A satire on gluttony by Hans Weiditz (number 1743 in Hernando’s picture inventory). During his tour of Europe in 1529–31, Hernando recruited the corpulent and jovial Nicolas Clenardus, a wearer of extravagant hats, to work in his library.
If visiting England was not an option, France was now open to Spanish travelers for the first time in Hernando’s adult life. The 1529 Peace of Cambrai had ended the thirty-five-year war that played out between France and Spain in northern Italy, and Hernando could finally travel through the country he had circled during much of his life. Clenardus narrates the journey through France to Spain, with Hernando and his other new recruits, with his usual charisma and focus on things of the body. The well-fed Dutchmen were horrified by the hostelries along the way, which Clenardus claimed were infinitely worse than those of which Erasmus had complained in southern Germany, especially when they reached Spain, where they found (after the good French dinners) virtually nothing to eat. They were forced to form scavenging parties to scrape together enough bread, wine, fish, and raisins to make up a homely meal, and struggled to find a single stick of kindling to light a fire against the frozen winds of northern Castile. They were also shocked to find they often had to share a single drinking glass among the whole table—and sometimes even with a neighboring table of complete strangers. On one occasion, near Vitoria, the communal glass slipped out of Vasaeus’s hand and shattered on the floor, and after that they were forced to drink their wine “in the manner of Diogenes”—from their own cupped palms. With wonderful gallows humor, Clenardus took this as a prompt to label Hernando their Prophet—a playful title by which he addressed him thenceforth—because Hernando had, after all, warned them before arriving in Spain that a time would come when they would lack even vessels from which to drink.9
After passing through Burgos and Valladolid, which were wholly frozen, against all of the Dutchmen’s expectations, they arrived at the court in the slowly regrowing Medina del Campo, where the sumptuous household of the Dowager Virreina, María de Toledo—still almost sovereign of Hispaniola during her son’s minority—provided at long last sufficient comfort for Clenardus’s taste. Hernando had evidently reached some accommodation with his sister-in-law by this point, though the party departed soon after on urgent business to Salamanca, where for the time being Hernando agreed to leave Clenardus to study the Arabic manuscripts held there. In a letter written to Hernando soon after, it is clear Clenardus had become something more for him than an amiable companion and a linguistic wonder: the Dutchman appears to have been the first truly to understand what Hernando’s library meant to the world and to its owner. In his letter, Clenardus remarked that, in drawing from the most distant corners everything that authors had to the present produced, Hernando had, like his father, reached beyond the limits of our world to make another: just as Columbus had, by a prodigious act, planted Spanish power and civilization in another world, so he Hernando had gathered the wisdom of the universe to Spain. Sons often resemble their fathers in appearance, his new Dutch friend remarked, but some also bear a resemblance in spirit and moral qualities. High praise indeed given that the first part of the letter argues Columbus’s deeds had made him like a god among men. It is, Clenardus concludes, just this resilience inherited from his father that has allowed Hernando to build in Seville the greatest library of all time. Unlike his father, Hernando had made few grand claims for his master project, and Clenardus’s reaction is the first on record. It is hard not to share the broken gratitude and swelling pride Hernando must have felt when, after a lifetime struggling in the wilderness, someone finally saw what he was doing and spoke openly of it.10
Clenardus’s fulsome praise of Hernando and of his father may, however, have been prompted by something more than friendship or admiration; it may have been meant to provide comfort for Hernando in a time of great difficulty and pain. In part, this was caused by Hernando’s growing awareness that his father’s reputation was being formed out there, in the world of print and public conversation, in ways hardly complimentary to the man he loved so much. In fact, it may have been Clenardus who first drew Hernando’s attention to this: the Psalter in five languages, which the Dutchman had spent so many years poring over in detail to learn the basics of the Arabic alphabet, contained one of the first biographical descriptions of Columbus to reach print, in the form of a note to Psalm 19 that spreads over five pages, written by its editor, Agostino Giustiniani. Columbus had used this psalm to prop up his claim that his discoveries were not just random events but rather a key part of God’s plan, but now his interpretation was part of the official fabric of Europe’s most sacred text, contained in one of the most prestigious editions of the Psalms being read across Europe: Columbus’s discoveries had become the meaning of this psalm, the fulfillment of its prophecy. Here the life of the explorer was being used to explain the psalm’s words about God’s message having traveled to the Ends of the World. Yet for all that it made Hernando and his father’s Book of Prophecies part of mainstream European thought, the account of Columbus’s life in the note on Psalm 19 was riddled with errors and (worst of all) opened with the damaging allegation that Columbus was vilibus ortus parentibus, “born of low stock.” The Psalterium had been published as long before 1516, and this note had appeared separately as a short pamphlet on Columbus, but this crucial document seems to have passed Hernando by in the flood until around this time.11
However, the version of Columbus’s life in the Psalms was hardly Hernando’s biggest problem. The “immortal” case between the crown and the Columbus family over New World rights had taken a surprising and potentially catastrophic turn. An agent in the case, Villalobos, acting for the emperor, had dramatically asserted that Columbus did not have the right to be called the sole discoverer of the New World—because parts of it had been discovered by Martín Alonso Pinzón, the captain who had accompanied Columbus and who had raced him back to Spain in an attempt to claim the glory all for himself. This was an entirely cynical ruse on the part of the emperor, as the Pinzóns had long since sold to the crown any rights they might claim over the discoveries in return for a small consideration up front. In addition to these attempts to chip away at the Columbus claim, wild rumors were circulating that several pilots had sighted the same islands years before he had, and that he was acting on their information when he sailed; the rumors would have meant little if they hadn’t potentially played into the interests of the emperor. But even this was not the worst in store: Charles, it seems, had also been pursuing another line of inquiry, following up on a theory that Columbus not only was not the sole discoverer of the New World, but could claim none of it at all—that he had been beaten to the punch by sixteen hundred years. The theory, the main proponent of which was none other than Gonzalo Fernández de Oviedo—Hernando’s fellow page at the court of the Infante Juan, who had written so scornfully of those he felt were of too lowly birth to be there—claimed Columbus’s Indies must be none other than the Islands of the Hesperides, mentioned by the classical author Statius Sebosus as being “forty days sail west of the Gorgonas Isles.” Oviedo further asserted that these islands had been conquered by an ancient Spanish king, Berosius, and were therefore already a Spanish possession when Columbus went there in 1492, meaning he had discovered nothing at all and had no claims whatsoever. This story was backed up by claims, first published in the 1533 history of Spain by Lucius Marinaeus Siculus (another figure from the court of the Infante Juan), that in the gold mines of the Americas coins had been found with the image of Augustus Caesar, which had been sent to the pope as proof of contact between Europe and those parts in classical times. Staggeringly, the courts agreed with the arguments of the crown, and on 27 August 1534 they issued the Sentencia de las Dueñas, stripping the Columbuses not only of their right to the title of viceroy of the Indies but also of any right to a share in the gold and other goods of those lands.12
A copy of the psalms in five languages (Hebrew, Greek, Arabic, Chaldean, and Latin), which played a
key part in the spread of the Columbus legend.
Hernando’s world was in pieces. Before his eyes, the image of his father was slowly being transformed into a shrunken and grotesque parody of the one Hernando had always kept in mind. His certain sense of the events of his childhood, when forty years before his father had found a new world and triumphed over mutiny and ingratitude to live to see himself vindicated, was crumbling away, assailed by contending and slanderous accounts, in which the lands his father had wrestled out of myth and legend into the light of day were slowly disappearing back into these mists. Everything that Hernando had spent his life learning, from ancient history and the labyrinth of the law to the use of ancient coins and inscriptions for understanding history, was now being turned against him. Faced with the annihilation of all he held dear, he turned to the only weapon he had left—his library, and in it the papers left to him by Columbus—in an attempt to make solid the father who was quickly slipping from his grasp.
XV
The King of Nowhere
How does one make a life out of words and paper? Capturing the essence of another person using the crude tools of narrative is a challenge at the best of times: out of the myriad events a pattern must be discerned, a structure created in which the life makes sense, and words must be found that resurrect the subject, conjuring for the reader the experience of being in their presence. How much greater, then, the challenge faced by Hernando in these years: to write about a father of whose memory he was infinitely jealous, and to do so with that father’s fate, of fame and of fortune, hanging in the balance. Hernando began this task as he did almost all others. He gathered about himself the papers he would need, those he had inherited from his father, the letters and charters, logbooks and collections of notes, and all the books in which his father had written as he read. Making a life out of paper is infinitely easier if the subject has already begun to cross over into the written world by himself. The physical features of these documents are tantalizingly present as Hernando writes about his father: he mentions the phrase Columbus used to test whether his pen was working properly—Jesus cum Maria sit nobis in via (Jesus and Mary accompany us)—and the moment at the end of June 1494 when, even as his father was writing in his log, the ship ran aground on a shoal south of Cuba. These absentminded marks of the Admiral’s pen—the words he wrote without thinking, the jag of his nib as the ship shunts into the sand—transport us to the moment of their creation, like a needle tracing the tremors of that world. They are eloquent testimonies to the arduous task of the biographer: using only pen strokes, to break down the distance between language and the world; to turn the paper and words back into something real.1
The reverential attachment to Columbus’s writings that can be seen in Hernando’s biography has something to do with the son’s devotion to his father and something to do with his profound affinity for written things, but it is also a product of the special circumstances in which Hernando was writing. As the opening chapters make clear, the immediate and practical reason for Hernando writing is to respond to the assertions—about Columbus, about the New World discoveries—that were swirling around Europe and the law courts of Spain as well as among the entourage of the emperor. Giustiniani’s slander regarding the Admiral’s parentage, the claims to equal credit made for the Pinzón family, and Gonzalo Fernández de Oviedo’s strange assertions about ancient contacts with the western Atlantic threatened, singly or collectively, to blot Hernando’s father’s name from the Book of History, to bankrupt his family, and to put paid to Hernando’s plans for a library the likes of which the world had never seen. Yet Hernando’s life, with years at the Sacra Rota in Rome and leading the Spanish delegates to Badajoz, had amply prepared him for high-stakes games of assertion and counterassertion. And, as at Badajoz, his library gave him an immense advantage: within its holdings he could find the books Oviedo was citing and all of Giustiniani’s publications. He could use them to show Giustiniani’s account not only contradicted the Columbus version of events but even contradicts itself, while Oviedo has misunderstood what he was reading because of his poor command of Latin. Each of these arguments could be checked, by anyone who cared to, against any of the copies of these same works. The library formed the perfect witness: objective in the fullest sense of the word, of nearly faultless memory, and open to simple verification. The appetite with which Hernando pursued his advantage over these adversaries was occasionally unattractive and may hint at some lingering disdain for his schoolmate Oviedo, but was wholly understandable given the circumstances.2
While the farragoes of Oviedo and Giustiniani were easily dismissed, the claims of the Pinzón family were not so simple. Hernando could, and did, reproduce the text of the Capitulaciones de Santa Fe, and the confirmation of these terms from 1493, always reminding the reader he was copying documents word for word that could be checked against official archives if necessary. These documents made clear that Columbus had rights over everything discovered on the expedition (and not just discovered personally), and that this extended from the Tordesillas Line westward to the Indies—as Hernando had asserted—rather than simply halfway around the world. But the lengths to which Hernando goes to show Columbus not only captained the first expedition across the Atlantic, but was the first person to see the fire lights on the island of Guanahani on the night of 11 October 1492, makes clear Hernando knew this was about something more than mere legal technicalities. It was Columbus, in Hernando’s words, who saw the light in the midst of darkness, in token of the spiritual light that he would bring to these benighted lands. As we move from the question of Columbus’s legal rights to his role in ordering the world, we enter the realm of biography proper.3
Hernando’s library held many models for biography, many volumes telling the life stories of various kinds of people highly prized by European culture. There were saints’ lives, in which the blessedness of the individual is marked out by precocious piety, inhuman feats of endurance, a disregard for earthly things, calm in the face of pain and death, and miracles surrounding the saint’s remains; there were biographies of authors, written as prefaces to their books, which sought to flesh out the person who had written the works that followed—such as the life of Pico della Mirandola, written by his nephew and translated by (among others) Thomas More. Then there were collections of lives, mostly of political figures, such as the Lives of the Noble Greeks and Romans by Plutarch or Boccaccio’s On the Fall of Illustrious Men. Some political leaders merited separate biographies, including the life of Agricola by Tacitus or the life of Richard III that Thomas More had written but not yet published. Yet though life writing presents itself as focusing on the actions and motives of an individual, biography is a literary ruse, a sleight of hand that uses the personal story to say something about the world beyond that person, to arrange (in a sense) the world around them. The saints prove the existence of heaven by their special awareness of it and the divine rewards they reap; the literary biography explains the author’s writings according to the manner of life he or she is shown to have led; the life of a political figure demonstrates the workings of society and history by revealing what kinds of character and policy succeed or fail within it. The point of a life is to make sense of the world in which it is lived, and Hernando’s biography of his father is just such a project, an act of ordering and interpreting that strikingly—and perhaps inevitably—bears close relation to his obsessive thought about order in his library.
The relation of Hernando’s Life and Deeds of the Admiral to the world belongs to one of the most powerful and enduring versions of biography: the assertion of primacy. Who was the first to discover, invent, create? Primacy is such a powerful and fundamental way of structuring the world that we rarely pause to examine its underlying assumptions, to question why it should matter if someone was first or the thirty-first to do a thing. Beneath these claims to primacy lies a notion of the world as sequence: it matters who did something because everything afterward follows from that, not just i
n the sense of being later than but also of being caused by. When God speaks to Job out of the whirlwind, His assertion of omnipotence is founded precisely on His being there before everything else: he is the first cause, the Prime Mover. Although this goes against one of the first principles of logic—post hoc non est propter hoc (“after” is not the same as “because of”)—it is nonetheless a fundamental part of how many cultures understand the world. The deep European attachment to this principle was shown in Clenardus’s letter suggesting Columbus was a god among men, and that Hernando could be one, too. In this Clenardus was following a popular way of understanding pagan religion in the Renaissance, which argued (after the classical writer Euhemerus) that the pagan pantheon was simply homage to famous ancestors, and that the great inventors and discoverers of the past had slowly been transformed into gods as their mortal forms and lives faded from memory. If Columbus was the first discoverer of the New World, he was a god, a figure in the pantheon of history; if not, he was nothing, one of those to whom history had merely happened. Chronological lists of those who have invented, found, or discovered things provide us with one way of ordering the world.4
The Catalogue of Shipwrecked Books Page 29
