THE SHIPWRECK, THE ECLIPSE AND THE UNIVERSAL LIBRARY

Hernando (or Ferdinand) Columbus

In which a celestial almanac saved Christopher Columbus and his stranded crew from starvation – and inspired his son, Hernando, to build a unique doomsday vault of books.

On 29 February 1504, Hernando Colón – then 15 years old – had been living on a shipwreck off the northern coast of Jamaica for eight months and five days. Though the main deck of the ship was submerged at high tide, the cabin in which he slept on the raised deck was safe from the waves – and also from the Taíno inhabitants on the shore, who had grown increasingly weary of the presence of these strange intruders. The Spanish explorers had initially been able to trade copper bells and glass beads for the local cassava bread, but the Taíno people’s taste for these trinkets had long since been exhausted, and the Spaniards’ supplies of food were dwindling fast.

Luckily for Hernando, he shared the cabin with one of the greatest magicians the world had known: his father. Cristóbal Colón, as he was called in Spanish, had risen from humble beginnings as a weaver’s son to become one of the best-known seafaring adventurers in history, with titles and a fortune beyond the dreams of most. Today, he’s widely known as Christopher Columbus.

Father and son had set out two years previously from Cádiz with four ships, intent on discovering a route to Cathay (China), which had also been Columbus’s goal in 1492. But that passage remained elusive, and as they coasted past what’s now Panama that fleet of four vessels dwindled to two, ravaged by woodworm and hurricanes.

The survivors sailed north for Hispaniola (the island now divided between Haiti and Dominican Republic), centre of Spanish operations in the Caribbean, but the remaining ships were so riddled with holes – like a honeycomb, as Hernando later wrote – that Columbus was forced to order the ships run aground off Jamaica before they sank.

After eight months living on the wrecks, with no sign of a rescue party, the situation looked bleak. But Columbus was in possession of a magic book – a pamphlet written by astronomer Abraham Zacuto, one of the many Spanish Jews who had been expelled from Spain in 1493. The 'Almanach Perpetuum' included an extraordinarily precise timetable for future lunar eclipses extending several decades – and one was predicted for that very evening.

Columbus summoned Taíno chieftains from tribes in the surrounding area, telling them that his god was a vengeful one who, that very evening, would swallow the moon as a warning to the Taíno against their continued refusal to trade with the ships. It was a bold gamble: after nearly two difficult years since sailing from Spain, he could not have been wholly certain of the date.

Yet Columbus’s luck held and, as Hernando later recalled, a howl of fear rose from the islanders as the setting sun revealed the face of the moon being rapidly obscured. Terrified, the Taíno were convinced of Columbus’s claims, and gave the Spanish additional food – enough to last them until their rescue from Jamaica four months later.

There were many aspects of this episode that must have stuck in Hernando’s mind in later life, not least the sight of his father reduced to using parlour tricks to save his hide in this most desperate of straits, and the fact that such tricks actually worked. But one pivotal point that must have struck him was the immense advantage conferred by this simple printed pamphlet – a flimsy and inexpensive product, but one that bestowed on its possessor extraordinary power.

It was precisely this kind of ephemeral product of the printing press that Hernando was to put at the centre of his own life’s ambition: a universal library that would encapsulate the world of knowledge just as his father’s intended circumnavigation was supposed to encircle the globe.

Over the course of his 35 remaining years, Hernando turned his hand to many things: he proposed a circumnavigation of the globe to finish what his father had begun; he served as a diplomat and cartographer as Spain and Portugal plotted to carve up the world between them; he started a dictionary and a cosmographical encyclopaedia of Spain; and he may have established the earliest botanical garden in Europe. But from the beginning his greatest passion was books. He took with him four chests containing 238 of them when he returned to the New World in 1509. And later, living in Rome during the age of Leonardo and Raphael, he began to acquire them in such numbers as to suggest the beginnings of a larger ambition.

In many respects, Hernando preferred the shadows to the glare of fame, lingering in the background even in the biography he wrote of his father. Yet through that book he became central to how history was to remember Christopher Columbus and think of the voyages he undertook.

We can recreate Hernando’s world in resplendent detail through the obsessive lists he made describing everything around him. This tendency to record the minutiae, making lists of everything he saw – on occasion taking inventories of his rooms, even down to bits of string and balls of wax – also enables us to follow the course of his project in extraordinary detail.

Importantly, for every book he bought from the age of 21 onwards, he noted the place, date and cost of purchase, as well as where and when he read the book, and whether he’d ever met the author. This enables us to follow a bibliomaniac of Renaissance Europe in ways that would be unimaginable without his catalogues. A vast number of the books he bought and listed in his catalogues have since disappeared entirely; we know about these only from his detailed lists.

Hernando’s lust for books was not unique among the men of his day. His age witnessed the birth of many great libraries, from the Biblioteca Laurenziana (Laurentian Library) in Florence – with its reading room designed by Michelangelo – to Oxford’s Bodleian Library. What set Hernando’s library apart, however, was its openness to absolutely everything that was available in the marketplace of books, reflecting his ambition to collect it all.

Most of his fellow Renaissance bibliomaniacs were scouring ancient monasteries in hopes of finding lost Roman and Greek works buried among the manuscripts. Hernando, meanwhile, saw that the printing press was changing the way information flowed around the world, enabling vast numbers of titles to be quickly and cheaply produced and distributed. Much like the engineers of search algorithms today, Hernando believed that whoever was able to collect, sort, and distil this flood of information would have a tool of extraordinary power. So, whereas the Bodleian famously closed its doors to cheap printed materials such as the plays of Shakespeare and Marlowe, Hernando’s library absorbed everything – from recipe books and bawdy ballads to books of law, medicine and philosophy.

The collection grew so rapidly that by 1526 Hernando could no longer hope to store his library in chests. That year he began to build an immense villa in the Italianate style on the banks of the river Guadalquivir in Seville. Like many Renaissance humanists (including the English statesman and author Sir Thomas More, who that same year began construction on his house in Chelsea), Hernando chose to build his home and library outside the city walls. This allowed him both to participate in the busy life of the city and to retire at other times into the tranquil surroundings of a garden for reading and contemplation.

Though the building was destroyed in the 17th century, contemporary images and descriptions give us some sense of what it looked like. With a front spanning about 60 metres, and nearly 24 metres deep, the edifice comprised a series of cube-shaped rooms spread over two floors. Extensive landscaping provided a view across to his father’s resting place at the Monastery of Santa María de las Cuevas, as well as to allow for an extensive garden of astonishing variety.

Though Hernando would have found models for this kind of suburban library in the works of ancient writers such as Cicero, what he was attempting was on an entirely different scale. Contemporary descriptions suggest that the garden may have had as many as 5,000 trees, some possibly imported from the New World to provide local samples of exotic life. As for the library itself, collecting on this scale brought challenges. One of Hernando’s inventions to deal with the extraordinary number of books he had accrued would be familiar to readers today: the wall-mounted case for vertical storage of books – or, as we would call it, a bookshelf.

Previous collections had largely been stored in chests or simply stacked on tables or in cupboards, and were small enough that a librarian with a decent memory could remember the location of each book, and pull them out without tipping over the other ones. However, as Hernando’s collection ballooned towards its final extent, numbering some 15,000–20,000 books, new measures were required. These modern bookshelves, first built for Hernando’s library and then appearing in the royal Escorial Library in Madrid (the oldest ones surviving today), allowed the weight of the books to be displaced onto the walls, and the spines to be labelled so that the books could be ordered and easily retrieved.

Storing the books was one problem, but navigating them was wholly another. The sheer quantity of books threatened to make the library unmanageable, because within any given category – ‘histories’, for example, or ‘authors whose names begin with an 'M’ – there were still a vast number of titles. Hernando experimented with many different ways of ordering his library, discovering in each its advantages and shortcomings.

During the last 13 years of his life, Hernando raced to finish the building and put instructions in place for the library’s organisation and perpetual growth, contending with a rising tide of books and his declining health. He was driven by a fear that his failure might mean the loss of this treasure trove of knowledge and culture. Like many others of the period, Hernando lived in the shadow cast by the classical culture of Greece and Rome, and was acutely aware of the fact that the vast majority of the writings of the ancients had been lost during the thousand intervening years.

Hernando’s library, then, had to be a doomsday vault, safeguarding Renaissance culture from the oblivion that had been visited upon the classical world. But it must also be a living organism, capable of feeding Spain’s empire with information and providing an authoritative answer to each question, resolving – he hoped – many of the religious and political controversies that wracked the public sphere during his lifetime.

The system he designed – with its elaborate and bizarre combinations of cages to protect the books, and its widely distributed catalogues that would allow everyone to draw upon the riches of the library – was a response to these contending urges to share and yet protect.

Perhaps the spectre that loomed largest for Hernando was that of the great Library of Alexandria, the most famous librarian of which, Eratosthenes, was a geographer like Hernando. (Eratosthenes had produced one of the most widely used estimates of the earth’s circumference using astronomical measurements with which Hernando would have been intimately familiar from his work as a mapmaker.) But the library at Alexandria, which had gathered together the thought of the ancient Mediterranean world, had disappeared in its entirety, destroyed – it was believed – either by fire or by invading armies. It left only an ideal to which to aspire, and a warning about the potential fate of such ambitious projects.

Over the following centuries, the library dwindled to a fraction of its original size through neglect. Spurned, ignored and locked away in an attic in Seville Cathedral for hundreds of years, a small but crucial portion of this library – about a quarter of the books, and almost all the catalogues – nevertheless survived (and survives today in the cathedral library), waiting for an age more able to appreciate its wonders.

The legacy of this library was a complex one. Hernando lived, in a sense, at the event horizon of printed information. Though during his youth a library of everything might have been possible, the amount of printed material was quickly spiralling beyond anyone’s ability to control. The ages that followed spoke in grand terms about their universal libraries and knowledge projects, but in reality these were often much more modest affairs, kept under control by strictly limiting what was deemed worthy of inclusion in the library.

A project to rival the ambition of Hernando’s would have to await the arrival of digitised books, optical character recognition and machine reading, enabling computers to achieve what humans never could. Even then, the extraordinary Google Books project foundered at an early stage, mired in arguments over intellectual property and the future of how thought would be paid for. Hernando’s quest, and the eventual fate of his library, holds many lessons for our own information age, with its rapidly expanding networks and quickly disappearing products – lessons that we are only just beginning to learn.

Written by Edward Wilson-Lee in "BBC World Histories Magazine",UK, August 2018, excerpts pp.26-33.Digitized, adapted and illustrated to be posted by Leopoldo Costa.