Columbus’ letters and the objects he sent back to Spain with them are witnesses to a mind struggling to put this flood of new things into order, when every day produced some unheard-of wonder, a struggle that is the prehistory to his son’s lifelong quest to organise the world. Insofar as Columbus did attempt to impose a system on what he was seeing, he usually fell back on the worldview of medieval cosmography, in which the oddity of men and their customs showed how far from the centre of the world any given place was, whereas the perfumes of Araby and the abundance of gold were clues that one was approaching the earthly Jerusalem or the boundaries of the lost Eden. Columbus’ New World was to him strangely both of these things, both centre and periphery, both far from the known and approaching man’s point of origin. More often than not his reports of the New World simply never progressed beyond incoherent lists. We should not, however, assume that because the lists lacked order and seemed chaotic, this was a dispassionate and scientific record of what he was seeing: in the tradition of the medieval ennumeratio, the rambling list was often a way of describing God, whose divine incomprehensibility could not be expressed except by the use of dissimilar images. One such list, for instance, described Christ as the
source, way, right, rock, lion, light-bearer, lamb – door, hope, virtue, word, wisdom, prophet – victim, scion, shepherd, mountain, nets, dove – flame, giant, eagle, spouse, patience, worm …
Perhaps in imitation of this Columbus most often fell back on protestations of inexpressibility – that the marvellous beauty of the New World was something that could not be put into words but simply had to be seen, to be experienced in rapt admiration. This move at once produced a mystical impression of these new territories and postponed giving them a meaning, leaving Columbus the sole authority, having been the only one to see what could not be properly described.10
Some observations did manage to breach this defensive wall of conventional interpretation and blank wonder. The bafflement Columbus felt, for instance, at the natives of Cibao province ‘locking’ the doors of their huts by placing single canes across the entry, slender barriers that none of them would dream of breaching, witnesses the effect of a custom that could not be fitted into these schemes. These cane-locks could not be explained by either of the simple narratives used to understand the New World, of Edenic innocence on the one hand or barbaric bestiality on the other; instead, they confronted the viewer with a version of privacy unique to that culture. In time it would be precisely these oddities of custom that would lead European thinkers to wonder if their own customs – of dress, of behaviour, of morality – were not the natural and necessary practices of a civilised people but were equally arbitrary and nonsensical when viewed from outside of that culture. But these awakenings would remain for a long time dormant. In the meantime Columbus and his sponsors at court saw no irony in sending ‘cannibals’ back to Spain to cure them of their sinful appetite for human flesh by converting them to Christianity, membership of which cult they would regularly celebrate by eating the body of the Son of God during Mass. No one appeared to flinch at subjecting the stone cemies or idols of the Taíno to derision and mockery, as mere pieces of wood and stone that the natives thought could speak and to which they made offerings, while renaming Taíno places after statues of the Virgin and saints that had equally proved their blessedness by miraculous acts.
This growing body of knowledge about the western Atlantic gave rise during Columbus’ Second Voyage to the first systematic attempts to write about this New World, a process in which Hernando played a key part. In response to Columbus’ letters of 1494 Hernando’s tutor Peter Martyr declared his intention to write a history of the voyages of exploration and the lands they had encountered, a task that was to occupy him intermittently for the rest of his life. And a mail packet that arrived late in 1495, as the court toured Catalonia, contained the first attempt to write an ethnographic account of a New World people, in the form of Fray Ramón Pané’s extensive study of the habits and customs of the Taíno, a text that survives only because Hernando copied it wholesale into his writings about his father, and to which we owe most of our knowledge about a culture that was quickly eradicated by massacre, conversion and disease. Pané’s survey begins with a description of the Taíno sky-deity and his five-named mother, and their belief that mankind emerged from two caves, Cacibayagua and Amayauba, guarded by a man named Marocael (‘without eyelashes’) who was turned to stone for failing to guard the caves. The description then relates a story of how the first female humans disappeared to an Island of Women, leaving behind children whose cries turned into the croaking of frogs; the men who remained, like the Christians who first arrived from the sea, were a people without women, ones who took what they lacked. Pané records the two caves, from which the sun and moon emerge, contained two stone cemi idols named Boinayol (‘son of the serpent-formed storm-god’) and Maroya (‘cloudless’), as well as the Taíno belief that dead men roam the earth without navels, endlessly seeking to embrace the female Coaybay (‘absent ones’). His account of native culture ends with a description of their ritual chants (which he likens to those performed by Muslims), their shamanic witch doctors, and the way their idols were made, from trees that move from their rooted spot and reveal to the shaman the form they wish to take during a psychotropic cohoba trip. Perhaps Hernando would have felt some sympathy with the frogs central to Taíno culture, who were once children left by their mothers and whose croaking is the sound of them calling out to the parent they have lost.
Many of the stories that Hernando transcribed from Pané are jumbled and very difficult to understand, and Pané modestly admits the limitations of his account, noting he did not have enough paper to write on and was forced to attempt to memorise everything in order, and that furthermore the linguistic and cultural barrier prevented him from understanding many things fully. But this humility should not distract from the system quietly imposed by Pané on what he heard, which proceeds from an account of the Taíno gods, through their story of the creation of man, to their understanding of the shape of the cosmos and of the afterlife, and finally the social institutions that are an expression of their way of seeing the world, from their rituals and sacred objects to the way in which they believe bodies can be healed by their form of medicine. This European way of describing ‘exotic’ peoples, moving from religious beliefs to social practices, was not an invention of Pané’s, and indeed since Pané it has become so naturalised that we are in danger of missing the argument that it contains. Hernando may well have recognised that the description of the Taíno follows the form set down by classical works including Pliny’s Natural History and transmitted through the Middle Ages by Isidore of Seville’s Etymologies: both Pliny and Isidore attempt to describe the entirety of the world as it is known to them, and one might be tempted to see their encyclopedias as merely randomly ordered lists. Closer inspection, however, reveals a very clear organisational principle based on Aristotelian philosophy, moving (as one description has put it) from ‘the original to the derived, and from the natural to the artificial’. As in Pané’s description of the Taíno, this creates order by starting with the things from which the world is seen to come (the gods, Creation) before moving on to the things created (man) and in turn the things created by these creations (religious ceremonies, medical practices, etc). This seems a reasonable enough way of proceeding, but in practice it allows the Christian reader to dismiss the entirety of another culture on the basis of an incorrect belief in God: if the premises on which the culture is based are false (i.e. their notion of God), all practices, beliefs and customs derived from those premises must also be false. Tellingly, Pané’s document ends with an account of his part in the first New World conversion to Christianity, of the attempts by a violent opponent of the Christians (the cacique Guarionex) to destroy the Christian icons, and the public burning of Guarionex’ men by Bartholomew Columbus.11
The pattern of Hernando’s life at court, and of learning about the New World through his father’s letters, was interrupted by the sudden return of Columbus in 1496, after an absence of three years,