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 that 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 evangelization 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’s 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’s 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 judgment, not least because many others (including learned clerics such as Gaspar Gorricio) found Columbus’s 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 onto 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? At one time many scholars believed that the lion’s share of The Book of Prophecies was written in the hand of Columbus’s younger son, though recently more levelheaded 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 some sections are unquestionably written by Hernando, and about others we cannot be certain. The most likely sequence of events 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’s 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 that celebrate the “wide and easy path” that will be opened to the Man of Virtue, helping to underpin the idea that Columbus’s successful voyages of exploration were the result of God’s special providence. It is perhaps worth pointing out that certain passages, such as 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 such as Gorricio, but would certainly have formed part of the humanist curriculum taught by Peter Martyr to Hernando in the household of the Infante Juan. Several copies were 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 idolized but must, on the brink of manhood, have recognized as increasingly eccentric and misunderstood by those in power. His surviving entries in the book are largely of a general, moralizing 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 publi
c 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 provided the 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 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 we will have cause to return to the question of their contents.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 that the thirteen-year-old Hernando would accompany his father on his impending Fourth Voyage 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’s desire to take the manuscript with him on the voyage, a theory confirmed by the Admiral’s quotation of several passages from the book in letters written during this voyage. A number of entries strongly suggest passages were continuing to be added to the manuscript even as Hernando and his father traveled around the New World. It is mesmerizing 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
IV
Rites of Passage
The fleet that left from Cadiz on 9 May 1502 consisted of four ships, each of which would become a character in the months ahead. References to them can sometimes be hard to sort, given that those on the voyage called them by different names, some proper to the ships themselves, some related to their point of origin, and some related to their crew. These four square-rigged caravels were the Capitana, referred to as such because it was the flagship, which carried Columbus and Hernando—its proper name, if it ever had one, is lost to history; the Vizcaína, from Biscay; the Santo or Gallega, from Galicia; and the Bermuda or Santiago de Palos, from Andalusia. Only three of the four ships could carry a full complement of supplies, as the Bermuda (captained by Bartholomew Columbus) drew so low in the water that waves washed onto the deck under full sail. A shipping manifest survives, giving a list of what was stocked for the crew of 140-odd men:
2000 arrobas of wine (c. 5,000 gallons)
800 quintals of hardtack (ship’s biscuit, c. 36 tons)
200 pork bellies
8 pipes of oil
8 tuns of vinegar
24 cows’ worth salt beef
960 fillets of salted mullet
720 other salted fish
2,000 wheels of cheese
12 cahizes of chickpeas (c. 750 lbs.)
8 cahizes of beans (c. 500 lbs.)
mustard
rocket
garlic
onions
4 fishing nets, plus lines and hooks
20 quintals of tallow (c. 2,000 lbs.)
10 quintals of pitch (c. 1,000 lbs.)
10,000 nails
20,000 carded goods (blankets, caulking oakum, hemp)
To these, listed roughly in descending order of volume, can be added a few things we deduce from later references: maps, nautical instruments, paper for logs and letters, and The Book of Prophecies. These swiftly dwindling supplies would be the only familiar things to populate Hernando’s world over the coming months and years, and they were slowly replaced with new and unheard-of things accumulated along the way. The superbly detailed account of this journey he later wrote was no longer simply reliant on the documents and reports he could gather: this was a record of personal experience, which, as the exquisite observations and interpretations show, laid new foundations of thought in the thirteen-year-old boy and would later shape the order he would bring to the world around him.1
If Hernando expected to leave the familiar behind after weighing anchor at Cadiz, he must have been disappointed. The fleet stopped first at Santa Catalina, then crossed in front of the Pillars of Hercules (also known as the Strait of Gibraltar) to North Africa, where they coasted along until they reached the town of Arcila, in modern Morocco. Hernando may have imagined himself on the verge of a chivalric encounter when approaching this place, as Columbus had intended to provide aid to the Portuguese besieged there, relieving them from the onslaught of the Barbary Moors. Sadly for Hernando, by the time they reached Arcila the siege had been lifted, and the whitewashed town rising up a hillside from behind its cove and seawall may have seemed little different to the many settlements the Muslims had built along the facing coast of Spain. Hernando did briefly disembark to visit the town’s wounded captain, only to find himself surrounded by Portuguese relatives of Columbus’s first wife, Filipa Moniz. From Arcila the fleet crossed to the Canary Islands, passing Lanzarote and Fuerteventura, then docking at Maspalomas, on Gran Canaria, for the customary final resupply of wood and water before pushing out into the open ocean. Finally, on the night of 24 May 1502, they set sail on the west-southwesterly course that by now Columbus had mastered.2
Experienced sailors of the fleet would have been pleased with the crossing, which at twenty-two days was the fastest westward passage Columbus had yet achieved. In just a few years the Admiral had, through his usual mixture of nautical skill and extraordinary luck, established sea routes between Europe and the Caribbean that were hard to better, and which would remain in use until the coming of steam. But the experience of three weeks without sight of land must have been astonishing for the novice Hernando. He would later write affectingly of the First Voyage’s experience of the featureless water, and though he may have been drawing on his father’s notes, the description must also have brought back his own first crossing of 1502:
Because all the men on the fleet were new to this type of voyage and danger and saw themselves so far from any help, they did not hold back from murmuring; and seeing nothing but water and sky, they fixed on every sign that appeared to them, being men who were farther from land than any had been till that time.
The moment of panic when considering the distance from land, unrelieved by any sight to break the flatness of the ocean, and the descent into paranoia, suspicion, and conspiracy as the bored, scared, and enervated mind scrabbles for something to interpret: these reactions are unavoidable among those at sea and cannot have been entirely quelled by the route’s being now well established and some of the crew experienced in Atlantic crossing. Columbus had also interpreted signs on his First Voyage—albeit in ways designed to confirm his pronouncements that they were nearing land—but Hernando would later recast his father as the exception to this rule, figuring his calm confidence in the threefold logic of his crossing (reason, authority, report) as what set him apart and allowed him to trust in his navigational measurements and projections rather than being pulled about by
the promise of every flock of birds or knot of seaweed. Perhaps during his crossing Hernando first sensed the need for such a buttress against the paranoid imaginings of the mind at sea.3
The experienced sailors on Columbus’s voyages had little reason to share his confidence in his navigational measurements: in the absence of reliable methods for measuring longitude, the Admiral was almost entirely dependent on dead reckoning, using a compass, measurements of time, and estimates of speed to chart the ship’s course. Though in retrospect Columbus was impressively accurate, the problems with this method meant there was no way to be completely sure how far west they were at any time: variable wind strength and ocean currents made estimates of speed untrustworthy, and the hourglasses were not only often faulty but also relied on fallible human hands to turn them over at the right times. To make matters worse, even the compasses failed to work consistently during Atlantic crossings. Whereas Columbus and other European sailors would have been used to the compass needle pointing slightly to the east of the North Star, Polaris, the Admiral had noticed with alarm on the First Voyage that, after crossing a line approximately one hundred leagues west of the Azores, the needle suddenly jumped a whole point, now falling to the west of Polaris. This phenomenon, incomprehensible without understanding magnetic variation and the difference between magnetic north and true north, deeply challenged contemporary understandings of how the world worked. While some evidence points toward knowledge of this magnetic variation before Columbus, scholars generally agree he was the first to record the phenomenon directly and to posit a cause, namely that the compass needle pointed not to the North Pole but to some other invisible point close to it. This explanation, the first to propose the concept of a magnetic north, is not, however, found in Columbus’s writings, but in Hernando’s biography of his father. As we have seen, Columbus believed at least as late as the Third Voyage that the variation of the compasses was caused by the bulging of a pear-shaped earth, and his theories hardly became less eccentric from that point on. As shall become clear, there may be good reasons to think this theory was first arrived at by Hernando—not Columbus—and only attributed to his father, one of the many revisions to Columbus’s ideas that later developments necessitated. Either way, the world as Hernando knew it tilted sideways as he crossed the Atlantic.4
The Catalogue of Shipwrecked Books Page 8
