Not all the news arriving at the ports was so miraculous. Early in 1523, while Hernando was still in Valladolid, a list of grievances against Diego’s conduct in Hispaniola arrived, drawing censure from Charles and another summons back to Spain to answer the charges. Diego’s reinstatement had barely lasted three years. Later that year, the king himself would be frustrated by the death of his papal ally Adrian VI, who died after hardly a year in Rome, to be replaced by Guilio de Medici, who accomplished his ambition in donning the papal tiara as Clement VII. Hernando also learned, shortly after his return in 1522, that the 1,637 books he had entrusted to Octaviano Grimaldi in Venice had gone down with the ship that was bringing them to Spain. The loss of these precious volumes must have been utterly devastating. Not only was it an extremely expensive consignment—Hernando had spent much of the two thousand ducats from Charles on books during his shopping spree, including the advance of two hundred ducats he had borrowed from the Grimaldi that would fall due in October of 1523—but it also meant the destruction of Hernando’s harvest from his seven months spent at the very epicenter of printing, the annihilation of what may well have been his most triumphant encounter so far with the world of the printed book. These hundreds of beautiful volumes, mostly unbound and probably stored in sealed barrels for safekeeping, joined the sleeping and ancient cities of the drowned with which the Renaissance imagination populated the seafloor. Besides the loss of the books themselves, the episode of his life that they represented, and the investment of wealth that he could not afford to replace, the destruction also meant something else: the extraordinary catalogues, which he had created to organize the collection, were now obsolete. Never fearing loss on such a tremendous scale, Hernando had forged ahead, entering the Venetian purchases not only in his alphabetical list of authors, but also in another catalogue he had developed. This was a kind of register, roughly in the order of acquisition, in which he had begun to assign each volume an identifying number and to make notes about each unique piece in minute detail, recording, as well as the author and the title, details of the opening lines of each book, where it was printed, where he had bought it, and how much he had paid. The books lost on the return voyage from Venice represented entries number 925 to 2,562 in the second of these four volumes. In this catalogue, for the first time, he had begun to sketch out how the books of the library might be divided by subject matter, sorting them into crudely defined fields: Theology, Astrology, Humanities, Grammar, History, Alchemy, Logic, Philosophy, Cosmography, Law, Medicine, Geomancy, Mathematics, Music, Poetry, Tuscan Verse, Greek, Chaldean, and so forth. But there was now a hole in the collection, sucked into the waters of the Bay of Naples along with the hundreds and hundreds of books these entries described.9
An illustration for Cicero’s Officia showing two men clinging to the wreckage of a ship. The figure at left is dressed as a fool. Hernando suffered a second catastrophic shipwreck just as his grand project got underway, a tragedy that shaped the final form of his library.
It was not the only one of Hernando’s projects to run aground in this period. On 13 June 1523, letters under the king’s name were sent out to the emissaries trawling Spain for Hernando’s Description, ordering an immediate halt to the project. They probably caught up with these information foragers in the region between Seville and Córdoba, as it was to Córdoba that the order to cease and desist was sent. Local authorities were instructed no longer to cooperate with Hernando’s assistants and were instructed to remove the letters of authority they carried with them, by force if necessary, and to confiscate the cosmographic notes found on their persons. It is unclear exactly what prompted this sudden and rather draconian end to the project; Hernando’s only surviving mention of the affair gestures cryptically to the “jealousy” of the Consejo de Castilla, though he does not say of what precisely they were supposed to be envious—that a project of this scope and importance was being undertaken by a private citizen, or of the enormous power that might accrue to the holder of this information? In all probability, the obstacles were the same as those that met similar projects across Europe in the decades to come: landowners and local magnates felt these surveying projects to be invading their property and roping them into a centralized, national system, a system that knew the land with unprecedented exactitude and was able therefore to tax and control it in ways previously unimaginable. The Revolt of the Comuneros in 1520–21 had been provoked by precisely these kinds of administrative impositions, which some Castilian communities were incensed to have foisted upon them by this foreign king and his Teutonic entourage, and Hernando’s Description may have been among the many ways in which Charles had gone too far, one of the sparks that lit the touchpaper of revolt. The Spanish were not to try anything similar again until fifty years later, when Philip II’s Relaciones topográficas represented a fundamental change in the relationship between the crown and its subjects.10
Hernando’s second great project from the years of the Description, his dictionary of the Latin language, also came to a halt, ending partway through the letter B on the word Bibo, “I drink.” If one is tempted to laugh at his failure to get any further than the second letter, it is worth remembering that by that stage he had covered 1,476 pages in closely written script and had racked up perhaps three thousand entries. It is possible the project was drawn to a close by a dawning realization of the scale of the task: if the first letter and a half were in any way representative, the final dictionary would span tens of thousands of pages and cover fifty thousand definitions, well surpassing the forty thousand that would appear in Samuel Johnson’s monumental dictionary a century and a half later. Hernando’s retreat from the field of lexicography may also, however, have been prompted by his having been beaten to the punch: Ambrosius Calepino had already, as early as 1502, completed a dictionary that made up for many (if not all) the perceived shortcomings of the medieval Latin dictionaries. Calepino’s would become the standard dictionary and would see 211 editions between 1502 and 1779; Hernando’s stopped where it was and would be largely ignored from then on.11
* * *
Many people would have been prompted into a spiral of despair by defeat on so many fronts at once, with his shipwrecked books, his brother in disgrace, his Description and his dictionary in ruins. There is no evidence that Hernando paused for a moment, though it does seem that from this time forward he would focus his attention, as much as he possibly could in the swiftly moving world in which he found himself, on the single and singular project of his library, with its rich profusion of books and images and music. It would be impossible to save the alphabetic catalogue he had drawn up, seeded as it was throughout with the ghostly presence of the books that had been lost in the sea, so he began a new one. The register that described each of the books in detail was also now fatally compromised, as it contained a large section, a whole volume almost, of books no longer physically present in his collection. Rather than attempting to cut this section out of the old catalogue, he began another, better one, which this time would include not only the descriptions of the books but also the hieroglyphic language he was developing. The only part of the old book-register he kept was the very section that detailed the books at the bottom of the sea, which he intended to replace, volume by volume, until the library was once more complete. To this orphaned volume, this memento of the departed, he gave the exquisite name of the Memorial de los Libros Naufragados, “The catalogue of shipwrecked books.” Not only was this the first catalogue Hernando made of his collection, but its title resounds with the poetry of his life, of the bringing together of books and shipwreck, of the struggle for memory in the face of fast-eroding loss. The sunken consignment had taught him an important lesson: his was not an imaginary library, such as the storied one at Alexandria, which could exist as an idea but need never worry about how it would live in the world. It was a library of flesh and blood—or rather paper, ink, and vellum—and needed to be housed, guarded, ordered, and arranged, tended to like a garden that must be
restrained from the wildness to which it always wishes to return. For the first time in his itinerant life, Hernando needed to put down roots, to find a place where his books could be safe; and one whence the library could begin to work its magic upon the world.
This, however, would have to brook one more extraordinary delay. For the arrival back at Sanlúcar de Barrameda of Magellan’s crew, even without Magellan himself, had precipitated a political crisis thirty years in the making. The circumnavigation had indeed reached the Moluccas, as planned, and the local king had even obligingly renamed the island Castile and made the standard pledge to be a vassal of the king of Spain. It may even have made matters somewhat easier that Magellan had died before they reached the Moluccas, as it meant these transactions could be clearly separated from any complications arising from Magellan himself (like Columbus) not being Spanish. The submission of Rajah Sultan Manzor, king of the Molucca island of Tadore (now Castile) meant little; the burning question still remained whether the islands rightfully belonged to the Spanish or the Portuguese under the terms of the 1494 Treaty of Tordesillas. Were the Moluccas more or less than 180° of longitude going west from the Tordesillas Line? This question could only be answered by determining the size of the world, and a summit was duly convened between the Spanish and the Portuguese to thrash the question out. Each delegation consisted of a team of navigators, astronomers, and lawyers. Hernando, despite being none of these, was chosen to lead the Spanish side; though technically included in the Spanish quota of astronomers, he was in reality one of the few people in any position to understand all of the mathematical, nautical, political, historical, and diplomatic issues involved. But with his immensely varied skills, Hernando brought a wealth of baggage to this task. The result of the summit might not only be crucial to allowing Spain’s empire to compete with Portugal’s in the future; it also represented a breaking point for his father’s legacy, for what that inspired or insane voyage across the Ocean Sea would finally mean for Spain and for the rest of mankind. Hernando was being asked to determine, once and for all, the size and shape of the world.
XII
Cutting Through
During the Christmas season of 1523–24, which he spent in the ancestral home of the Dukes of Alba at Piedrahíta, Hernando returned once more to the volume of Seneca’s Tragedies that he had last been annotating in 1518, but which had been put aside while the Description, the dictionary, the nautical chart, and his tour of Europe’s greatest book towns made greater claims on his attention. Seneca was more valued in the Renaissance than he is today, beloved for his stately declamations and political themes, but the place he held in Hernando’s life had more to do with one particular passage—the passage in the Medea, stored in The Book of Prophecies, in which the chorus foretells that
During the last years of the world,
the time will come in which Oceanus
will loosen the bounds, and a huge landmass
will appear; Tiphys will discover new worlds,
and Thule will no longer be the most remote land.
Against this passage, Hernando has written, in a note only partly legible today, “A prophecy . . . by my father . . . Christopher . . . admiral . . . the year 1492.” Yet for all the pride captured in this note, which linked Hernando through his father to both the great feats of exploration and the glories of the classical world, it may well have seemed the beguiling prophecy had now revealed itself as a lurking and treacherous riddle. It was no longer as clear that Tiphys, discoverer of new worlds, represented Columbus; many others now contended for the title, and Diego’s presence in Spain—at his in-laws’ castle at Piedrahíta—to answer charges of misgovernance suggested that the family’s foothold in the New World was slipping. While the discovery that Thule was not the most distant land may once have seemed a glorious revelation, it was obvious now that it was also a cruel trick: If not Thule, what was? Where did one reach the other side of the world and start to turn back, getting closer again instead of farther away? In the end the obsessive quest to establish the roundness of the earth by circumnavigation had simply given way to another instance of the maddeningly obscure, in which the true measure of the earth’s circumference retreated ceaselessly beyond grasp. If his father was undoubtedly the one who had loosened the bounds of Ocean, to Hernando fell the far trickier task of putting them back again.1
With a delicate sense of the diplomatic symbolism involved, the towns of Badajoz and Elvas, which faced each other across the Spanish-Portuguese border at the Río Caya, had been chosen for the meeting point. The document naming the deputies was signed by the emperor on 21 March 1524 in Burgos, where Hernando joined the rest of the Spanish delegates to present to the Consejo de Castilla their strategy for the impending encounter. To keep the conference from getting out of hand, each sovereign had been allowed to nominate a team of nine experts to represent him: three pilots, three jurists, and three astronomers. While the jurists were career bureaucrats and possibly unknown to Hernando, he would likely have known the astronomer from Salamanca (Dr. Sancho Salaya) and the mathematician from Valencia (Fray Tomás Duran), and certainly Pedro Ruiz de Villegas, a cartographer from the Consejo de Indias. Though he was technically included in the delegation as one of the Spanish astronomers, records of Hernando’s involvement show him drawing together arguments from every side—legal, cartographic, political, historical, and geometrical. In addition to the official delegates, a constellation of others were at Badajoz to assist in an unofficial capacity: Sebastian Cabot and Juan Vespucci, two other members of exploration dynasties with whom Hernando worked at the Casa de Contratación, as well as their fellow mapmaker Diego Ribeiro, who had been lured to the Spanish side perhaps to help with Magellan’s expedition. The Spanish team had two more trump cards to play at the conference: the testimony of Sebastián de Elcano, the last man standing from Magellan’s circumnavigation, and Simón de Alcazaba, a Portuguese pilot with experience of the very region under discussion who had turned witness for the Spanish.2
Hernando set himself apart from the rest almost as soon as they met, first pressing them to get started on rehearsing their case (while the others favored waiting for the emperor) and then, in presenting written arguments, suggesting a gambit that wholly departed from their instructions. While the emperor had intended the team to establish, by means of astronomical and cartographic demonstration, that the Moluccas were within the half of the world set aside for Spain in the Treaty of Tordesillas, Hernando wanted to go further, reviving his father’s old belief that the papal bulls gave the Portuguese not half the world east of the Tordesillas Line, but merely the tiny segment between the line and the farthest extent of their discovery by that point—namely the Cape of Good Hope. After all, as Hernando pointed out, the pope had conceded to Spain all territories to the west of the Tordesillas Line as far as the Indies—which included all of the territories between the line and India going west, such as the Moluccas, even if this was simply taking advantage of the fact that (in 1494) it was believed the territories Columbus had discovered were the Indies. This was a point, then, not of astronomy or cartography, but of legal interpretation of the treaty, one that stood to win for the Spanish not simply the fount of the spice trade but the better part of the world. The majority view, however—indeed of everyone but Hernando—was for sticking to the remit they had been given by the emperor.3
In response to this, Hernando patiently outlined the flaws in this plan. The division of the globe depended, he pointed out, on an accurate measure of its circumference, which could be done in one of two ways: either by physically measuring the globe itself or by extrapolating from measurements of celestial bodies. As for the first method, short of actually taking the measurement with a string, estimates would have to be based on distances sailed and so would have to take into account not just wind speeds and currents, but also the drag on the ship of the freight, whether the hull was free of impediments or not, whether the ship had old or new sails, and whether it was freshly ca
ulked or riddled with damp—and that was without even beginning to factor in magnetic variation and other things affecting the bearings taken. There is a disorienting frankness to Hernando’s observations, drawing attention to the uncertain nature of all their measurements. The second method, using celestial observation, was more promising, but still far from guaranteeing universal agreement, as suggested by the wide variety of estimates on how many miles were in a degree of longitude. In the end, no one had achieved an indisputable demonstration of this, and each cosmographer fell back upon whichever authorities he most credited: this was, in other words, a game of rhetorical arguments rather than mathematical proofs. When pressed for his own opinion, Hernando stayed faithful to the small-earth hypothesis of his father, which (drawing on Tobit and Alfragano and Pierre d’Ailly) put the world’s circumference at 5,100 leagues, as opposed to the 5,625 of Ptolemy, the 7,875 of Strabo, or the 12,500 of Aristotle.4
One of the first great world maps made using new mapping techniques, produced by Diogo Ribeiro under the supervision of Hernando in his post as pilét mayor, 1529.
But even if one could agree on the size of a single degree of longitude, one would still need to measure how many degrees lay between two places, a task fraught with difficulty. Hernando proceeded to lay out five different methods for measuring longitude, each with its attendant problems, coyly adding that he intended to enumerate them so the gentlemen of the Consejo could tell him if he missed any. These methods included
sailing in a straight, diagonal line between two latitudes
by the use of a “fluent instrument”
a waterwheel to measure distance
the observation of eclipses
the observation of fixed and unfixed stars
The Catalogue of Shipwrecked Books Page 24
