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Source ISBN: 9780008146221

Ebook Edition © May 2018 ISBN: 9780008146238

Version: 2018-05-04

Dedication

for Kelcey

Contents

Cover

Title Page

Dedication

Maps

Epigraph

Prologue: Seville, 12 July 1539

PART I: THE SORCERER’S APPRENTICE

I. The Return from Ocean

II. In the Chamber of Clean Blood

III. The Book of Prophecies

IV. Rites of Passage

V. A Knowledge of Night

PART II: A LANGUAGE OF PICTURES

VI. Shoes & Ships & Sealing Wax

VII. The World City

VIII. The Architecture of Order

IX. An Empire of Dictionaries

PART III: AN ATLAS OF THE WORLD

X. The Devil in the Details

XI. No Place Like Home

XII. Cutting Through

XIII. The Library Without Walls

PART IV: SETTING THINGS IN ORDER

XIV. Another Europe and the Same

XV. The King of Nowhere

XVI. Last Orders

XVII. Epilogue: Ideas on the Shelf

Acknowledgements

A Note on the

Life and Deeds of the Admiral

Notes on Sources

Picture Section

List of Illustrations

Index

Also by Edward Wilson-Lee

About the Author

About the Publisher

Maps

The route of Columbus’ Fourth Voyage, 1502–4, on which he was accompanied by Hernando.

Detail of Hernando and Columbus’ route around the Caribbean and Central America in 1502–4.

The route of Hernando’s journey through Europe in 1520–2; the dashed portions are conjectured.

The route of Hernando’s journey through Europe in 1529–31; the dashed portions are conjectured.

Epigraph

Achilles’ shield is therefore the epiphany of Form, of the way in which art manages to construct harmonious representations that establish an order, a hierarchy … Homer was able to construct (imagine) a closed form because he … knew the world he talked about, he knew its laws, causes and effects, and this is why he was able to

give it a form

. There is, however, another mode of artistic representation, i.e., when we do not know the boundaries of what we wish to portray, when we do not know how many things we are talking about and presume their number to be, if not infinite, then at least astronomically large … The infinity of aesthetics is a sensation that follows from the finite and perfect completeness of the thing we admire, while the other form of representation we are talking about suggests infinity almost

physically

, because in fact

it does not end

, nor does it conclude in form. We shall call this representative mode the

list

, or

catalogue

UMBERTO ECO,

The Infinity of Lists

Como todos los hombres de la Biblioteca, he viajado en mi juventud; he peregrinado en busca de un libro, acaso del catálogo de catálogos; ahora que mis ojos casi no pueden descifrar lo que escribo, me preparo a morir a unas pocas leguas del hexágono en que nací.

JORGE LUIS BORGES, ‘El Biblioteca de Babel’

The use of letters was invented for the sake of remembering things, which are bound by letters lest they slip away into oblivion.

ISIDORE OF SEVILLE,

Etymologies

I.iii

So if the invention of the Shippe was thought so noble, which carryeth riches, and commodities from place to place, and consociateth the most remote regions in participation of their fruits: how much more are letters to be magnified, which as Shippes, passe through the vast Seas of time, and make ages so distant, to participate of the wisdome, illuminations, and inventions the one of the other?

FRANCIS BACON,

Advancement of Learning

PROLOGUE:

Seville, 12 July 1539

On the morning of his death, Hernando Colón called for a bowl of dirt to be brought to him in bed. He told his servants that he was too weak to raise his arms and instructed them to rub the soil on his face. While many of them had been with him for a decade or more and were intensely loyal, they refused on this occasion to obey his orders, thinking he must finally have taken leave of his senses. Hernando mustered the strength he needed and reached into the bowl by himself, smearing his face with the silt of the Guadalquivir, the river that meandered through Seville and held his house in the crook of its arm. As he painted himself with mud, Hernando spoke some words in Latin that began to make sense of this performance for those who had gathered at his side:

remember that you are dust

, he said,

and unto dust you will return

. On the opposite bank of the river, Hernando’s father – Christopher Columbus, Admiral of the Ocean Sea – had recently been raised from the same soil, from a grave in which he had lain for thirty years. If Hernando’s word is to be believed (and for many things in Columbus’ life we have only Hernando’s word) the men who opened his tomb may have been surprised to find, along with the explorer’s bones, a pile of chains. These chains were a link to a moment in Hernando’s past, when at twelve years old his mostly absent father appeared bound in them, returning as a prisoner from the paradise he looked upon as his discovery and his gift to Spain.

The meaning of the great explorer’s grave-goods, of these chains that he wished to be placed with him in his tomb, was something Hernando only divulged late in life, when he came to write his father’s story. But the dust with which he painted himself on the morning of his death would have made sense to all around him: it was a symbol of abject humility, humility he knew he c

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