The Catalogue of Shipwrecked Books. Edward Wilson-Lee

      During the period that followed Columbus’ appearance in chains, the weather-beaten, ageing explorer shared with his son a secret project, one that promised to reveal the world in an entirely new light. This work was designed to lift Columbus’ discoveries above the petty cost–benefit calculations on which many of the courtly debates were centred, framing them instead as events in a grand religious narrative of history, in which they would set the stage for the triumph of the Christian faith and the coming of the End of Time. The manuscript in which he compiled his evidence now survives as 84 leaves of badly damaged paper, sporadically filled with writing in a number of different hands. Each sheet of paper, originally made in Italy, is watermarked with a splayed hand below a six-pointed star. The work was initially given the rather bland, descriptive title of the ‘Book or collection of auctoritates [authoritative writings], sayings, opinions, and prophecies concerning the need to recover the Holy City and Mount Zion, and the finding and conversion of the islands of the Indies and of all peoples and nations’. Hernando was to rename it The Book of Prophecies, and the role he played in its creation is the first evidence of his growing genius for ordering.1

      The chains were soon removed from the Admiral of the Ocean Sea – indeed, they would have been taken off sooner, had Columbus not refused the offer from the captain escorting him back, preferring to satisfy his fine sense of the theatrical by landing in Spain in the guise of a slave. The shackles neatly captured, for Columbus, the disparity between what he had achieved and how he had been rewarded: in the words of a prophecy he grew fond of quoting, he was the man who had broken the chains of Ocean that bounded the ancient world, and yet the chains of a captive were the only thing he had been given in return. This was the reason (Hernando recalled towards the end of his life) he had them set aside as a relic, to be placed in his tomb as a token of the world’s ingratitude. After ordering his release Ferdinand and Isabella asked him to come to them at Granada, and over the coming months Columbus resumed his Sisyphean task of attempting to re-establish the legitimacy of his claims to power and wealth from the New World. The Monarchs were quick to condemn Bobadilla’s treatment of their Admiral, and to appoint a new commission under Nicolás de Ovando to scrutinise Bobadilla’s own conduct, which must have afforded Columbus considerable satisfaction.2

      Columbus was no longer content, however, to attend to these practical and administrative tasks, and during this period of residence in Spain he seems to have devoted increasing amounts of attention to The Book of Prophecies. This was not a sudden development in Columbus’ thinking: after all, he had sought since the earliest accounts of the New World to evoke the Edenic feel of the Caribbean, using its fertile climate and the nakedness of its inhabitants to suggest the enterprise was a step towards a blessed Golden Age (and, by extension, towards gold). But Columbus’ letters of October 1498 and February 1500 marked a significant shift in his thinking. In the first of these he reported his detour, at the beginning of the Third Voyage, around a three-headed island (he christened it ‘Trinidad’) towards another landmass, which he initially named ‘Isla Santa’ but later learned was terra firma – a continent – that the inhabitants of this region called Paria. Columbus’ three-month detour around Paria included some of the most harrowing events to date even for a man whose life had been a catalogue of near-death experiences. First among these was a period shortly after they reached the equator sailing south, during which they were becalmed for eight days in a heat so intense the ships’ holds turned to ovens and the decking planks began to groan and split. Drawing on his father’s logbooks, Hernando later ventured the opinion that had it not been for the relative cool of night and the occasional shower of rain, the ships would have been burned with everyone inside them. When the wind finally rose and they reached Trinidad their relief was cut short as they passed in horror through a sea channel between Trinidad and Paria, one that flowed as fast as a furious river, and in which waves from either end crashed in the middle, causing the water to rise like a cliff along the whole length of the strait. They called this strait at the southern end of Trinidad the Boca de la Sierpe, the Serpent’s Mouth. Their fear increased when they realised they were now trapped in a gulf between Trinidad and the mainland: they could not sail back south against the current of the Boca de la Sierpe, and it became clear their only route back towards Hispaniola lay through a similar channel to the north, to which they gave the twin-name Boca del Drago (Dragon’s Mouth). As if the moment were not fraught enough with danger, the crew had to do without the guidance of their leader: Columbus hadn’t been sleeping again and his eyes were so bloodshot with continual wakefulness that he was losing his sight. For a man obsessed with observing and recording every detail, and convinced he had a God-given sight that revealed things to him before others, this blindness must have been torture. Under these circumstances they took the only option open to them and ran the Boca del Drago. They survived but were spat out at such a pace that they only regained control after being carried on the current for sixty leagues.3

      Though Columbus may have had to rely on the eyes of others on the visit to Paria, he began to believe he had been given a vision of something more. Struggling to fit the extraordinary experiences of Paria into a model he could understand, he reasoned that the ship’s movement had not been determined by simple natural phenomena, but by an irregularity in the shape of the earth. He now saw that the earth was not perfectly spherical: it was shaped like a woman’s breast, globular in form but rising to a peak like a nipple, a peak he reasoned was located at the easternmost point of the equator, and on top of which was to be found the Celestial Paradise. As evidence for this he adduced a number of arguments: the as yet unexplained behaviour of the compass needle in the middle of the ocean, which confoundingly ceased to point exactly to the north every time he passed a certain point 100 leagues west of the Azores; the speed at which they had exited the Boca del Drago, suggesting they were going downhill; and the doldrums where they had baked for eight days, there to ensure (he speculated) that no one could approach the Celestial Paradise without God’s permission. Further to this he pointed to how the people of Paria failed to conform to late-medieval understandings of racial geography, in which the hottest places on earth were supposed to hold the darkest-skinned people, who had been singed by the climate. He not only found people in Paria braver, more astute and more talented than most he had encountered, but they were also lighter skinned – because, he argued, they lived where the earth began to rise to a point, ‘like the stem of a pear’.4

      Columbus had been prevented from developing his theories further at that point by illness and by the immediate urgency of dealing with the open rebellion when he arrived at Santo Domingo. In December 1499, however, he once again found himself stranded aboard a small caravel when, touring Hispaniola during a lull in the rebellion, he was attacked by a band of Taínos and forced to put out to sea without supplies or an adequate crew. On the day after Christmas, weltering in the ocean and staring into an abysm of despair, Columbus experienced the first of a series of visions during which God chastised him for his doubt and told him He would stand by him. On his return to Santo Domingo in February – after forty-odd days afloat – Columbus wrote again to the court, recounting this vision and urging Ferdinand and Isabella to take the discovery of the Indies as a divine signal that they should embark on a last, fatal push to bring about the triumph of the Christian Church,