In Amazonia

by Raffles, Hugh

  This utilitarian experimentation fits squarely within the broader context of what Christopher Hill has called “a greedy demand for scientific information” in sixteenth-century England.90 The Ralegh circle aggressively promoted a vernacular science, seeing in it the basis for a new expansionist maritime politics. Merchant recognition that effective navigation, mining, and surveying relied on modern mathematics and astronomy created the conditions for a potent alliance of capital, craft, and scholarship outside the Aristotelian bulwarks of the academy. Indeed, the laboratories of the period were not in Oxbridge, but in London, in the workshops developing new techniques to process glass, paper, dyes, metal, and sugar.91 The intellectual energy of this coalescence of popular scientific production—a rash of books aimed at merchants, craftsmen, mariners, and surveyors—was fueled by a popular nationalist anti-Spanish politics that embraced economic liberalism and was expressed most succinctly in the Hakluytian demand for free commercial access to the Spanish-American empire. It was to be seen clearly in the sponsorship of Gresham College, an urban, merchant-founded, adult education institution, providing free lectures in the vernacular and self-consciously organized as an alternative to the universities.92

  Yet, we should be cautious about mapping sixteenth-century science as coherently prefigurative of our own. This was a world in which the phenomena of nature were “bursting and pullulating,” animated, and brimming with cosmic meaning.93 Although Ralegh’s was an instrumental experimentation, it was also a product of the surge of interest in natural history and natural philosophy expressed in the eclectic encyclopedia of the Kunst-und Wunderkammer, the cabinets of curiosity.94 Manifold new territories, scientific as well as geographic, were on the horizon. Ralegh may have approached his marvels with circumspection, but he was by no means immune to their substance, and, as a mode of inquiry, the non-compartmentalized natural philosophy he debated with Dee and Hariot has few corollaries in the post-nineteenth-century distribution of art, religion, and science. There was no incongruity to the pairing of imperial hardheadedness with fabulous non-headedness: the reincarnation of the ancient world’s acephalous Blemmyes as the Guianan Ewaipanoma. Such juxtaposition speaks to an epistemological ordering in which “the conventional antinomies of visionary and down-to-earth, romantic and practical, have little meaning.”95 In John Dee, we meet an energetic imperial scholar whose translation of Euclid’s Elements (1570) was part of a modernist program of extending the methods of quantitative analysis to natural questions, and whose mechanistic view of the universe would be familiar to Kepler, Galileo, and Descartes.96 Yet, Dee’s knowledge was also divine revelation, communicated in his long-running conversations with angels, and his remarkable technical contribution to modern navigation was bound up with his desire to reach Cathay and find Initiates to the secrets of the Philosopher’s Stone and Elixir of Life.97

  Nonetheless, in the chatter surrounding Elizabeth, Ralegh’s reports of the marvels of Guiana contributed to a general disbelief in the reliability of his narrative, which was received locally as a work of the literary imagination.98 In this time of growing skepticism, when a readership capable of scrutiny and comparison was being formed from the glut of travelers’ narratives, authorial credibility was no longer a given, and Ralegh’s qualification and hedging were inadequate defense.99 Amazons and Acephali—as well as creatures that did not appear in The Discoverie, such as dog-headed Cynocephali and the Sciopodes whose one foot was so large they could rest in its shade—were traceable through Pliny to Greek reports of their fifth-century B.C. Persian and Egyptian neighbors.100 Just as they demeaned the paltry financial rewards of his voyage, accusing him of having returned via Barbary to buy the ore he presented at Court, Ralegh’s opponents ridiculed the narrative extravagances of The Discoverie.

  Yet, animated by the overseas voyages, the medieval vogue for the wondrous in nature was still flourishing in late-sixteenth-century Europe,101 and Ralegh’s marveling was fashionable and tactical, as well as epistemological. The Discoverie was an immediate literary success. It ran through three editions in 1596, was rapidly translated into Latin and German, and circulated internationally in several of the popular compendia of discovery narratives—Hakluyt’s Principal Navigations, Hulsius’ Voyages, and the Latin, French, and German editions of De Bry’s Americae.102 It produced echoes in the literature of the seventeenth century and stayed in print in various European languages throughout the eighteenth. From Othello’s bitter memory of the “Anthropophagi and men whose heads / Do grow beneath their shoulders” (1604) and De Bry’s and Hulsius’ foregrounding of Amazons and Ewaipanoma in their engravings—(left, Hulsius’ title page of 1599)—it seems clear that the same sensations for which The Discoverie suffered at Court were not only a source of its wider appeal, but also diagnostic and constitutive of the early modern European imaginary of Guianan nature.

  ON THE NATURE OF GUIANA

  When Ralegh claimed that nowhere else on earth was there such a confusion of streams, “the one crossing the other so many times, and all so faire and large, and so like one to another, as no man can tell which to take,” it was not an excuse for his disarray. Rather, he was underscoring difference to emphasize his ultimate achievement in overcoming it. Yet, in this passage and in many others like it, what Ralegh succeeds in conveying above all is the radical and protean otherness of Guianan nature. Rhetorically, on the heels of a long and scholarly preamble appealing for investment and patronage on the basis of the failures of previous El Dorado expeditions, what he offers is a characteristically self-defeating contradiction, one that undermines his own strategic interests. Because why should an investor risk dearly held capital to enter a world of such prodigious unpredictability?

  American nature was psychically as well as physically unsettling. New nature demanded new vocabulary. Waterfall, cataract, lagoon, whirlpool, swamp, hurricane, tornado, and thunderstorm all entered the English language in the first hundred years of exploration.103 Ralegh gropes for neologisms, twisting existing terms to fit unfamiliar phenomena. Words, literally, fail him. He settles on overfals, “the turbulent meeting of contrary currents,” to capture what we now recognize as the spectacular Caroní Falls. But his usage will not survive past 1613.104

  New referents demanded new signifiers. Peter Hulme has traced the steady displacement of the English vernacular “tempest” by “hurricane,” from the Arawakan hurakan. The English language seemed incapable of describing such alien terror, only the American word would do. The hurricane was “an attribute of native savagery, a fact confirmed by its tendency of attacking … the marks of civility: the building of towns and the practices of tillage and husbandry.”105 The otherness of such phenomena was only meaningful when tied to its geographical and human context. It was through such congruencies and correspondences between the natural and the human that Ralegh and his contemporaries found order in their pullulating world, and regulated—E.M.W. Tillyard’s word is “tamed”—the anomalies of New World nature.106 Yet Ralegh consistently avoids the negative conflation of human and natural menace. Rather than between European and native, his principal arenas of conflict in Guiana are those between English and Spanish, and between humans—English, Spanish, and native—and nature.

  The unpredictable logic of this nature is at times unfathomable to the European traveler. Tides, currents, islands, winds, rains, and hills circumscribe travel and open its potentialities. But they do so firmly on their own account, not as embodiments of human difference. Looking through the eyes of his native pilots, Ralegh sees a landscape that is intensely mercurial, as frequently inimical as it is harmonious. Even at its most familiar, this animate New World remains more exotic than the indigenous Guianans with whom he is able to converse and whose signs he can claim to interpret. This nature, he knows, is profoundly meaningful, but too often its meanings elude him, to the point that his entire enterprise is under threat.

  The heightened imaginative pitch of the opening scenes on the Orinoco establishes a tension b
etween the invaders and nature that Ralegh never fully succeeds in ordering. Although he manages to acquire a knowledgeable pilot, he can never relax because “many times the old man himselfe was in great doubt which river to take.”107 The traumatic crossing of the estuary shakes Ralegh’s confidence, and The Discoverie is peppered with commentary on the punishments he and his men endure from waters and climate. It is a struggle that continues right up until their nail-biting departure from the delta:

  [W]hen we were arrived at the sea side then grew our greatest doubt, and the bitterest of all our journey forepassed, for I protest before God, that wee were in a most desperate estate: for the same night which we ancored in the river of Capuri, where it falleth into the sea, there arose a mighty storme, and the rivers mouth was at least a league broad, so as we ran before night close under the land with our small boates, and brought the Galley as neere as we could, but she had as much a doe to live as coulde be, and there wanted little of her sinking, and all those in her.108

  Much like the storm through which Shakespeare was to deposit Antonio, Ferdinand, and the rest on Prospero’s Island in The Tempest (1611), Ralegh’s bracketing of his time on the Orinoco in this way is an effective device to dramatize the distinctiveness of the New World. Like those of Shakespeare’s shipwrecked Italians, the torments undergone by Ralegh and his men pervade the narrative, potent auguries that enliven natural phenomena and bring them to life as actors, center stage in the drama of discovery, a nature that colonizes consciousness and manipulates mortality.

  Such anxiety here. Part stems from the enforced dependence on local people that these unnerving natural conditions create. Three days after capturing their new guide, a man familiar with this stretch of the river, their galley hits a sandbar. They haul it off and press on. But the next day finds them rowing hard against the swiftly running current:

  [W]e had then no shift but to perswade the companies that it was but two or three daies worke, and therfore desired them to take paines, every gentleman and others taking their turns to row, and to spell one the other at the howers end…. When three daies more were overgone, our companies began to despaire, the weather being extreame hot, the river bordered with verie high trees that kept away the aire, and the currant against us every daie stronger than other: But we evermore commanded our Pilots to promise an end the next daie, and used it so long as we were driven to assure them from fower reaches of the river to three, and so to two, and so to the next reach: but so long we laboured as many daies were spent, and so driven to draw our selves to harder allowance, our bread even at the last, and no drinke at all: and our men and our selves so wearied and scorched, and doubtfull withall whether we should ever perform it or no.109

  These are desperate straits. Weak from hunger and heat, Ralegh is reduced to pleading with his men to keep going lest “the worlde … laugh us to scorne.”110 At this moment of despair, suddenly, unannounced, Guianan nature shows its other face:

  On the banks of these rivers were divers sorts of fruits good to eate, flowers and trees of that varietie as were sufficient to make ten volumes of herbals, we releeved ourselves manie times with the fruits of the countrey, and sometimes with foule and fish: we saw birds of all colours, some carnation, some crimson, orenge tawny, purple, greene, watched [pale blue], and of all other sorts both simple and mixt, as it was unto us a great good passing of the time to behold them, besides the reliefe we founde by killing some store of them with our fouling peeces.111

  This is the first intimation Ralegh gives us that nature in Guiana can be as paradisaical as it is nightmarish. It is a decisive moment, but hardly unexpected. One unspoken premise of the voyage to Guiana has always been “the literalization of the celestial Jerusalem” in El Dorado’s gilded hallways.112 This, of course, is merely one migration of many in this period: Berrio has moved El Dorado from the upper Amazon to Guiana; Montaigne’s natural savage has relocated to Brazil from Cicero’s Scythia and Tacitus’ Germany; and, here, with Columbus and Ralegh, Mandeville’s missing paradise of the east finds an American home.113 What is significant is the need to fix these places geographically as well as imaginatively, to find in them objects of exploration, discovery, and possession. Ralegh, we know, consistently comes up short of his stated goal and must always resort to finding substance in the mostly inconsequential. He does not discover El Dorado or even its outliers. He fails to secure meaningful alliances, and the meager treasure with which he returns nowhere approximates the cost of his voyage. But there are numinous moments in The Discoverie when he comes close to finding earthly paradise.

  It is not just an image of effortless plenty in the above passage; it is the experience of surfeit, thrilling for minds that find science in the blatantly sensuous (ten herbals!). And at the very moment the writing convinces that all human needs could be met right here, Ralegh organizes a reconnaissance party and they are off once again—this time to a village where the pilot has told them they can find more familiar foods: “bread, hens, fish, and … countrey wine.”114 Having reached this enchanted place after such suffering, they leave so soon; despite its abundance such exotic nature is inadequate—an early anticipation of Buffon’s thesis on the inferiority of the Americas. The Eden of Ralegh’s imagination will be more pastoral.

  There is a further anticipation here. In the recurrent ambivalence toward Guianan nature resides the germ of the tropical—the equatorial colonial world of natural excess, sensual and brutish, that will come to saturate European geographies of northern South America.115 With no looking back, in what will eventually be a well-worn trope of tropicality, Ralegh leads his men out of the haven of domestic security, and the expedition again plunges into the uncanny waters of illegibility and distrust. The pattern is repeated. Rowing endlessly and without food on the pitch-black river, using their swords to hack through the branches that bar their path, they suspect treason and “[determine] to hang the Pilot” who, in a startling reversal tells his captors that their goal is just a little farther, just one more reach of the river.116 At the moment all hope seems lost, they hear dogs barking and spy a light. They find bread and hens. They almost meet the local chief who, laden with gold “came so neer us” while they rode at anchor in the night “as his Canoas grated against our barges.”117 And the next morning, elation, epiphany. “On both sides of this river, we passed the most beautifull countrie that ever mine eies beheld.” It is the same leap from despair to rapture, the same vertiginous lunge between unstable poles:

  [A]nd whereas all that we had seen before was nothing but woods, prickles, bushes, and thornes, heere we beheld plaines of twenty miles in length, the grasse short and greene, and in divers parts groves of trees by themselves, as if they had been by all the art and labour in the world so made of purpose: and stil as we rowed, the Deere came downe feeding by the waters side, as if they had been used to a keepers call. Upon this river there were great store of fowle, and of many sorts: we saw in it divers sorts of strange fishes, and of marvellous bignes[s] but for Lagartos [alligators] it exceeded, for there were thousands of those uglie serpents.118

  Unlike the terrifying country through which they had just passed, this is an eminently legible scene, a thoroughly civilized prospect—at least, that is, until the irrupting memento mori, the serpents in paradise. What distinguishes this place, as Ralegh makes clear in emphasizing the contrast, is the sense of space and perspective it allows the relieved travelers. Claustrophobia is gone, and all of a sudden they behold the landscape stretching in a great plain to the horizon. In this visual reckoning there is, for the first time, the possibility of possession, and a glimmer of what Ralegh will see in his final figure of Guiana, never sackt.

  It is this sympathetic landscape’s ability to offer itself as a prospect that makes it so ripe for colonization. The forests and mountains beloved of modern guerrilla armies are anathema to an invading force; open space allows for defensive encampment as well as advance. And the prospect allows possession in other ways: by virtue of its famili
arity and its naturalness. The short green grass, the tame deer, the attractively arranged groves of trees, the abundant fowl (ready for a gentleman’s sport)—if it weren’t for the reptiles it could be the same Thames “Meadow, by the Riuers side” where Edmund Spenser “a Flocke of Nymphes … chaunced to espy” in Prothalamion, his neo-pastoral wedding allegory of the following year.119

  But what else? It was Raymond Williams who pointed out that Philip Sidney’s definitive Arcadia (1590) “was written in a park which had been made by enclosing a whole village and evicting the tenants.”120 In England, such landscapes had to be manufactured from nature’s craggy raw materials. Ralegh, who devoted time and money to the planting of his gardens at Sherbourne in Dorset, knew the aesthetic, social, and moral value of such improvement. The revelation here is that such a landscape could apparently simply exist. Rather than having to undertake the labor of recreation, this scene offers the prospect of a simple occupation of the idyllic picturesque—a prospect that is not just a view, but a projection into a domesticated future.

  An Englishman could stop and settle in these Guianan plains. They were places to create a future out of the reminders of a faraway life, places to know that peaceful “sensation of suddenly being at home in the world.”121 Why should Ralegh be immune to this prospective nostalgia of the traveler? Overlooking “the valley of Amariocapana,” he shades his eyes to view the savanna receding into the far distance:

  [A]s fayre grounde, and as beawtifull fieldes, as any man hath ever seene, with divers copses scattered heere and there by the rivers side, and all as full of deare, as any forrest or parke in England, and in every lake and river the like abundance of fish and fowle.122

  At moments such as these, The Discoverie is suffused with familiar analogy. Ralegh sees a mountain as “a white Church towre,” and hears bells clashing in the sound of cataracts. The “town of Toparimaca … standing on a little hill, in an excellent prospect, with goodly gardens a mile compasse round about it, and two very faire and large ponds of fish adjoyning” could be in his own Mendip Hills.123 The exotic landscape resonates with Englishness: the inevitable point of reference and the sign of the latent materiality of colonial transformation.