In Amazonia

by Raffles, Hugh

  I asked what nations those were which inhabited on the further side of those mountaines, beyond the valley of Amariocapana, he answered with a great sigh (as a man which had inward feeling of the losse of his conntrey and liberty, especially for that his eldest sonne was slain in a battel on that side of the mountaines, whom he most entirely loved), that he remembred in his fathers life time when he was very old, and himselfe a yoong man that there came down into that large valley of Guiana, a nation from so far off as the Sun slept, (for such were his own words,) with so great a multitude as they could not be numbred nor resisted, & that they wore large coats, and hats of crimson colour, which colour he expressed, by shewing a piece of red wood, wherewith my tent was supported, and that they were called Oreiones, and Epuremei, those that had slain and rooted out so many of the ancient people as there were leaves in the wood upon all the trees.53

  There is something quite out of the ordinary here: an ethnographic sensibility rare in the contemporary literature. Despite Ralegh’s controlling of the terms of the interview, the passage is striking for its labor of empathy, the resolve to break the barriers of language and capture the voice, gesture, and historicized subjectivity of Topiawari, less an indigene than a fellow noble. It is a narrative of doubling. Ralegh offers us the inner life of an outsider, his “inward feeling,” a tale of dispossession made real through the immediacy of reported speech and by the appeal to the universality of the emotionally specific—the loss of homeland, parent, and, as Ralegh himself had recently experienced, child. He shows a willingness to allow the equivalence of rank, with its embedded confusions of sentiment and honor, to transcend difference.54 As such, the account of their meeting is intended to impress upon his status-conscious readers the wonder of similitude, within an environment of difference:55

  This Topiawari is held for the proudest, and wisest of al the Orenoquopeni, and so he behaved himselfe towards me in all his answers at my returne, as I marvelled to finde a man of that gravity and judgement, and of so good discourse, that had no helpe of learning nor breed.56

  The familiar bustle in Topiawari’s camp takes Ralegh back to “a great market or faire in England,” and, when he again meets the old king on his return downstream, the deferential visitor “desires” him to “instruct me” some more about Guiana.57

  Although by now we sense that this discoverie will be little more than a scouting trip, Ralegh uses the authority of the old man’s detailed advice as the premise on which to abandon his planned march on El Dorado. Finally, they undertake what Ralegh presents as a symbolic exchange of kin:

  [H]e freely gave me his onelie sonne to take with me into England, and hoped, that though he himselfe had but a short tyme to live, yet that by our meanes his sonne shoulde be established after his death: and I left with him one Frauncis Sparrow, a servant of captain Gifford, (who was desirous to tarry and coulde describe a cuntrey with his pen) and a boy of mine called Hugh Goodwin, to learne the language.58

  We have to be wary of reading too much of Topiawari through Ralegh. It is, however, clear that native leaders were faced with a number of competing options at this moment of sudden involvement in imperial competition. Topiawari, too, is negotiating an ally at these meetings, and their exchange patterns the relationship in a manner notable for its formal mutuality. We might regard this transaction as an inaugural moment in the relationship between Guiana and Europe. Ralegh, with no apparent sense of the potential ambiguities of such an act, offers it as a moment of purity: a ceremonialized meeting of distinct societies, untainted by cultural or—thanks to his vigilance—sexual miscegenation. We know that native Americans were already long marked by commercial and political intercourse with Europeans.59 Here though, we meet exchange of a different order. True, Ralegh presents a highly specific contract embodying strategic and affective association between the English and the “Arromaia.” But this transaction also transcends such individualities, signaling a new transoceanic regime as human bodies circulate, securing the cultural and genetic hybridization that has become axiomatic in local discourse on modern Amazonia. It is one of the starting points for a complex history of institutionalization and counter appropriation that today is often figured too easily as a tragic endgame of cultural extinction. Topiawari sent several men to London: of these, two will later assist Ralegh with botanical experiments during his imprisonment in the Tower, and it seems plausible that a third is the Anthony Canabre who serves as Robert Harcourt’s interpreter on the Oiapoque in 1609, returning to mediate between what are no longer two worlds.60

  Yet, even such elaborate dialogue cannot guarantee communication. Ralegh had failed to hear what Topiawari was telling him. The Guianan requested a body of fifty armed men as defense against the Spanish. The Englishman demurred, leaving just Sparrey and the sixteen-year-old Goodwin. The following year, when Lawrence Keymis sailed out to consolidate the alliance, he found that Topiawari had fled ahead of a small force of Berrio’s men and was now dead. Compounding disaster, Berrio had established the fort of San Thomé on the strategic site of the old man’s port, blockading the gateway to El Dorado.61 This was the garrison where Wat Ralegh, the eldest son, would be killed under Keymis’ command in 1618 and the reef upon which the El Dorado adventure was finally wrecked.

  Perhaps it is useful here to recall Stephen Greenblatt’s comment that the “overriding interest” of these chroniclers of New World encounters was “not knowledge of the other but practice upon the other.”62 Clearly, the separation is not so clean and, as I have emphasized, there are also reciprocities: local people were involved in a set of practices that were no less tied up in the political economy of exploration than were those of the Europeans whose invention it was. Yet, the emphasis on practice is rewarding. For Topiawari, practice on the other, however disadvantageous the terms, extended across the Atlantic to the Elizabethan Court. For Ralegh, it also stretched beyond Guiana to London, and, similarly, to the reception of The Discoverie in the chambers of state and the joint-stock companies. Both men knew that the return voyage carried the burden of the colonial future. However much he may elide the structural asymmetries, Ralegh infuses his text with this powerful intimation that, like himself, Topiawari and the other Guianan leaders are involved in a high-stakes game for personal and political survival. It is with a sense of ontological equivalence that he creates these recognizable Americans, as circumscribed by calculation and micropolitics as any Tudor courtier or statesman.

  But this is shifting ground. And there is another, radically different language in which Ralegh tells the story of Guiana. It is, unmistakably, what Michel de Certeau has called “writing that conquers,” writing that uses the New World as “a blank, “savage” page on which Western desire will be written.”63 It is writing that draws the lines of difference and spells out their consequences. And it arrives most jarringly at the end of Ralegh’s narrative in a vision of violation, a proposition that colors all that came before:

  To conclude, Guiana is a Countrey that hath yet her Maydenhead, never sackt, turned, nor wrought, the face of the earth hath not been torne, nor the vertue and salt of the soyle spent by manurance, the graves have not been opened for gold, the mines not broken with sledges, nor their Images puld down out of their temples.64

  Complicated figures. But conventional also. George Chapman, in De Guiana carmen Epicum, his epic poem that commemorates Ralegh’s first voyage, imagines the English conquerors with “their glad feet on smooth Guiana’s breast.”65 For Lawrence Keymis, Guiana is also a woman, and similarly enticing, although no longer so innocent. Her lands “do prostitute themselves unto us,” he writes in his account of 1596, “like a faire and beautifull woman in the pride and floure of desired yeeres.”66

  Sexual conquest was already a commonplace metaphor for colonial subjugation, drawing on the long-standing symbolic alignment of nature and the feminine.67 The figuring of Guiana as woman—in the context of the male expedition—extends the logic of contemporary gender relations, feminizing Guia
nan landscapes and Guianans, naturalizing the politics of dispossession. For the Elizabethan Englishman, it also has its more specific referent: an assertion of subject masculinity in an age of peculiar ambivalence.68 Ralegh’s virgin Guiana, the site of his own sexual restraint, is a too-transparent metaphor for his virgin queen, and its symbolic violation at the close of his account can be read as a mark of his recent humiliations, a textual response to his banishment, wounded and nasty. His tone turns threatening, the wheedling diminishes. If Elizabeth is not willing to “invade and conquere”—to perform the rape in her own name—she will forfeit dominion to “men worthy to be kings thereof” who “will undertake it of themselves.”69 He resolves the ambivalence around his vaunted continence but in a manner dangerous and self-defeating. His parting shot becomes a further instance of The Discoverie’s failure as a persuasive text. It strikes the wrong tone, as if he suspects the limits of his writerly powers and has tired of this game, as if he knows already that Elizabeth will not be seduced into supporting this extravagant American fantasy.

  The potential assaults on Guiana’s virtue that Ralegh lists here—rape, theft, ransack—are the very activities from which he and his men so self-consciously refrain. It is their rejection that separates English civility from Spanish barbarity, enabling Keymis’ fantasy of Guiana, the eager colonial vassal, inviting his entry. Other actions however—the working, turning, and planting of the land—are the foundation of a putatively different type of colonial enterprise, and the selfsame projects that have only recently failed Ralegh in Roanoke. This conflation of plantation and violation is thus an uneasy coupling. It implies that all along disavowal has been merely deferral, a further incitement. Plantation will take place, the land will be worked and turned, and the riches of the country will be pillaged without restraint. The character of English imperial command is not so different from that of the Spanish after all.

  In this discourse of Guianan planting, the value of the region derives not just from the temporary stay of colonial depradation but, equally, from the lack of industry of native people. When, in the following decades, the English achieve their brief settlement of the Oiapoque and Amazon, it is, inevitably, to turn the soil, to plant tobacco and sugar, and to undertake manurance. With his usual bluntness, Keymis captures the logic of Ralegh’s conceit, and he does so with an inversion that domesticates the territory to emphasize its appeal. In Guiana, he tells potential investors, there are “whole shires of fruitfull rich grounds, lying now waste for want of people.”70 It is an invitation that will echo down the centuries: a land poor in people but rich in resources; a land of indolence awaiting only industry; a pristine landscape on which the marks of culture are rendered invisible, invalid, unproductive.71

  DISCOVERY

  A full century had passed since Columbus’ landfall in the Caribbean, yet at the time of Ralegh’s outfitting of the El Dorado venture, Europe was still in the midst of a long and uneven process of intellectual assimilation. Rather than a definitive intellectual watershed, the discovery of the New World had turned out to be an extended, uncertain, and incomplete process, one that as readily enlivened medieval thought as overthrew it. Debates on such questions as the character of native humanity and the distinctiveness of New World nature were to sustain their urgency well into the seventeenth century and beyond, and it was not only in relation to definitions of America that local hierarchies were destabilized.72 In the most famous examples—Montaigne’s “Of cannibals” (1580) and “Of coaches” (c. 1585)—scathing satire of the civilized was combined with precise, conventionally idealized depictions of reported native American mores, and drawing on the tradition recently initiated by Las Casas, the conduct of New World colonialism was taken as a measure of European debasement.73

  American novelties were not, as often supposed, a fatal challenge to a coherent system of Old World tradition and belief.74 Among Renaissance scholars, familiarity with the classical texts had brought with it a rich sense of human, geographical, and historical difference—as well as strategies for rendering difference intelligible. Moreover, any philosophical coherence had long since fragmented, and the accounts of discovery entered Europe as supplements to the lively antagonism between humanists and scholastics in which many of the chroniclers themselves participated. The foundational texts, the geography and natural history of Herodotus, Strabo, and Pliny, among others, had proved fluid and adaptable and, taken together as a complex and frictional corpus, had been subject to appraisal in a dissenting atmosphere that substantially predated the American voyages.75 By the late sixteenth century, Lorraine Daston and Katherine Park tell us, European scholars were engaged in a bruising “intellectual free-for-all.”76

  For humanists, New World discoveries could enrich and strengthen the traditional schema while simultaneously demonstrating the foolishness of a dogmatic reliance on the ancient corpus. Once landfall in the Americas was confirmed, it was the Bible that often emerged as the most secure authority, and reconciliation among the scriptures, the ancients, and the discoveries was a familiar struggle—one in which Ralegh was to engage repeatedly in the History of the World.77 Travelers to America could experience firsthand the falsity of the Aristotelian klimata underlying the Renaissance map’s division into habitable oikoumene and outlying antipodean, boreal and torrid zones, the preserves of the marvelous races. The Bible, on the other hand, with a versatile imprecision, records that God instructed Adam and Eve to go forth and multiply. This is the starting point for the official Spanish chronicles of the New World, the Decades (1511–30) written by the Milanese humanist, Peter Martyr. In 1587, Hakluyt dedicated his edition of the Decades to Ralegh, who read the chronicles before setting out for Guiana and who shared Martyr’s “critical skepticism,”78 as well as the pre-evolutionary conviction in a global nature, invented by God and intact since Creation.

  Notwithstanding creationist unity, early modern scholars—especially those who crossed the Atlantic—found ways of making sense of American difference without reductionism, although without resolving the tension between difference and resemblance, novelty and the familiar. Accounts are laden with the hyperbole of difference—“I know all the earth doth not yeeld the like confluence of streames and branches.” Yet, interpretation often demanded a falling-back on personal experience. Ralegh manages novelty via its refraction through pre-existing aesthetic conventions, a comparative method in which familiar precedent is invoked through historical as well as geographical analogue, through reference to ancient Rome as well as to English parkland.79 Even his Amazons show appropriate Tudor virtues: “cruell and bloodthirsty” in war, so courtly in love that they “cast lots for their Valentines.”80

  Ralegh’s reports of such New World marvels are worth considering in some detail. He takes care to establish that his interest in Amazons, oyster-trees, and the headless Ewaipanoma is a curiosity born of science. Unable to meet any Amazons for himself, yet “very desirous to understand the truth,” he “made inquirie amongst the most ancient and best traveled of the Orenoqueponi.”81 He proceeds according to a hierarchy of proofs: textual authority (at various points he cites such familiar figures as Pliny, Mandeville, Thevet, and Martyr), reliable hearsay (often gained in conversation with local leaders), and, the only unequivocal test, the evidence of his own eyes.82 This was an empiricist methodology derived from the experimental, a logic through which the discoveries were becoming reinterpreted as the ground of a modern science, distinct from prior knowledges: “I am aware,” wrote the astronomer Kepler in 1610, “how great a difference there is between theoretical speculation and visual experience; between Ptolemy’s discussion of the antipodes and Columbus’s discovery of the New World.”83

  A methodological distinction of this type was entirely consistent with Ralegh’s larger contribution to the English maritime effort. At once patron, student, and pioneer of scientific navigation, he assembled a collaborative network of practitioners and scholars caught up in the associated development of cartography, l
ogarithms, and optics, practices explicitly conceived as applied sciences.84 As well as veterans of the recent Irish subjugations—a proving ground for would-be conquistadores—this select circle of Americanists included merchants, mariners, and instrument-makers, the prominent astronomer-mathematicians John Dee and Thomas Hariot, and the artists Theodore de Bry and John White, whose images of native American life were to have lasting influence on European ideas of geographical and historical difference.85

  This was a comprehensive attempt to found imperial expansion on a systematic, empirical basis. And, with some justification, it has been said that Ralegh made of each of his voyages a scientific expedition.86 By this, we should not imagine the type of extravagant data-collecting regime famously imposed on James Cook by Joseph Banks in 1768.87 Although Ralegh’s interests in New World botanicals and mineralogy might anticipate those of later colonial travelers, his principal energies were devoted to the foundational task of placing navigation on a scientific footing.88 Held in the Tower from 1603, Ralegh read Copernicus and Galileo (as well as Machiavelli), and he equipped a workshop where, assisted by the Puritan Lady Apsley and Arawak men who had returned with him from Guiana in 1595, he experimented with ways of keeping meat fresh at sea, of curing scurvy, of distilling fresh water from salt water, and of deriving medicinals from various New World plants.89