In Amazonia

by Raffles, Hugh

  21. A challenge of historical writing is to resist the certainty of hindsight when reimagining the possibilities of the lived moment. This point is elegantly elaborated in relation to the conquest of America by Jonathan Goldberg, “The History That Will Be,” in Premodern Sexualities, ed. Louise Fradenberg and Carla Freccero (New York: Routledge, 1996), 3–21.

  22. Whitehead, Discoverie, 138. All emphases in this and other quotations from The Discoverie are present in the original text.

  23. Even when this strategy met with its greatest success—the capture and looting of the treasure-laden Portuguese carrack, the Madre de Dios, in 1592—most of the profit scattered with the sailors on their return to Dorset. See Edwards, The Life, vol. 1, 155–58.

  24. Cited in Murdo J. Macloed, “Spain and America: The Atlantic Trade, 1492–1720,” in The Cambridge History of Latin America, vol. I: Colonial Latin America, ed. Leslie Bethell (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984), 314–88, 387. Also, see John H. Elliott, The Old World and the New, 1492–1650 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1970), 54–78.

  25. Helgerson, Forms of Nationhood, 151–91; Taylor, Late Tudor, 1–38; Rabb, Enterprise and Empire, 19–92; William R. Scott, The Constitution and Finance of English, Scottish and Irish Joint-Stock Companies to 1720 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1910–12), vol. 2.

  26. David B. Quinn, Explorers and Colonies: America, 1500–1625 (London: The Hambledon Press, 1990); Helgerson, Forms of Nationhood.

  27. “The Letters Patents, Granted by the Queenes Majestie to M. Walter Ralegh, now Knight, for the Discovering and Planting of New Lands and Countries, to Continue the Space of 6. Yeeres and No More,” in The Portable Hakluyt’s Voyages, ed. Irwin R. Blacker (New York: Viking, 1965), 279–85, 279.

  28. See Lacey, Ralegh, 15–17. John Aubrey, in his Brief Lives ed. Oliver Lawson Dick (London: Secker & Warburg, 1949) informs us both that Ralegh “spake broad Devonshire to his dying day” (255) and that “In his youth for several yeares he was under streights for want of money. I remember that Mr. Thomas Child, of Worcestershire, told me that Sir Walter borrowed a Gowne of him when he was at Oxford (they were both of the same College) which he never restored, nor money for it” (253).

  29. “Epistle Dedicatorie,” in Whitehead, Discoverie, 121.

  30. William H. Sherman, John Dee: The Politics of Reading and Writing in the English Renaissance (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1995), 182–92.

  31. Whitehead, Discoverie, 135.

  32. Ibid., 156.

  33. Ibid., 158, 179, 148.

  34. Antonello Gerbi, Nature in the New World: From Christopher Columbus to Gonzalo Fernández de Oviedo, trans. Jeremy Moyle (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1985), 93. Also, Jonathan Goldberg, Sodometries: Renaissance Texts, Modern Sexualities (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1992), 179–222.

  35. Joyce Lorimer, “Ralegh’s First Reconnaissance of Guiana? An English Survey of the Orinoco in 1587,” Terra Incognitae 9 (1977): 7–21. Dom Antonio was the aggrieved king-in-exile whose accession in 1580 had been preempted by his cousin, Philip II, thus cementing a Spanish control of the Iberian peninsula that lasted until 1640.

  36. Andrews, Elizabethan Privateering, 173.

  37. On Spanish concerns about such vulnerabilities, see Ojer, La formación, 353–96.

  38. See Eva G. R. Taylor, “Introduction,” in The Original Writings and Correspondence of the Two Richard Hakluyts, ed. Eva G. R. Taylor, vol. 1 (Hakluyt Society Second Series No. 76. London: Hakluyt Society, 1935), 47; and Charles Nicholl, The Creature in the Map: A Journey to El Dorado (New York: Morrow, 1995), 32–37.

  39. This was the pre-existing narrative context within which Ralegh interpreted Topiawari’s tales of crimson-hatted foreigners attacking from the west (see below, n. 53). It is worth noting the correspondence between this story of Andean invasion and the diffusionary models of cultural development in the Americas that came to dominate Amazonian studies in the early and mid-twentieth century. As we know, scholars such as Julian Steward and Betty Meggers explained the presence of “complex” societies in Amazonia by positing an early migration from the Andes. Burdened with a developmentalist theory of culture that rested on a close causative relationship between the ecological potential of an area and the societies that could emerge there, Steward, Meggers, and others fell back on speculation about Andean migration to account for “anomalous” evidence of large-scale settlements. These scholars were extremely cautious about regarding narratives such as The Discoverie as historical sources and thereby giving credence to accounts of substantial floodplain chiefdoms. Nevertheless, it is in Ralegh’s account that we find the first explicit statement of what would become a hegemonic Andean diffusionary hypothesis.

  40. José Toribio Medina, ed., The Discovery of the Amazon According to the Account of Friar Gaspar de Carvajal and Other Documents, trans. Bertram T. Lee (New York: Dover, 1988).

  41. Pedro Simón, The Expedition of Pedro de Ursua and Lope de Aguirre in Search of El Dorado and Omagua in 1560–1, trans. William Bollaert (Works issued by the Hakluyt Society, No. 28. London: Hakluyt Society, 1861), 194.

  42. Whitehead, Discoverie, 141.

  43. Simón, “The Expedition,” xi—xii.

  44. Lorimer, Settlement, 10. For broad El Dorado histories, see John Hemming, The Search for El Dorado (New York: E. P. Dutton, 1978); and Robert Silverberg, The Golden Dream: Seekers of El Dorado (Athens: University of Ohio Press, 1996).

  45. A preliminary to Ralegh’s own voyage was his sponsorship of John Burgh’s belligerent voyage to La Margarita, Cumaná, and probably Guiana in 1593. See Andrews, English Privateering, 225–35.

  46. Shirley, “Raleigh’s Guiana Finances.” Rabb, Enterprise and Empire, 35–92, delineates distinct agenda within the coalition of merchant and gentry investors in the colonial voyages. His data on the Guiana campaign are in Table 5, 66.

  47. Alfred L. Rowse, Sir Walter Ralegh, His Family and Private Life (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1962), 183. More detail is offered by Ojer, La formación, 539–63.

  48. Patricia Seed, “Taking Possession and Reading Texts: Establishing the Authority of Overseas Empires,” The William and Mary Quarterly 49, no. 2 (1992): 183–209, 186.

  49. See John Hemming, Red Gold: The Conquest of the Brazilian Indians (London: Macmillan, 1978).

  50. Whitehead, Discoverie, 165–66.

  51. See Hakluyt, Discourse of Western Planting, 52–61.

  52. Campbell, The Witness, 242.

  53. Whitehead, Discoverie, 173.

  54. This was not an unprecedented sentiment, but it does situate Ralegh in a particular New World tradition. Las Casas, for example, “stated explicitly in the very last work he wrote, On Royal Power, [that] the ‘kings’ and ‘princes’ of the Americas enjoyed the same status as the nobility in Naples and Milan.” Anthony Pagden, “Introduction,” in Bartolomé de Las Casas, A Short Account of the Destruction of the Indies, ed. and trans. Nigel Griffin (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1992), xiii–li, xvi.

  55. For a brilliantly sustained discussion of this tension in the texts of New World discovery, see Anthony Pagden, European Encounters with the New World: From Renaissance to Romanticism (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1993), 17–49.

  56. Whitehead, Discoverie, 174.

  57. Ibid., 181.

  58. Ibid., 185.

  59. And, of course, with each other. Ralegh avoids homogenizing Americans into undifferentiated “Indianness.” The political affiliations of particular groups are of paramount importance to him.

  60. Harcourt, Relation, 73; Whitehead, “Introduction,” 30–31.

  61. Lawrence Keymis, “A Relation of the Second Voyage to Guiana, Performed and Written in the Yeere 1696. by Lawrence Keymis Gent.,” in Richard Hakluyt, The Principal Navigations, Voyages, Traffiques & Discoveries of the English Nation Made by Sea or Over-land to the Remote and Farthest Distant Quarters of the Earth at Any Time Within the Compasse of These 1600 Yeeres, vol. 10 (Glasg
ow: James MacLehose, 1903–5), 462–67.

  62. Stephen Greenblatt, Marvelous Possessions: The Wonder of the New World (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1991), 12–13.

  63. Michel de Certeau, The Writing of History, trans. Tom Conley (New York: Columbia University Press, 1988), xxv; emphasis in original.

  64. Whitehead, Discoverie, 196.

  65. George Chapman, “De Guiana carmen Epicum,” in Hakluyt, Principal Navigations, vol. 10, 451.

  66. Keymis, “Relation,” 487.

  67. Carolyn Merchant, The Death of Nature: Women, Ecology, and the Scientific Revolution (New York: Harper & Row, 1980). Seamus Heaney has written powerfully on this tripartite connection in direct relation to Ralegh. In his poem “Ocean’s Love to Ireland,” Heaney revisits the famous “Sweet Sir Walter” episode from Aubrey’s Brief Lives, an episode Aubrey narrates in a comic register. Taking his cue from Ralegh’s “The Ocean to Cynthia,” Heaney writes water as the medium that fuses Ralegh’s rape of a maid of honor with the colonial violence of the Irish campaigns. He ties the material historicity of bodies, rivers, puddles, swamps, and oceans, bringing into view hierarchies of sex, race, and nation, and holding Raleigh to account as the agent through whom Ireland is “possessed and repossessed.” Heaney’s Ralegh is cynical and brutal, far removed from the national-heroic rogue of Aubrey’s gossip, and the retold story is bitter and deadening: “Ralegh has backed the maid to a tree / As Ireland is backed to England / And drives inland / Till her strands are all breathless / ‘Sweesir, Swatter! Sweesir, Swatter!’” Seamus Heaney, North (London: Faber, 1975), 41. This, of course, is a radically different metaphorics of water from that of Gaston Bachelard, which I consider in Chapter 7.

  68. For a perceptive discussion of The Discoverie in these terms, see Montrose, “The Work of Gender.”

  69. Whitehead, Discoverie, 199.

  70. Keymis, “Relation,” 487.

  71. As the Brazilian military would put it in the 1970s when encouraging migration to Amazonia from the hardscrabble northeast: “a land without people for a people without land.”

  72. See Anthony Pagden, The Fall of Natural Man: The American Indian and the Origins of Comparative Ethnology (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1982); and, more generally, Manuela Carneiro da Cunha, “Introdução a uma história indígena,” in História dos índios no Brasil, org. Manuela Carneiro da Cunha (São Paulo: Companhia das Letras, 1992), 9–24. On nature, see Antonello Gerbi, The Dispute of the New World: The History of a Polemic, 1750–1900, trans. Jeremy Moyle (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1973); idem, Nature in the New World; and Clarence J. Glacken, Traces on the Rhodian Shore: Nature and Culture in Western Thought from Ancient Times to the End of the Eighteenth Century (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1967).

  73. Viz. Michel de Certeau: “Discourse about the other is a means of constructing a discourse authorized by the other.” Heterologies: Discourse on the Other (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1986), 68. Cf. Michael T. Ryan, “Assimilating New Worlds in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries,” Comparative Studies in Society and History 23 (1981): 519–38, 521: “Neither Montaigne nor any other sceptic was particularly interested in seeing the world through the eyes of an exotic: That would simply be exchanging custom for custom, folly for folly.”

  74. John H. Elliott, The Old World and the New; Ryan, “Assimilating New Worlds”; Anthony Grafton, New Worlds, Ancient Texts: The Power of Tradition and the Shock of Discovery (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1992); Anthony Pagden, “‘The Impact of the New World on the Old’: The History of an Idea,” Renaissance and Modern Studies 30 (1986): 1–11; idem, The Fall of Natural Man; Gerbi, Nature in the New World; and Glacken, Traces on the Rhodian Shore.

  75. Grafton, New Worlds, 65–68; Lorraine Daston and Katherine Park, Wonders and the Order of Nature, 1150–1750 (New York: Zone Books, 1998), 63.

  76. Daston and Park, Wonders, 220. Although, given the limits of a discursive practice that failed to encompass atheism, for example, we should understand “free-for-all” in rather relative terms. My thanks to Carla Freccero for this observation.

  77. Roy Porter, “The Terraqueous Globe,” in The Ferment of Knowledge: Studies in the Historiography of Eighteenth-Century Science, ed. George S. Rousseau and Roy Porter (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1980), 285–324; Grafton, New Worlds, 147, 207–12; Glacken, Traces on the Rhodian Shore, 357–66. A key question given little attention in these texts is the active opposition between Protestant and Catholic interpretations and experiences of the New World. This theme is explored more often in readings of French accounts (see, most famously, Jean de Léry, History of a Voyage to the Land of Brazil, Otherwise Called America, trans. Janet Whatley [Berkeley: University of California Press, 1990], and, for important commentary, de Certeau, The Writing of History, 209–43; also Lestringant, Mapping the Renaissance World, on André Thévet). Clearly, though, the competition between religions and the associated national politics formed a complex strategic field of action for Ralegh. His treatment of the conquistadores as both source and inspiration for the Guiana campaign (The Discoverie as a “Spanish” text), his marriage into the suspect Throckmortons, and the whispers of atheism that hung around his inner circle were all fodder for his detractors—and ultimately the stuff from which the fatal charges of pro-Spanish conspiracy were manufactured.

  78. Gerbi, Nature in the New World, 61.

  79. Michel Foucault, The Order of Things: An Archaeology of the Human Sciences (New York: Vintage, 1994), 17–45, argues suggestively but schematically for similitude as the ordering principle of an early modern European episteme.

  80. Whitehead, Discoverie, 146; emphasis in original.

  81. Ibid., 145.

  82. Cf. Greenblatt, “Introduction,” xi, on “one of the key principles of the Renaissance geographical imagination: eye-witness testimony, [which] for all its vaunted importance, sits as a very small edifice on top of an enormous mountain of hearsay, rumor, convention, and endlessly recycled fable.”

  83. Johannes Kepler, Kepler’s Conversation with Galileo’s Sidereal Messenger, ed. and trans. Edward Rosen (New York: Johnson Reprint Corp., 1965), 17, cited in Pagden, “‘The Impact,’” 4.

  84. Andrews, Trade, Plunder, and Settlement, 27–31; Sherman, John Dee, 182–92.

  85. Hugh Honour, The New Golden Land: European Images of America from the Discoveries to the Present Time (New York: Pantheon, 1975), 71–78; Grafton, New Worlds, 126.

  86. Hill, Intellectual Origins, 125.

  87. As the botanist John Ellis wrote, rather tartly, to Linnaeus in August 1768: “No people ever went to sea better fitted out for the purpose of Natural History, nor more elegantly. They have got a fine library of Natural History; they have all sorts of machines for catching and preserving insects; all kinds of nets, trawls, drags and hooks for coral fishing; they have even a curious contrivance of a telescope by which, put into the water, you can see the bottom to a great depth, where it is clear…. They have two painters and draughtsmen, several volunteers who have a tolerable notion of Natural History, in short Solander assured me this expedition would cost Mr Banks 10000 pounds.” Quoted in Ray Desmond, Kew: The History of the Royal Botanic Gardens (London: Harvill Press with the Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew, 1995), 87.

  88. For a sense of the distinctiveness of these projects, see Allen J. Grieco, “The Social Politics of Pre-Linnean Botanical Classification,” I Tatti Studies: Essays in the Renaissance 4 (1991): 131–49.

  89. Ralegh also experimented with brewing the famous “Guiana balsam” that, in 1612, failed to revive Prince Henry Stuart, his only significant protector at the Jacobean Court. See John W. Shirley, “The Scientific Experiments of Sir Walter Ralegh, the Wizard Earl, and the Three Magi in the Tower 1603–1617,” Ambix 4, nos. 1–2 (1949): 52–66; Whitehead, “Introduction,” 30–31; Hill, Intellectual Origins, 131–32.

  90. Hill, Intellectual Origins, 16.

  91. Ibid., 66�
�67.

  92. Cambridge University did not have a chair of mathematics until 1663. A fine account of the history of Gresham College can be found in Hill, Intellectual Origins, 31–60.

  93. Eustace M. W. Tillyard, The Elizabethan World Picture (London: Chatto & Windus, 1943), 93; Paula Findlen, Possessing Nature: Museums, Collecting, and Scientific Culture in Early Modern Italy (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994); Porter, “The Terraqueous Globe,” 289–90. For a sophisticated elaboration of this point, see Lorraine Daston, “The Nature of Nature in Early Modern Europe,” Configurations 6, no. 2 (1998): 149–72.

  94. Among outstanding works that pay attention to the relationship between early modern natural history, overseas discovery, and collecting, see Daston and Park, Wonders; Findlen, Possessing Nature; Krzysztof Pomian, Collectors and Curiosities: Paris and Venice, 1500–1800 (Cambridge: Polity, 1990); Oliver Impey and Arthur MacGregor, eds., The Origins of Museums: The Cabinet of Curiosities in Sixteenth- and Seventeenth-Century Europe (New York: Clarendon Press, 1985); Pamela H. Smith and Paula Findlen, eds., Merchants and Marvels: Commerce, Science, and Art in Early Modern Europe (New York: Routledge, 2001); and Horst Bredekamp, The Lure of Antiquity and the Cult of the Machine: The Kunstkammer and the Evolution of Nature, Art and Technology, trans. Allison Brown (Princeton: Markus Wiener, 1995). Scott Atran, Cognitive Foundations of Natural History: Towards an Understanding of Science (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989).

  95. Stephen Greenblatt, Sir Walter Ralegh: The Renaissance Man and His Roles (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1973), 103.

  96. On Dee, see Taylor, Tudor Geography; Sherman, John Dee; and, for the initial and effective revision, Nicholas H. Clulee, John Dee’s Natural Philosophy: Between Science and Religion (London: Routledge, 1988).