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’s 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’s 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 that 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 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, ruler of the Holy Roman Empire. 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’s 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 also a necessary defense 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 1495–96.13
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’s 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 substantial revenue in the event of Columbus’s death—1 to 2 million maravedís in annual rent, putting Hernando on a footing surpassed only by a few heirs in the land—and on the other hand, perhaps more important 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’s entail tried to suggest. His lavish bequests were made on the basis of projected income that existed only in Columbus’s imagination and would depend on the crown’s continued adherence to the agreements of 1492. While these agreements were notarized and Columbus could appeal in case of any doubt to the importance of the sovereigns’ 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’s 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 toward the equator before heading west in search of the elusive mainland. This expedition lasted three months and conf
erred 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 recognized it as such at the time and though later cartography was famously to accord that honor to Amerigo Vespucci. But Columbus’s 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’s brothers and stoked by poor conditions on the island, but increasingly and uncontrollably turned against the Admiral himself after his return.
Columbus’s 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 Mosquitoes, 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
III
The Book of Prophecies
Following Columbus’s appearance in chains, the weather-beaten, aging explorer shared with his son Hernando a secret project, one that promised to reveal the world in an entirely new light. This work was designed to lift Columbus’s discoveries above the petty cost-benefit calculations on which many of the courtly debates were centered, 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 eighty-four 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, yet the chains of a captive were the only thing he had been given in return. This was the reason (Hernando recalled toward the end of his life) Columbus 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 reestablishing 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 scrutinize 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’s 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 toward a blessed Golden Age (and, by extension, toward gold). But Columbus’s 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) toward 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’s 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 realized 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 toward 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-five leagues.3
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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 this landmass, just below 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 behavior 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 one hundred 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
The Catalogue of Shipwrecked Books Page 6
