The Catalogue of Shipwrecked Books

by Edward Wilson-Lee

  These observations, at first slipping into the entries of the Description almost by mistake, quickly added another dimension to Hernando’s project. Though he seems from the outset to have imagined an encyclopedia of Spanish towns to accompany the maps, listing each settlement alphabetically with its vital statistics, the plans eventually included not only its location and its surroundings and its hereditary lords but everything memorable about the place. The expansion of Hernando’s ambitions also, however, meant there was no possibility of completing this Herculean labor without assistance. Within months of starting the project, he had recruited a team of assistants who would be sent throughout the realm of Spain to record information for the Description on his behalf; returning, they compiled their findings into a central register that started to expand at an even more rapid rate, and eventually this multitude of individually walked itineraries would be turned into a cosmographical table and map of Spain. After compiling the first sixty or so pages of information himself, different hands begin to appear in Hernando’s manuscript, describing in detail the journeys taken by these emissaries. In a pattern he was to follow for the rest of his life, Hernando formed around himself something that was less like the normal pattern for scholars in the Republic of Letters—a network of like-minded equals comparing their findings toward shared ends—and more like a ship’s crew, acting like extensions of their captain’s body, giving him eyes and ears and limbs beyond the capacity of a single individual.9

  Even with a group of surveyors to help him, the logistics of the project would likely have been impossible for a private individual to undertake, and the costs of employing a team of educated assistants to gather and transcribe the information may have been beyond Hernando’s means, given he was still surviving on the modest sum accorded to him in the 1511 settlement of the Columbus case. Whether through good fortune or necessity, then, the project took on a more official character as it expanded its scope and ambition. Though most of the new king’s actions, after his arrival in September 1517, showed his slight regard for his Spanish subjects—such as Charles’s galling appointment of the nephew of his favorite, Chièvres, to Spain’s most prestigious bishopric at Toledo—he seems to have taken favorable notice of Hernando at an early stage. The surveyors gathering information for the Description were provided with royal letters, instructing local officials to cooperate with them in the exercise, suggesting perhaps Hernando had already encountered the obstacle of irate magnates suspicious of this strange man who was pacing their land and asking questions. The prospect of a detailed and methodical survey of these kingdoms must have been attractive to Charles and his advisers, who were wrangling both with the bewildering patchwork of Spanish government and with strong resistance to his attempts to import trusted Flemish officials into key positions. Whereas Charles’s grandfather Maximilian I had reputedly been able to draw maps of his dominions from memory, the uncharted nature of Spanish territory must have greatly contributed to the frustrations of the stranger king. This grant of royal patronage was a major coup for Hernando’s project, not only signaling a certain amount of prestige at Charles’s court, but ensuring the credibility of the information gathered as the project left Hernando’s personal control. It was evidently a great concern to Hernando that his emissaries maintain the same meticulous standards as he had during the initial phase of the project, and to achieve this Hernando designed an ingenious double-lock system to ensure the facts taken down for the Description were trustworthy: the emissaries would record the testimony of the local officials, and their findings would in turn be certified by the local notary before being brought back to the central repository. This meant the emissaries were kept honest by having to gather testimony from local dignitaries—rather than simply producing their own, unsubstantiated observations—and the local dignitaries were kept honest by having their words witnessed as a legal document. Fascinatingly, Hernando not only allowed for but positively expected his representatives to retread the same territory: only by comparing several independent reports could they be sure the information was entirely exact. Hernando’s great engine for mapping Spain was, in effect, a gigantic sieve that worked through repetition and verification to weed out human error.10

  Charles’s admiration for the robustness of Hernando’s methods seems to have been so great that he not only gave the Description his blessing but also considerably expanded Hernando’s remit, ordering him in May 1518 also to work on an official map to guide Spanish ships to the Indies. Though the Casa de Contratación in Seville, charged with the administration of all of Spain’s overseas ventures, had produced an official map of the Atlantic shipping routes—the Padrón Real—as early as 1507, it was widely agreed this was vastly inferior to the charts used by their Portuguese rivals. One of Charles’s first acts upon arriving in Spain was to appoint Sebastian Cabot, son of the Italian explorer John Cabot, as pilót mayor (chief navigator), in charge of all technical aspects of Spanish shipping, from the making of maps to the training of pilots and the certification of all nautical instruments. Though the family name, and the ambitious design of the Description, doubtless contributed to Hernando’s appointment to assist Cabot, it may have been a manuscript dialogue circulating at court in 1517–18, likely written by Hernando, that sealed his nomination. The dialogue, which takes the form of a conversation between the young “Fulgencio” and the learned “Theodosio” about the dire state of Spanish mapmaking, accuses the old Casa de Contratación of a conspiracy of incompetence, in which the pilót mayor only signed off on maps by his cronies, who in turn knew nothing other than what they were told by the pilots, who themselves were trained by the same mapmakers to begin with. This cozy arrangement was perpetuated, it seems, because the pilót mayor took a cut from the sales of maps produced by the mapmakers he knew. As a result of this corrupt system, Theodosio laments, Spanish pilots are often up to six degrees out in their measurements—a distance roughly equivalent to the entire breadth of Spain. This hopeless situation was compounded by the fact that no one at the Casa de Contratación understood either magnetic variation—the different relation of the compass needle to true north at various points on the globe, which may have been Hernando’s own discovery—or the arcane way mapmakers used to try to correct for this anomaly, which employed two different systems for degrees of latitude in different parts of the globe. The Portuguese, by contrast, could sail six thousand miles without going a single degree wrong in their calculations, and this level of technical superiority was sure to handicap Spain in its quest for global dominion. Theodosio’s solution to the problem was similar to the one Hernando had employed in the Description: the Casa de Contratación should compile all the information received from the hundreds of ships that sailed between Spain and the Indies every year and use an average of these findings to reach a progressively refined picture of the Atlantic waterways.11

  Envy of Portugal’s superior navigational techniques may well explain a cryptic entry in the notes for the Description from November 1518. On the twenty-fourth of that month, one of Hernando’s emissaries arrived at his house in Seville to find his steward and the rest of the household in residence but Hernando himself absent, gone to Portugal, it seems, defraçado—“incognito.” If Hernando’s mission was an act of cosmographical espionage, as the secrecy and later revelations would indicate, then it was part of a larger arms race between the two nations that was souring relations between Manuel I and his nephew Charles. Prominent among the defections this year was that of Fernão de Magalhães—better known to history as Ferdinand Magellan—who had arrived at the court in Valladolid in March 1518 and offered to put himself in Charles’s service. Following a path similar to that of Columbus, Magellan had come to Spain after his proposals had fallen on deaf ears at the Portuguese court.

  Magellan’s proposed voyage, sailing westward to the Moluccas, had more modest ambitions than the scheme of Hernando’s that had been rejected in 1511—it was not, indeed, clear that Magellan intended to circle the globe at
all—though what he offered might achieve the same end of global domination by slightly different means. This voyage, Magellan argued, would establish once and for all that the Molucca islands, fount of the Eastern spice trade, were less than 180° west from the Tordesillas Line and thus lay indisputably within the dominion granted to the Spanish by the treaty of 1494. In his bid to play kingmaker by diverting the flood of Eastern wealth toward Spain, Magellan also had a trump card that Hernando had lacked: Magellan claimed to have seen, in the possession of the king of Portugal, a map showing the location of the long-sought-after strait that would allow access from the western Atlantic through the Americas to the great “Southern Sea,” the first European sightings of which were reported by the Spaniard Núñez de Balboa in 1513 after an arduous crossing of Darién (Panama). Repeated Portuguese protests against the Spanish harboring a defector and even capitalizing on his treachery had little effect, and by September 1518 Magellan was sufficiently forward in the preparations for his voyage to simply respond to emissaries from Portugal that there was now no turning back.

  The major remaining obstacle to Magellan’s voyage was the fact that his gambit about the strait on the king of Portugal’s map seems to have been a bluff. No such strait is shown on the map of Martín de Behaim, where the chronicler of Magellan’s voyage claims he saw it, nor does one appear on any other surviving map of the period. It may well be, then, that Hernando’s clandestine mission to Portugal in November of 1518 was an attempt to substantiate Magellan’s claims, and that his efforts were directed not at the pilfering of maps themselves, but rather at coaxing one or more Portuguese mapmakers into defection. Two key cartographers appeared in Seville for the first time in late 1518 or early 1519: Diogo (or, in Spain, Diego) Ribeiro, who was recorded in Spain as a maker of maps and instruments for Magellan’s voyage, and who would work closely with Hernando at the Casa de Contratación over the coming years, and Jorge Reinel, scion of the greatest family of Portuguese mapmakers, whose father Pedro Reinel was forced to follow and bring him home before his treachery went beyond what his youth could excuse.12

  * * *

  Hernando had noted in March 1518, in the volume of Seneca’s Tragedies that was his frequent companion, that this period found him “distracted with many tasks and much travel”—something of an understatement, given that he was presiding over the Description and perhaps continuing to gather geographical information himself, attempting to salvage the family fortunes in the court of Charles and in the law courts, working toward a navigational chart of the Atlantic, and perhaps engaging in stealing state secrets from Portugal. For all this, he chose this hectic moment to embark on yet another immense task. He left the court at Zaragoza and retired to Segovia, at the northern foot of the Sierra de Guadarrama, where in November the heat of the summer would just have been abating and returning some of that town’s alpine feel. Segovia is a curious palimpsest of Castilian history, from the Roman aqueduct, at once both impossibly elegant and indestructible, to the stirring perfection of its Romanesque churches—San Millan, San Martín, San Esteban, and Veracruz. Though they are called Romanesque, their domes and patterned, rounded arches remind us these are memories less of Rome than of Byzantium. Alongside these are the convent of Corpus Christi, scarcely hiding its former status as the town’s main synagogue, and the Moorish and Mudéjar elements of the much-reconstructed Alcázar, the triangular fortress that juts its bow out into the V where the rivers Esmera and Clamora meet. The Romanesque capitals, with their biblical kings who have become crusader knights, and their griffins, centaurs, and grotesques, speak less to Rome than to these other diasporas from the Levant. The private houses testify to the Segovians’ awareness of their town as an architectural menagerie, from the punk-Gothic Casa de los Picos, faced by 617 granite spikes, to the symmetrical foliage on the façade of the Palacio del Conde Alpuente. At the top of the hill, the Gothic elements of the Romanesque cathedral—its cloister, choir, and portal—heralded links to France and Germany in the north, part of the Castilian assertion of an Old Christian heritage against the inescapable reality of its mestizo past.13

  One morning Hernando began by writing the exact time (eight in the morning, on 6 September) and then the following definition:

  A: the first letter both for the Greeks and for other nations, either because they imitate the Hebrew letters from which they all come, or because it is the first sound the newborn makes, or because in pronouncing it is the first sound one makes. . . .

  This is the opening entry of almost three thousand entries that cover the 1,476 pages of Hernando’s Vocabulario or Latin Dictionary, and it is followed by a nine-page entry on the word ab. While Hernando’s ambition and stamina must be a matter for amazement, his decision to move from mapping and tabulating places to the art of dictionary making would not have been as surprising then as it is now. The foremost Spanish humanist, Antonio de Nebrija, had, after all, paired cosmography with his main occupation of philology and had seen no distance between the two, famously pronouncing in the preface to his great Castilian grammar of 1492 that “language is the instrument of empire,” and that if Ferdinand and Isabella wanted their burgeoning empire to last as long as the Romans, then they would need a language as precisely constructed as Latin. Language would have to be fixed, like coordinates on a map, if it was to be used to build an empire in the real world.14

  Interestingly, however, Hernando chose to begin a dictionary not of the Spanish language but of Latin, perhaps because even Latin, as the foundation for all the Romance languages, was itself only crudely documented by this point. For all the dignity attributed to Latin in European culture, Hernando had not yet found a satisfactory dictionary of the master tongue of Renaissance thought. The great dictionary of the Middle Ages, the thirteenth-century Catholicon of Giovanni Balbi of Genoa, was no longer felt to meet the high standards of humanist scholarship in the classical languages. In an attempt to remedy this, Hernando began to synthesize a vast range of existing language treatises that drew together examples of how each word had been used by the best writers of antiquity. This was—though not consciously defined as such—a dictionary on historical principles, one that did not so much set out to create an authoritative definition for words as an attempt to map how those words had been used by authors in the past. This excitingly allowed not only for variety in how words were used, but (more important) for a notion of historical development to emerge: a map of language alive to the organic creature it was treating, a creature that is constantly evolving and can only be charted in its movements, rather than pinned down to a particular set of meanings.15

  Yet as the opening entry on the letter A suggests, something was at stake here greater even than the power of Spanish culture relative to the other empires-in-waiting of Europe. Hernando’s definition of the first letter of the Latin alphabet is not merely telling us what it means, but rather making an argument in various forms that its place in the alphabet is natural, rather than arbitrary: this may be because it descends from aleph, the first letter of the Hebrew alphabet and therefore of the language closest to the original tongue given to Adam by God, or because both phonetics and the history of language prove that it belongs before the other letters, either as the most basic sound that can be made by the human mouth or as an interjection, the most basic part of speech. In addition to the many other tasks it may have set itself, then, Hernando’s dictionary belongs in the long history of attempts, stretching back to Plato’s dialogue Cratylus and beyond, to establish language as something with a solid and definite relationship to the world of things, rather than simply being a conventional tool that only works because we all agree on what each word means. Language and the tools used to fix and order it, such as the alphabet, were worryingly unstable foundations on which to ground human knowledge, and any attempt to organize the world using language needed first to tackle this basic problem. Just as the Description sought to put Spain on the path to empire by fixing its geographic features, so the linguistic tools o
f Europe needed to be put on a firm footing if they were to serve the universal empire Hernando had in mind.16

  The need for Spain’s tools of empire to be at the ready was given fresh urgency when, in February 1519, news reached Charles at the Monastery of Montserrat that his grandfather Maximilian I had died in early January at his seat of power in Austria. While Maximilian’s death immediately added the Archduchy of Austria to Charles’s titles, it more importantly meant the throne of the Holy Roman Emperor was now vacant. This was not an honor that Charles would inherit automatically: the selection of the new emperor lay in the hands of an unpredictable group of seven German princes and churchmen—the Electors—who appointed a king of the Romans, who then had to be crowned emperor by the pope. While the House of Habsburg, of which Charles was the scion, had held the post for much of the past century, the current election was far from a done deal. As Raphael’s fresco in the Vatican suggested, the French king, Francis, also had ambitions, as did Charles’s uncle by marriage, Henry VIII of England, and while Henry’s hopes were founded on little more than the schemes of his right-hand man, Wolsey, Francis had realistic hopes of gaining the votes controlled by the pope. In large part, this was because Leo didn’t want to see Charles as both king of Naples and Holy Roman Emperor, something that would bring immense power too close to the doorstep of the Vatican.