The Catalogue of Shipwrecked Books I The Return from Ocean Hernando Colón''s earliest recorded memory is characteristically precise. It was an hour before sunrise on Wednesday, the twenty-fifth of September 1493. He was standing next to his older half brother, Diego, looking out at the harbor 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 laborers 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 favorable 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 harbor 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. 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''s 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, Guacanagarí, and named in honor of the Christmas Day on which it was founded. Columbus''s 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 harbor in their skiffs, swarming to see the island natives whom Columbus had brought home as part of his plunder, Columbus''s 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 A contemporary drawing (1509) of the harbor of Cadiz, site of Hernando''s earliest recorded memory. 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''s exploits. Hernando may have been present at Córdoba 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''s 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 harbor 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 Isabella finally completed the Reconquista, the capture of the Spanish peninsula from the Muslims who had ruled it (almost whole or in parts) for seven hundred years, a crusade that was cast as the righteous restoration of Christian rule. In an attempt to transform the small symbolic victory at Granada into a turning point in the ancient clash between the Abrahamic faiths, the Reyes Católicos celebrated their military triumph by presenting the Jews in their dominions with an ultimatum: forced conversion or exile. This was only an escalation of a long-standing Spanish history of persecuting those of the Jewish faith, but it proved a decisive one. Despite the fact that the Jewish community had been established in Iberia even longer than the Muslims and had been central to the flourishing of culture and society in Arabic Spain, many of them could not stomach the price of keeping their homes, which included agreeing that their sacred Talmud was merely a forgery designed to stop the onward march of the Christian faith. Those who chose to stay also faced the prospect of having their property confiscated by the likes of Tomás de Torquemada, the leader of the Inquisition, set up in 1478, who would use this fortune to finance a golden age of Spanish art and exploration. A great multitude prepared to leave, and in their number went many of the greatest intellectuals of fifteenth-century Spain. Forced, as one chronicler records, to sell their houses for a donkey and their vineyards for a little bread, they made the most of the disaster by casting it as a new Exodus, in which the Lord of Hosts would lead them in triumph to the Promised Land. Observing this pathetic scene did not restrain the same chronicler from accusing them of secretly taking much of the kingdom''s gold with them.

The rabbis attempted to alleviate any feeling of desperation by having the women and children sing to the sounds of timbrels as they walked away from their homes. Though the Jews were given temporary asylum in Portugal, their safe haven there lasted only as long as Columbus''s first voyage, and when their paths crossed in Lisbon, the Jews were on the move again, boarding ships bound for North Africa.3 Even in his travel-worn state Columbus was quick to find a way for his own expedition to play a part in this grand historic narrative. His voyage west had, after all, been given royal sanction from the camp at Santa Fe outside the walls of Granada, at which Ferdinand and Isabella were celebrating the recent capitulation of the city''s last Muslim king, Boabdil, and from which they would also later issue the edict expelling the Jews. The letter Columbus sent ahead to Barcelona from Portugal sang of the marvelous fertility of the islands he had found, in perpetual bloom, and the naked innocence of the native people, who were willing to part with the abundant gold of that region for a few trifles from the visitors they regarded as descended from heaven. If the Jews had a new Exodus, Columbus offered Christians a new Eden. The letter announced that even if the natives knew nothing of Castile or of Christ, they showed themselves miraculously ready to serve both. As a token of their part in an expanded Spanish empire, Columbus had renamed these islands as he took possession of them, so that they now reflected the hierarchy of Spanish power, from Christ the Savior on down through the Monarchs and royal children: San Salvador Santa Maria de la Concepción Fernandina Isabela Juana Hispaniola In its final paragraph the letter makes clear what has been implicit in the preceding pages, namely that these islands Columbus had encountered should be added to the list of famous victories achieved by the Catholic Monarchs, one that--like the conquest of the Moorish kingdoms and the expulsion of the Jews--would expand both the dominion of the Church and fill the coffers of Spain.

This letter, soon printed again in Latin at Rome and Basel, and accompanied by a picture showing a single m.