Playing Cards of the South Sea Bubble, 1720

I lay it down as a foundation, that whosoever, sailing over the South Seas... shall never fail to discover new worlds, new nations, and new inexhaustible funds of wealth and commerce, such as never were yet known to the merchants of Europe.

- Daniel Defoe, A New Voyage Round the World, by a Course Never Sailed Before (London, 1724)

South Sea Bubble by Edward Matthew Ward (1846).

So much has been written about the South Sea Bubble of 1720 (see here, here, here and here) that I'm not going to reiterate the story of this huge financial collapse, which seems to be revisited and reinterpreted at each moment that the cycle of boom and bust repeats itself. Amidst all the economic analysis it is easy to loose sight of the (to me) far more interesting underlying geopolitical motive behind the stock speculation. This was the recognition that the Spanish Empire's control over the Pacific Ocean was weakening, and that other commercial powers might be able to assert themselves in this vast and largely unknown 'South' Sea -- which, Defoe proposed, should actually be the 'American Sea' because it gave access to the rich ports of Spanish America. Spanish treasure fleets and the occasional Portuguese carrack had been warily traversing this vast maritime world since the first decade of the sixteenth century, but it still held many surprises in store. Hawaii and New Zealand, for instance, were as yet unknown to Westerners, as was much of Polynesia, Melanesia and Micronesia. British observers had been aware of the potential for trade in this region since the time of Drake, and the South Sea Company represented the fulfillment of these hopes.

Famously, however, things did not work out as planned. A roughly ten-fold decrease in the price of South Sea stock between 1720 and 1721 ruined countless families and sent shockwaves through the popular culture of Western Europe. No less a personage than Isaac Newton was reported to have lost the huge sum of roughly £20,000 (millions in the US dollar of today). Perhaps apocryphally, the astronomer remarked that he could "calculate the movement of the stars, but not the madness of men."

As I said above, historians and economists have shed a lot of ink on this subject. But the popular culture of the South Sea Bubble strikes me as less well covered. For instance, I was interested to discover that playing cards seem to have been a popular means of commemorating the financial failure. Perhaps the juxtaposition of economic catastrophe with the small-scale world of gambling was a form of sly social commentary? Below are some images of 'Bubble Cards' and other printed ephemera from the 1720-21 period.

The caption to this card, the Jack of Hearts, shows how the fortunes of the Company could impact the world of courtship:

Here's a complete set of South Sea playing cards via BibliOdyssey.

And a broadside that cleverly gathers together (we would say plagiarizes) some of the most popular images of the collapse. Note the Bubble Card posted above in the bottom left corner, for instance:

The sheer number of Bubble Cards  held by libraries to this day attests to their popularity. I suppose it is a testament to the entrepeneurial character of the age that even a disastrous financial collapse could be used to sell merchandise. And it seems fitting that this merchandise consisted of ink on paper, since so many of the schemes associated with the South Sea Bubble (and, indeed, European trading companies in general) amounted to little else.

The Scottish author Charles Mackay discussed the Bubble in his famous work Extraordinary Popular Delusions and The Madness of Crowds (1841). A sample of this chapter is available online here. For more images, I highly recommend BibliOdyssey's post on the subject. The Baker Library of the Harvard University Business School has digitized a different set of South Sea Bubble cards which are viewable in their entirety here.

A Defaced Herbal from 1710: William Salmon's Botanologia

A portrait of Salmon from the frontispiece
to his Ars Chirurgica (1699).

The image above is from a copy of William Salmon's Botanologia: The English Herbal, or History of Plants (London: I. Dawks for H. Rhodes and J. Taylor, 1710) which is available for view via Villanova University's digital library. Evidently the nudity of the figure (I suppose either the sun god Helios or Apollo) bothered an early owner of the book, since he or she appears to have obliterated the poor deity's rear quarters and genitalia with a quill pen. Conversely, perhaps someone had drawn something offensive onto the scratched-out area, and the ink was merely restoring modesty? Why is a man pouring a bucket of rain on the god from a cloud anyway?

It is all a bit of a mystery. And indeed, we know little more about the life of the man who wrote the book itself. William Salmon (1644-1713) numbered among the most successful medical practitioners of Restoration-era London but was largely forgotten after his death. Though he was much maligned as a quack doctor or 'mountebank' by eighteenth-century medical authorities, Salmon appears to have won considerable success as a self-proclaimed "Doctor of Physic," apothecary and author of popular treatises on everything from home surgery to figurative drawing, landscape painting and the science of hand gestures. Salmon's practice began in a tavern. Next, displaying a characteristic commercial shrewdness, the doctor rented space immediately opposite St. Bartholemew's Hospital in London and developed a medical practice that treated patients who were rejected from that institution. His specialty was drug mixtures and pills that featured a range of bizarre and exotic ingredients, the sort of thing that would later come to be called 'patent medicines.' (See my previous entry on early modern London's drug trade for some representative remedies, including a medicinal usage of 'Cranium Humanum,' i.e. human skull!).

The full frontispiece of Botanologia.

Little is known of Salmon's life. His Oxford Dictionary of National Biography by Phillip K. Wilson entry notes intriguingly,

"Contemporaries claimed that as a boy Salmon was apprenticed to a mountebank, whom he served as a ‘wachum’ or ‘zany’, and amused audiences by ‘tumbling through a hoop’ or with ‘tricks of legerdemain and slight of hand’; he also ‘made speeches and wrote Panygyricks in praise of his master's Panaceas. He wrote Almanacks to direct the taking of his medicines, and made the stars vouch for their virtue.’"

The same entry notes that "Salmon also created a cabinet of curiosities that included some items he brought back from his travels to the West Indies." Salmon himself referred in print to his travels "some years last past in the American World," noting modestly that he had "but lately returned home to perfect the whole System of Medical Learning." (See Allen Debus, ed. Medicine in Seventeenth Century England [Berkeley, 1974], 144). The nature and itinerary of these travels is still a bit of a mystery though, as far as I can tell.

I've been researching Salmon a bit recently and have noticed that he was a very prescient and effective advertiser. At least one of his books that I've consulted contains embedded advertisements for his medical practice and the 'Salmon's pills' for treatment of venereal disease available there, while a search of London newspapers circa 1660-1720 will turn up numerous notices such as the following, in The Flying Post (February 18-20, 1707):

I note in passing that this newspaper appears, most unusually, to have been published by a woman, one Ann Snowden, who resided "near Doctors-Commons."

For further reading see the discussion in Allan Debus, ed., Medicine in Seventeenth Century England (Berkeley, 1974), Craig Ashley Hanson's The English Virtuoso (Chicago, 2009).

Also worth checking out are "William Salmon, a 17th Century Renaissance Man," an essay on a rare books website by Bruce Tober that contains some interesting details I haven't seen elsewhere; and Phillip K. Wilson's Oxford Dictionary of National Biography piece, the authoritative account of his life. Caroline Rance's fabulous The Quack Doctor blog references and quotes Salmon here. Finally, Brent Elliot has written a very interesting and informative essay on the Botanologia here. I'm indebted to all of these authors for their work in uncovering the shadowy history of Salmon's interesting life.

Jahangir's Turkey: Early Modern Globalization and Exotic Animals [Updated Nov. 2017]

The above image is one of my favorite examples of the cross-pollinations that early modern globalization brought about. It is a detail from a lavish watercolor painting created in 1618 by Bichitr for the Mughal emperor Jahangir (1569-1627). Here we find the strange juxtaposition of King James of England alongside a self-portrait of the artist, Bichitr. He is holding a small panel that seems to also depict Bichitr as he bows deeply while surrounded by an elephant and fine horses, probably animals from Jahangir's imperial menagerie.

At left is an official royal portrait of King James that probably served as the basis for Bichitr's more colorful depiction (you can click the image to see a high-res version). I suspect that a copy of this painting was presented to the Mughal court during the 1615-1619 embassy of Sir Thomas Roe, one of the early English emissaries sent to establish trade relations in India, as an attempt to demonstrate the grandeur of the English state.

The Mughals, however, were decidedly unimpressed. This is amply illustrated by Bichitr's full painting (see below) which depicts Jahangir turning away from both James and the Shah of Persia in order to converse with a humble Sufi holy man.

What I find most interesting about this work, however, is the painting of animals that Bichitr is holding. Why are they there?

Another work, by the celebrated Mughal court painter Ustad Mansur, offers an even more intriguing depiction of an animal from Jahangir's court. Jahangir described this creature in the official chronicle of his reign, the Jahangirnama, as an "extremely strange" wonder. The turkey was offered as a mate to a peacock and the bird's exotic looks and behavior became an object of debate among Jahangir's advisors, who couldn't guess where it had come from.

Ustad Mansur. India, Mughul period, 1612 (Victoria and Albert Museum, London).

As you likely have guessed, this is none other than a turkey. A domestic turkey, or Meleagris gallopavo, to be exact – a bird domesticated in Pre-Columbian Mexico and widely distributed throughout the indigenous cultures of North America. Now this iconic New World fowl was sitting in the throne room of one of the most powerful emperors in Asia.

To lock gazes with the turkey as it peers out at us from a Mughal watercolor is to confront a mystery.

By what route did this “true original Native of America,” as Benjamin Franklin called it, happen to arrive in the most powerful imperial court in Asia? In fact, this encounter was not as strange as it may at first seem. Emperor Jahangir (when not on an opium or alcohol binge) was a keenly observant man with an intense interest in nature. He kept an extensive menagerie of exotic creatures and delighted in recording their behaviors in his journal.

It was at Jahangir’s bidding that Mansur produced over one hundred natural history paintings that rival the work of any painter of the European Renaissance.  Two years earlier Mansur had painted a Mauritian dodo that is still cited by biologists as the most accurate surviving representation of the bird. In other words, Jahangir was exactly who a canny merchant or courtier would go to if they came across a highly unusual-looking bird.

From Wikipedia: "Two live [dodo] specimens were brought to India in the 1600s according to Peter Mundy, and the specimen depicted might have been one of these. Other birds depicted are Loriculus galgulus (upper left) Tragopan melanocephalus (upper right), Anser indicus (lower left) Pterocles indicus (lower right)." Hermitage, St. Petersburg.

By the beginning of Jahangir’s reign (1605-1627), Spanish, Portuguese, Dutch and English ocean-going vessels were plying the spoils of American nature throughout all the major emporia of the Old World, from Senegal to Japan. Although Jahangir regarded the Portuguese and other Europeans as a negligible presence in his domain, he was well aware that the people he called ‘Franks’ had access to trade networks that were closed off to his own subjects. Indeed, Jahangir’s sole reference to the Portuguese colony at Goa in his self-authored chronicle of his reign, the Jahangirnama, was to note that his turkey had been obtained along with several other exotic beasts by a servant sent to the “vice-rei” at “the port of Goa… to purchase any rarities he could get hold of there for the royal treasury.”

To Jahangir, the Portuguese were simply go-betweens. It was the American animal – and not the European merchant – that interested Jahangir and his court.   Nor was Jahangir the only Asian potentate to be fascinated by the exotic beasts carried by the Portuguese. I've written previously, for instance, about this fascinating Japanese nanban screen from the 16th century that depicts Portuguese creole traders selling animals from faraway lands in a Japanese market:

A detail showing a richly attired Portuguese trader with a shrewd-looking Indian or African monkey.

Jahangir's turkey was, ultimately, a harbinger of great changes. It had been carried to Jahangir's court in Agra by an underling Jahangir sent to purchase 'rarities' from the Portuguese. Although the Mughals were still secure in their power in this period, with Europeans serving as little more than petty traders in the periphery, times would change. By the reign of Jahangir's grandson Aurgangzeb (1658-1707), the British, French and Dutch had made serious territorial gains and were beginning to dominate trade in the Indian Ocean.

Many global trade networks in the early modern period tended to be based around exotica likes gems, drugs and animals, but these trades had very real effects. The appearance of strange objects from unknown lands (from tobacco to turkeys) was often the first harbinger of the epochal changes that brought the colonial powers of Europe into conflict with the vast 'gunpowder empires' of Asia.

The balance of world power was shifting. In its own humble way, Jahangir's turkey had something to do with it.

Further reading:
The history of animals is still a relatively new field, so I don't believe much has been written specifically on exotic creatures and early European empires. Three exceptions I can think of are Elephant Slaves and Pampered Parrots and The Emperor's Giraffe. Virginia DeJohn Anderson's Creatures of Empire is a very interesting and provocative study of the role of the more prosaic (but perhaps most important) domesticated animals in the service of British imperial expansion. Finally, the British Library's Asian and African Studies blog is a great place to start for those interested in the material cultures of premodern Asia.

Sources: 
Jahangir, The Jahangirnama, (Oxford University Press, 1999), Wheeler Thackston, ed. and trans., 133-4. Som Prakash Verma, Ustad Mansur: Mughal Painter of Flora and Fauna (Abhinav Publications, 1999).

Strange Creatures Intermixt with a Spaniard's Voyage to the Moone, 1700

Nathaniel Crouch (c. 1632 - after 1700) was an obscure but most interesting man: a London bookseller, he took the unusual step of authoring his own books on many subjects and publishing them under pseudonyms. Crouch's nom de plume of choice was "R.B." or "Richard Burton." As revealed by the research of Robert Mayer, Crouch attended meetings of the Royal Society and was regarded by contemporaries as an "ingenious man" despite his craftsman's trade and lowly birth as the son of a tailor. Although he has gone largely unstudied by modern scholars, the works of Crouch/Burton were prized by both Samuel Johnson and a young Benjamin Franklin, whose autobiography records his high regard for "Burton's books" (Mayer 393). Today I present some images I came across in a work that Crouch published under the name of R.B. entitled The English Acquisitions in Guinea and East-India (London, 1700). As the full title reveals, this was an expansive work which not only described the new colonial possessions of an expanding British Empire but also offered accounts of "Religion, Government, Trade, Marriages, Funerals, strange Customs, &c., Also the Birds, Beasts Serpents, Monsters and other strange Creatures found there. Intermixt with divers Accidents..."

The woodcut illustrations of English Acquisitions are quite compelling, as they center almost exclusively on depictions of "Monsters and other strange Creatures" that were reported by travelers in the Indian Ocean region and coastal Africa. I suspect that most or all were plagiarized from earlier accounts, a common practice of the era. Here are the images, intermixed with extracts from Crouch's accompanying text:

Creatures of "Guinea," or west Africa.

More beasts of Africa, accompanied in true early modern fashion by an extract from the Roman poet Lucan.

Crouch did not shy away from gory descriptions, and indeed these may have contributed to the popularity of his works. Here he is on the execution techniques of the "Great Mogul" of India:

 And the rather frightening accompanying illustration:

As I read this book I was surprised to find that the middle section was devoted to a description of a voyage to the moon via swans! After reading a bit I realized that this was a reprint from a remarkable work of early science fiction written in manuscript by the Elizabethan bishop Francis Godwin: the Man in the Moone, or a Discourse of a Voyage thither, by Domingo Gonsales (c. 1600). Here's the amazing illustration of the bird-powered contraption created by the ingenious Spaniard Gonsales:

This work is remarkable for the way in which it conflates the voyages of Columbus and otehr New World explorers with space travel. Godwin (and Crouch as well, it seems) reasoned that if 'Moderns' had been able to discover vast and previously unknown new lands across seas, then it stood to reason that similar wonders awaited those who traveled into the sky:

Here  'Gonsales' offers a bizarre description of outer space as imagined in early modern times. This land was apparently haunted by demons and "Wicked Spirits" who spoke Spanish, Dutch and Italian, as well as creatures that his Gansas (swans), could consume as food:

Strange stuff, and all the more interesting because Crouch chose to include it in a book lauding the expansion of the British empire. Was the moon next?

For more on the early modern astronaut Domingo Gonsales, read the original work: The Strange Voyage and Adventures of Domingo Gonsales, to the world in the Moone. For more on Nathaniel Crouch see Robert Mayer, "Nathaniel Crouch, Bookseller and Historian: Popular Historiography and Cultural Power in Late Seventeenth-Century England," in Eighteenth-Century Studies Vol. 27, No. 3 (Spring, 1994), pp. 391-419.

Image of the Week: The Defeat of the Spanish Armada

This painting, by an anonymous English artist, depicts in remarkable detail the Spanish Armada's confrontation with English vessels, probably at the momentous Battle of Gravelines. From Wikipedia:

         English losses stood at 50-100 dead and 400 wounded, and none of their ships had been sunk. But after the victory, typhus, dysentery and hunger killed many sailors and troops (estimated at 6,000–8,000) as they were discharged without pay: a demoralising dispute occasioned by the government's fiscal shortfalls left many of the English defenders unpaid for months, which was in contrast to the assistance given by the Spanish government to its surviving men.
         Although the English fleet was unable to prevent the regrouping of the Armada at the Battle of Gravelines, requiring it to remain on duty even as thousands of its sailors died, the outcome vindicated the strategy adopted, resulting in a revolution in naval warfare with the promotion of gunnery, which until then had played a supporting role to the tasks of ramming and boarding. The battle of Gravelines is regarded by some specialists in military history as reflecting a lasting shift in the naval balance in favour of the English, in part because of the gap in naval technology and armament it confirmed between the two nations, which continued into the next century. In the words of Geoffrey Parker, by 1588 'the capital ships of the Elizabethan navy constituted the most powerful battlefleet afloat anywhere in the world.'^[22]

As with many early modern paintings, the charm of this one is in the details: note the tiny figure (painted in red) clinging to the broken mast of the sinking vessel in the detail I've picked out above. Below is the full painting, along with two more details of direct cannon fire.

Waterboarding in the Seventeenth Century Spice Islands

 

"[He] poured the water softly upon his head until the cloth was full, up to the mouth and nostrils, and somewhat higher, so that he could not draw breath but he must suck in all the water."
— A True Relation of the Unjust, Cruel and Barbarous Proceedings against the English at Amboyna (London, 1624). 

I've been reading Miles Ogborn's Indian Ink: Script and Print in the Making of the English East India Company (University of Chicago Press, 2007) (which I recommend very highly, by the way) and, turning to page 125, was surprised to find an apparent depiction of waterboarding in the frontispiece to an English pamphlet from 1624! As you can see in the below image (from a 1671 reprint of the 1624 original) an English merchant is being restrained while a Dutchman pours a jug of water over his cloth-wrapped face.

This page (seemingly an extract or adaptation from Anthony Farrington's Trading Places: The East India Company and Asia) has a good capsule description of the conflicts between Dutch and English merchants in the so-called Spice Islands that gave rise to these acts of torture, which appalled domestic audiences in Britain and the Low Countries alike:

In February 1623 Gabriel Towerson, English chief on the clove island of Amboina, and nine other Company servants (together with nine Japanese samurai mercenaries, some of them from Hirado, and a Portuguese) were executed by the Dutch Governor Herman van Speult on a charge of conspiracy to seize the fort there. The proceedings were marked by horrific tortures to extract confessions and it is likely that the `plot' was a convenient fabrication designed to drive the English permanently out of the spice islands. The news caused uproar in Europe. Pamphlets replete with gory frontispieces and titles beginning A true relation of the unjust, cruell and barbarous proceedings against the English appeared in London, to be refuted in turn by publications from Amsterdam, but the affair was never settled and joined that of Run to bedevil Anglo-Dutch relations for two generations. Soon after the English Company withdrew from Japan and mainland Southeast Asia.

The edition of A True Relation scanned into Early English Books Online contains an interesting marginal annotation, which I've cropped below:

The poor scan quality and general illegibility of seventeenth century handwriting makes parts of this difficult to transcribe, but my guess it reads something like this:

"This Relation is made publick from an MS never before printed & written by Mr Beaumont one of ye Persons who escaped yt to Macassar[?] and with several others made affidavit of this Barbaritey in ye High Court of Admiralty."

The Drawings of George Psalmanazar

The brilliant eighteenth century impostor George Psalmanazar (1679?-1763) is one of my favorite historical figures and someone I'll return to at a later date to write about in more depth. Today I'm just going to post some of his drawings, which were discovered by the historian Frederick Folely, S.J., in a sheaf of Church documents held by the Lambeth Palace Library (in 1968 Folely reprinted the images below in his rare and out of print  Great Formosan Impostor).

Put very briefly, Psalmanazar was a mysterious young man who convinced a wide array of early eighteenth century British luminaries, such as Henry Compton, the Bishop of London, that he was a native of the island of Formosa, now known as Taiwan. In reality, he was most likely from southern France, and his claims about Formosa were almost completely fictional -- which makes them very interesting.

The rather crude drawings below were apparently drawn by Psalmanazar himself (in his posthumously published Memoirs he modestly admits to "some ability" in the visual arts, not evident here). They depict various Formosan stock types, from a rustic fellow labeled 'a Country Bumpkin' to a 'Vice-Rey' and 'King.' Below the drawings, I've included the actual engravings from Psalmanazar's published work on Formosa, the Historical and Geographical Description.

'Tabernacle in which God appears.'

Comparison of Psalmanazar's original drawing (left) with the published British (center, 1704) and French (right, 1705) editions.

The printed English versions of 'Rusticus' (Country Bumpkin) and 'Civis' (Burger) shown above.

For more on these drawings see Peter Mason's excellent article on them, "Ethnographic Portraiture in the Eighteenth Century: George Psalmanazar's Drawings" in Eighteenth Century Life. The best book on Psalmanazar's life and influence is The Pretended Asian: George Psalmanazar's Eighteenth-Century Formosan Hoax by Michael Keevak.