And there is even a first-hand description by Doctor Diego Alvarez Chanca of Seville, physician to the King and Queen and to the Princess, Doña Juana la Loca, who at his own request went “as doctor on the second fleet Columbus prepared for the Indies.” Prose was not his strong point, but he says in a letter to the Cabildo of Seville: “We went along the coast of this island and the Indian women we were carrying said it was not inhabited, that those of Caribe had unpeopled it and so we did not stop there.” That was Montserrat; then comes Redonda: “Later that afternoon we saw another, night by then, near that island we missed some shoals for fear of which we lay at anchor, for we didn’t dare go unless it was day.” It would appear from all of this that though they never set foot on the island, probably because access to Redonda was so difficult, they did spend a night near it, because of some shoals.
A much more recent mention, and in another language, is that of the historian and professor, first at Oxford — where else? — then at Harvard, Samuel Eliot Morison, who, in addition to writing an important biography of the Admiral in 1942 for which he won a Pulitzer Prize, led the Harvard Columbus Expedition, which in the autumn of 1939 and winter of 1940 followed the Navigator’s routes in two schooners, in order to describe in detail all that Columbus found, saw and did in his journeys, point by point and step by step. In the biography he said, “Proceeding in a general northwesterly direction, the fleet passed along a small, steep and rounded but inaccessible rock less than a mile long which Columbus named Santa María la Redonda, ‘St. Mary the Rotund.’ Redonda retains her name and her importance as a sea mark to this day; but she has never been worth inhabiting.” His mention of it in a later book, dating from 1974, is less reserved: “Then came a minuscule, round island, Santa Maria la Redonda: it has never been inhabited, though a crazy American once declared himself its king.” Of course the word had to be “crazy,” the same word that, according to the British press, the Gestapo used, in its day, to describe Hugh Oloff de Wet. If only Professor Morison were still alive, and knew.
Accustomed to the robbery, looting, plagiarism and endless espionage of the contemporary university, which leads professors to avoid breathing a word about any project-they’re working on until it is no longer at the research stage but is safely entombed in shelvable print, my friend Eric Southworth sometimes asks if, since I’m dividing these pages into two volumes, I’m not worried that someone will “appropriate” the “real characters” while I write or think about or await the second volume, and, for example, recount all that I have yet to tell or still don’t know about Ewart or De Wet or Gawsworth or the bandit Red Dean or the Maneras.
That might not be very pleasant, but I don’t fear it, and anyway, these “characters” don’t really belong to anyone, they are real, and if I feel that they are in some way mine it’s only because I happened to notice them while I was writing novels or plotting stories and they were hardly remembered by a living souclass="underline" perhaps only by Hugh Cecil, Anthony Edkins, Steve Eng, Roger Dobson, Jon Wynne-Tyson, my estimable father and myself — I mean until recently. Or it may be that it was these characters who crossed paths with me. Nor would I want to know everything, about them or about anyone, least of all about myself. And if I did know everything I don’t believe I would ever tell it, we’re always selecting and discarding, knowing or not knowing often doesn’t matter much. Or sometimes true knowledge turns out to make no difference, and then invention can begin.
Anyway, as I’ve already said, I’m devoid of scholarly or journalistic inclinations and would never dive into libraries and collections of periodicals or the Internet, which I don’t use, I write on a typewriter and go over the pages by hand; I would never dash off to interview witnesses or heirs or survivors, recording their scraps of memory in order to find out things that don’t come to find me spontaneously and of their own accord, without any effort on my part, without my moving from here, from my place, from where I can send requests to the booksellers of Oxford and York and London or challenge Don Juan Benet to demonstrate his sagacity. It’s as if I scorned any knowledge that is achieved by force or seized, that is active and anxious and dependent upon the will, my own will, of course: any knowledge I don’t deserve. This attitude would be unforgivably incompetent in a scholar, reporter or scientist, but I am none of those things nor am I thinking of becoming any of them in order to speak of things that have happened to me or interest me or affect me, or of things that have not happened to me but that I have slowly learned of and therefore remember.
It wouldn’t be particularly unlikely or strange were some thief or looter or plagiarist or opportunist, who also abound, silent and masked amid the tempest of literature, to speed-read all of Cardboard Crucifix, if it can be found (but Ben Bass has disappeared), and all of whatever Wilfrid Ewart and James Denham published in their short lives and Stephen Graham in his long one, and a biography of the bandit Dean of Canterbury, if any such thing exists, and all the unknown short novels of Enrique Manera, my Antillean great-grandfather. Or were they to dredge up the living relatives or resentful ex-lovers or the silent papers, waiting without impatience. That is not my work. The most such a person could ever tell would be the facts, and facts in themselves are nothing, language cannot reproduce them just as any number of repetitions, with their sharp edges, cannot reproduce the time that is past or gone, or revive the dead who have already gone past us and been lost in that time. And at this point who knows what has become real and what has become fictitious.
Who can say if the unlikely news I’m now pondering is real or fictitious, about a Spanish daughter of Matthew Phipps Shiel, native of Montserrat with its high mountains and first king of Redonda (but perhaps it’s no more incredible than the fact that his royalties now belong to me): a child born on July 16, 1900, in London, to his ephemeral wife Carolina or Lina, inscribed in the register of births on August 30 as Dolores Katherine Shiel, the only known legitimate descendent of Felipe I, whose parents called her Lola like my grandmother or Lolita like my mother, as women named Dolores are always called. Shiel and Lina were married in the Italian church of St Peter in the London district of Holborn on November 3, 1898, soon it will be a century ago, in the presence of their respective mother-in-law and mother, another Lola, and a friend, Arthur Machen, Archduke of Redonda. Shiel was thirty-three years old; Lina was only eighteen.