In the end Hernando had no chance to put his library to the test as a field kit to make himself and the world anew. On 17 September 1509, only two months after arriving in Hispaniola, he returned to Spain, leaving it seems with such haste that he did not even have the chance to pack: the inventory of his possessions was in all likelihood a list of the things that should be sent on after him. This second eastward Atlantic crossing was five years almost to the day since the last, and a great many things had changed. Hernando was no longer merely a passenger on the fleet returning to Spain but its capitán general, and Nicolás de Ovando, the governor of Hispaniola who had denied Hernando and Columbus shelter in the port their family built and then left them to rot on their ship-fortresses off Jamaica, was traveling with him as a subordinate. This must have given some satisfaction to Hernando, who decades later was still bitter at Ovando’s temerity in welcoming him and his father back to Santo Domingo with open arms after leaving them to suffer a slow death aboard the worm-eaten Bermuda and Capitana. Greater satisfaction, however, would have come from the fact that Hernando’s brother, Diego, was now governor in Ovando’s stead, restored to their father’s seat and to his title of Admiral.
The period from Columbus’s death to this moment at which the family fortunes seemed restored had been anything but smooth. Before he died, Columbus had been attempting to gain further assurances from King Ferdinand regarding his rights over the New World and their hereditary nature, but in truth the matter was no longer entirely in Ferdinand’s hands: with the death of Isabella in 1504 the throne of Castile had passed to her daughter, Juana, and Juana’s husband, Philip the Fair of Burgundy. The kingdoms of Spain were no longer united, as they had been under the Reyes Católicos, and there was no prospect of their being united again under Juana: although she was her father’s heir, Aragon functioned under Salic law, which meant that females could not inherit the crown. The Aragonese may have considered this something of a blessing, as it would have brought them under the rule of Philip, a foreigner, and Juana herself, who was accused (perhaps opportunistically) of inheriting the mental instability common in her mother’s line, which would earn her the sobriquet La Loca, “the mad.” Juana and Philip took eighteen months to arrive from the Netherlands, where they had left their children in the care of Margaret of Austria (the Infante Juan’s widow, the course of whose 1497 voyage to Spain had been prophesied by Columbus); they had arrived in Spain just as Columbus lay dying.
Ferdinand, who despite his strong partnership with Isabella had always been amorously inclined and sexually active outside the marriage chamber, had soon remarried, to the eighteen-year-old Germaine de Foix, daughter of the Count of Navarre and niece of the king of France. Germaine reportedly fed him ox-testicle concoctions in hopes of restoring his youthful vigor and producing a rival heir, and Ferdinand left for Italy soon after marrying, to busy himself with his Aragonese possessions on that peninsula. It seemed the great union of Spanish kingdoms, which had been the project of Ferdinand and Isabella’s joint reign, was at an end. But just as suddenly, another reversal changed everything: Philip the Fair died suddenly in September 1506, only a few months after arriving in Spain, and the distraught Juana gave rein to paranoia and hysterical grief, having his body mummified and later exhumed against the will of the Church before parading it around Spain. It is said she would not let his body lie in any nunneries along the way because she was jealous of the presence of other women around her husband. By mid-1507 Ferdinand had returned from Naples, and in August he took effective control of Castile back from Juana.
The return of Ferdinand could nevertheless not solve the fundamental problem facing Hernando and Diego: the hereditary rights they claimed were so immense there was no chance of their being secured by two youths, the elder entirely foreign and the younger not wholly legitimate, no matter who their father might have been. Hernando had a little money, such as the munificent sixty thousand maravedís paid to him in 1506 for each year he spent on the Fourth Voyage, but he was unlikely to collect on the vast sums promised in Columbus’s will. In the hands of someone powerful enough to uphold it, of course, the Columbus claim was a very attractive proposition indeed. The right partner in the claim was found in the Duke of Alba, whose niece María de Toledo married Diego in the spring of 1508. Aside from being one of the most powerful nobles in Spain and an indispensable ally of Ferdinand’s in keeping peace in the peninsula, Alba was also one of the few who had stayed by the king’s side while most others flocked to Juana and Philip, so his wishes now carried significant weight. Improvements in the Columbuses’ fortunes followed swiftly: on 9 August that year Diego was appointed governor of Hispaniola and Admiral of the Indies by Ferdinand. This was far from the full extent of what had been promised to their father—Diego was governor, not viceroy, and Admiral of the Indies, not of “the Ocean Sea” and all it contained—but a suit was lodged for the recovery of those rights as well and entrusted, during Diego’s absence, to the Duke of Alba’s agent.7
Ferdinand gave his new governor his instructions on 9 May 1509, and the newlyweds departed on 3 June on the Que Dios Salve, accompanied by Hernando and their uncles Bartholomew and Diego, as well as a hoard of silver plate and jewels, and a large number of gentlewomen attending on María de Toledo, who were intended to elevate the social scene in Santo Domingo. The Calle de Fortaleza was soon to be renamed the Calle Las Damas, as that was where María de Toledo and her ladies-in-waiting paraded their pristine Spanishness up and down a street between houses uncannily like those they knew in Valladolid and Medina del Campo. Diego’s jewels—such as the angel-face pendant, surmounted by an emerald, bordered by diamonds, and with a pearl suspended beneath, which he later had Hernando pawn for him—show a taste for luxury that set him far apart from the rest of his family.8
The newfound air of confidence among the Columbus faction was belied by the precipitous nature of Hernando’s return to Europe that September. Though the great historian of the Americas Bartolomé de Las Casas, who was in the fleet that brought Hernando over, suggests he was merely going back to continue his studies, Hernando’s departure without even managing to ship his chests of beloved books indicates his return had more alarming motives. In part it may have been prompted by the arrival at Santo Domingo in late June of an expedition led by Vincente Yáñez Pinzón (who had accompanied Columbus on the First Voyage) and Juan Díaz Solís, claiming to have explored parts of the Central American isthmus not known to Columbus. Hernando refuted this, claiming they had merely visited the same regions of Veragua that he and his father had on the Fourth Voyage, and derided their maps as simply showing the same landmass twice so they could claim a discovery. In support Hernando cited the testimony of Pedro de Ledesma, the pilot on both voyages whose gruesome wounds had so fascinated Hernando during Columbus’s last stand on Jamaica. But Hernando’s mockery hid the danger this posed to the Columbuses’ claim, part of which turned on whether the family had rights covering all territories in the Ocean Sea west of the Tordesillas Line, or simply those Columbus had personally discovered. If other navigators began to lay claim to their own new discoveries, this might seriously harm the family’s fortunes.9
This was not, however, the only storm cloud hanging over the future of the Columbus clan. In the winter of 1507, even as marriage negotiations were under way with the Duke of Alba and it looked possible that Columbus’s shaky claim would become one of the greatest fortunes in Europe, Diego had managed during liaisons to impregnate not one but two local women. One of these, Costanza Rosa, gave birth to a son (Cristóbal) in mid-1508, and the other, Isabel de Gamboa, to a second (Francisco) in October of the same year. Following the pattern of his father’s proceeding with Hernando and his mother, Diego distanced himself from the women while providing for the children they bore him—as long, in the case of Costanza Rosa, as she could prove the child was actually born in June or July of 1508, which would match up with the dates of their liaison. But disastrously for Diego the other affair was proving alto
gether more difficult: as the will he drew up before leaving for Hispaniola made clear, Isabel de Gamboa’s child was only to be provided for if she lost the suit she was currently pursuing against him in the diocesan courts of Burgos. The case alleged Diego had made a legally binding promise of marriage to her during their liaison and that therefore her child was legitimate. The significance of this can hardly be exaggerated: should Isabel’s son be upheld as Diego’s legitimate heir, no son of María de Toledo’s could inherit the Columbus claim, turning the Duke of Alba in an instant from their most powerful ally to a cheated and humiliated foe. As would later become clear, part of the reason for Hernando’s being back in Spain was to fight the fires his brother had created through his sexual incontinence, a tragic irony given Hernando was himself the product of a union disowned to make way for greater glory.10
But Hernando’s plans were of an altogether more ambitious nature than simply cleaning up his brother’s messes. While he did carry back to Spain a list of issues Diego wished to be represented to Ferdinand and spent the next eighteen months arguing family business at the itinerant court, he also made good use of his time in the king’s presence. The climax came when Hernando was traveling with Ferdinand in late June of 1511, as the court moved northward from Seville to the remote and famous monastery at Guadalupe, which Columbus had visited in pilgrimage after the First Voyage and for which he had named an island on the Second. As they progressed through the high plain of Estremadura, Hernando communicated to Ferdinand his plan to undertake the first circumnavigation of the earth, one he soon set down in a detailed written proposal at the king’s request. This extraordinary voyage, Hernando proposed, would be brought to completion by a veritable Argo consisting of the Columbuses (Hernando, Diego, and Bartholomew) and Amerigo Vespucci, as well as Vincente Yáñez Pinzón and Juan Díaz Solís, who had just returned from exploring the Yucatán. The idea of this voyage had been hugely important to Columbus, who was repeatedly frustrated in his determination to return from the New World by sailing right around the world and following the Portuguese route around the Cape of Good Hope. The idea of circumnavigation was for Columbus a curious obsession, just as it has remained for many since: a symbolic act of closure, completion, which may achieve nothing more than returning to the starting point but nonetheless exerts a powerful hold. This hold was not only felt by Hernando but even believed by him to be a craving common to all mankind up to that point, and he told Ferdinand this voyage (if successful) would be a gift to all the generations throughout the world, who would then have physical proof of the roundness of the earth, its potential to be circled, and of its being everywhere inhabitable—proof that until then would remain tantalizingly elusive. The voyage had the potential to draw a line around a world that would otherwise remain worryingly open.11
For Columbus the project of circumnavigation had been filled with millenarian overtones, promising to bring about the universal conversion that would set in motion the endgame of Christian history. Hernando was at least in part faithful to his father’s vision and also presented to the king the Colón de Concordia, a work in three parts that, though lost, clearly revived the project of The Book of Prophecies. As Hernando relates in a later account, the Colón de Concordia listed prophecies and authorities to demonstrate that the circumnavigation of the globe would occur in their lifetime, that it would bring about universal conversion, and that the resulting universal empire would come to Spain. But it seems Ferdinand had tired of hearing these arguments, which also had fierce critics at the court, so Hernando agreed to focus on the value of the voyage to human knowledge. He prepares the ground by pointing out the relatively minor expense of the enterprise—no more than 5 or 6 million maravedís, which (while three times the cost of Columbus’s First Voyage) he suggested was less than it cost to feed a single town for a year—a sum (Hernando says, goading Ferdinand) that would never have made Caesar or Alexander blanch before the magnitude of their destinies.12
After rehearsing the reasons why he believed the voyage possible, Hernando proceeded to the real substance of his petition to the king by providing a detailed outline of the person needed to lead such an extraordinary venture. Though technically Hernando was presenting the petition on behalf of his brother, he is clearly talking about himself in his proposal rather than the courtier brother who had no ocean experience, making his description in effect a remarkable self-portrait of Hernando in his early twenties. He insists the circumnavigator would need to know the different types of ship intimately, given that each sea’s currents and shoals require different ones, even down to the regions and seasons in which the wood for them should be taken; that the captain should be able to recruit crew and lay in supplies expertly for the intended voyage, for (as sailors say) by a single filament in a rope a whole ship can be lost; and that he should have the navigational, meteorological, celestial, zoological, cosmographic, and cartographic knowledge necessary, for which purpose he must be an arithmetician, astrologer, cosmographer, and painter. While the first eight points in Hernando’s portrait of the circumnavigator cover these important technical skills, the final three focus on qualities of mind, passages in which Hernando’s self-portraits are almost identical to the picture he would later draw of his father. He says that the person capable of completing this task must not be too reverent toward the authority of ancient cosmographers, whose ideas have been overturned by recent events; that he must not be too drawn to the attractions of ports, so as not to risk being stranded by fog or foul weather; and that the person must be of good upbringing and reputation, so as to be more zealous in the service of God, to bear more hardship, and (most strikingly) to be more firm in virtue for fear of shame. In his design for the perfect pioneer Hernando reveals an unguarded conviction that his own mastery of minutiae, borne out by shipping manifests and a vast range of technical skills, would in combination with his inherited traits of self-belief and self-control provide for him a destiny equal to his father’s. Hernando was, in no uncertain terms, laying claim to the special genius of his father, which combined meticulous observation with an inspired spirit to bring unthinkable feats—whether circling the world or enclosing its knowledge in one library—into the realm of the possible. This document also suggests the feats of almost superhuman determination that Hernando would later undertake were driven at least in part by the memories of shame that had scarred his early life—and that perhaps he believed this had also been a motive for his father, even if Hernando would always publicly insist on Columbus’s higher and nobler motives.13
A print of The Ship of St. Reynuit (also known as The Ship of Mismanagement), showing how great journeys (and great nations) succeed or fail depending on how well they are run. The print (c.1520–30), by an anonymous printmaker after Jan Wellens de Cock, was number 2808 in Hernando’s image collection.
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Hernando’s heroic proposal makes clear that in rounding the world with a small group of companions there was no separating the pursuit of knowledge from the rewards of power and wealth this would entail. If he charmingly suggests the circumnavigation should be undertaken in part to break the tension of living in an uncircled world, he also sees the conquests of Arabia, Persia, intra-gangetic India, and Calicut as following almost inevitably from the success of the voyage, and enough wealth accruing from those conquests to put the rest of the globe under subjugation. For Hernando, closing the circle of the unknown world meant gaining the ability to control it. And though physically encompassing it was one way to achieve this, he was not averse to pursuing the same objectives on multiple fronts. While his book collecting showed no signs yet of aspiring to the universal, the year in which he proposed the circumnavigation to Ferdinand (1511) marks both a significant escalation in his purchasing and a more serious attitude toward his books, as suggested by the dated inscriptions in each volume that begin to appear in this year. In the characteristic formula he was to use for the rest of his life, for instance, we learn of the Librum de fine by the thirteenth
-century Mallorcan sage Ramon Llull that “Este libro costo en Alcalá de Henares 68 maravedís anno 1511” (This book cost sixty-eight maravedís in Alcalá de Henares in the year 1511). Llull, an extraordinary figure who wrote more than two hundred works in a bewildering variety of categories and in three different languages (Latin, Catalan, Arabic), seems already to have been a favorite of Hernando’s before 1511, with his great Romance Blanquerna and one of his philosophical treatises being among those books likely taken to Santo Domingo. But the volume purchased in 1511 was born of Llull’s other great ambition: it was a plan for a crusade, proposing that, as a first step to conquering Islam, Christians must learn to speak the Arabic language—as Llull himself had done, by secluding himself with a Muslim slave for nine years. Perhaps inspired by Llull’s ideas, Hernando had acquired a manuscript of the Qur’an in 1510, the beauty of whose calligraphy he noted though he almost certainly knew nothing of what it meant. The idea that the ultimate triumph of Christian culture could be achieved by unlocking the secrets of other languages came to obsess Llull, who would later focus less on learning individual languages and more on developing infinite translation machines. Hernando seems to have caught this bug, and in addition to purchasing several texts in Greek (Homer, Hesiod) during a stay in Seville in 1511—suggesting perhaps he had managed to make good use of his Greek Lexicon in Santo Domingo—he bought a number of Hebrew language manuals published in Paris by the pioneering French printer of Greek and Hebrew François Tissard. While acquiring Greek was fashionable for intellectuals of the day, Hebrew was if anything more esteemed as the language of the Old Testament and of Moses’s revelation, and because of this there was a hint that, unlike the other languages of Fallen Man, which had been scrambled when God destroyed the Tower of Babel, Hebrew might provide access to eternal truths in ways that other, all too human languages could not. Evidence of this belief was to be seen in the growing interest in cabbala, the mystical Jewish practice of deriving hidden truths from the Hebrew Bible using occult, systematic decryption methods.14
The Catalogue of Shipwrecked Books Page 13
