The Catalogue of Shipwrecked Books. Edward Wilson-Lee

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