first cloud may have been cast for Hernando upon his father’s golden world by the succession of reports that slowly revealed the macabre fate of La Navidad, Columbus’ original fortress-settlement in the New World. Though Columbus attempted to gloss over this in his communication of January 1494, even the child Hernando might have noticed something amiss in the fact that his father’s letters were addressed not from La Navidad but from the new settlement of La Isabela. Readers of Hernando’s later account of events might have had a premonition of this disaster, given how often he insists upon the care with which his father recorded the place where he had left thirty-nine men from varied backgrounds, including an Englishman, an Irishman from Galway and a relation of Hernando’s on his mother’s side. But when the fleet of the Second Voyage finally made their way back to Hispaniola, they hardly had need of Columbus’ directions. On a riverbank near the first landmark of Monte Cristo they found two corpses, one with a noose around his neck and another with his feet tied, though some may have deceived themselves that these bodies, too decomposed for identification, were not those of men who had been left behind in La Navidad. Hernando meticulously recorded further details of this scene: one of the men was young and the other old; the noose was made of esparto grass and the strangled man’s arms were extended, his hands tied to a piece of wood like a cross. The hope that these were not Spaniards became harder to sustain when, the next day and further up the river, they came across two more bodies, one thickly bearded – in a land of natives without facial hair. When they finally anchored off La Navidad, reluctant to come closer to shore for fear of grounding as the Santa Maria had, a canoe bearing envoys from Guacanagarí approached, its men wearing masks that they then handed to Columbus. They initially reported all was well but were finally pressed to admit that a few of the settlers of La Navidad had died of disease and fighting. Guacanagarí himself, they said, could not come to greet Columbus because he was lying in his hut, gravely wounded after having battled with two other caciques – Caonabó and Marieni – who had attacked La Navidad.7
Hernando’s account of these events, which draws upon Columbus’ lost expedition diaries but must also have been coloured by his own memories, shows all the signs of trauma as it recounts the disintegration of Columbus’ idyll. Hernando describes the further bodies that were found, with an estimate of how long they had been dead, and the story that unfolded piece by piece of how a party of settlers had broken with the rest and embarked on a course of rape and pillage, leading the cacique Caonabó to march on them and put the stockade to the flame. Yet there were discrepancies in the stories told by Guacanagarí and his men, and the belief the Taíno were simply and naively honest became harder to sustain. After narrating this bloodcurdling episode, Hernando turns strangely to his father’s pleasure when Guacanagarí gave him a gold belt, crown and grains worth four gold marks, in exchange for items valued at only 34 maravedís (equivalent to less than 1/2,000th the amount). It is unclear whether Columbus was truly so cold-blooded in his mercantile calculations at this moment or if he was desperately grasping for positive news in the face of a massacre for which the real guilt was unlikely ever to be determined. Similarly, Hernando’s recording of this exchange in his biography of his father, shortly after what must have been a brutal childhood memory, has the feel of those misdirections often prompted by trauma.
Hernando’s presence at court made him an eyewitness to the competing interpretations of these events. Dr Chanca’s account of the La Navidad affair played into a dawning belief in the deceitful bloodiness of these new Spanish subjects, something that would have been reinforced by reports of a further disaster for Spanish Atlantic expansion that also arrived in April 1494. In an attempt to complete the conquest of the Canary Islands by taking the final holdout of Tenerife, the conquistador Alonso de Lugo had refused to accept the surrender of the pastoralist Guanches who lived there and attacked instead, only to be roundly beaten back to the sea with the loss of eight hundred Christian lives. The heart-warming triumph of the natives of Tenerife was sadly short-lived: de Lugo returned the following year with a larger force and captured them en masse, a pattern of hardening attitudes towards Atlantic peoples that was only to worsen in the coming years. The German traveller Hieronymus Munzer was soon to see these ‘beasts trapped in human form’ for sale in Valencia and to note without irony the ‘sweetening effect’ of religion on these slaves, many of whom were put to work harvesting sugar cane. To counter this mounting bigotry, Columbus had a tightrope to walk: even as he attempted to conjure out of nothing a belief in the New World as a gold-paved Eden, he had to admit the settlement was faltering at the outset. In the same breath with which Antonio de Torres was to report that vines and wheat sprang marvellously and untended out of the New World ground, he was obliged to request the Monarchs send supplies from Spain, namely:
wine, hardtack, wheat, salt pork, other salted meat, cattle, sheep, lambs, male and female calves, donkeys, raisins, sugar, almonds, honey, rice, and medicine
And all this if possible before the summer arrived. The reason Columbus gave for this want in his land of milk and honey was the poor quality of what had been stocked for the Second Voyage: the wine had been lost through poorly made barrels, the horses supplied by the farrier in Seville were all broken-backed nags, and the fine strapping men he expected to find when they disembarked in Hispaniola turned out to be layabouts who expected simply to feast on manna, gather the gold that was lying about, and return to Europe rich men. They could not survive on the local cassava bread and required the food they were used to in Spain, and they constantly fell ill in that climate. To prove this de Torres carried with him a list of the healthy and a list of the sick. Just as Columbus was quick to blame the fate of La Navidad on the viciousness of some of the men he left there, so the failure of the New World settlements over the coming years was increasingly to be laid (by Columbus himself, and later Hernando) at the feet of men whom the Admiral disdained for not being willing to suffer like him to turn his vision into a reality. But even Columbus’ adherence to the picture of naked innocence among the New World natives was beginning to crumble: not only does he detail the defensive measures he has taken against local aggression, he also in his struggle to make his discoveries profitable proposes a trade be set up in which Spanish cattle be exchanged for New World slaves. Though the Monarchs firmly resisted this suggestion, Columbus continued to push for it in hopes of saving his vision of the New World, being tempted for the sake of expediency into an execrable history of kidnap and enslavement.8
The letters from Columbus over the succeeding years followed these familiar patterns. Hernando would have learned in his seventh year, during the early months when the court was at Madrid, of his father’s expedition against the aggressor Caonabó in the province of Cibao, where the rivers ran with grains of gold but they faced constant attacks from Caonabó’s warriors. At the same time he would have heard tell of his father’s expedition in search of terra firma, the continental landmass of Cathay, when instead he got no further than the coasts of Cuba and Jamaica, becoming marooned amid a labyrinth of hundreds of islets he named the Jardines de la Reina, ‘The Queen’s Gardens’. There they witnessed flamingoes, pilot fish that hitched rides on the dorsal fins of other swimmers, turtles as big as shields in numbers that blanketed the sea, a cloud of butterflies so large it cast the ship in darkness, and a breeze so sweet the soldiers felt themselves surrounded by roses and the finest perfumes in the world. The Admiral boasted they would have returned to Castile via the East on that very journey, if not for the fact that their supplies were exhausted, as was the Admiral, having not (he claimed) changed clothes or slept in a bed for eight months. On returning to Hispaniola Columbus found his brother Bartholomew, who had finally caught up with him after more than six years, and succumbed to a fever that for five months deprived him of his sight, his memory and his senses.9
Columbus’ letters and the objects he sent back to Spain with them are witnesses to a mind struggling to put this flood of new things into order, when every day produced some unheard-of wonder, a struggle that is the prehistory to his son’s lifelong quest to organise the world. Insofar as Columbus did attempt to impose a system on what he was seeing, he usually fell back on the worldview of medieval cosmography, in which the oddity of men and their customs showed how far from the centre of the world any given place was, whereas the perfumes of Araby and the abundance of gold were clues that one was approaching the earthly Jerusalem or the boundaries of the lost Eden. Columbus’ New World was to him strangely both of these things, both centre and periphery, both far from the known and approaching