr Chanca’s letter, however, marks a departure from the party line – noting for instance the exotic fruit that some of those on the fleet, perhaps trusting to the Edenic reports they had heard, attempted to taste, only to be rewarded for nothing more than a lick by grotesquely swollen faces and a raving madness.

The first cloud may have been cast for Hernando upon his father’s golden world by the succession of reports that slowly revealed the macabre fate of La Navidad, Columbus’ original fortress-settlement in the New World. Though Columbus attempted to gloss over this in his communication of January 1494, even the child Hernando might have noticed something amiss in the fact that his father’s letters were addressed not from La Navidad but from the new settlement of La Isabela. Readers of Hernando’s later account of events might have had a premonition of this disaster, given how often he insists upon the care with which his father recorded the place where he had left thirty-nine men from varied backgrounds, including an Englishman, an Irishman from Galway and a relation of Hernando’s on his mother’s side. But when the fleet of the Second Voyage finally made their way back to Hispaniola, they hardly had need of Columbus’ directions. On a riverbank near the first landmark of Monte Cristo they found two corpses, one with a noose around his neck and another with his feet tied, though some may have deceived themselves that these bodies, too decomposed for identification, were not those of men who had been left behind in La Navidad. Hernando meticulously recorded further details of this scene: one of the men was young and the other old; the noose was made of esparto grass and the strangled man’s arms were extended, his hands tied to a piece of wood like a cross. The hope that these were not Spaniards became harder to sustain when, the next day and further up the river, they came across two more bodies, one thickly bearded – in a land of natives without facial hair. When they finally anchored off La Navidad, reluctant to come closer to shore for fear of grounding as the Santa Maria had, a canoe bearing envoys from Guacanagarí approached, its men wearing masks that they then handed to Columbus. They initially reported all was well but were finally pressed to admit that a few of the settlers of La Navidad had died of disease and fighting. Guacanagarí himself, they said, could not come to greet Columbus because he was lying in his hut, gravely wounded after having battled with two other caciques – Caonabó and Marieni – who had attacked La Navidad.7

Hernando’s account of these events, which draws upon Columbus’ lost expedition diaries but must also have been coloured by his own memories, shows all the signs of trauma as it recounts the disintegration of Columbus’ idyll. Hernando describes the further bodies that were found, with an estimate of how long they had been dead, and the story that unfolded piece by piece of how a party of settlers had broken with the rest and embarked on a course of rape and pillage, leading the cacique Caonabó to march on them and put the stockade to the flame. Yet there were discrepancies in the stories told by Guacanagarí and his men, and the belief the Taíno were simply and naively honest became harder to sustain. After narrating this bloodcurdling episode, Hernando turns strangely to his father’s pleasure when Guacanagarí gave him a gold belt, crown and grains worth four gold marks, in exchange for items valued at only 34 maravedís (equivalent to less than 1/2,000th the amount). It is unclear whether Columbus was truly so cold-blooded in his mercantile calculations at this moment or if he was desperately grasping for positive news in the face of a massacre for which the real guilt was unlikely ever to be determined. Similarly, Hernando’s recording of this exchange in his biography of his father, shortly after what must have been a brutal childhood memory, has the feel of those misdirections often prompted by trauma.

Hernando’s presence at court made him an eyewitness to the competing interpretations of these events. Dr Chanca’s account of the La Navidad affair played into a dawning belief in the deceitful bloodiness of these new Spanish subjects, something that would have been reinforced by reports of a further disaster for Spanish Atlantic expansion that also arrived in April 1494. In an attempt to complete the conquest of the Canary Islands by taking the final holdout of Tenerife, the conquistador Alonso de Lugo had refused to accept the surrender of the pastoralist Guanches who lived there and attacked instead, only to be roundly beaten back to the sea with the loss of eight hundred Christian lives. The heart-warming triumph of the natives of Tenerife was sadly short-lived: de Lugo returned the following year with a larger force and captured them en masse, a pattern of hardening attitudes towards Atlantic peoples that was only to worsen in the coming years. The German traveller Hieronymus Munzer was soon to see these ‘beasts trapped in human form’ for sale in Valencia and to note without irony the ‘sweetening effect’ of religion on these slaves, many of whom were put to work harvesting sugar cane. To counter this mounting bigotry, Columbus had a tightrope to walk: even as he attempted to conjure out of nothing a belief in the New World as a gold-paved Eden, he had to admit the settlement was faltering at the outset. In the same breath with which Antonio de Torres was to report that vines and wheat sprang marvellously and untended out of the New World ground, he was obliged to request the Monarchs send supplies from Spain, namely:

wine, hardtack, wheat, salt pork, other salted meat, cattle, sheep, lambs, male and female calves, donkeys, raisins, sugar, almonds, honey, rice, and medicine

And all this if possible before the summer arrived. The reason Columbus gave for this want in his land of milk and honey was the poor quality of what had been stocked for the Second Voyage: the wine had been lost through poorly made barrels, the horses supplied by the farrier in Seville were all broken-backed nags, and the fine strapping men he expected to find when they disembarked in Hispaniola turned out to be layabouts who expected simply to feast on manna, gather the gold that was lying about, and return to Europe rich men. They could not survive on the local cassava bread and required the food they were used to in Spain, and they constantly fell ill in that climate. To prove this de Torres carried with him a list of the healthy and a list of the sick. Just as Columbus was quick to blame the fate of La Navidad on the viciousness of some of the men he left there, so the failure of the New World settlements over the coming years was increasingly to be laid (by Columbus himself, and later Hernando) at the feet of men whom the Admiral disdained for not being willing to suffer like him to turn his vision into a reality. But even Columbus’ adherence to the picture of naked innocence among the New World natives was beginning to crumble: not only does he detail the defensive measures he has taken against local aggression, he also in his struggle to make his discoveries profitable proposes a trade be set up in which Spanish cattle be exchanged for New World slaves. Though the Monarchs firmly resisted this suggestion, Columbus continued to push for it in hopes of saving his vision of the New World, being tempted for the sake of expediency into an execrable history of kidnap and enslavement.8

The letters from Columbus over the succeeding years followed these familiar patterns. Hernando would have learned in his seventh year, during the early months when the court was at Madrid, of his father’s expedition against the aggressor Caonabó in the province of Cibao, where the rivers ran with grains of gold but they faced constant attacks from Caonabó’s warriors. At the same time he would have heard tell of his father’s expedition in search of terra firma, the continental landmass of Cathay, when instead he got no further than the coasts of Cuba and Jamaica, becoming marooned amid a labyrinth of hundreds of islets he named the Jardines de la Reina, ‘The Queen’s Gardens’. There they witnessed flamingoes, pilot fish that hitched rides on the dorsal fins of other swimmers, turtles as big as shields in numbers that blanketed the sea, a cloud of butterflies so large it cast the ship in darkness, and a breeze so sweet the soldiers felt themselves surrounded by roses and the finest perfumes in the world. The Admiral boasted they would have returned to Castile via the East on that very journey, if not for the fact that their supplies were exhausted, as was the Admiral, having not (he claimed) changed clothes or slept in a bed for eight months. On returning to Hispaniola Columbus found his brother Bartholomew, who had finally caught up with him after more than six years, and succumbed to a fever that for five months deprived him of his sight, his memory and his senses.9

Columbus’ letters and the objects he sent back to Spain with them are witnesses to a mind struggling to put this flood of new things into order, when every day produced some unheard-of wonder, a struggle that is the prehistory to his son’s lifelong quest to organise the world. Insofar as Columbus did attempt to impose a system on what he was seeing, he usually fell back on the worldview of medieval cosmography, in which the oddity of men and their customs showed how far from the centre of the world any given place was, whereas the perfumes of Araby and the abundance of gold were clues that one was approaching the earthly Jerusalem or the boundaries of the lost Eden. Columbus’ New World was to him strangely both of these things, both centre and periphery, both far from the known and approaching man’s point of origin. More often than not his reports of the New World simply never progressed beyond incoherent lists. We should not, however, assume that because the lists lacked order and seemed chaotic, this was a dispassionate and scientific record of what he was seeing: in the tradition of the medieval ennumeratio, the rambling list was often a way of describing God, whose divine incomprehensibility could not be expressed except by the use of dissimilar images. One such list, for instance, described Christ as the

source, way, right, rock, lion, light-bearer, lamb – door, hope, virtue, word, wisdom, prophet – victim, scion, shepherd, mountain, nets, dove – flame, giant, eagle, spouse, patience, worm …

Perhaps in imitation of this Columbus most often fell back on protestations of inexpressibility – that the marvellous beauty of the New World was something that could not be put into words but simply had to be seen, to be experienced in rapt admiration. This move at once produced a mystical impression of these new territories and postponed giving them a meaning, leaving Columbus the sole authority, having been the only one to see what could not be properly described.10

Some observations did manage to breach this defensive wall of conventional interpretation and blank wonder. The bafflement Columbus felt, for instance, at the natives of Cibao province ‘locking’ the doors of their huts by placing single canes across the entry, slender barriers that none of them would dream of breaching, witnesses the effect of a custom that could not be fitted into these schemes. These cane-locks could not be explained by either of the simple narratives used to understand the New World, of Edenic innocence on the one hand or barbaric bestiality on the other; instead, they confronted the viewer with a version of privacy unique to that culture. In time it would be precisely these oddities of custom that would lead European thinkers to wonder if their own customs – of dress, of behaviour, of morality – were not the natural and necessary practices of a civilised people but were equally arbitrary and nonsensical when viewed from outside of that culture. But these awakenings would remain for a long time dormant. In the meantime Columbus and his sponsors at court saw no irony in sending ‘cannibals’ back to Spain to cure them of their sinful appetite for human flesh by converting them to Christianity, membership of which cult they would regularly celebrate by eating the body of the Son of God during Mass. No one appeared to flinch at subjecting the stone cemies or idols of the Taíno to derision and mockery, as mere pieces of wood and stone that the natives thought could speak and to which they made offerings, while renaming Taíno places after statues of the Virgin and saints that had equally proved their blessedness by miraculous acts.

This growing body of knowledge about the western Atlantic gave rise during Columbus’ Second Voyage to the first systematic attempts to write about this New World, a process in which Hernando played a key part. In response to Columbus’ letters of 1494 Hernando’s tutor Peter Martyr declared his intention to write a history of the voyages of exploration and the lands they had encountered, a task that was to occupy him intermittently for the rest of his life. And a mail packet that arrived late in 1495, as the court toured Catalonia, contained the first attempt to write an ethnographic account of a New World people, in the form of Fray Ramón Pané’s extensive study of the habits and customs of the Taíno, a text that survives only because Hernando copied it wholesale into his writings about his father, and to which we owe most of our knowledge about a culture that was quickly eradicated by massacre, conversion and disease. Pané’s survey begins with a description of the Taíno sky-deity and his five-named mother, and their belief that mankind emerged from two caves, Cacibayagua and Amayauba, guarded by a man named Marocael (‘without eyelashes’) who was turned to stone for failing to guard the caves. The description then relates a story of how the first female humans disappeared to an Island of Women, leaving behind children whose cries turned into the croaking of frogs; the men who remained, like the Christians who first arrived from the sea, were a people without women, ones who took what they lacked. Pané records the two caves, from which the sun and moon emerge, contained two stone cemi idols named Boinayol (‘son of the serpent-formed storm-god’) and Maroya (‘cloudless’), as well as the Taíno belief that dead men roam the earth without navels, endlessly seeking to embrace the female Coaybay (‘absent ones’). His account of native culture ends with a description of their ritual chants (which he likens to those performed by Muslims), their shamanic witch doctors, and the way their idols were made, from trees that move from their rooted spot and reveal to the shaman the form they wish to take during a psychotropic cohoba trip. Perhaps Hernando would have felt some sympathy with the frogs central to Taíno culture, who were once children left by their mothers and whose croaking is the sound of them calling out to the parent they have lost.

Many of the stories that Hernando transcribed from Pané are jumbled and very difficult to understand, and Pané modestly admits the limitations of his account, noting he did not have enough paper to write on and was forced to attempt to memorise everything in order, and that furthermore the linguistic and cultural barrier prevented him from understanding many things fully. But this humility should not distract from the system quietly imposed by Pané on what he heard, which proceeds from an account of the Taíno gods, through their story of the creation of man, to their understanding of the shape of the cosmos and of the afterlife, and finally the social institutions that are an expression of their way of seeing the world, from their rituals and sacred objects to the way in which they believe bodies can be healed by their form of medicine. This European way of describing ‘exotic’ peoples, moving from religious beliefs to social practices, was not an invention of Pané’s, and indeed since Pané it has become so naturalised that we are in danger of missing the argument that it contains. Hernando may well have recognised that the description of the Taíno follows the form set down by classical works including Pliny’s Natural History and transmitted through the Middle Ages by Isidore of Seville’s Etymologies: both Pliny and Isidore attempt to describe the entirety of the world as it is known to them, and one might be tempted to see their encyclopedias as merely randomly ordered lists. Closer inspection, however, reveals a very clear organisational principle based on Aristotelian philosophy, moving (as one description has put it) from ‘the original to the derived, and from the natural to the artificial’. As in Pané’s description of the Taíno, this creates order by starting with the things from which the world is seen to come (the gods, Creation) before moving on to the things created (man) and in turn the things created by these creations (religious ceremonies, medical practices, etc). This seems a reasonable enough way of proceeding, but in practice it allows the Christian reader to dismiss the entirety of another culture on the basis of an incorrect belief in God: if the premises on which the culture is based are false (i.e. their notion of God), all practices, beliefs and customs derived from those premises must also be false. Tellingly, Pané’s document ends with an account of his part in the first New World conversion to Christianity, of the attempts by a violent opponent of the Christians (the cacique Guarionex) to destroy the Christian icons, and the public burning of Guarionex’ men by Bartholomew Columbus.11

The pattern of Hernando’s life at court, and of learning about the New World through his father’s letters, was interrupted by the sudden return of Columbus in 1496, after an absence of three years, almost half the life of his younger son. Joyful as the reunion must have been for Hernando, the Admiral was not returning in triumph this time, and no fanfare greeted him on his arrival at Cadiz in June nor when he was received by the Reyes at the Casa del Cordón in Burgos. The proliferation of different accounts of the New World at court had given substance to increasingly widespread and urgent complaints regarding the conduct of the Admiral as governor of the new territories, and that of his brother Bartholomew during Columbus’ extended absences for further exploration. The charges focused not on the tyrannical exploitation of the native population but rather on the high-handed treatment of the Spanish settlers who had come to Hispaniola, with the anti-Columbian party deriding the New World as a place of harshness and violence only made worse by Columbus’ leadership, and the Admiral responding that the troubles were largely produced by the viciousness of the Spanish settlers and their needless provocation of the native population. Though the judicial commission didn’t find against Columbus, the Admiral seemed to have sensed his long absence from court was allowing those who opposed him to fill the silence this created.12

Columbus was reunited with his children at Burgos during a particularly tumultuous period, one in which a less talented showman might have failed to make his case heard over the cacophony of things competing for the Monarchs’ attention. Ferdinand and Isabella were in the process of restructuring their court to strengthen the position of their heirs, transferring the Infante Juan to a household of his own, strategically located at Almazán on the border between Ferdinand’s province of Aragon and Isabella’s of Castile. They had also arranged a double marriage that would link their house solidly to the ascendant House of Habsburg, betrothing their children to the heirs of Maxmilian I, the Holy Roman Emperor. Shortly before Columbus arrived at court an armada of 130 ships, bearing an estimated twenty-five to thirty-five thousand passengers, had departed from the Basque country to take the princess Juana to Flanders, where she would marry Duke Philip of Burgundy, and to bring back on the return trip Maximilian’s eldest daughter Margaret. For the princess’ private retinue of three thousand, they stocked two hundred cows, a thousand chickens, two thousand eggs, four thousand barrels of wine and nearly a quarter of a million salted fish. The fleet’s size was not only an expression of the great importance of the event: it was a necessary defence against aggression from the French, with whom Spain was at war as both countries sought to secure and extend their control over the Italian peninsula. The nuptial celebrations party had turned to horror, however, when as many as ten thousand of the Spanish party died of cold and illness during the harsh Flanders winter of 1495–6.13

If Hernando sensed his father’s showmanship was wearing thin when, presenting another assortment of wonders from the New World, he could offer only a small amount of gold ‘as earnest of what was to come’, the Admiral nonetheless found a way to use his peculiar talents to bring himself to the fore. Both Columbus and Hernando were later to recall in writing how in March 1497, during the fleet’s return from Flanders bearing Juan’s intended bride Princess Margaret, Columbus had convinced the worry-stricken Monarchs not to move with the rest of the court to the inland town of Soria, but instead to stay behind in Burgos to be nearer to Laredo, the port at which he predicted the fleet would dock, even forecasting the exact day they would arrive and the route they would take. This unusual mode of turning a portolan – the sailor’s description of the routes and distances between ports – into a form of prophecy served Columbus well, and both he and Hernando were over the coming years to exploit the almost mystical authority it conferred on them. As Hernando would later learn, the Italian polymath Angelo Poliziano even had a word for this practice, calling it a mixed science, falling halfway between the ‘inspired’ knowledge that came from divine revelation and the practical kind that comes from human invention.14

The wedding of Princess Margaret to the Infante Juan was celebrated in Burgos on Palm Sunday, 19 March 1497, after which the Monarchs moved quickly to secure further alliances, with Isabella leaving shortly after to celebrate the marriage of their eldest daughter Isabel to King Manuel of Portugal. The nuptial joy was to be short-lived. Juan fell ill while Isabella was away, and died soon after in the arms of his father, who tried to comfort his son by telling him God had reserved greater realms for him in the hereafter than those he would now never inherit on earth. It was said that Juan’s dog Bruto lay down at the head of his master’s coffin in Salamanca Cathedral and refused to move for any other reason than to make water outside the church. The dog was still to be found where he last saw his master long after the body was moved to Ávila for burial, though by then a pillow and food had been provided for him at his new post. It is also said Ferdinand joined Isabella for the marriage of their elder daughter but did not tell his wife of the death of their son until the festivities were over. Their daughter, the newly crowned queen consort of Portugal, was also to die, ten months later, only to be replaced as queen by her younger sister Maria who married the same Portuguese king after two years had elapsed.

During Columbus’ two-year residence back in Spain Hernando would have watched his father battle to push his plans forward through the fog of these family and dynastic events, which were themselves being played out in a European context of war against France in Italy, the Turks in the Mediterranean, and the north African Arabs along the Barbary Coast. Columbus followed the court in its cumbersome progress around Aragon, and then from Burgos to Valladolid, Medina del Campo, Salamanca and Alcalá de Henares. Slowly but surely the Admiral secured a further restatement of the Monarchs’ promises to him in the Capitulaciones de Santa Fe of 1492, procured desperately needed resupply for the settlers at Hispaniola, saw his sons Diego and Hernando transferred from the household of the dead prince to that of the queen herself, and gained permission to return to the New World on a third voyage. Yet Columbus was continually and understandably nervous about the ability of his fortunes to weather the onslaughts against him during his long absences, much less after his death, and in addition to the reiterated promises of Ferdinand and Isabella he took advantage of his presence in Spain to draw up an entail on his estate. This document not only further cemented the Admiral’s status by involving him in a legal procedure reserved for members of the nobility, it also vaulted Hernando into the highest elites of Spanish society. On the one hand it held out the promise of a very substantial revenue in the event of Columbus’ death – 1–2 million maravedís in annual rent, putting him on a footing surpassed only by a few heirs in the land – and on the other hand, perhaps more importantly for a ten-year-old boy, it named both Diego and Hernando in a single breath as mis hijos legítimos, ‘my legitimate sons’.15

Exactly what Diego and Hernando would be legitimate heirs to, however, was much less certain than Columbus’ entail tried to suggest. His lavish bequests were made on the basis of projected income that existed only in Columbus’ imagination, and would depend on the crown’s continued adherence to the agreements of 1492. While these agreements were notarised and Columbus was able to appeal in case of any doubt to the importance of the sovereign’s word within the chivalric code, in reality the Capitulaciones posed an unacceptable threat to the Spanish monarchy, conferring on Columbus and his heirs in perpetuity virtual autonomy over a kingdom beyond the sea and an income that would rival that of the crown itself.

The tenuousness of Columbus’ vision of the future became apparent during the Third Voyage, on which he departed at the end of May 1498. Unwilling simply to return to the islands of which he was governor and oversee their resupply, he had split his fleet in two at the Canary Islands, sending three ships on to Hispaniola and taking three himself south towards the equator before heading west in search of the elusive mainland. This expedition lasted five months and conferred on Columbus the distinction of being the first European to see the American continental landmass, a part of modern-day Venezuela that he called Paria, even if it is not wholly clear he recognised it as such at the time and though later cartography was famously to accord that honour to Amerigo Vespucci. But Columbus’ delay in arriving at Hispaniola was nothing short of disastrous: when he did land at the end of August 1498 in the town of Santo Domingo, founded by his brother Bartholomew on the west bank of the deep-drawing River Ozama and named after their father, he once again found the island in open revolt. This rebellion, like that of 1495, was directed first against Columbus’ brothers and stoked by poor conditions on the island, but increasingly and uncontrollably turned against the Admiral himself after his return.

Columbus’ sons were not in the least shielded from this complete collapse of their father’s power, his reputation and his prospects: instead, they were directly in the firing line as settlers from Hispaniola began to bypass the New World administration and present their complaints directly to the Monarchs. Hernando recalled many years later, with the vividness reserved for experiences of shame, the mob of fifty or so returned settlers who had installed themselves (with a barrel of wine) outside the gate of the Alhambra where the court was in residence. The mob took to shouting loud complaints about how the Admiral had ruined them by withholding their wages, and brayed their petition to Ferdinand every time he attempted to leave the palace, shouting ‘Pay us! Pay us!’ However, the most virulent of their attacks were reserved for Diego and the eleven-year-old Hernando, who in a rare instance quotes the direct speech hurled at them by the mob:

Look at the Sons of the Admiral of Mosquitos, of him who discovered the Land of Vanity and the Land of Deceit, to be the sepulchre and the misery of the Gentlemen of Castile!

Hernando remembers how after this he and his brother avoided the mob, presumably now leaving the palace only through the back doors.16

The length of time the Monarchs withstood this onslaught of complaints speaks of their fidelity to Columbus and the strength of his supporters at court, but eventually even they could not resist the dispatch of a second inquest into affairs in the New World territories, this time led by Francisco de Bobadilla. A mere three months after Bobadilla landed in Santo Domingo on 23 August 1500, Hernando was to have the long-awaited reunion with his father. But the Columbus of Hernando’s twelfth year was not the gift-laden conjurer of his eighth. Instead, Columbus returned to Spain half stricken with blindness, to report that he and his brothers had been led, in the town named after their father, through crowds shouting insults and blowing horns at the fallen Admiral, past street corners covered with ballads lampooning the discoverer of the New World, and subjected to a show trial in which the judge Bobadilla incited the witnesses to pour their scorn upon Columbus. He landed at Cadiz on 20 November 1500, stripped of his governorship and his dignity, and bound in chains hand and foot.17