Читать книгу The Catalogue of Shipwrecked Books: Young Columbus and the Quest for a Universal Library - Edward Wilson-Lee - Страница 19

During the period that followed Columbus’ appearance in chains, the weather-beaten, ageing explorer shared with his son a secret project, one that promised to reveal the world in an entirely new light. This work was designed to lift Columbus’ discoveries above the petty cost–benefit calculations on which many of the courtly debates were centred, framing them instead as events in a grand religious narrative of history, in which they would set the stage for the triumph of the Christian faith and the coming of the End of Time. The manuscript in which he compiled his evidence now survives as 84 leaves of badly damaged paper, sporadically filled with writing in a number of different hands. Each sheet of paper, originally made in Italy, is watermarked with a splayed hand below a six-pointed star. The work was initially given the rather bland, descriptive title of the ‘Book or collection of auctoritates [authoritative writings], sayings, opinions, and prophecies concerning the need to recover the Holy City and Mount Zion, and the finding and conversion of the islands of the Indies and of all peoples and nations’. Hernando was to rename it The Book of Prophecies, and the role he played in its creation is the first evidence of his growing genius for ordering.1

The chains were soon removed from the Admiral of the Ocean Sea – indeed, they would have been taken off sooner, had Columbus not refused the offer from the captain escorting him back, preferring to satisfy his fine sense of the theatrical by landing in Spain in the guise of a slave. The shackles neatly captured, for Columbus, the disparity between what he had achieved and how he had been rewarded: in the words of a prophecy he grew fond of quoting, he was the man who had broken the chains of Ocean that bounded the ancient world, and yet the chains of a captive were the only thing he had been given in return. This was the reason (Hernando recalled towards the end of his life) he had them set aside as a relic, to be placed in his tomb as a token of the world’s ingratitude. After ordering his release Ferdinand and Isabella asked him to come to them at Granada, and over the coming months Columbus resumed his Sisyphean task of attempting to re-establish the legitimacy of his claims to power and wealth from the New World. The Monarchs were quick to condemn Bobadilla’s treatment of their Admiral, and to appoint a new commission under Nicolás de Ovando to scrutinise Bobadilla’s own conduct, which must have afforded Columbus considerable satisfaction.2

Columbus was no longer content, however, to attend to these practical and administrative tasks, and during this period of residence in Spain he seems to have devoted increasing amounts of attention to The Book of Prophecies. This was not a sudden development in Columbus’ thinking: after all, he had sought since the earliest accounts of the New World to evoke the Edenic feel of the Caribbean, using its fertile climate and the nakedness of its inhabitants to suggest the enterprise was a step towards a blessed Golden Age (and, by extension, towards gold). But Columbus’ letters of October 1498 and February 1500 marked a significant shift in his thinking. In the first of these he reported his detour, at the beginning of the Third Voyage, around a three-headed island (he christened it ‘Trinidad’) towards another landmass, which he initially named ‘Isla Santa’ but later learned was terra firma – a continent – that the inhabitants of this region called Paria. Columbus’ three-month detour around Paria included some of the most harrowing events to date even for a man whose life had been a catalogue of near-death experiences. First among these was a period shortly after they reached the equator sailing south, during which they were becalmed for eight days in a heat so intense the ships’ holds turned to ovens and the decking planks began to groan and split. Drawing on his father’s logbooks, Hernando later ventured the opinion that had it not been for the relative cool of night and the occasional shower of rain, the ships would have been burned with everyone inside them. When the wind finally rose and they reached Trinidad their relief was cut short as they passed in horror through a sea channel between Trinidad and Paria, one that flowed as fast as a furious river, and in which waves from either end crashed in the middle, causing the water to rise like a cliff along the whole length of the strait. They called this strait at the southern end of Trinidad the Boca de la Sierpe, the Serpent’s Mouth. Their fear increased when they realised they were now trapped in a gulf between Trinidad and the mainland: they could not sail back south against the current of the Boca de la Sierpe, and it became clear their only route back towards Hispaniola lay through a similar channel to the north, to which they gave the twin-name Boca del Drago (Dragon’s Mouth). As if the moment were not fraught enough with danger, the crew had to do without the guidance of their leader: Columbus hadn’t been sleeping again and his eyes were so bloodshot with continual wakefulness that he was losing his sight. For a man obsessed with observing and recording every detail, and convinced he had a God-given sight that revealed things to him before others, this blindness must have been torture. Under these circumstances they took the only option open to them and ran the Boca del Drago. They survived but were spat out at such a pace that they only regained control after being carried on the current for sixty leagues.3

Though Columbus may have had to rely on the eyes of others on the visit to Paria, he began to believe he had been given a vision of something more. Struggling to fit the extraordinary experiences of Paria into a model he could understand, he reasoned that the ship’s movement had not been determined by simple natural phenomena, but by an irregularity in the shape of the earth. He now saw that the earth was not perfectly spherical: it was shaped like a woman’s breast, globular in form but rising to a peak like a nipple, a peak he reasoned was located at the easternmost point of the equator, and on top of which was to be found the Celestial Paradise. As evidence for this he adduced a number of arguments: the as yet unexplained behaviour of the compass needle in the middle of the ocean, which confoundingly ceased to point exactly to the north every time he passed a certain point 100 leagues west of the Azores; the speed at which they had exited the Boca del Drago, suggesting they were going downhill; and the doldrums where they had baked for eight days, there to ensure (he speculated) that no one could approach the Celestial Paradise without God’s permission. Further to this he pointed to how the people of Paria failed to conform to late-medieval understandings of racial geography, in which the hottest places on earth were supposed to hold the darkest-skinned people, who had been singed by the climate. He not only found people in Paria braver, more astute and more talented than most he had encountered, but they were also lighter skinned – because, he argued, they lived where the earth began to rise to a point, ‘like the stem of a pear’.4

Columbus had been prevented from developing his theories further at that point by illness and by the immediate urgency of dealing with the open rebellion when he arrived at Santo Domingo. In December 1499, however, he once again found himself stranded aboard a small caravel when, touring Hispaniola during a lull in the rebellion, he was attacked by a band of Taínos and forced to put out to sea without supplies or an adequate crew. On the day after Christmas, weltering in the ocean and staring into an abysm of despair, Columbus experienced the first of a series of visions during which God chastised him for his doubt and told him He would stand by him. On his return to Santo Domingo in February – after forty-odd days afloat – Columbus wrote again to the court, recounting this vision and urging Ferdinand and Isabella to take the discovery of the Indies as a divine signal that they should embark on a last, fatal push to bring about the triumph of the Christian Church, one which must begin with the conquest of Jerusalem.5

In a sense Columbus was harping on an old theme: he had long been waging a campaign for the Monarchs to think of his western discoveries as part of a wider crusade that would be followed by the subjection of the Indies and the Holy Land. As part of this he stood in fierce opposition to the mainstream reading of the Treaty of Tordesillas, the 1494 power-sharing agreement with Portugal, which had been brokered by the Pope and which divided the world into Portuguese and Spanish zones of activity in an attempt to keep the two nations from going to war over their new discoveries. The treaty granted Spain the right to occupy everything to the west of the Tordesillas meridian – an imaginary line 370 leagues west of the Cape Verde islands – and Portugal everything to the east of this line. This secured for Portugal its possessions in the Atlantic (the Azores and Madeira) as well as exclusive rights to deal with the west African territories (Ife, Benin and the Kingdom of Kongo), and gave Spain a free hand in the New World. In one of the greatest oversights in history, however, the treaty failed, in setting down where the zones of influence began, to make any mention of where they would end. The Portuguese could be forgiven for thinking their zone took in one hemisphere of the globe, ending halfway around the world going east – though it wasn’t remotely clear at the time where exactly ‘halfway’ would be. Columbus, on the other hand, was almost alone in maintaining that the Portuguese zone only covered the area from the Tordesillas Line as far east as they had sailed by the treaty date of 1494 – the Cape of Good Hope – making the Spanish portion stretch west right from the mid-Atlantic all the way around the world and back to the Cape. Crucially for Columbus, this kept the symbolic centres of late-medieval thought – Cathay, India, Persia, Ethiopia and (most importantly) Jerusalem – firmly within the part projected for Spanish expansion.6

Columbus’ letter of February 1500, however, began to make a theological argument that the discovery of the New World was in itself evidence of God’s apportioning Jerusalem to Spain, and a prompt to begin preparations to take back the Holy Land. On his return to Spain in November of the same year, and now free of the judgments of Bobadilla against him, Columbus had time to pursue these thoughts, and was now in a position to begin to put them into some kind of systematic order, a task that may have first brought Hernando’s unusual and extraordinary talents into the open. Columbus also recruited the help of a Carthusian monk, Gaspar Gorricio, and periodically stayed at Gorricio’s charterhouse, the Cartuja de las Cuevas, across the Guadalquivir from the part of Seville from where Hernando would eventually build his library. This place would become increasingly central to Columbus’ world and to Hernando’s, offering then as now a sanctuary removed from the bustling town, with cool and solid brick buildings lit by the sun from the cloister, expanding effortlessly through the spindly Mudéjar pillars of the colonnade. Here, beneath the refectory mural of St Christopher carrying the infant Christ across the water, Columbus seemed to find a perfect setting for his increasingly monastic temperament, and it was here he would store his most precious papers when he went once more over the ocean.7

Though Columbus had always had a mind for a good quotation, and was likely in contact with Gorricio and collecting authorities supporting his thinking in some fashion before his return from the Third Voyage, his activities now were on a wholly different scale. Among the passages copied into the 84 leaves of the Book of Prophecies as it survives today are excerpts from

Angelus de Clavasio, Guillielmus Durandus, St Augustine, Isidore of Seville, Nicholas of Lyra, Daniel, King Alphonso the Wise, Joachim of Fiore, the Psalms, Rabbi Samuel of Fez, Zephaniah, Jeremiah, Alfonso Fernández de Madrigal (El Tostado), Pierre d’Ailly, Albumazar, Ezekiel, Seneca, the Gospels, St John Chrysostom, Joachim of Calabria, the Book of Kings

These passages from the Bible, the early Church Fathers, medieval mystics and scholastics, as well as more recent figures, are stitched together by a series of short original passages, including a letter from Columbus to the Reyes Católicos (for whom it was evidently designed), a prayer by Gorricio, and verses in Castilian in the hand of Hernando.

Yet as a glance at the list above will quickly suggest, the passages from authorities are not arranged in order of importance, alphabetical order, date, geographical or religious origin, or any other obvious quality. The order is not determined by how it was compiled, as it seems the Book may have passed back and forth between Gorricio and Columbus, with Hernando making his additions in blank spaces left by the other two. After an introduction they are, however, arranged within three sections – de Praeterito (On the Past), de Praesenti et Futuro (On the Present and to Come), and de Futuro. In novissimis (On the Future and the End of Time) – though even within this framework the thicket of quotations makes little sense. Properly understood, the passages form an argument, a revelation of the nature of things through an inspired act of ordering, as Hernando says in his first set of verses for the Book:

Haré semeiante a este me siervo

al sabio varón, sagaz e prudente,

que funda e hordena por modo exelente

I will make my servant like him,

the knowledgeable man, wise and astute,

who founds and orders in excellent fashion.

Creation, as Hernando’s epigram suggests, requires not only strong foundations but the act of arrangement thereafter. The wise man, the Elect, is he who knows how to put things in their proper sequence.8

To make sense of the Book of Prophecies it is important to start with its first principles. To begin with, the Book follows St Augustine in asserting that God’s preordained plan for mankind is not simply a general plan, determining the shape of the great events of Christian history from the Fall of Man to the Last Judgement, but instead often affects what happens on a more minute level, right down to the lives of individual people. Importantly, these people need not be great kings or learned sages, as God’s power can by itself make great the lowly. As a lovely passage from Gorricio’s prayer has it, the God of the Book of Prophecies is a

God who instructs the heart of man without effort or words, and who makes wise the tongues of stammerers, and who is near us in times of need.

Augustine is again brought in to prove that those chosen for God’s special favour are in fact more likely to be lowly than powerful: they are distinguished ‘through unusual grace and intelligence rather than nobility of birth’, making a strength of the ways in which Columbus and his son were looked down upon by their enemies at court. This special providence does not just take the form of inspiring eloquent speech but can also help the chosen individual in any field of knowledge – including (again following Augustine) a suggestion that God can even instruct His chosen messengers in such technical matters as astronomy. In a dig aimed at those who rejected Columbus’ pre-1492 arguments about the extent of the globe’s circumference, the Book suggests the Admiral’s success was in itself evidence that God was on his side, and those opposed to him were, like the Pharisees, wilfully rejecting God’s call in favour of clever arguments and intellectual pride:

If indeed they knew so much that they could measure the world, why couldn’t they find its Lord more easily?

This is not to say the Book of Prophecies portrays Columbus as a kind of holy fool, who knows nothing and simply channels God’s grace: in fact, the prefatory letter to the Monarchs goes to great lengths to point out the Admiral’s nautical experience, a passion that trains the sailor to find out the secrets of the world, which Columbus has done through reading widely in cosmography, history, literature and philosophy. Rather, the argument is that even with all this knowledge and experience man can do nothing without lunbre, light, which Columbus receives in the form of flashes of inspiration. The fact that he has been right about so many things, the argument goes, proves these flashes are not madness but come from God, and that the Admiral has been chosen for a special role in history.9

The second major principle of the Book of Prophecies was that the words of the Bible should not always be taken literally. This is not to say, as some modern apologists for the Scriptures might, that the Bible is a compendium of traditions and that we should focus (selectively) on its ethical teachings rather than getting stuck on its claims as a record of history. Indeed, it was central to Columbus’ claims that many of the more fantastic stories of the Bible, from the Garden of Eden to the Flood, be records of literal truth. It was rather that the Book used the common belief that some pronouncements in the Bible, especially the cryptic sayings of the prophets and the Books of Wisdom, could be seen as darkly worded prophecies – even if these predictions were often not revealed as such until after the events in question had come to pass. The example chosen by Columbus and his helpers to illustrate this comes from the Book of Daniel, where the prophet says

I shall be a father to him and he will be a son to me.

While in Old Testament history this was taken as referring to King Solomon, the Book points out he is later revealed to be speaking more directly about Christ, ‘qui est filius Dei per naturam’, in whom the prophecy is more perfectly fulfilled because he is God’s natural son. Hernando, the natural son of the Admiral, must have thrilled at this choice of example, which served as a reminder that he was just as much his father’s son as Jesus, born to Joseph’s wife Mary, was the son of God.10

The argument about how to interpret the Bible was central to the Book of Prophecies because of the fact that the great majority of the Scriptures deal not generally with the fate of the world, nor with the role of Christians and Christianity in God’s plan, but rather with the special relationship between God and His people of Israel – the Jews. The Christian take on this, once again founded on Augustine but developed into one of the centrepieces of medieval Christian thought, was that the Jews had because of their various crimes in history forfeited their place as God’s Chosen People. As a result, when the prophecies of the Old Testament spoke of the future of ‘Israel’ this was to be taken not as speaking of a physical Israel (i.e. the Jewish people), but of a spiritual Israel, which was none other of course than the Christian Church itself. Among other evidence for this the Book produces a copy of a fourteenth-century letter, popular in Columbus’ day (though almost certainly a forgery), from Rabbi Samuel of Fez in north Africa, demonstrating from the Old Testament that the favour of the Lord had passed from the Jews to the Christians, and pointing to the spread of Christianity as evidence of this. Here, then, you had it from the horse’s mouth.11

The third and final pillar of the Book’s logic concerns the specific position of Columbus and his contemporaries within the chronological framework of Christian history. In other words, in order to know where you figure in God’s plan for mankind, you need to know how long history itself will last and how much time has elapsed since Creation. This had been a central question in Christian thought since the time of the Apostles, when the initial belief that Christ’s Second Coming would happen during their lifetime was disappointed and had to be successively replaced by theories positing a longer gap between First and Second Comings, albeit usually ones that kept the Second Coming fairly imminent. The Book of Prophecies uses Augustine’s prediction that the world would last 7,000 years – one millennium for each day of Creation – along with the calculation of the medieval King Alfonso the Wise that the world was created 5,343 years before the birth of Christ, to predict, as Columbus was writing in 1501, that there were 155 years left until the End of History. This may seem like something of an anticlimax, given that Columbus and his contemporaries could live comfortably in the knowledge they would never see that day, but the number of things that had to happen before the End meant dramatic events would need to start unfolding much sooner.12

With these foundations laid down, the Book of Prophecies begins to assemble selections from biblical, classical and medieval authorities to locate Columbus’ New World discoveries within God’s plan for the world. The argument was that, like Christ’s incarnation, the voyages of discovery were predicted long before they happened, though often in ways that didn’t make sense until after the fact. And, as with the Christian use of the Jewish scriptures, these predictions didn’t have to be made by Christian prophets, even though they concerned key events in Christian history. One of the most striking passages in the Book of Prophecies – and the one that inspired Columbus to be buried with chains – comes not from a religious text but from a piece of theatre, the Medea by the Roman writer Seneca, in which a chorus towards the end of the play speaks the following lines:

During the last years of the world,

the time will come in which Oceanus

will loosen the chains, and a huge landmass

will appear; Tiphys will discover new worlds,

and Thule will no longer be the most remote land.

The playwright Seneca was not a religious authority or even a Christian, but who could deny that these lines seemed to predict Columbus’ discoveries, and isn’t the ability to prophesy in itself a mark of God’s favour?13

The discovery of the New World was not, however, simply an isolated event that had been predicted and had come to pass. It was rather the first step towards a central condition in God’s plan for the End of Time, namely, the universal evangelisation and conversion of the world. Many Christian thinkers believed this had already been fulfilled, when after the destruction of the Temple in Jerusalem by the Roman emperors Titus and Vespasian the word of God was spread by apostles through the world. Others, however, including the medieval theologian El Tostado and biblical scholar Nicholas of Lyra, believed there would be a second spreading of the Gospel closer to the End of Time, and this view was obviously supported by the discovery of the New World, which showed without a doubt that the Christian message hadn’t been spread to every corner of the globe.

Crucially for Columbus, the Bible could be read as predicting not just a second wave spreading the Gospel around the world, but one that took the precise form of his discoveries. For this he was able to take advantage of a quirk of translation that stretched back over a thousand years. A vast number of passages, largely in the Book of Isaiah but also elsewhere, speak poetically about the universal spread of God’s name as reaching even אי, a Hebrew term with several meanings. While the general sense is ‘places where one can take shelter’, and the metaphorical sense in Isaiah is likely closer to ‘coastlands’ or ‘the furthest-outlying places’, St Jerome in translating the Bible into Latin had chosen to render אי as ‘insula’, island. This meant the Bible as used by Columbus and his contemporaries was riddled with passages insisting that one sign of the universal conversion that would bring on the End Times was the spread of the word of God to certain unidentified islands – an event Columbus had unquestionably brought about. So important were these references to ‘islands’ that Gorricio had set about compiling a concordance listing all relevant mentions of the word in the Bible.14

In fact, the circumstances of Columbus’ life and discovery could be linked to prophecies in the Bible in much greater detail than this. The Book noted the verses from Isaiah to the effect that

My just one is near; my saviour has gone out. My arms will judge the peoples; the islands will await me and will welcome my force.

Of these verses fulfilment could be found, for those determined to do so, in the (supposed) welcome given by the Taíno to the Christians and their message. Isaiah also said of this ‘just one’ that he would be lowly like Columbus: ‘so will his appearance be inglorious among men and his form among the sons of man’. A passage from Zephaniah confirmed the people they would meet in this Last Evangelisation would be innocent, just as Columbus felt many of the New World tribes to be: ‘They will not do evil nor speak lies nor will a deceitful tongue be found in their mouths, for they will be fed and will lie nearby and will not have cause to fear.’15

For Columbus and his faction, placing his discoveries within the framework of the universal triumph of the Christian faith had the advantage not only of suggesting the Admiral’s actions had divine blessing, but also of providing some reassurance about the smooth passage of events to come. A passage from the Book of Ezekiel, for instance, suggested the immense communication problems they were experiencing in the New World, which greatly slowed the spread of the Gospel while the explorers struggled both to teach European languages and to understand local ones, would be temporary. Crucially for Columbus, given the doubts at court about whether these new provinces would ever prove profitable, these passages also predicted the discovery of these islands would produce great wealth:

For the islands await me, the ships of the sea first, so that I may bring your sons from afar, their silver and gold with them, in the name of the Lord, your God, the Holy One of Israel, because he has glorified you.

Columbus came increasingly to associate the places he had discovered with the fabled biblical lands of Tarshish, Ophir and Kittim, lands that had sent legendary treasures to King Solomon. Like the gold-flecked streams of Cibao province in Hispaniola, the richness of Ophir was said to be so great that sailors needed only to gather the soil, thrown up by the claws of the lions that dug holes on the shore, and fire it in a furnace to produce vast quantities of gold. Similarly, Tarshish (or Tarsus) was important in biblical geography as the homeland of one of the Magi, Caspar, traditionally reputed to have brought gold to the infant Jesus.

Yet Columbus could not afford to rest on his laurels and wait for this apocalyptic history to take its course, as universal evangelisation and conversion was only one of two triggers that would bring on the Second Coming. The other was the conquest of Jerusalem, the city whose symbolic force had set Columbus on the path of collecting the passages for the Book of Prophecies, and which he announces as the main thrust of his argument in the prefatory letter to Ferdinand and Isabella. While the defeat of the Moors in the Reconquista and the expulsion of the Jews shortly thereafter were already widely seen in Spain as part of God’s plan, Columbus was able to cite specific prophecies, attributed to the medieval mystic Joachim of Calabria, to the effect that someone from Spain would recover the wealth of Zion. There were also passages Columbus saw as linking him personally to this destiny, such as the following from Psalm 115:

You have separated my chains; I shall celebrate a sacrifice of praise to you, and I will invoke the name of the Lord. I will recite my solemn vows to God in the full sight of all his people in the halls of the house of the Lord, in the midst of you, Jerusalem.

This must have appealed strongly to Columbus’ heady mix of vanity and paranoia, linking as it did the Chains of Ocean that he saw himself as having broken and the chains in which he had been brought back a prisoner from Santo Domingo in 1500.16

It is easy with hindsight to write off the Book of Prophecies as an expression of Columbus’ narcissistic insanity. We have the advantage of knowing the world did not come to an end in 1656, and that though the discovery of the Americas was the beginning of an extraordinary expansion of the Christian faith, it was hardly either universal or particularly welcome to all subjected to it. Yet the fact that human culture even today regularly falls back upon apocalyptic predictions – in religious fundamentalism, ecological/medical/technological disaster narratives and stories about clashes of culture – may make us want to pause before passing judgement, not least because many others (including learned clerics like Gaspar Gorricio) found Columbus’ vision of his place in history compelling. Though the dire state of the New World settlements may have meant Columbus had a practical need for just such a narrative, it nevertheless remained the case that the central texts of late-medieval culture provided ample and persuasive evidence that he was on to something. Columbus showed himself able, when medieval certainties about the world had been severely challenged and many might feel themselves adrift in a sea of facts bereft of order, to reassemble the pieces of his culture’s belief into a narrative capable of accommodating the new discoveries. In a world exploding with a seeming chaos of new information, the man who provided a sense of order had a significant claim to power, much like the proverbial one-eyed king of the blind.

What, then, was the part of Hernando in all this? It was at one time believed by many scholars that the lion’s share of the Book of Prophecies was written in the hand of Columbus’ younger son, though recently more level-headed studies have pointed out the unlikelihood of the twelve-year-old Hernando – however astonishing his later career – being able to draw on such a broad range of reading. An examination of the manuscript also reveals that a majority of the passages are in a script that looks nothing like Hernando’s increasingly distinctive handwriting; these are probably by a professional scribe employed by Columbus. Yet there are sections that are unquestionably written by Hernando, as well as others about which we cannot be certain. The most likely sequence of events, then, was that during the last months of 1500 and the first months of 1501 Columbus began to compile extracts he had already come across in his reading, certainly in the presence of Hernando (who was living with him at the time) if we can be sure of nothing more. We do know, from a letter of Columbus’ included in the Book, that in September 1501 he passed what he had done so far to Gaspar Gorricio, and it seems likely that while Gorricio compiled lists of relevant quotations, the manuscript was then handed to a professional scribe to do the actual work of writing out the texts in question. Gorricio returned it six months later, on 23 March 1502, saying not everything had been copied out but that the Book as it was would serve its intended purpose. In its final pages the Book is a series of cryptic lists, possibly referring to further passages that could be copied into the manuscript when time permitted.

At some point after this Hernando made his own entries in the Book of Prophecies. Like the Castilian verses quoted above, many of his entries are passages of Spanish verse which celebrate the ‘wide and easy path’ that will be opened to the Man of Virtue, helping to underpin the idea that Columbus’ successful voyages of exploration were the result of God’s special providence. It is perhaps worth pointing out that certain passages, like the verses from Seneca’s Medea, would have been unlikely to feature either in the practical reading of Columbus or the theological reading of a monk like Gorricio, but would certainly have formed part of the humanist curriculum taught by Peter Martyr to Hernando in the household of the Infante Juan. There were several copies later recorded in Hernando’s library which he may already have owned by this stage, including a lost manuscript translation of the plays into Spanish. It is not hard to imagine the young Hernando, daydreaming in the classroom, reading his heroic and absent father into his lessons wherever he could. Certainly the addition from Medea was made at a later stage, and in a hand that belongs to neither Columbus nor Gorricio but might belong to Hernando, though we cannot be certain of its authorship.17

We can also only guess at Hernando’s private feelings about the wild-eyed claims of a father whom he idolised but must, on the brink of manhood, have recognised as increasingly eccentric and misunderstood by those in power. His surviving entries in the Book are largely of a general, moralising nature and steer clear of the occult identification of the Admiral and his acts with biblical events, characters and prophecies. Yet the experience must have had a profound effect on Hernando, and it is tempting to read the course of his own later life as written also in the Book of Prophecies. One of his most extensive entries, and indeed the last in the manuscript as a whole, is another poem about the paths that open to the Virtuous Man; but it is also a code, an acrostic verse whose first words taken together form a sentence, ‘Memorare Novissima Tua et In Eternam Non Peccabis’ – remember your death and you will never sin. The addition of an apocalyptic context to the life of a pubescent boy with a megalomanic father can hardly have failed to affect him irreversibly.18

As we shall see, in later life Hernando did much to reduce the role of millenarian theories in the public narrative of his father’s life, turning Columbus from a provoker of the End Times to the first figure in a new world. But Hernando’s attempt to distance himself and his father from these ideas may not tell the whole truth of his role in the Book of Prophecies. Large sections are missing from the Book, one of which bears the following comment: ‘Whoever removed these pages acted badly, for this was the best prophecy in this book.’ This note was almost certainly written during Hernando’s lifetime or very shortly thereafter, suggesting perhaps that the pages were removed by Hernando himself or by those close to him. What is more, both of the larger sections missing from the manuscript, including the one lamented above, are flanked by passages in Hernando’s handwriting, increasing the likelihood that they contained writings by him. The missing prophecies will likely never be recovered, but the question of their contents is one to which there will be cause to return.19

Whatever part Hernando played in creating the Book of Prophecies, and however he felt about the father who held it up to himself as a mirror, it is clear Hernando was increasingly close to Columbus during this period. The most dramatic evidence of this came when it was decided the thirteen-year-old Hernando would accompany his father on his impending Fourth Voyage back to the New World. There is no sign Columbus ever considered taking his adult elder son and heir Diego with him. There were good practical reasons for this, both to leave someone to argue the Admiral’s case at court and to preserve the dynasty in case of disaster. But Hernando would (both then and in later life) have good reason to feel he had a legacy of knowledge and experience from his father that was worth more than a mere monetary inheritance.

Gorricio returned the uncompleted Book of Prophecies less than two months before Hernando and his father set sail for the New World, likely prompted by Columbus’ desire to take the manuscript with him on the voyage, a theory confirmed by the fact that the Admiral quotes several passages included in the Book in letters written during this voyage. There are also a number of entries that strongly suggest passages were continuing to be added to the manuscript even as Hernando and his father travelled around the New World. It is mesmerising to think that not only were the revelations of the Book of Prophecies being honed even as father and son explored new reaches of the western Atlantic, but, even more astonishingly, that the Book’s predictions about Tarshish, Ophir and Kittim and their place in providential history meant they were in effect carrying with them a guidebook to unknown lands. The prophetic manuscript functioned like a map in reverse, providing them with landmarks that needed to be arranged on the landscape they were about to witness.20