This method of arranging the world on the basis of primacy presented one of the first means of ordering the new libraries of the Renaissance. In the 1490s, Johannes Zeller of Tritheim (Trithemius)—whose library in Würzburg Hernando may well have visited in 1522—had created a list of around a thousand writers, placed in chronological order, drawing on even older, medieval models. (Hernando had owned a copy of this list since his trip to Florence in 1516.) Trithemius’s work was part of a broad and complex project of chronology in the Renaissance, which engaged all available evidence to try to establish exact dates for historical texts and events. If confidence in major historical dates is something we largely take for granted, this is because of the painstaking and horrendously complex efforts of scholars such as Trithemius, who spent lifetimes sorting through a thicket of contradictory evidence about when precisely key events had happened—centrally, the birth of Christ, and everything else radiating out from this. The task became so maddening that in later life Trithemius took to inventing chronicles allowing him at last to put the unsettling lack of certainty to rest, eventually causing his exposure and disgrace. But even secure chronology has obvious limitations when one begins to apply it to the books in a library: books will appear to be bizarrely unrelated to books written the year before or the year after them, or even in the same year; books will not appear next to the titles to which they are responding or to which they inspired in turn—they won’t even appear next to their own sequels in a properly chronological list of titles. Any attempt to be properly chronological quickly fails: other categories—form, genre, geography—must be introduced to make sense of it all, and before long chronology is not the major principle of order.5
The limitations in ordering the library chronologically are much the same as for thinking of history in that way: just because something is first does not mean that what comes after follows from it. Arguments can be made for Hernando’s own primacy in various fields: the first to record magnetic variation; head of the first team to undertake a map on modern, “scientific” principles; the first to conceive of and attempt to create a truly universal library. Indeed, one might even suggest his life of Columbus is the first modern biography—not an exposition of theology (like a saint’s life) or of national history (like the chronicles of kings), but taking a private individual as its subject, and attempting to understand not the example he provides for others but rather his uniqueness, and doing so moreover not using received traditions but documentary evidence and eyewitness report. The credibility of these claims, however, always rests on how they are framed—what do we consider evidence of “recording,” what is “scientific” and “universal,” what is the essence of a “modern” biography? More interesting, perhaps, is the question that will increasingly pose itself in the final parts of Hernando’s life: What relationship do invention and discovery have with that which comes after?
The impossibility of proving definitively that his father was the first to cross the Atlantic meant Hernando had another, infinitely subtler task: to move beyond the establishment of simple primacy to the assertion of a natural order. He needed to demonstrate his father’s extraordinary feat was in keeping with Columbus’s character, something that convinced by its probability where he had failed to do so by proof. This is the focus of many modern biographies: it would not do for the great achievements of a celebrated figure’s life to seem to come from random happenstance, so they must proceed inevitably from that person (and only ever from that person). In biographies written after the Enlightenment, this would take the form of narrating the events that led up to the crucial moment: if the mind was a blank slate, written upon by the world in which it lived, then the person was necessarily the sum total of the experiences leading up to that moment. Without this notion of internal development, however, the event must have some external cause: it is just as important, then, that we know nothing of the childhood of Jesus or of Galahad, because they were not formed into the Messiah or the Grail Knight by experience but were chosen for it by Providence or Destiny.
This distinction, between ways of ordering the world that are internal, that come from within us, and those that exist outside and simply await discovery, lay at the heart of another possible way of organizing the library. Just before returning to Spain from the Netherlands in 1531, Hernando had purchased at Antwerp a new book, On the Disciplines by Juan Luis Vives, the Spanish follower of Erasmus who served as tutor to Princess Mary Tudor until his stance on Henry VIII’s divorce saw him expelled from England. In this book, Vives proposed a way of seeing knowledge that was entirely different to the thorny and abstract ideas of theologians and scholastic philosophers. Placing man himself at the center of things, Vives suggested the natural structure of knowledge is the one that comes from the order in which real people learn things. To explain what he means, he tells the story of a primitive man who leaves his dwelling and narrates the things he encounters: he must find food, learn to protect himself against his environment, and develop relationships with other human beings; eventually, he will have time to consider things such as beauty and to contemplate the heavens and the origins of things. Each of these things properly understood, Vives argues, is a field of knowledge, a discipline—agriculture, military science, politics, the liberal arts, theology—and meant that even the humblest men could know as much about the world as philosophers, given that all knowledge began in and was built from basic experiences. This, in a sense, reversed the ordering in medieval monasteries’ libraries, in which the Things of God came first and everything else followed after. It is also similar to, though not the same as, the chronological way of organizing the library: instead of placing the books, and the thoughts they contain, in historical order—the sequence in which they occurred to humanity as a whole—Vives suggests we should place them in the order that they would occur to a particular person, as he or she builds from basic experience to complex constructions. This psychological way of ordering knowledge—though Vives would not have used that term—fits the order of the world within the span of a human life.6
The decision whether to portray Columbus as someone who grew into his knowledge of the world, or one of those who gained it by inspiration from above, was (in a sense) made for Hernando because his father did not have an early life that led up to the years of discovery. It is unclear whether to give credit to the strange and painful confession Hernando makes early on in the biography, namely that he did not know many of the details of his father’s early life, having been too full of filial piety during their years together to pry into a past that was not volunteered. In truth, even if Hernando had known, he would have been forced to draw a veil over the youth of his father. What we know now of Columbus’s early life—descended from humble weavers, unlearned if not unlettered, caught up in the expansion of Genoese shipping networks as they pushed west to make up for the rise of the Ottomans in the East—would not combine, in most sixteenth-century minds, to produce a major player in the history of the world and of mankind. In response to this need, Hernando chose for his father a form of life similar to that provided for other figures of destiny, such as Jesus or Galahad. Hernando even suggests Columbus consciously chose to be vague about his parentage and early life—so as to be like the other Apostles, or like Christ himself, who, despite being descended from the royal line of Jerusalem, preferred to be known as the son of Mary and Joseph.
But Hernando also found for his father, buried in the library, an origin story out of the pages of chivalric romance. The volume that helped him to stitch this together still survives in his library today and provides us not only with proof that Hernando wrote the biography, but also with clues as to when and how and why. He records that he began reading the Enneads by the historian Sabellicus in 1534, on 3 August—that eventful date in the Columbus story, which marked both the beginning of his father’s First Voyage and the start of Hernando’s dictionary. On the page of this epic history that records Columbus’s First Voyage, Hernando has marked out a passa
ge in a way he reserved for those about his father: with a delicate and detailed drawing of a hand, its index finger pointing to the section in question, and the label “Christopher Columbus, my father.” This symbol, known as a manicule, was commonly used by Renaissance readers to identify passages in text they thought important, but Hernando hardly ever used it. He has drawn another, similar mark a few pages earlier, however, next to a passage dealing with a man who shared his father’s name: “Columbus junior, the Illustrious Archpirate.”
From the pages of Sabellicus Hernando drew a wholly new story of Columbus’s arrival in Portugal, at the beginning of his career as an explorer. Columbus (Hernando writes) was prompted to leave Genoa and take to the sea to join up with another man bearing the Columbus name, a member of the family who was a corsair in the western Mediterranean involved in the daring capture of four Venetian galleys off the coast of Portugal. Hernando writes for Columbus a role in this sea battle and departs from his usually fastidious accounts of the explorer’s life to insert a scene of pure romance: it tells of how, when the ships closed on one another, hand-to-hand combat broke out, of such ferocity and daring that from morning until the hour of vespers the sailors fought without pity using sidearms as well as bombards and other explosives. At the climax of the battle Columbus’s ship is set alight by one of the Venetian vessels, and the flames grow so quickly that those aboard can more easily bear the thought of drowning than the torment of the fire, and they leap overboard. Columbus, being a great swimmer and seeing land only two leagues distant, avails himself of an oar that fate presents to him and reaches shore, from where after many days of recovery he makes his way to Lisbon in the confidence that he will find others there of his Genoese nation. God, the biography suggests, preserved Columbus that day for greater things.7
This description is so starkly different from the rest of the serious, documentary biography that it has left many Columbus experts with the conviction it could not have been written by his son. Indeed, if Hernando had not marked these passages in their source and drawn a link there between Columbus the Pirate and his father (who in reality were unrelated), it would seem out of keeping with his usually reserved and fastidious character. But in the light of this evidence, the scene reveals itself as central to Hernando’s personality, though perhaps a part he kept hidden almost all his life: a moment in which the boy who lost in his father the source of his pride finds a secret place of fantasy to give that father a little more life. Resurrection is among the most powerful narrative devices ever invented, and this, I suppose, is just such a thing.
* * *
If Hernando could not prove, using documentary evidence, that his father was the first to discover the New World and could not provide him with a life that led naturally toward the act of discovery, what was left to him? The answer to this is related to a third way of organizing the world of knowledge, one to which we are led by the increasing diminutions of scale we have been following: from the chronological order, which arranges things on the scale of history, to the psychological, which takes the progress of a human life as the foundation of order, to the physiological, which takes the human body itself as the best model for how to understand the structure of the universe. Hernando had always been intensely interested in the body and in medicine, as is suggested by the large number of medical books among his early purchases, and this may have been part of the reason why during this climactic period of his life he traveled to France, where as well as visiting Montpellier (a center of medical science) and buying thousands of books, he sought out and met at Lyons the only modern author to join Erasmus in having his own section at the back of the alphabetical catalogue: Dr. Symphorien Champier. Champier is barely known today even among specialists of the period, but in his time he was a celebrated author on philosophy, history, and the occult sciences, the mystical attempts of which to unearth a hidden structure to the world drew strenuous objections from Champier. His main interest, however, was in medicine, and he presided over the medical college at Lyons alongside—among others—François Rabelais. Rabelais had lovingly mocked his senior colleague in Pantagruel, including in the chaotic Library of St. Victor many volumes by Champier, as well as in the episode in which the author takes a journey into Pantagruel’s innards after being sheltered during a rainstorm by the giant prince of Utopia’s tongue. Rabelais’s jocular suggestion that the real worlds awaiting discovery actually lay within the human body was part of a fundamental concept at the time; namely that the body reflected the same structure as the world outside—it was a microcosm, or small universe, reflecting the big one. Erasmus himself had translated several short treatises by the leading figure of classical medicine, Galen, and was a close supporter of many of the leading medical figures of the day, including Paracelsus (a pioneer in using cadavers for teaching and research, opening the secrets of man’s insides to the same scrutiny Hernando had given to the manatee) and Champier himself. Given the relation between microcosm and macrocosm, Erasmus reasoned, the true physician was also a philosopher. The reverse was also true: anyone interested in philosophy, in how knowledge works, would be mad not to take as their road map the human body, giving one as it did a local laboratory in which to investigate that God in whose image man had been created. In an oration, In Praise of Medicine, which Hernando had bought in Bruges at the end of his first European tour, Erasmus had declared that medicine comprises not one or two branches of science but an encyclopedic knowledge of all the arts, that it brought together “countless disciplines, an infinite knowledge of things,” and, quoting Galen, that the physician was a man of universal knowledge.
On just these grounds Hernando founded the central claim of his biography of Columbus. Time and again during the Life and Deeds of the Admiral, he suggests his father had succeeded where others failed because of his superhuman discipline, endurance, and self-control, which allowed Columbus to ignore the many signs in the ocean that his crews were scrabbling to interpret and to focus instead, calmly, on the threefold argument that had convinced him he would find land in the west—reason, the authority of ancient writers, and the reports from other sailors in the Atlantic. Hernando considered the proof of this levelheadedness to be the logs his father so assiduously kept, meticulous records demonstrating that the path to discovery was through the slow and methodical compilation of measurements, records, and observations. In his biography Hernando even sets up an antagonist, a rival who represents the opposite approach—none other than Martín Alonso Pinzón, who in Hernando’s telling is endlessly scheming, paranoid, and capricious, and who (as his reward) dies of a broken heart when Ferdinand and Isabella deny his attempt to announce the discovery.
This image of Columbus, which has, since Hernando created it, been central to the legend of the explorer, required Hernando to perform considerable acts of historical revision to make it work. Gone from Hernando’s life of his father are Columbus’s beliefs that he had in 1492 reached the Far East—Cipangu and the outskirts of Cathay—and many of the wilder theories about the places he had visited, which survive in his letters to the Reyes Católicos. The Book of Prophecies, with its argument that Columbus’s discoveries were part of God’s plan for mankind, with its divine revelations that Columbus and Hernando used to guide them on the Fourth Voyage, is nowhere mentioned. Hernando is also silent on the series of visions his father experienced from 1498 onward, which were felt by Columbus to be guiding him in his ventures and to be proof of his election by God for the task. Hernando similarly fails to mention his father’s attempt to make his discoveries profitable by starting a trade in Arawak Indian slaves, and instead emphasizes the great affection Columbus had for the New World natives and his attempts to save them from Christian brutalities. As with so much in Hernando’s biography of Columbus, this narrative constructs the character that was needed in the 1530s—when it was clear America was not part of the Asian continent, when the providential character of Columbus’s discoveries was less clear, and when the railing of Bartolomé de Las
Casas had begun to open European eyes to the atrocities of the conquistadores—and bears little resemblance to the Columbus who comes out of his own writings. If anything, the Columbus portrayed in the Life and Deeds of the Admiral—the calm and methodical compiler of information, sympathetic to the ideas of Las Casas—looks a lot more like Hernando himself.8
Hernando’s extended tour of southern France, where he was once again amassing large numbers of books—particularly medical tomes and the printed music for which Lyons was beginning to be famous—was cut abruptly short when, in mid-1536, he was summoned from Avignon to the Spanish court at Valladolid. That the queen had ordered comfortable lodgings to be prepared for him against his arrival may have alerted him that the tide, flowing for so long against the Columbus family fortunes, had finally turned in their favor. Ten days before he was summoned to court, the judges who had been assigned to arbitrate between the Columbus family and the crown had pronounced their verdict, one that reinstated Diego’s son Luis as hereditary Admiral of the Indies and also conferred upon him the titles of Marquis of Jamaica and Duke of Veragua. Though the verdict did not reinstate the Columbuses to the governorship of Hispaniola or the vice-regency of the Indies and denied them the vast financial claims over the riches of the New World promised to Columbus in the Capitulaciones de Santa Fe in 1492, it nevertheless awarded the heir the not inconsiderable annual pension of ten thousand ducados, as well as a series of smaller pensions for other members of the family. The judges seem, mercifully, to have overlooked Hernando’s self-inflicted wound when he gave away his rights to his patrimony at La Coruña in 1520 and awarded him a pension of a thousand ducados for life, to which the emperor added a further five hundred gold pesos to help with the work on the library.9
The Catalogue of Shipwrecked Books Page 30
