The Catalogue of Shipwrecked Books: Christopher Columbus, His Son, and the Quest to Build the World's Greatest Library - Hardcover

Edward Wilson-Lee is a Fellow in English at Sidney Sussex College, Cambridge, where he teaches medieval and Renaissance literature. His research focuses on books, libraries, and travel, which during this project has involved journeys to and through Spain, Italy, India, and the Caribbean. He is the author of Shakespeare in Swahililand and The Catalogue of Shipwrecked Books.

The Catalogue of Shipwrecked Books I

The Return from Ocean

Hernando Colón’s earliest recorded memory is characteristically precise. It was an hour before sunrise on Wednesday, the twenty-fifth of September 1493. He was standing next to his older half brother, Diego, looking out at the harbor of Cadiz. Dancing on the water in front of him was a constellation of lamps, on and above the decks of seventeen ships about to weigh anchor, preparing to return to the islands in the west where their father had first made landfall less than a year before. Christopher Columbus was now the “Admiral of the Ocean Sea” and was of sufficient fame that chroniclers took down each detail of the scene in front of the five-year-old Hernando. The fleet was formed of a number of lighter craft from Cantabria in the north of Spain, vessels made with wooden joinery so as not to be weighed down with iron nails, as well as the slower but more durable caravels. On board the ships were thirteen hundred souls, including artisans of every sort and laborers to reap the miraculous and uninterrupted harvests of which Columbus had told, but also well-bred caballeros who went for adventure rather than work.1

A favorable wind had begun to freshen, and as the dawn grew behind the city, the dots of lamplight would slowly have been connected by the cabins and masts and riggings to which they were fixed. The scene and the mood were triumphant: tapestries hung from the sides of the ships and pennants fluttered from the braided cables, while the sterns were draped in the royal ensigns of the Reyes Católicos (Catholic Monarchs), Ferdinand of Aragon and Isabella of Castile, the great sovereigns whose marriage had united a fragmented Spain. The piercing fanfare of hautboys, bagpipes, trumpets, and clarions was so loud, according to one observer, that the Sirens and the spirits of the water were astonished, and the seabed resounded with the cannonades. At the harbor mouth a Venetian convoy, returning from a trade mission to Britain, augmented the noise with their own gunpowder salutes, preparing to follow Columbus part of the way in the hope of learning something of his course.

It is unclear whether, in later life, Hernando could reach back beyond this earliest recorded memory to the rather different circumstances in which, earlier that year, his father had returned from his first voyage across the Atlantic. Columbus had arrived back in Europe with only one of the three vessels with which he had left Spain on 3 August 1492: his flagship, Santa Maria, had run aground off Hispaniola on Christmas Eve, and on the return voyage he had lost sight of the Pinta during a storm near the Azores. Thirty-nine of Columbus’s original crew of ninety or so had been left on the other side of the ocean, in the newly founded settlement of La Navidad in Hispaniola, a town built from the shipwrecked lumber of the Santa Maria with the assistance of the local king or cacique, Guacanagarí, and named in honor of the Christmas Day on which it was founded. Columbus’s skeleton crew for the return voyage had been reduced to just three men when the rest were taken prisoner by unfriendly islanders in the Azores, though he did eventually secure their release. And when the great explorer finally did reach Europe in the only ship remaining to him, the Niña, he was running under bare poles after another heavy storm had split the sails. To make matters worse, he had arrived back not in Spain but in Portugal, dragging his ship past the Rock of Sintra to take shelter under the Castle of Almada in Lisbon estuary, where he was treated with suspicion before eventually receiving a summons to make his report to King João. Though later reports would focus on the crowds who covered the harbor in their skiffs, swarming to see the island natives whom Columbus had brought home as part of his plunder, Columbus’s royal audience was for all intents and purposes an imprisonment, and his release was in part prompted by João’s doubts regarding the discoverer’s claims. Hernando’s written records of these early events would record the hardship but leave out much of the confusion of this first return, of the forlorn man and his outlandish claims.2


A contemporary drawing (1509) of the harbor of Cadiz, site of Hernando’s earliest recorded memory.

Hernando’s early life was unusual—perhaps unprecedented—because from the youngest age his personal recollections of his father would have contended with widely circulated written accounts of Columbus’s exploits. Hernando may have been present at Córdoba in March when a letter was read aloud at the cathedral announcing his father’s discoveries, and he kept as central relics in his library several editions of the letter, printed first at Barcelona, through which the discoveries were announced to the world. Hernando’s later collecting was to place at the heart of his universal library precisely this kind of cheap print whose first rustlings could be heard in these reports on Columbus’s voyage. The letter that was to be the common reading matter of Europe was written by Columbus when he landed in Portugal, and the crowds of Jews embarking from Lisbon harbor for Fez in North Africa would have served as a reminder that his ocean crossing would be forced to compete for public attention. The tumultuous course of recent events had reached a peak of intensity in the early months of 1492, when with the taking of Granada Ferdinand and Isabella finally completed the Reconquista, the capture of the Spanish peninsula from the Muslims who had ruled it (almost whole or in parts) for seven hundred years, a crusade that was cast as the righteous restoration of Christian rule. In an attempt to transform the small symbolic victory at Granada into a turning point in the ancient clash between the Abrahamic faiths, the Reyes Católicos celebrated their military triumph by presenting the Jews in their dominions with an ultimatum: forced conversion or exile. This was only an escalation of a long-standing Spanish history of persecuting those of the Jewish faith, but it proved a decisive one. Despite the fact that the Jewish community had been established in Iberia even longer than the Muslims and had been central to the flourishing of culture and society in Arabic Spain, many of them could not stomach the price of keeping their homes, which included agreeing that their sacred Talmud was merely a forgery designed to stop the onward march of the Christian faith. Those who chose to stay also faced the prospect of having their property confiscated by the likes of Tomás de Torquemada, the leader of the Inquisition, set up in 1478, who would use this fortune to finance a golden age of Spanish art and exploration. A great multitude prepared to leave, and in their number went many of the greatest intellectuals of fifteenth-century Spain. Forced, as one chronicler records, to sell their houses for a donkey and their vineyards for a little bread, they made the most of the disaster by casting it as a new Exodus, in which the Lord of Hosts would lead them in triumph to the Promised Land. Observing this pathetic scene did not restrain the same chronicler from accusing them of secretly taking much of the kingdom’s gold with them. The rabbis attempted to alleviate any feeling of desperation by having the women and children sing to the sounds of timbrels as they walked away from their homes. Though the Jews were given temporary asylum in Portugal, their safe haven there lasted only as long as Columbus’s first voyage, and when their paths crossed in Lisbon, the Jews were on the move again, boarding ships bound for North Africa.3

Even in his travel-worn state Columbus was quick to find a way for his own expedition to play a part in this grand historic narrative. His voyage west had, after all, been given royal sanction from the camp at Santa Fe outside the walls of Granada, at which Ferdinand and Isabella were celebrating the recent capitulation of the city’s last Muslim king, Boabdil, and from which they would also later issue the edict expelling the Jews. The letter Columbus sent ahead to Barcelona from Portugal sang of the marvelous fertility of the islands he had found, in perpetual bloom, and the naked innocence of the native people, who were willing to part with the abundant gold of that region for a few trifles from the visitors they regarded as descended from heaven. If the Jews had a new Exodus, Columbus offered Christians a new Eden. The letter announced that even if the natives knew nothing of Castile or of Christ, they showed themselves miraculously ready to serve both. As a token of their part in an expanded Spanish empire, Columbus had renamed these islands as he took possession of them, so that they now reflected the hierarchy of Spanish power, from Christ the Savior on down through the Monarchs and royal children:

San Salvador

Santa Maria de la Concepción

Fernandina

Isabela

Juana

Hispaniola

In its final paragraph the letter makes clear what has been implicit in the preceding pages, namely that these islands Columbus had encountered should be added to the list of famous victories achieved by the Catholic Monarchs, one that—like the conquest of the Moorish kingdoms and the expulsion of the Jews—would expand both the dominion of the Church and fill the coffers of Spain. This letter, soon printed again in Latin at Rome and Basel, and accompanied by a picture showing a single man guiding a ship toward an endless and fertile archipelago, was one of the central relics of Hernando’s childhood, at once cheap and priceless, flimsy and timeless, manufactured and intimate, widely distributed and intensely personal.4

Overwriting the native place names with Spanish ones was only one of the word tricks by which this New World was transformed, tricks that included set speeches through which Columbus and others legally “took possession” of the islands, even though these speeches meant nothing to the indigenous peoples listening to them. The former names began to lose their authority and were often soon lost altogether, as Spanish power came to seem natural in a place with so many Spanish names. For all the momentous consequences of their actions, Columbus and his crew often seemed little conscious of the power of this act of naming. As Hernando was later to record, the last-named island, Hispaniola, was so called because they caught there the same fish available in Spain (gray mullet, bass, salmon, shad, dory, skate, corvinas, sardines, crayfish). The power of Columbus’s names to change the world was often at odds with the casual way in which he chose them: to commemorate a particular event or an impression of the landscape, or, as here, because it brought back a memory of somewhere he had been before. One of the most powerful experiences for Columbus the explorer, and for the European audience of his feats, was the feeling of having found the familiar in an unexpected place, and around these familiar things the European imagination of the New World began to form.


An image from De insulis nuper in mari Indico repertis (Basel, 1494), showing Columbus manning a ship among the newly renamed islands.

Yet the letter that reached print and would later be found on the shelves of his son’s library was not the first Columbus had written, and Hernando was later to record an original, lost letter penned during the storm off the Azores a few weeks before the return to Europe. Despairing of ever reaching Spain to make his report in person, Columbus in this letter lamented that he would leave his two sons without help in a strange land, far from his ancestors (who, as Spain would soon learn to forget, were Genoese). He had dipped a copy of this first letter in wax, sealing it inside a barrel and turning it overboard with a notice to the discoverer that they could exchange the contents for a reward of a thousand ducats at the Spanish court. It is the first of the documents key to Hernando’s life that probably sits at the bottom of the sea.

The letter Columbus wrote from Lisbon not only inaugurated his fame but also saved him from the fate of those who come second. Arriving back in the Spanish port of Palos on 15 March, he learned that in fact the Pinta had not sunk in the storm off the Azores, and that its captain, Martín Alonso Pinzón, had himself gone ahead to Barcelona to break the news of the discovery and conquest to Ferdinand and Isabella. Crucially, Columbus’s luck held out a few days longer, and Pinzón died before he could gain an audience with the Monarchs. The explorer arrived in Barcelona in mid-April, bringing with him eyewitness reports and gifts from the lands (in the words of one contemporary report) “where the sun sets in the month of March”: pineapples, cotton, parrots, cinnamon, canoes, peppers four times as hot as those eaten in Spain, a group of natives, and (most important) a small amount of gold. The intended effect of this list—the argument it makes without seeming to—is simple: In a land of such varied and unrelated wonders, who can doubt that anything could be true? In this, Columbus’s gifts were like the great medieval collection of Jean, duc de Berry, which among its three thousand items contained a unicorn’s horn, St. Joseph’s engagement ring, an embalmed elephant, an egg found inside another egg, and other such marvels. The force of this argument, of these incomprehensible novelties, seems to have been enough to gain widespread acceptance for Columbus’s claims that gold was marvelously abundant in those regions, even if he had only a meager sample at present. He knelt before Ferdinand and Isabella, who quickly raised him to his feet and recognized him as the Admiral of the Ocean Sea, going on to reconfirm the rewards that had been promised at Santa Fe in January 1492, which conferred upon him in the event of a successful voyage extraordinary rights over lands he claimed in the Monarchs’ names.5

In a remarkable display of Columbus’s new status, he then rode on horseback through Barcelona in triumph, flanking Ferdinand with his heir, the Infante Juan. If, as is likely, Columbus rode on Ferdinand’s left side, he would have seen the still-tender scar running from the king’s ear down to his shoulder, the result of an attempted assassination a few months earlier. The wide variety of groups suspected of being behind this attack—the French, the Catalans, the Navarrese, the Castilians—was a reminder of the fragile state of Ferdinand and Isabella’s Spanish union, which faced opposition from within the Iberian Peninsula and outside it. Isabella had wrested her kingdom not only from the Moors but before that from her half brother, Enrique IV, and those loyal to his line, then forming with Ferdinand an unlikely but effective partnership to rule over their fractured and restive kingdoms; but the threat of a return to civil war was always present. That the blame for the assassination attempt was eventually pinned on a madman, one Juan de Cañamares, who claimed the devil had incited him to kill the king, served, like Columbus’s victorious return, conveniently to distract attention from local difficulties and to recast peninsular affairs as a battle between divine forces of Good and Evil.

For now Hernando was probably sheltered by his youth from the fact that not everyone shared this triumphal account of his father’s return. There wer...