and which it might be heretical to question.10
The versions of the Columbus story that descended from Hernando – as most do – would pass over the growing body of support for Columbus at the Spanish court and focus instead on a dramatic climax in which the explorer forced the hand of an unwilling world. Neither of the learned gatherings to whom Columbus presented his arguments (in 1487 and 1491) reached a conclusion favourable to Columbus’ design, and Ferdinand and Isabella understandably remained reluctant, given the cost of the war against the Moors and the terms Columbus was demanding, to invest in a venture whose promise rested on the word of an unproven if undoubtedly charismatic stranger. Hernando would portray his father, scorning to beg his destiny from the blind, as abandoning the Spanish court to look for other means of advancing his plans. Only the eleventh-hour intercession of the queen’s confessor, Fray Juan Pérez, gained Columbus a favourable hearing, and the offer of the Secretary of the Exchequer, Luis de Santangel, to front the costs himself seems to have persuaded the Monarchs to come to terms with Columbus. Later accounts of these events were to heighten the dramatic tension, with stories of Columbus being called back even as he rode away from the city, and the queen offering to pawn her own jewels to pay for the expedition.
This narrative of events in 1491 and early 1492 was later honed to epic perfection by those seeking to paint a picture of Spanish destiny and by the vision of Columbus promoted by the explorer himself and by his faction. The legend obscures many of the mundane and practical contexts that might detract from this messianic version of events. Among these were the Monarchs’ need for new sources of gold now the Moors of Spain would no longer be paying tribute drawn on the north African trade routes, the pressure for European expansion (especially from mercantile nations including the Venetians and Genoese) to look west as the Ottoman Turks began to absorb the eastern Mediterranean regions that had once supplied many of their goods, and the comparability of Columbus’ voyage to many fifteenth-century expeditions that had enlarged the European orbit south down the coast of Africa and west to islands in the Atlantic.
Another effect of the narrowing of the Columbus narrative to focus on the single Man of Destiny was to obscure his family life, obliterating the personal circumstances of his actions and instead making those around him conform to the patterns of his myth-making. Columbus’ abrupt departure from Portugal after the failure of his bid for King João’s support was attributed to his unwavering focus on his destiny, but may also have been driven by the death of Doña Filipa, who had given him Hernando’s elder brother but whose premature passing abruptly cut his ties to Portugal. It was her relatives who determined where he went in Spain by providing links when he arrived there, especially in Palos, which was to be the launching point for his first expedition. The legend also glosses over the change in Columbus’ name at this point, from the Italian Colombo to the Spanish Colón by which he was known for the rest of his life, though Hernando was later to argue that all of these names were symbolically appropriate to Columbus: ‘Colombo’, ‘the dove’, who like Noah’s messenger reaches out into the flood and brings back evidence of land as a covenant between God and His nation; and ‘Colón’, which in Greek made Columbus a ‘member’ of Christ, an arm doing his bidding, and foretold he would make of the natives coloni, ‘members of the Church’ – though with no small irony this is also the root for the word ‘to colonise’. And the picture of the lonely visionary, pursuing his destiny in the face of blind opposition from the Spanish court, is somewhat complicated by the fact that during his years of lobbying in Cordoba he was also engaged in a liaison with the young orphan Beatriz Enríquez de Arana. Beatriz’ parents had been of lowly station – in fact from the same class of weavers from which Columbus himself derived – but Columbus likely came to know her through the circle of doctors in Cordoba who surrounded her uncle and guardian, Rodrigo Enríquez de Arana. Though Hernando, who was born of this affair, was not disloyal to his Arana relatives, noting the significant role many of them later played in Columbus’ voyages, he did not pause in the narrative of his father’s life so much as to write his mother’s name, and his own birth on 15 August 1488 is passed over in silence, preserving the smooth course of the explorer’s story. Columbus did not mention, in the first draft of the letter he cast overboard in the storm, that both Diego and Hernando during the voyage were under the care and protection of Beatriz in Cordoba, and his triumphant return largely meant for Beatriz that these children were taken from her. Though she was still living in 1506 when Columbus died, the explorer hardly ever mentioned her again in his letters. The anguished way in which her name was spoken in his final testament reflects a pattern in the life of Columbus and his sons, who showed themselves at once to be of tender conscience and yet also coldly willing to cast aside those near them in pursuit of the destiny they believed to be theirs, a trait that saw Beatriz even being largely written out of her own son’s life.11
It is easy to see, however, how the events of the first voyage drove an already determined man to such extraordinary levels of narcissism. Columbus had sailed west into the Ocean Sea, the body of water thought to surround the landmass of the earth, far beyond any other person on record and, according to his own account (and there is no other), he had resisted the nearly mutinous opposition of his crew almost single-handedly. He did this through a combination of threat and encouraging interpretations of the signs, which Hernando was later to record in detail:
a mast adrift, strange behaviour of the compass needle, a prodigious flame falling from the sky, a heron, greenish weed, a flock of birds flying west, a pelican, small birds, a junco de rabo, a whale, gulls, songbirds, crabs, a freshness in the air, reef fish, ducks, a light in the distance
A less determined person would have seen this as a jumble of flotsam rather than signs of approaching land. Columbus also practised downright deception, intentionally giving his sailors a significantly lower figure than his true estimation of the distance travelled, in order to limit the blank fear they felt at being further and further from the world they knew. In what he saw as a reward for his resilience, he found land precisely where he had predicted it to be, at 750 leagues west of the Canary Islands, exactly the distance to east Asia estimated by his calculation of the number of degrees and using al-Faragani’s figure of 56⅔ miles to the degree. (No one was aware at that point that al-Faragani was using an Arabic mile significantly longer than the European one, so that his figure was not in the least confirmed by the voyage.) In the view of Columbus and most others, he was the first man to have sailed west to reach the other side of the known world, reaching the island of Cipangu (Japan), for which the local name was ‘Cuba’. For the first time in history someone had broken the bounds of Ocean, and had closed the circle of the globe within the compass of human knowledge. What was more, he had on arriving there met a people who – despite (or because of) his inability to speak to them – he was able to make conform to European notions of prelapsarian innocence, a people who did not know the shame of nakedness or the use of iron or the worth of gold, and who (by extension) must live in or near some version of Eden, as confirmed by the perpetual and uncultivated fertility of those lands. Given the deeply ingrained beliefs of the time the only possible conclusion was that Columbus had triggered an event not just of geographical and political expansion, but one in the providential history of the world: a beginning of the return of man to paradise and the end of secular history.
Yet if Columbus’ First Voyage in some ways could be neatly shoehorned into a narrative of Christian providence, it was harder to square with the existing worldview in other ways. If the voyage confirmed the claims of Ptolemy and Marco Polo, it also proved them unquestionably wrong in other respects, exploding the notion of a world neatly bounded by the uncrossable Ocean Sea, and made it hard to argue that St Augustine was right to doubt. The observations on these voyages and those that followed were increasingly incompatible with the writings of Pliny, Aristotle, Plato and others. If they had been wrong about this – the very shape of the world – what else might the ancient authorities have been wrong about? Nor did the native people conform entirely to expectations: for all their Edenic nature they seemed not to understand any of the ancient languages spoken by the converted Jewish interpreters Columbus had taken with him. What knowledges might these people have outside the ambit of classical thought? More troublingly, although Columbus spoke with great enthusiasm about the natural piety of the people he had met and their readiness to be evangelised and converted to Christianity, it was clear they had no existing notion of the Gospel. What