Simon - The catalogue of shipwrecked books: Christopher Columbus, his son, and the quest to build the worlds greatest library

The route of Hernandos journey through Europe in 152931; the dashed portions are conjectured.

O n the morning of his death, Hernando Coln 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, Hernandos fatherChristopher Columbus, Admiral of the Ocean Seahad recently been raised from the same soil, from a grave in which he had lain for thirty years. If Hernandos word is to be believed (and for many things in Columbuss life we have only Hernandos word), the men who opened his tomb may have been surprised to find, along with the explorers bones, a pile of chains. These chains were a link to a moment in Hernandos 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 explorers 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 fathers 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 could afford to vaunt because there was no doubt he had achieved something extraordinary. Hernando, the man who was welcoming his impending decay with open arms, had built an engine capable of withstanding forever the onslaught of time. He died shortly after this performance, at eight oclock in the morning.

An hour later the next act in Hernandos strange death pageant began. Those closest to him had gathered at his house for the reading of his will, reaching his Italianate villa by the river by passing through the Puerta de Goles (Hercules Gate) and the garden of unknown plants. Hernando had an extraordinary memory, an obsession with lists, and a delicate conscience, so his will tabulated in minute detail the people to whom he felt he owed something, right down to a mule driver whom he had shortchanged nearly two decades previously. But after the tables of his conscience had been cleared, his testament moved on to its great crescendo, a declaration all but incomprehensible to his time. The main heir to his fortune was not a person at all, but rather his marvelous creation, his library. As this was the first time in living memory that someone in Europe had left their worldly wealth to a group of books, the act itself must have been somewhat confusing; but it was even harder to make sense of given the form of the library in question. Most of Hernandos books were not like the precious manuscripts treasured by the great libraries of the dayvenerated tomes of theology, philosophy, and law, books that were often sumptuously bound to reflect the great value placed upon them. Instead, much of Hernandos collection consisted of books by authors of no fame or reputation, flimsy pamphlets, ballads printed on a single page and designed for pasting on tavern walls, and other such things that would have seemed just so much trash to many of his contemporaries. To some eyes, the great explorers son had left a legacy of