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for Kelcey
Achilles’ shield is therefore the epiphany of Form, of the way in which art manages to construct harmonious representations that establish an order, a hierarchy. . . . Homer was able to construct (imagine) a closed form because he . . . knew the world he talked about, he knew its laws, causes and effects, and this is why he was able to give it a form. There is, however, another mode of artistic representation, i.e., when we do not know the boundaries of what we wish to portray, when we do not know how many things we are talking about and presume their number to be, if not infinite, then at least astronomically large. . . . The infinity of aesthetics is a sensation that follows from the finite and perfect completeness of the thing we admire, while the other form of representation we are talking about suggests infinity almost physically, because in fact it does not end, nor does it conclude in form. We shall call this representative mode the list, or catalogue.
UMBERTO ECO, The Infinity of Lists
Como todos los hombres de la Biblioteca, he viajado en mi juventud; he peregrinado en busca de un libro, acaso del catálogo de catálogos; ahora que mis ojos casi no pueden descifrar lo que escribo, me preparo a morir a unas pocas leguas del hexágono en que nací.
JORGE LUIS BORGES, “El Biblioteca de Babel”
The use of letters was invented for the sake of remembering things, which are bound by letters lest they slip away into oblivion.
ISIDORE OF SEVILLE, Etymologies I.iii
So if the invention of the Shippe was thought so noble, which carryeth riches, and commodities from place to place, and consociateth the most remote regions in participation of their fruits: how much more are letters to be magnified, which as Shippes, passe through the vast Seas of time, and make ages so distant, to participate of the wisdome, illuminations, and inventions the one of the other?
FRANCIS BACON, Advancement of Learning
The route of Columbus’s Fourth Voyage, 1502–4, on which he was accompanied by Hernando.
Detail of Hernando and Columbus’s route around the Caribbean and Central America in 1502–4.
The route of Hernando’s journey through Europe in 1520–22; the dashed portions are conjectured.
The route of Hernando’s journey through Europe in 1529–31; the dashed portions are conjectured.
PROLOGUE
Seville, 12 July 1539
On the morning of his death, Hernando Colón called for a bowl of dirt to be brought to him in bed. He told his servants that he was too weak to raise his arms and instructed them to rub the soil on his face. While many of them had been with him for a decade or more and were intensely loyal, they refused on this occasion to obey his orders, thinking he must finally have taken leave of his senses. Hernando mustered the strength he needed and reached into the bowl by himself, smearing his face with the silt of the Guadalquivir, the river that meandered through Seville and held his house in the crook of its arm. As he painted himself with mud, Hernando spoke some words in Latin that began to make sense of this performance for those who had gathered at his side: Remember that you are dust, he said, and unto dust you will return. On the opposite bank of the river, Hernando’s father—Christopher Columbus, Admiral of the Ocean Sea—had recently been raised from the same soil, from a grave in which he had lain for thirty years. If Hernando’s word is to be believed (and for many things in Columbus’s life we have only Hernando’s word), the men who opened his tomb may have been surprised to find, along with the explorer’s bones, a pile of chains. These chains were a link to a moment in Hernando’s past, when at twelve years old his mostly absent father appeared bound in them, returning as a prisoner from the paradise he looked upon as his discovery and his gift to Spain.1
The meaning of the great explorer’s grave-goods, of these chains that he wished to be placed with him in his tomb, was something Hernando only divulged late in life, when he came to write his father’s story. But the dust with which he painted himself on the morning of his death would have made sense to all around him: it was a symbol of abject humility, humility he knew he could afford to vaunt because there was no doubt he had achieved something extraordinary. Hernando, the man who was welcoming his impending decay with open arms, had built an engine capable of withstanding forever the onslaught of time. He died shortly after this performance, at eight o’clock in the morning.
An hour later the next act in Hernando’s strange death pageant began. Those closest to him had gathered at his house for the reading of his will, reaching his Italianate villa by the river by passing through the Puerta de Goles (Hercules Gate) and the garden of unknown plants. Hernando had an extraordinary memory, an obsession with lists, and a delicate conscience, so his will tabulated in minute detail the people to whom he felt he owed something, right down to a mule driver whom he had shortchanged nearly two decades previously. But after the tables of his conscience had been cleared, his testament moved on to its great crescendo, a declaration all but incomprehensible to his time. The main heir to his fortune was not a person at all, but rather his marvelous creation, his library. As this was the first time in living memory that someone in Europe had left their worldly wealth to a group of books, the act itself must have been somewhat confusing; but it was even harder to make sense of given the form of the library in question. Most of Hernando’s books were not like the precious manuscripts treasured by the great libraries of the day—venerated tomes of theology, philosophy, and law, books that were often sumptuously bound to reflect the great value placed upon them. Instead, much of Hernando’s collection consisted of books by authors of no fame or reputation, flimsy pamphlets, ballads printed on a single page and designed for pasting on tavern walls, and other such things that would have seemed just so much trash to many of his contemporaries. To some eyes, the great explorer’s son had left a legacy of rubbish. Yet to Hernando these things were priceless because they brought him closer to the goal of a library that would collect everything, becoming universal in a sense never before imagined. It was not even clear where this strange and multifarious collection began and ended: in addition to all these written works, there were chests and chests of printed images—the largest collection ever gathered—and more printed music than had ever been brought together before. As some accounts would have it, even the garden outside had begun to collect the plant life of the world and arrange it in its beds. There was, however, no word yet for such a botanical garden.2
Visitors to the library would have been greeted by the strangest of sights. The scale of the collection must surely have been impressive, by far the largest private library of the day, blurring the vision as the number of individual items expanded beyond what could be taken in at a glance. Contributing to this disorientation, they might have noticed next that the walls of the library had disappeared. In their place were row upon row of books standing upright on their spines, stacked in this new vertical way in specially designed wooden cases. To the modern viewer these kinds of bookshelves are so familiar as to escape notice, but visitors to the library were encountering these as the first of their kind. This was just one of many elements in Hernando’s fabulous library design that defied explanation, beginning with the inscription at the entrance proudly de
claring the edifice was founded on shit. Inside the library, the baffling marvels multiplied: the bookless cages in which readers were supposed to sit, the chests full of volumes that should be turned over two or three times a year but were not for reading, the bookshop of useless titles. Then there was the army of paid readers, and the fiendishly complex system of security and surveillance. Most mysterious of all, perhaps, was the master blueprint for the library, which lay in pieces: more than ten thousand scraps of paper, to be precise, each bearing a different hieroglyphic symbol. Each of the myriad ways these pieces could be put together suggested a different path through the library.3
It was possible to puzzle out some elements of the design by simple logic: the creation of the bookshelves, for instance, had been a matter of necessity. While previous collections, with hundreds of volumes or at most a few thousand, might be stacked on tables or in chests and could be found at will by a librarian of good memory, a library on the scale of Hernando’s would have overwhelmed even the most capacious of human minds and quickly overflowed from most rooms. The new bookshelves took little space from any room and displaced the weight of the books onto the walls behind them. They formed orderly ranks, so that their call numbers could be read from left to right, in a sequence like a line of text; storing the books vertically also meant each could easily be removed, unlike the horizontal stacks, where removing the bottom book would make those above topple. But here the logic of the library explorer may have broken down. What did the line of text, made up of the titles of the books in sequence, actually say? How were wanderers in the library to navigate their way through this world of books? As anyone who has ambled through a library will know, order is everything. The ways in which books can be organized multiplies rapidly as the collection grows, and each shows the universe in a slightly different light. Order the books alphabetically by author and the wanderer will find all of the Pérezes and the Patels together, whether or not their books share anything else. Ordering by size will save space by fitting books of the same height into snug shelves, but this puts pocket novels in the same place as prayer books.
The wanderer in the library is lost without the order that catalogues and shelving systems create; Hernando referred to such unmapped collections as “dead.” But even with a map the wanderer is stuck with the order given to them by the librarian, unable to go through the collection in any other way, especially in a book hoard flooded as Hernando’s was with the kind of cheap print previously excluded from these civilized spaces. Breaking old paradigms, whether by discovering a new continent or by allowing a new universe of information into the decorous space of the library, was useless or even dangerous unless there was a new paradigm to take its place, a new vision of what these expanded worlds meant. Without this, those who had once felt at home in the world would simply be stranded in a pathless sea of information. As a solution, Hernando’s library aimed not simply to be universal but to provide a set of propositions about how that universe fit together. Some of these propositions could be found in the books kept at the center of the library—color-coded in leather that was black, red, or white, or embossed—which contained his catalogues (including the enchanting and mysteriously named Catalogue of Shipwrecked Books), while others can only be pieced together from the ten thousand pieces of the final map to the collection, with their hieroglyphic signs.
But not everything in the library fitted on the shelves or could be put in the catalogues. Hernando’s will left strict instructions that as soon as both of his executors were together, they were to open in each other’s presence a chest containing his personal papers. An inventory of these survives, though now worm-eaten and delicate as a form left in ash. Among other things, it lists
designs for a house
ballads for singing
recipes for medicine
a catalogue of plants and gardens
the case of Doña Isabel de Gamboa
the art of making nautical maps
a book of the travels of the emperor
plans for the conquest of Persia and Arabia
a system of charity for the poor
a verse life of Columbus
a poetical treatise
certain geographical writings on Spain
a dictionary
a dialogue between Goodwill, Power, and Justice
a ledger of Columbus’s writings
certain papers on the de Arana family
Most of the hundred-odd entries in the inventory are illegible, but the parts that can be deciphered begin to give some sense of the myriad adventures of Hernando’s extraordinary mind. Some of these works by Hernando survive—the immense dictionary he compiled by hand, the geographical encyclopedia he began on a personal tour around the whole of Spain—but many are lost entirely. The list, moreover, is not complete and omits many of the things in which he played a part, including the maps he helped create, some of which changed the shape of the known world. Some of his works were likely not listed because they were no longer in his possession at the time of his death.4
Among those writings mysteriously missing from this list is perhaps the most famous document of all: the biography of Columbus that was printed, in Italian translation, under Hernando’s name in Venice three decades after his death. To this Life and Deeds of the Admiral we owe much of what we know about the great explorer, including the details of his early life and many of his voyages, especially the Fourth Voyage, the part of Columbus’s life we know most richly and intimately because Hernando was there as an eyewitness. Though Hernando was not quite eighteen when his father died, he had an intense knowledge of him that no one else could possibly have—not only as his son, but as someone who had lived with him, in a confined space and facing death, for more than a year in a strange land. That the Life was not mentioned among Hernando’s papers, and the curious circumstances surrounding its appearance in Italy long after his death, has led to endless controversies. The original Spanish version of this work has never been found, so we are entirely reliant on the Italian translation. Various theories emerged, many proposing a forgery undertaken in Hernando’s name, a conspiracy to falsify the life of one of history’s greatest figures.
But the missing pieces of this puzzle were waiting to be found in the labyrinthine remnants of Hernando’s library. Somewhat over four thousand titles today form the Biblioteca Colombina, housed in a wing of Seville Cathedral, all silence and spotless marble like a mausoleum. These are only a fraction of the books that made up this once-immense library, but this fraction—along with the map of the original collections that survives in the catalogues—is more than enough to reconstruct the life of an extraordinary man in resplendent detail, detail almost unthinkable for most people who lived in his time. This is because Hernando’s books contain within their covers not just an exquisitely detailed picture of the Renaissance world, but also a map of his life. In every book he bought, Hernando recorded the date and place of its acquisition and how much it cost, often also noting where and when he read it, if he met with the author, or from whom he received the book if it was a gift. He also responded in many cases to what the books said, though as will become apparent, he had his own singular way of doing so. These many fragments, when pieced together, give an account of one of the most fascinating lives in a period filled with entrancing characters; of a man who not only saw more of the world and what it had to offer than almost any of his contemporaries, but also one whose insights into this changing world were astonishingly prescient.5
To reconstruct Hernando’s life from his books is to find him present at many of the most significant events of the age of Renaissance, Reformation, and exploration. But Hernando’s view of these events is rather like one of the deceptive anamorphic paintings of which the age was so fond, in which a picture viewed from another angle reveals something entirely different. This is in part because Hernando’s mind moved ceaselessly from event to system, from a single thing to a general framework into which it could be fitted. This wil
l quickly become clear in the story of his life, for while most biographies start with a list of documents about their subject that need to be set in order, many of the documents through which we know about Hernando are themselves lists: catalogues, encyclopedias, inventories, logbooks, which he compiled obsessively and compulsively. We should not be deceived by the staid and impersonal appearance of these lists, documents that at first seem all fact and no interpretation. To the trained eye, each contains a story: how the list maker imagines the place for which he has packed the items, his way of seeing the world that lies behind a particular kind of ordering, the secrets being hidden by omissions from the list.
If Hernando attempted to bring order to his rapidly expanding world by reducing it to catalogue entries and finding ways of organizing these lists that seemed logical, he was far from immune to distorting influences, distortions that can be traced to the core of his being. Much of his life can be explained by his desire to become worthy of, perhaps even equal to, the father he worshipped, though this was a father whom he in a sense created, as he slowly and deliberately shaped our collective memory of Columbus into the man known today. In death and in life, many of Hernando’s actions were in conversation with the father he last saw in his youth, but whose voice he continued to hear and record long after. Their relationship, both before and after the explorer’s death, was inevitably affected by the fact that Hernando was not the product of a legitimate union—he was, in the delicate Spanish phrase, a natural son. Although Columbus never paid this distinction much mind, the circumstances of his birth meant Hernando could win legitimacy only by showing himself to be his father’s son in spirit. Hernando’s travels in the realm of knowledge and the new routes he pioneered through it were in a real sense akin to what his father had achieved.
The Catalogue of Shipwrecked Books Page 1
