We can also only guess at Hernando’s private feelings about the wild-eyed claims of a father whom he idolised but must, on the brink of manhood, have recognised as increasingly eccentric and misunderstood by those in power. His surviving entries in the Book are largely of a general, moralising nature and steer clear of the occult identification of the Admiral and his acts with biblical events, characters and prophecies. Yet the experience must have had a profound effect on Hernando, and it is tempting to read the course of his own later life as written also in the Book of Prophecies. One of his most extensive entries, and indeed the last in the manuscript as a whole, is another poem about the paths that open to the Virtuous Man; but it is also a code, an acrostic verse whose first words taken together form a sentence, ‘Memorare Novissima Tua et In Eternam Non Peccabis’ – remember your death and you will never sin. The addition of an apocalyptic context to the life of a pubescent boy with a megalomanic father can hardly have failed to affect him irreversibly.18
As we shall see, in later life Hernando did much to reduce the role of millenarian theories in the public narrative of his father’s life, turning Columbus from a provoker of the End Times to the first figure in a new world. But Hernando’s attempt to distance himself and his father from these ideas may not tell the whole truth of his role in the Book of Prophecies. Large sections are missing from the Book, one of which bears the following comment: ‘Whoever removed these pages acted badly, for this was the best prophecy in this book.’ This note was almost certainly written during Hernando’s lifetime or very shortly thereafter, suggesting perhaps that the pages were removed by Hernando himself or by those close to him. What is more, both of the larger sections missing from the manuscript, including the one lamented above, are flanked by passages in Hernando’s handwriting, increasing the likelihood that they contained writings by him. The missing prophecies will likely never be recovered, but the question of their contents is one to which there will be cause to return.19
Whatever part Hernando played in creating the Book of Prophecies, and however he felt about the father who held it up to himself as a mirror, it is clear Hernando was increasingly close to Columbus during this period. The most dramatic evidence of this came when it was decided the thirteen-year-old Hernando would accompany his father on his impending Fourth Voyage back to the New World. There is no sign Columbus ever considered taking his adult elder son and heir Diego with him. There were good practical reasons for this, both to leave someone to argue the Admiral’s case at court and to preserve the dynasty in case of disaster. But Hernando would (both then and in later life) have good reason to feel he had a legacy of knowledge and experience from his father that was worth more than a mere monetary inheritance.
Gorricio returned the uncompleted Book of Prophecies less than two months before Hernando and his father set sail for the New World, likely prompted by Columbus’ desire to take the manuscript with him on the voyage, a theory confirmed by the fact that the Admiral quotes several passages included in the Book in letters written during this voyage. There are also a number of entries that strongly suggest passages were continuing to be added to the manuscript even as Hernando and his father travelled around the New World. It is mesmerising to think that not only were the revelations of the Book of Prophecies being honed even as father and son explored new reaches of the western Atlantic, but, even more astonishingly, that the Book’s predictions about Tarshish, Ophir and Kittim and their place in providential history meant they were in effect carrying with them a guidebook to unknown lands. The prophetic manuscript functioned like a map in reverse, providing them with landmarks that needed to be arranged on the landscape they were about to witness.20
IV.
The fleet that left from Cadiz on 9 May 1502 consisted of four ships, each of which would become a character in the months ahead. References to them can sometimes be hard to sort, given that those on the voyage called them by different names, some proper to the ships themselves, some related to their point of origin and some related to their crew. These four square-rigged caravels were: the Capitana, referred to as such because it was the flagship that carried Columbus and Hernando – its proper name, if it ever had one, is lost to history; the Vizcaína, from Biscay; the Santo or Gallega, from Galicia; and the Bermuda or Santiago de Palos, from Andalusia. Only three of the four ships could carry a full complement of supplies, as the Bermuda (captained by Bartholomew Columbus) drew so low in the water that waves washed on to the deck under full sail. A shipping manifest survives, giving a list of what was stocked for the crew of 140-odd men:
2000 arrobas of wine (c. 5,000 gallons)
800 quintals of hardtack (ship’s biscuit, c. 36 tons)
200 pork bellies
8 pipes of oil
8 tuns of vinegar
24 cows’ worth salt beef
960 fillets of salted mullet
720 other salted fish
2,000 wheels of cheese
12 cahizes of chickpeas (c. 340kg)
8 cahizes of beans (c. 225kg)
mustard
rocket
garlic
onions
4 fishing nets, plus lines and hooks
20 quintals of tallow (c. 900kg)
10 quintals of pitch (c. 450kg)
10,000 nails
20,000 carded goods (blankets, caulking oakum, hemp)
To these, listed roughly in descending order of volume, can be added a few things we deduce from later references: maps, nautical instruments, paper for logs and letters, and the Book of Prophecies. These swiftly dwindling supplies would be the only familiar things to populate Hernando’s world over the coming months and years, and they were slowly replaced with new and unheard-of things accumulated along the way. The superbly detailed account of this journey he later wrote was no longer simply reliant on the documents and reports he could gather: this was a record of personal experience, which, as the exquisite observations and interpretations show, laid new foundations of thought in the thirteen-year-old boy and would later shape the order he would bring to the world around him.1
If Hernando expected to leave the familiar behind after weighing anchor at Cadiz he must have been disappointed. The fleet stopped first at Santa Catalina then crossed in front of the Pillars of Hercules (also known as the Strait of Gibraltar) to north Africa, where they coasted along until they reached the town of Arcila, in modern Morocco. Hernando may have imagined himself on the verge of a chivalric encounter when approaching this place, as Columbus had intended to provide aid to the Portuguese besieged there, relieving them from the onslaught of the Barbary Moors. Sadly for Hernando, by the time they reached Arcila the siege had been lifted, and the whitewashed town rising up a hillside from behind its cove and sea wall may have seemed little different to the many settlements the Muslims had built along the facing coast of Spain. Hernando did briefly disembark to visit the town’s wounded captain, only to find himself surrounded by Portuguese relatives of Columbus’ first wife, Filipa Moniz. From Arcila the fleet crossed to the Canary Islands, passing Lanzarote and Fuerteventura, then docking at Maspalomas on Gran Canaria for the customary final resupply of wood