In Amazonia (17 page)

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

D
ISCOVERY

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, logarithms, 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

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.