The forerunner of Google

On 9 May 1502, a young Spaniard joined the fleet setting sail for the newly discovered Americas. The boy, Hernando, was 13 and his father was Christopher Columbus, ‘Admiral of the Ocean Sea’. Although Columbus père had already crossed the Atlantic three times, this would nevertheless be a journey of almost unimaginable privation. Hernando would witness hurricanes, shark attacks and brutal battles, both with the tribes of the northern Panamanian coast and with mutineers from his own ship. He would suffer fevers, see his father denied entry into the port he had founded a decade earlier, and he would be shipwrecked, for more than a year, on the southern coast of Cuba.

Here, playing for time with the leaders of the Taíno islanders, who had been supplying provisions for the stranded Europeans, Columbus pulled off a feat of extraordinary bravado. Armed with his almanac and as wily as Odysseus, he threatened to bring down a lunar eclipse. Sure enough, at the appointed hour, the moon turned dark. The Taíno were impressed, and continued to feed Columbus’s men until they were rescued three months later.

This is the stuff of adventure fiction: from Mark Twain to Rider Haggard to Tintin, the eclipse gambit has had a long literary afterlife. For young Hernando, however, while he would idolise his father till his dying day, perhaps it is little wonder that he chose to spend his life thereafter on dry land. Besides, his achievements in adulthood would be, in their own way, as breathtaking as his exploits as a teenager. In The Catalogue of Shipwrecked Books Edward Wilson-Lee gives us the first biography in English of Hernando: scholar, courtier and book collector.