Columbus’ sons were not in the least shielded from this complete collapse of their father’s power, his reputation and his prospects: instead, they were directly in the firing line as settlers from Hispaniola began to bypass the New World administration and present their complaints directly to the Monarchs. Hernando recalled many years later, with the vividness reserved for experiences of shame, the mob of fifty or so returned settlers who had installed themselves (with a barrel of wine) outside the gate of the Alhambra where the court was in residence. The mob took to shouting loud complaints about how the Admiral had ruined them by withholding their wages, and brayed their petition to Ferdinand every time he attempted to leave the palace, shouting ‘Pay us! Pay us!’ However, the most virulent of their attacks were reserved for Diego and the eleven-year-old Hernando, who in a rare instance quotes the direct speech hurled at them by the mob:
Look at the Sons of the Admiral of Mosquitos, of him who discovered the Land of Vanity and the Land of Deceit, to be the sepulchre and the misery of the Gentlemen of Castile!
Hernando remembers how after this he and his brother avoided the mob, presumably now leaving the palace only through the back doors.16
The length of time the Monarchs withstood this onslaught of complaints speaks of their fidelity to Columbus and the strength of his supporters at court, but eventually even they could not resist the dispatch of a second inquest into affairs in the New World territories, this time led by Francisco de Bobadilla. A mere three months after Bobadilla landed in Santo Domingo on 23 August 1500, Hernando was to have the long-awaited reunion with his father. But the Columbus of Hernando’s twelfth year was not the gift-laden conjurer of his eighth. Instead, Columbus returned to Spain half stricken with blindness, to report that he and his brothers had been led, in the town named after their father, through crowds shouting insults and blowing horns at the fallen Admiral, past street corners covered with ballads lampooning the discoverer of the New World, and subjected to a show trial in which the judge Bobadilla incited the witnesses to pour their scorn upon Columbus. He landed at Cadiz on 20 November 1500, stripped of his governorship and his dignity, and bound in chains hand and foot.17
III.
During the period that followed Columbus’ appearance in chains, the weather-beaten, ageing explorer shared with his son a secret project, one that promised to reveal the world in an entirely new light. This work was designed to lift Columbus’ discoveries above the petty cost–benefit calculations on which many of the courtly debates were centred, framing them instead as events in a grand religious narrative of history, in which they would set the stage for the triumph of the Christian faith and the coming of the End of Time. The manuscript in which he compiled his evidence now survives as 84 leaves of badly damaged paper, sporadically filled with writing in a number of different hands. Each sheet of paper, originally made in Italy, is watermarked with a splayed hand below a six-pointed star. The work was initially given the rather bland, descriptive title of the ‘Book or collection of auctoritates [authoritative writings], sayings, opinions, and prophecies concerning the need to recover the Holy City and Mount Zion, and the finding and conversion of the islands of the Indies and of all peoples and nations’. Hernando was to rename it The Book of Prophecies, and the role he played in its creation is the first evidence of his growing genius for ordering.1
The chains were soon removed from the Admiral of the Ocean Sea – indeed, they would have been taken off sooner, had Columbus not refused the offer from the captain escorting him back, preferring to satisfy his fine sense of the theatrical by landing in Spain in the guise of a slave. The shackles neatly captured, for Columbus, the disparity between what he had achieved and how he had been rewarded: in the words of a prophecy he grew fond of quoting, he was the man who had broken the chains of Ocean that bounded the ancient world, and yet the chains of a captive were the only thing he had been given in return. This was the reason (Hernando recalled towards the end of his life) he had them set aside as a relic, to be placed in his tomb as a token of the world’s ingratitude. After ordering his release Ferdinand and Isabella asked him to come to them at Granada, and over the coming months Columbus resumed his Sisyphean task of attempting to re-establish the legitimacy of his claims to power and wealth from the New World. The Monarchs were quick to condemn Bobadilla’s treatment of their Admiral, and to appoint a new commission under Nicolás de Ovando to scrutinise Bobadilla’s own conduct, which must have afforded Columbus considerable satisfaction.2
Columbus was no longer content, however, to attend to these practical and administrative tasks, and during this period of residence in Spain he seems to have devoted increasing amounts of attention to The Book of Prophecies. This was not a sudden development in Columbus’ thinking: after all, he had sought since the earliest accounts of the New World to evoke the Edenic feel of the Caribbean, using its fertile climate and the nakedness of its inhabitants to suggest the enterprise was a step towards a blessed Golden Age (and, by extension, towards gold). But Columbus’ letters of October 1498 and February 1500 marked a significant shift in his thinking. In the first of these he reported his detour, at the beginning of the Third Voyage, around a three-headed island (he christened it ‘Trinidad’) towards another landmass, which he initially named ‘Isla Santa’ but later learned was terra firma – a continent – that the inhabitants of this region called Paria. Columbus’ three-month detour around Paria included some of the most harrowing events to date even for a man whose life had been a catalogue of near-death experiences. First among these was a period shortly after they reached the equator sailing south, during which they were becalmed for eight days in a heat so intense the ships’ holds turned to ovens and the decking planks began to groan and split. Drawing on his father’s logbooks, Hernando later ventured the opinion that had it not been for the relative cool of night and the occasional shower of rain, the ships would have been burned with everyone inside them. When the wind finally rose and they reached Trinidad their relief was cut short as they passed in horror through a sea channel between Trinidad and Paria, one that flowed as fast as a furious river, and in which waves from either end crashed in the middle, causing the water to rise like a cliff along the whole length of the strait. They called this strait at the southern end of Trinidad the Boca de la Sierpe, the Serpent’s Mouth. Their fear increased when they realised they were now trapped in a gulf between Trinidad and the mainland: they could not sail back south against the current of the Boca de la Sierpe, and it became clear their only route back towards Hispaniola lay through a similar channel to the north, to which they gave the twin-name Boca del Drago (Dragon’s Mouth). As if the moment were not fraught enough with danger, the crew had to do without the guidance of their leader: Columbus hadn’t been sleeping again and his eyes were so bloodshot with continual wakefulness that he was losing his sight. For a man obsessed with observing and recording every detail, and convinced he had a God-given sight that revealed things to him before others, this blindness must have been torture. Under these circumstances they took the only option open to them and ran the Boca del Drago. They survived but were spat out at such a pace that they only regained control after being carried on the current for sixty leagues.3
Though Columbus may have had to rely on the eyes of others on the visit to Paria, he began to believe he had been given a vision of something more. Struggling to fit the extraordinary experiences of Paria into a model he could understand, he reasoned that the ship’s movement had not been determined by simple natural phenomena, but by an irregularity in the shape of the earth. He now saw that the earth was not perfectly spherical: it was shaped like a woman’s breast, globular in form but rising to a peak like a nipple, a peak he reasoned was located at the easternmost point of the equator, and on top of which was to be found the Celestial Paradise. As evidence for this