A History of the World in Twelve Shipwrecks (26 page)

Bulgari leather

Whalebone (baleen)

Refined sugar

Tar

Glue

Tobacco

Tobacco pipes

Ebony wood

Japan wood

Brazil wood

Yellow wood

Scotti cloth of Bruges

Haarlem clothing

Serge cloth

Linen of Flanders

Cloth of Hamburg

Hats

Syrian oil

Wine

Almond confiture

Green peas

Medicaments

Musk oil

Madder (red dye)

Pencil graphite

Writing pens

Nails

Pins

Candlesticks

Lanterns

Knives and sheaths

Locks

A rodent trap

A globe

Charts

Maps of the world

Books

Paintings

The cargo manifest lists six consignments shared with the
Santo Cristo di Castello
, laden when the ships were at anchor together in the roadstead of Texel near Amsterdam and taking on goods from several of the same merchants. The share of these consignments on the
Santo Cristo di Castello
, bound for Cadiz and Genoa, comprised 3,334 pounds of cinnamon, five bales of pepper weighing 2,003 pounds and a barrel of cloves weighing 489 pounds, with a total value of over 3,000 gold ducats – only a small part of the value of either of these cargoes, but still over half a million pounds in today's currency and showing the enormous value of spices in the seventeenth century and the profits that could be made from the trade.

Cloves came from the Moluccas, the fabled ‘Spice Islands', and pepper and cinnamon mainly from southern India and Sri Lanka respectively. Since 1602 the import of these spices to Amsterdam had been in the hands of the Dutch East India Company, the Vereenigde Oostindische Compagnie (VOC), which managed the trade from its chief port of Batavia in Java. By the time of the wreck, the company had more than 150 ships and 50,000 employees and controlled large parts of what is now Indonesia. The 1660s can be regarded as its heyday; in 1640 it had taken Galle in Sri Lanka from the Portuguese,
bringing more control over the cinnamon trade, and in 1652 it had established the resupply base at the southern tip of Africa that was to become Cape Colony. Control over European trade with Japan and China, as well as with parts of India – in the period before the English East India Company became ascendant – meant access to a wide range of goods that were shipped back to Amsterdam, from silk and textiles to exotic woods and diamonds.

The cargo manifest shows that the cloves and pepper on board the
Santo Cristo di Castello
were bought from the East India Company at their harbour-town of Enkhuizen on the Zuider Zee, not far from Texel. The East India Company was a pervasive presence not only in the Far East but also in the Netherlands, with its distinctive VOC monogram – arguably the first widely recognised commercial logo in history – seen on coins, cannons and flags, its administrative buildings and warehouses dominating the seafront and its shipyards building not only company vessels but also warships for the state, and other merchantmen on private commissions, possibly including the
Santo Cristo di Castello
herself. Ships such as the
Santo Cristo di Castello
and the
Sacrificio d'Abramo
were instrumental to the success of the company, as it was in such vessels that spices and other goods purchased by merchants from the Company were taken to consumers around Europe, increasing the demand for more. As the cargo manifests show, those ships also had space for the shipment of a huge range of raw materials and manufactured items from the Low Countries, Germany and elsewhere in north-west Europe, galvanising production and demand for those goods as well – a synergy fuelled by the East India Company that made this one of the richest periods of maritime trade up to that time.

Captain Viviano came from a city with a famous maritime tradition where many of his contemporaries were mariners and merchants. Little is known of his prior history, except that on his previous ship he had brought Jews from Spain to Genoa to escape the Inquisition, but he is likely to have been an experienced captain to have been entrusted by those financing the venture with overseeing the construction of the
Santo Cristo di Castello
in 1666 and taking it on its maiden voyage. Given this, it seemed puzzling that he should not have left Amsterdam until the following year and then not until autumn, when the sea conditions in the Atlantic would have been less certain. Insurance policies signed by Viviano in Amsterdam on 2 September and 16 September
1667 show that he could not have left before the latter date, less than three weeks before the wrecking. The evidence of the manifests suggests that the cargo was laden by early summer and that he could have departed with the
Sacrificio d'Abramo
in May or June. Perhaps he was more cautious than Captain Basso about sailing during wartime and less trusting of the passport, but the Anglo-Dutch war ended on 31 July and his passage after that should have been unimpeded. What was it that had kept the
Santo Cristo di Castello
at Amsterdam for so long?

In 2006 a reorganisation of the Sauli family archive in Genoa revealed a cache of letters related to the Basilica of Santa Maria Assunta, the church that the Sauli family – one of the wealthiest in Genoa – used as a private chapel. In the early 1660s, one of the family, Francesco Maria Sauli, decided to embellish the church with sculpture and paintings. For the creation of a magnificent new altarpiece he turned to the painter he regarded as the most famous in Amsterdam – Rembrandt van Rijn. Sauli had a part-share in a ship under construction in Amsterdam, and while it was still on the stocks, he instructed his agents and the ship's captain to enter into negotiations with the painter. The agents' names were Benzi and Voet, and the captain was none other than Giovanni Lorenzo Viviano. When I saw that name I realised that the letters contained an extraordinary revelation not only about lost works of Rembrandt but also about the ship that had been carrying them. Concurrent research in the archives of Genoa by Dr Luca Lo Basso and Renato Gianni Ridella has added even more clarity to the ship's movements and her extraordinary final cargo.

The letters are fascinating for the story they tell and the characters involved. In June 1666 Benzi and Voet informed Sauli that they had put Viviano in touch with ‘the painter Rembrandt'. They then reported after their first meeting that ‘he has promised to make two
modelli
of the paintings you want so that they can be sent at the end of the month. He wants a lot of money, but he presents himself as someone who has knowledge of the art of painting and he therefore stands his ground.' The altarpieces were to be very large paintings, and the smaller
modelli
were to allow Sauli to approve the final commission. Unsurprisingly, Rembrandt needed more time – ‘as is usual with painters, this man is rather unpredictable and you cannot rely on what he says' – though he was apologetic and stressed that he knew the importance of the work: ‘He has thrown himself into the work heart
and soul … he wants to garner praise and honour in our part with the commission.' By August, Viviano himself was writing to Sauli with his concern about the delay and the cost, and in so doing revealed the subject matter of one of the paintings –
l'Assunta di Nostra Signora
, ‘The Assumption of the Virgin Mary', appropriately enough, as the church in Genoa was dedicated to the Virgin Mary, and showing the significance of this commission in Sauli's conception of how the art in the church would appear.

While this was going on great events were unfolding on the world stage – the Anglo-Dutch war of 1665–7, the capture of New Amsterdam by the English and renaming of it as New York City in 1665, the Great Fire of London in September 1666 – and the ship was then icebound in Amsterdam during the severe winter of 1666–7. After the paintings were finally finished in 1667 they were paid for by Sauli, who recorded the transaction in a letter to Benzi and Voet: ‘I make payment of 1,049.30 guilders to Captain Giovanni Lorenzo Viviano for the costs incurred for two paintings that Captain Giovanni Lorenzo had commissioned by you to make in Amsterdam by the painter Rembrandt and which he loaded on his ship in that city, after which he left for Genoa.' After that, nothing is heard of the paintings again; the next letter from Benzi and Voet to Sauli, on 2 December 1667, has ‘news of the loss of Captain Viviano's ship off the coast of England'. There were several reasons for the delay in leaving Amsterdam, including the ship not being seaworthy after being launched, and Viviano being ill, but the correspondence reveals that the biggest factor was the time needed by Rembrandt to complete the commission, and leaves no doubt that the two paintings were on board the
Santo Cristo di Castello
when she was ‘cast away' on the coast of Cornwall on 5 October 1667.

Another revelation in the correspondence was that Captain Viviano was also instructed by Sauli to acquire a copy of Blaeu's 11-volume
Atlas Maior
, at the time the most lavish and costly publication ever produced. Not only that, but the cargo manifest of the
Sacrificio d'Abramo
shows that it was carrying an example of Blaeu's ‘globe universale', destined for Genoa on the account of the same agents Benzi and Voet. The
Atlas Maior
had only recently been finished at the time that Viviano was visiting Rembrandt – the last of the 590 maps had been completed in 1665, hand-coloured and representing an immense and painstaking work of craftsmanship. The price of the
set, 450 gulden – almost half the final price of the Rembrandt commission – meant that works of this nature were only within the reach of wealthy men such as Sauli, for whom having atlases and globes in their own private libraries served not only for edification but also as wealth display. Willem Blaeu of Amsterdam and his son Johan were among the most influential publishers of the seventeenth century, and as cartographers to the Dutch East India Company they were intimately bound up with the spread of geographical knowledge – ships carried their charts for navigation, and captains brought back new knowledge that allowed the information to be constantly updated and corrected. Blaeu was not only a cartographer and globemaker but also a bookseller, combining the role of literary agent, publisher and distributor, and relied on merchant-captains such as Viviano and Basso to take books to buyers in Spain and Italy who provided a ready market for maps and globes as well as paintings.

A remarkable insight into this trade comes from the bills of lading from the
Sacrificio d'Abramo
, showing that Basso took on board eleven books from Blaeu by three of the most influential thinkers of the period – providing a unique picture of the maritime trade in books as well as the literary and scientific world of the seventeenth century. The least expensive book in the consignment, valued at only two guilders, was Johannes Kepler's
Epitome Astronomiae Copernicanae
(1621), the work that spread the idea of the heliocentric universe, inspired Newton and provided the basis for modern physics. Another inexpensive volume was Andrea Argoli's
Pandosion sphaericum
(1644), an old-fashioned geocentric cosmography that also included a description of the circulation of the blood based on the work of the Dutch physician Johannes Walaeus.

The rest of the books were by the prolific Jesuit polymath Athanasius Kircher, and represent most of his major works:
Oedipus Aegyptiacus
, an attempt to decipher hieroglyphics;
Ars Magna Lucis et Umbrae
, on the display of images on a screen using a magic lantern;
Musurgia Universalis
, representing Kircher's view that the harmony of music reflects the proportions of the universe;
Magnes sive de arte Magnetica
, on magnetism;
Obeliscus Pamphilius,
on the Egyptian obelisk in the Piazza Navona in Rome;
Mundus Subterraneus
, a study of the inner nature of the planet that included an attempt to identify the site of Atlantis;
Iter extaticum coeleste
, on astronomy;
Diatribe de prodigiosis Crucibus
, discussing the cause of mysterious crosses that had
appeared in Naples; and
Scrutinium physico-medicum contagiosae luis
, a microscopic investigation of the blood of plague victims – a book being carried on a ship where one of the documents to survive is a plague passport. Kircher was still active in 1667, and the
Oedipus Aegyptiacus
and
Mundus subterraneus
had only just been published.

What makes this consignment so important is that it provides a cross-section of titles being marketed and read at a particular moment in history. Few surviving libraries are time-capsules in this way; knowing what was being marketed at a particular time cannot simply be reconstructed from the date of publication, as books were considered ‘current' for longer than they are today. Just as with paintings, where there was a clear difference between the Rembrandts commissioned by Sauli and the ‘jobbing' art that constituted most of the export, so a distinction can be made in the book trade between prestige, high-value items such as the
Atlas Maior
and the bulk of books that were bought more for their contents than for display. The comparison with the art trade ends there, however: unlike cheap art, the contents of these less costly books such as Kepler's
Epitome
were often of great cultural and intellectual value. Viewed together, the books in this consignment represent a straddling of the medieval and the modern – the Copernican model of the universe alongside a Geocentric one, Kircher's blending of occult mysticism with observational science – and give a vivid picture of the state of knowledge about the world on the cusp of the Enlightenment.