CITIES BUILT ON BOOKS For centuries, people have carried founding libraries with them to establish an identity for themselves in the places in which they live, as Alberto Manguel explains
Above and below Illustrations from Ulisse Aldrovandi’s Monstrorum Historia (1642). 22 THE LONDON LIBRARY MAGAZINE
In my Buenos Aires High School, alongside thorough readings of Don Quixote and other Spanish classics, we studied the bloody adventures that some call the Conquest and others the Invasion of the Americas. We learned that the literate and illiterate soldiers who sailed for the New World carried with them not only their mythologies and faith – mermaids and amazons, giants and unicorns, and the redeeming god who is nailed to a cross and the tale of the virgin mother – but also the printed books in which these stories were recorded or retold. It was moving to read in Christopher Columbus’s account of his first voyage across the Atlantic in 1492 that, upon reaching the coast of what is now Venezuela, the admiral saw three manatees swimming close to his ship, and wrote that he observed ‘three mermaids emerge quite visibly from the sea, but’ , he added with commendable honesty, ‘they are not as beautiful as they are made out to be’ . Antonio Pigafetta, who travelled with the Portuguese explorer Ferdinand Magellan on his voyage around the world in 1519–22, described the inhabitants of the southernmost part of the continent as big-footed or ‘patagones’ because he thought he recognised in the tall natives dressed in boots and capes of fur, the Nephilim, the offspring of the gods and of the daughters of men mentioned in the Book of Genesis. Francisco de Orellana gave the river and the jungle of the land he explored the name of Amazon because, in the women warriors he and his men encountered, Orellana recognised the
