“We should not be deceived by the staid and impersonal appearance of these lists [catalogues, inventories, etc.], documents that at first seem all fact and no interpretation. To the trained eye, each contains a story: how the list maker imagines the place for which he has packed the items, his way of seeing the world that lies behind a particular kind of ordering, the secrets being hidden by omissions from the list.”
Columbus’s second son Fernando/Hernando from mistress Beatriz Enriquez de Arana
First memories as five year old were father’s return to Spain in September 1493
“Man of destiny” narrative later formed around Columbus obscures more practical contexts: Spain’s need for gold, pressure for European expansion, similar contemporary voyages
“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.”
“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?”
Joined court of young Spanish prince Infante Juan as a page but didn’t fit into aristocratic pastimes of hunting and hawking; studious, bookish, solitary
One of the special duties of the pages was keeping the household’s books: Manual (tracked everything incoming and outgoing household), The Book of Jewels (database of treasures), Great Book (reconcile and index everything in Manual and Book of Jewels), Book of the Inventory (track correspondence)
“From his earliest days, some of the most prized books in Hernando’s world were ones that tamed a wilderness of miscellaneity through the magic of lists, making a curtain and a cup part of the same order by reducing them to name, number, cost, and location.”
Columbus drew up entail of his estate with Spanish monarchs based on projected income, but named Hernando and Diego as legitimate heirs
Third Voyage ended with Columbus returning to Spain half-blind and shackled by order of Bobadilla, leader of Spain’s second inquest into New World, though Columbus arranged for the shackling as symbol of he who had “broken the chains of Ocean”
Hernando joined Columbus’s fourth voyage in 1502 as a 13-year-old
Learned of manatees in Caribbean
Ran aground off Jamaica so sent a group of men on canoes 100 miles to Hispaniola to organize rescue mission
Mutiny developed after several months of silence, and soon Columbus was abandoned with a skeleton crew
As trade with locals dried up, Columbus summoned the island’s leaders for a feast and predicted (using an almanac) a lunar eclipse that night from “wrathful God” for not trading with them; a nerve-wracking gamble but worked
Eventually rescued and arrived back in Spain hobbled and bedridden in 1504; Amerigo Vespucci one of few to visit him in final days
“The hollow created in Hernando’s life by the death of his father would become apparent in the decades to come, as he slowly removed the Admiral’s weakness and madness from the historical record, allowing his own life to become like a New Testament to Columbus’s Old, changing its patterns and its meanings.”
In Hispaniola for 21st birthday and inventoried everything he’d bought; notable for including everything (not just valuables) and being such a record so far in the past
Hernando’s library demonstrates “the extraordinary variety of Hernando’s interests, and how as well as being an ark of civilization in the New World the library was a field laboratory, a survival kit, and a scheme of immense ambition for expanding the intellect of its owner.”
His culture and contemporaries “saw all things of the world as integrally linked and did not think of these as separate fields of thought.”
Proposed circumnavigation trip to Ferdinand in 1511: “for Hernando, closing the circle of the unknown world meant gaining the ability to control it.”
Escalating book purchases around same time signify intellectual conquest too
Fashionable among intellectuals at the time to learn Ancient Greek, though Hebrew was more esteemed as language of Old Testament, Moses, Kabbalah
Bartolomé de Las Casas foremost historian of New World and champion of native peoples, yet still held lifelong affection for Hernando and Diego
Hernando paused circumnavigation planning to argue Diego’s case against his bastard son’s mother in Rome, where it was moved for a fair trial
Prestigious libraries in Italy “emphasized the sacredness of their contents by excluding all but the most prestigious texts—perfect libraries rather than universal ones, and perfect by means of this exclusiveness.” Most books were manuscripts and in Latin or Greek
Hernando witnessed unveiling of Michelangelo’s Sistine Chapel painting in 1512
Most likely commissioned earliest and most credible portrait of Columbus in 1519 by Sebastiano del Piombo
Created his own indices for books, which were still fairly rare especially in manuscript age
Also created cataloging system for his 3,000+ printed image collection: first divided by subject (with internal hierarchy for prints with multiple subjects), then size of paper and other defining qualities
“All systems of order involve hierarchy… But even if the hierarchy is arbitrarily selected… after a time it comes to seem natural, inevitable. And once these hierarchies are written into the tools we use to navigate the world, this step becomes ever harder to undo… if God was revealed, according to medieval theologians, in the order of the world, orders imposed upon it could come to seem godlike. God is the name we give to the possibility of order.”
Embarked on detailed encyclopedic gazetteer of Spain, which led to new Spanish King Charles commissioning official map for Spanish ships to the West Indies
Spain/Portugal rivalry led Ferdinand Magellan (Fernão de Magalhães) defecting to Spain to offer voyage services, claiming (falsely at the time) of a Panama strait connecting the oceans
Embarked on a Latin dictionary project in addition to geographical data gathering, family legal matters, Atlantic navigational charting; “drew together examples of how each word had been used by the best writers of antiquity”
Latin “crudely documented” at the time
“A map of language alive to the organic creature it was creating, a creature that is constantly evolving and can only be charted in its movements, rather than pinned it down to a particular set of meanings.”
“Hernando’s dictionary belongs in the long history of attempts to establish language as something with a solid and definite relationship to the world of things, rather than simply being a conventional tool that only works because we all agree on what each word means.”
Saw off Diego in 1520 back to Hispaniola as reinstated governor thanks to Hernando’s lobbying Charles with vision of expanded Spanish presence in Americas
Document drawn up by Diego awards Hernando lifetime pension but without direct claim to Columbus’s patrimony; Diego held the worldly goods but Hernando the “sublime spirit that had allowed their father to change the shape of the world”
Created “Abecedarium” (alphabetical list of authors and book titles within library) which helped create the very notion of an author in era of anonymous works; also inseparably joined character of author and his works
In 1520 began including in book purchase notes the exchange rates between local currency and home money; serve as time machine and “resurrect a lost world of trade networks and fluctuating relationships between societies, recorded in the language of currency exchange.”
Charles, now Holy Roman Emperor, gifts Hernando a salary and grant, which he uses to go book-buying in Venice
(228) Developed custom alphabet of biblioglyphs to concisely describe books in his library (inspired by invented alphabet in More’s “Utopia”)
Alphabet indicated size, length, columns, chapters, index, manuscript or print, etc; variations on a few basic shapes (circles, squares, triangles) bisected to form other characters – “it seemed the surest way to fix a face, a landscape, or a language was to link it to the pure and simple universal truths of geometry”
At 33 his nearly 6,000 titles was one of the biggest private collections in Europe
One of Magellan’s five ships returned from circumnavigation in September 1522: found strait through Patagonia into Pacific Ocean (which they named), Magellan didn’t survive
Over 1,600 of his books shipwrecked on voyage from Venice to Spain during same period Description of Spain and his Latin dictionary halted; created new catalogue with updated list and description of biblioglyphs, along with “catalogue of shipwrecked books” he intended to replace
“The bringing together of books and shipwreck, of the struggle for memory in the face of fast-eroding loss.”
Strove to put down roots to better safeguard his library; “it was a library of flesh and blood—or rather paper, ink, and vellum—and needed to be housed, guarded, ordered, and arranged, tended to like a garden that must be restrained from the wildness to which it always wishes to return.”
Circumnavigation and the actual size of the world questioned the Spain/Portugal treaty re: Castile islands, so Hernando chosen to lead Spanish side of negotiations
Difficult to determine size of longitude, and one of Hernando’s five suggested methods included observation of eclipses (which was successfully used more than 200 years later)
Erasmus: “Is there anywhere on earth exempt from this swarm of new books? Even if, taken out one at a time, they offered something worth knowing, the very mass of them would be an impediment to learning.”
Catalog for titles and authors, but for contents Hernando hired “sumistas” to summarize each volume into a few sentences for Book of Epitomes; helped call bullshit on publishers’ ostentatious and misleading titles, and showed Hernando was considering the universality of his library in terms of shape as well as size (denser rather than larger)
“As Hernando‘s collection grew, he seems to have conceived a misery familiar to all lovers of learning: the feeling that for every step one advances, a million paths to further understanding open up—a world of opportunity, of course, but also something that makes a mockery of the pathetic progress you have made so far.”
Created subject index Book of Materials, which wrestled with which terms to use and where to file titles; used most common terms, which countered the contemporary goal of language as perfectly unambiguous and abstract perfection
1537 made final journey to Hispaniola with Columbus’s exhumed remains and planned library in will (“Biblioteca Hernandina”)
Largest collection in Europe with over 15,000 volumes, and largest printed image and music collections
In letter to Charles V: “It is one thing to build a library of those things found in our time: but entirely another to order things in such a way that all new things are sought out and gathered forever.”
Instructed his librarians and collectors to avoid large booksellers and manuscripts, and instead acquire everyday pamphlets, one-sheets ballads, and other ephemera
His “profound intuition” that “the invention of print had upended the world of information, replacing one in which a few authoritative and venerable manuscripts held sway with one flooded by an endless supply of the new.”
Verses he asked to be inscribed near the door of the library: “The wise care little for widely held views / As most people are easily swayed / And that which they throw from their houses / Is later thought to be of highest value.”
Plan was for one enormous room with a metal grate at center for readers to read but not take volumes: “a doomsday vault that would prevent human culture from being lost again on the scale it had at the end of the classical period. This central, read-only data bank would also guarantee there was somewhere in which matters of great doubt could be resolved: a complete library, with a copy of every book by every author”
Book of Epitomes and Book of Materials meant to be copied and distributed through Spain to allow unlimited readers to navigate the locked-down collection from a distance
“As a counterpart to his global memory vault, Hernando had created a search engine.”
Table of Authors and Sciences a prototype of card catalog with annotations for browsing
Nearing death, created an inventory of all his things to be appended to his will and assigned his estate to Diego’s son Luis, who’d lose interest in it
Funeral monument he designed for himself uses Columbus’s coat of arms but with his four catalogs (Book of Authors, Sciences, Epitomes, Materials) as supporters of the shield instead of beasts
Fewer than 4,000 volumes of his library remain today after decay, neglect, and the Inquisition
Some of Hernando’s ideas taken up later: magnetic variation by Edmund Halley, longitude by John Harrison’s marine chronometer, searchable global repository by the Internet
“The great Renaissance historian Flavio Biondo likened this process, of bringing hidden parts of the past back into view, to the act of bringing up planks from a shipwreck, making visible what once was drowned in oblivion, submerged beneath the waters of time. Though most of Hernando’s great vessel has been wrecked, the pieces we are able to gather tell a story of someone who set out before us into the unknown. They are relics of a vision that is with us once again.”