of seeing the world that lies behind a particular kind of ordering, the secrets being hidden by omissions from the list.
If Hernando attempted to bring order to his rapidly expanding world by reducing it to catalogue entries and finding ways of organising these lists that seemed logical, he was far from immune to distorting influences, distortions that can be traced to the core of his being. Much of his life can be explained by his desire to become worthy of, perhaps even equal to, the father he worshipped, though this was a father whom he in a sense created, as he slowly and deliberately shaped our collective memory of Columbus into the man known today. In death and in life, many of Hernando’s actions were in conversation with the father he last saw in his youth, but whose voice he continued to hear and record long after. Their relationship, both before and after the explorer’s death, was inevitably affected by the fact that Hernando was not the product of a legitimate union – he was, in the delicate Spanish phrase, a natural son. Although Columbus never paid this distinction much mind, the circumstances of his birth meant Hernando could win legitimacy only by showing himself to be his father’s son in spirit. Hernando’s travels in the realm of knowledge and the new routes he pioneered through it were in a very real sense akin to what his father had achieved.
For all that he died nearly five centuries ago, Hernando’s discovery of his world bears striking, sometimes uncanny, resemblance to the one we are collectively discovering every day. Perhaps no one has been as helpless in the face of information as those who have lived through the beginning of the twenty-first century: the digital revolution has increased the amount of available information exponentially, and as a result we are wholly reliant on the search algorithms developed to navigate it, tools whose modes of ordering and ranking and categorising are quickly remaking our lives. The invention of print was another such revolution, and the tools developed in response to it profoundly shaped the world until yesterday, during the age of print. The way of seeing things created by the print library has become so natural to us as to be all but invisible; we forget that its form is far from inevitable, that it was the product of specific decisions with immense consequences, consequences which our current age, sleepwalking into new ways of organising knowledge by search algorithms, seems likely to face on an even larger and more pervasive scale. Hernando was, in a sense, one of the first and greatest visionaries of the age of print. If his life has escaped the notice of previous generations, it was perhaps because the power of tools that order our reservoirs of information was not as obvious. To reconstruct his life is not only to recover a vision of the Renaissance age in unparalleled depth, but also to reflect upon the passions and intrigues that lie beneath our own attempts to bring order to the world.
PART I
I.
Hernando Colón’s earliest recorded memory is characteristically precise. It was an hour before sunrise on Wednesday, the 25th of September 1493. He was standing next to his older half-brother, Diego, looking out at the harbour of Cadiz. Dancing on the water in front of him was a constellation of lamps, on and above the decks of seventeen ships about to weigh anchor, preparing to return to the islands in the west where their father had first made landfall less than a year before. Christopher Columbus was now the ‘Admiral of the Ocean Sea’ and was of sufficient fame that chroniclers took down each detail of the scene in front of the five-year-old Hernando. The fleet was formed of a number of lighter craft from Cantabria in the north of Spain, vessels made with wooden joinery so as not to be weighed down with iron nails, as well as the slower but more durable caravels. On board the ships were thirteen hundred souls, including artisans of every sort and labourers to reap the miraculous and uninterrupted harvests of which Columbus had told, but also well-bred caballeros who went for adventure rather than work.1
A favourable wind had begun to freshen, and as the dawn grew behind the city the dots of lamplight would slowly have been connected by the cabins and masts and riggings to which they were fixed. The scene and the mood were triumphant: tapestries hung from the sides of the ships and pennants fluttered from the braided cables, while the sterns were draped in the royal ensigns of the Reyes Católicos (Catholic Monarchs), Ferdinand of Aragon and Isabella of Castile, the great sovereigns whose marriage had united a fragmented Spain. The piercing fanfare of hautboys, bagpipes, trumpets and clarions was so loud, according to one observer, that the Sirens and the spirits of the water were astonished, and the seabed resounded with the cannonades. At the harbour mouth a Venetian convoy, returning from a trade mission to Britain, augmented the noise with their own gunpowder salutes, preparing to follow Columbus part of the way in the hope of learning something of his course.
A Drawing of the City of Cadiz, 1509.
It is unclear whether, in later life, Hernando could reach back beyond this earliest recorded memory to the rather different circumstances in which, earlier that year, his father had returned from his first voyage across the Atlantic. Columbus had arrived back in Europe with only one of the three vessels with which he had left Spain on 3 August 1492: his flagship Santa Maria had run aground off Hispaniola on Christmas Eve, and on the return voyage he had lost sight of the Pinta during a storm near the Azores. Thirty-nine of Columbus’ original crew of ninety or so had been left on the other side of the ocean, in the newly founded settlement of La Navidad in Hispaniola, a town built from the shipwrecked lumber of the Santa Maria with the assistance of the local king or cacique, Guacanagari, and named in honour of the Christmas Day on which it was founded. Columbus’ skeleton crew for the return voyage had been reduced to just three men when the rest were taken prisoner by unfriendly islanders in the Azores, though he did eventually secure their release. And when the great explorer finally did reach Europe in the only ship remaining to him, the Niña, he was running under bare poles after another heavy storm had split the sails. To make matters worse, he had arrived back not in Spain but in Portugal, dragging his ship past the Rock of Sintra to take shelter under the Castle of Almada in Lisbon estuary, where he was treated with suspicion before eventually receiving a summons to make his report to King João. Though later reports would focus on the crowds who covered the harbour in their skiffs, swarming to see the island natives whom Columbus had brought home as part of his plunder, Columbus’ royal audience was for all intents and purposes an imprisonment, and his release was in part prompted by João’s doubts regarding the discoverer’s claims. Hernando’s written records of these early events would record the hardship but leave out much of the confusion of this first return, of the forlorn man and his outlandish claims.2
Hernando’s early life was unusual – perhaps unprecedented – because from the youngest age his personal recollections of his father would have contended with widely circulated written accounts of Columbus’ exploits. He may have been present at Cordoba in March when a letter was read aloud at the cathedral announcing his father’s discoveries, and he kept as central relics in his library several editions of the letter, printed first at Barcelona, through which the discoveries were announced to the world. Hernando’s later collecting was to place at the heart of his universal library precisely this kind of cheap print whose first rustlings could be heard in these reports on Columbus’ voyage. The letter that was to be the common reading matter of Europe was written by Columbus when he landed in Portugal, and the crowds of Jews embarking from Lisbon harbour for Fez in north Africa would have served as a reminder that his ocean crossing would be forced to compete for public attention. The tumultuous course of recent events had reached a peak of intensity in the early months of 1492, when with the taking of Granada Ferdinand and