American Monsters: Images of Brazilian Nature from Early Modern Europe

"The most disgusting and nauseating thing which man ever saw." 
-Spanish chronicler Andres Bernaldez on Christopher Columbus' first impression of Caribbean iguanas, 1513.

IN HIS BOOK Marvelous Possessions: The Wonder of the New World, Harvard literature professor Stephen Greenblatt argues that "the production of a sense of the marvelous in the New World is at the very center of virtually all of Columbus's writings about his discoveries, though the meaning of that sense shifts over the years." Greenblatt thinks that Columbus emphasized wonders and marvels "because marvels are inseparably bound up in rhetorical and pictorial tradition with voyages to the Indies. To affirm the 'marvelous' nature of the discoveries is, even without the lucrative shipments yet on board, to make good on the claim to have reached the fabled realms of gold and spices." Yet Greenblatt doesn't devote much space in his book to the flip side of the "marvelous": the monstrous.

As Iberian voyages of "discovery" segued into expeditions of conquest and settlement over the course of the sixteenth century, Europeans increasingly visualized the New World as a land of bizarre torments, freakish monsters and outlandish civilizations in thrall to the devil.

Map of Brasil, Dieppe School, 1547. Click to see
much larger version.

Spanish interpretations of the religious practices they encountered in the lands of the Aztec Triple Alliance have attracted the majority of historians interested in how Europeans expressed fear, apprehension and disgust -- as well as wonder -- toward the Americas (see below for some recommendations). The pictures below show that monsters and the monstrous were also depicted in the context of Portuguese Brazil. I'm particularly interested in how the incredible biodiversity of Amazonia was initially interpreted by European observers who had seen nothing to rival it in their temperate homelands. Although comparisons to the Garden of Eden were frequent, these images also reveal a profound anxiety about the abundance of nature in the Neotropics. 

The Flemish engraver Theodor de Bry's vision of Brazil mingles outlandish sea creatures with
flying devils who torment the Tupí Indian villagers at lower right. Theodor de Bry, Americae 
tertia pars (Frankfurt, 1592)

Birds of paradise feature in this detail from the 1547 Dieppe map of Brazil linked above.

Tupí Indians hunt leonine creatures, probably reflecting early accounts of jaguars. Another detail.

In the same pictorial field, villagers lounge while two tortoises amble by.

During the Dutch occupation of parts of Brazil in the 1640-60 period, a number of highly
skilled painters visited the new colony to record their impressions of its flora and fauna.
In this 1665 painting by Albert Eckhout, two dueling tortoises recall the pair in the detail
from the Dieppe map above.

Despite their skill in visual representation, however, Dutch artists were often at least as fanciful in their depictions of South American monsters as their French and Iberian peers. The engravings below, selected from the Dutch author Arnoldus Montanus' 1671 De Nieuwe en Onbekende Weereld (The New and Unknown World), offer a positively bizarre take on American animals and peoples. 

The "draco" (dragon) in this one bears a passing resemblance to the "Jenny Hanivers" and
"Sea Monks" of early modern sailors' lore.

Europeans were also fascinated and fearful of the "monstrous" forms of indigenous Brazilians themselves. Although most accounts remarked upon the good health, longevity and physique of Tupí Indians and other indigenous societies in Brazil (probably a reflection more of the poor health and diet of the European mariners than anything else), others focused on their tendency toward body-modification. The most entertaining and strange European take on piercing and tattooing I have been able to find is John Bulwer's fantastically titled Anthropometamorphosis: Man Transform’d, or the Artificial Changeling. Historically presented, in the mad and cruel Gallantry, foolish Bravery, ridiculous Beauty, filthy Fineness, and loathesome Loveliness of most Nations, fashioning & altering their Bodies from the Mould intended by Nature. With a Vindication of the Regular Beauty and Honesty of Nature, and an Appendix of the Pedigree of the English Gallant. (London: J. Hardesty, 1650). (I wrote about this a bit in an earlier post). Below he describes how "the Brasileans... are pricked within the flesh" with paint.

Bulwer's title page takes this a step further, showing an Amerindian figure sporting some truly remarkable tattoos! The European woman with facial tattoos to the figure's left highlights Bulwer's concern that this "barbarous" custom would become fashionable with his own countrymen (he was right, but it would take another three hundred years or so to really catch on, and the whole "face on a butt" tattoo fad seems to still lie in the future).

Readers wanting to learn more about the role of the devil and the monstrous in European interpretations of Amerindian societies might want to start with Fernando Cervantes' The Devil in the New World and Jorge Canizares-Esguerra's Puritan Conquistadors. Greenblatt's Marvelous Possessions, quoted above, is a great study of how the fantastical and marvelous figured into colonization, while Joyce Chaplin's Subject Matter: Technology, the Body and Science on the Anglo-American Frontier, revises and critiques his claims in various interesting ways. Those interested in New World nature and particularly animals should check out A New World of Animals: Early Modern Europeans on the Creatures of Iberian America Miguel de Asua and Roger French, a fun, learned and highly-entertaining book (from which I stole the quote on iguanas that opens this post). 

Le Monde Aquatique

The images below are hand-colored details from two lavishly illustrated atlases of the world's oceans produced by the workshops of Pieter Goos (d. 1670) and Johannes van Keulen (1654-1715).  Goos' L'Atlas de la Mer, ou Monde Aquaticque ("Atlas of the Sea, or the Watery World") the title page of which is visible at left, was published in Amsterdam in 1670. It would appear that van Keulen capitalized on the success of this work by reprinting the maps of Goos in slightly revised versions after his death in his Grand Nouvel Atlas de la Mer, ou Monde Aquatique (Amsterdam, 1696). Both Goos and Van Keulen shrewdly commercialized their knowledge of important commercial shipping lanes (which had once been proprietary to the Dutch trading companies) by publishing marine atlases in multiple languages, contributing to the hybridizations of knowledge and peoples that were a defining feature of the cosmopolitan late seventeenth-century.

What I find most interesting about these maps are the decorative, scroll-like 'cartouches' that ornament their corners, displaying a remarkable wealth of ethnographic and natural detail. These details, of course, were frequently wildly inaccurate, being based on second-hand information and long-held iconographies of the exotic and foreign (parasols, for instance, had a complex history in European depictions of Asians and Africans). Yet even these misperceptions are of interest, since, like the bizarre fabricated ethnographic sketches of Taiwan produced by the impostor George Psalmanazar, they offer insights into a vanished mental universe in which the boundaries of the known world were still shifting, uncertain and hazy, and when maps still contained huge swathes of blank space filled only by sea monsters and speculation.

All images are screenshots from hi-def scans of the works of Van Keullen and Goos that are accessible via a new online archive created by the French government relating to the Compagnie des Indes.

Detail from the title page of Goos' Atlas de la Mer evidently depicting Urania, the muse of astronomy.

Another detail featuring beautiful depictions of an armillary sphere and various mapping devices.

Title page of Van Keulen's atlas apparently depicting Europe (the woman with the torch) illuminating
the continents and oceans of the earth. Note the parasol, a popular iconographic marker of the exotic.

Cartouche for a map of Gabon in West Africa featuring an African writing and, oddly, what would appear to be a
Tupí Indian from coastal Brazil with a parrot-like bird.

A detailed painting of Fort Nassau near Moree, Ghana, a center of slave-trading.

A figure reckons the altitude of the sun using a cross-staff.

Another cartouche mingling African and South American iconographies.

The cartouche for a map of the River Gambia in West Africa apparently depicts a monkey preventing
a man from killing serpents with an axe -- I'd be curious if anyone reading this could explain this image. 

Several excellent recent works of history have also considered the political, economic and scientific implications of seventeenth-century world maps, and the larger world of cosmopolitanism, travel and early modern globalization in which they were embedded. I would especially recommend Alison Games'Web of Empire: English Cosmopolitans in an Age of Expansion (Oxford, 2008), Benjamin Schmidt's Innocence Abroad: the Dutch Imagination and the New World, 1570-1670 (Cambridge, 2001) and Harold Cook's Matters of Exchange: Commerce, Medicine and Science in the Dutch Golden Age (Yale, 2008).

Smokers and Drunkards in the Dutch Golden Age

I've recently been amassing an image library of paintings by the likes of Frans Hals, Adrian Brouwer, Gerrit Dou, Gabriel Metsu and Jan Steen -- Dutch painters who were contemporaries of Rembrandt and Vermeer and, though less well known, were in my view almost as good. I suspect that Vermeer's popularity has given us a somewhat distorted view of everyday life in the Golden Age of the Dutch Republic (which peaked from the 1620s to 1670s), which, one would gather from his great works, was a place of serene repose at the writing desk and quiet contemplation alongside leaded windows. Yet the works by the artists I've mentioned above tell a different story: one of drunken tobacco-smoking in crowded pubs. Since the Dutch were, after all, famous among their British, French and Iberian contemporaries (and rivals) for their paired addictions to liquor and smoking, I suspect that this latter impression gives a more accurate view of the exuberant, wealthy and self-indulgent era when the Dutch Republic controlled world trade. Below I've cropped some images of the Hollanders enjoying their drugs of choice:

A family enjoying a feast day with a number of spiritous liquors. The corked bottle on the left may well be gin, which was invented by the Dutch in the 17th century. From: Jan Steen, ‘The way you hear it, is the way you sing it’.  (detail). ca. 1665 Oil on canvas. 134 × 163 cm (52.76 × 64.17 in). The Hague, Royal Picture Gallery Mauritshuis.

Detail from another work by Jan Steen, Argument over a Card Game. Oil on canvas, 90 x 119 cm Staatliche Museen, Berlin

A lower social order enjoying the same vices: Adriaen van Ostade's Carousing peasants in a tavern. c. 1635, Munich.

What has really struck me from looking closely at these paintings of partying Hollanders is the frequency with which very young children are shown smoking tobacco. Evidently it was thought to be perfectly fine for a child as young as 6 or 8 to be given a pipe to smoke on special occasions! See below:

Detail from Jan Steen's The Happy Family. Would any Dutch-speakers care to translate the inscription above the smoking girl? Something about pipes, I gather.

Another detail of a smoking child from the same work.

 

It would appear that children were allowed to drink as well (although this doesn't surprise me nearly as much):

Detail from Jan Steen's Katzenfamille ("cat family"?). Note the kittens in the upper right corner!

Finally, here are some images of other drugs that may have been available to consumers in the Dutch Republic via apothecary shops and quack doctors or druggists. (My own research suggests that exotica such as cannabis, opium and datura were widely available in the Indian Ocean trade emporia that the Dutch dominated in this period, and quite possibly were consumed in the domestic Netherlands by those who had grown bored with pipes, cakes and ale). These first two details depict quack doctors with medicines, both by the great Jan Steen:

Finally, Adriaen Brauwer's famous painting The Bitter Draught, apparently depicting a man imbibing an odd-tasting medicinal drug.

 

 

Paintings from Dutch Brazil

Dutch Brazil, which officially called itself 'Nieuw Holland,' was a short-lived (1630-1654) state in the north-east of Brazil that resulted from the Dutch Republic's aggressive policy of territorial expansion at the expense of the Portuguese colonies in the first half of the seventeenth century -- a policy that also led to the Dutch occupation of Portuguese Angola between 1641 and 1648 and a number of annexations in Portuguese India, including the city of Cochin (see below).

These devestating defeats for the Portuguese crown sprang from a combination of factors -- the Dutch were a nation on the rise in this period, and the Portuguese, junior partners in the Iberian Union of the 1580-1640 period, found themselves with diminished resources and man-power to defend their far-flung empire. The tide began to turn in the 1620s (see my previous post on the Portuguese-Spanish defeat of the Dutch in Bahia, 1625), but the Dutch retained a foothold in Pernambuco and the north Amazon region until the 1650s, as shown by the map below.

One result of these geopolitical misadventures was a fascinating episode in the history of European art and the print culture of early modern natural history. The Dutch government encouraged painters, botanists and other observers of nature to visit the new colonies and record their observations of the strange new tropical lands that had fallen into the hands of the Dutch Republic. The painter Albert Eckhout (1610-1665) was perhaps the most outstanding of these imperial observers. Below are a selection of some of his wonderfully observed paintings of Brazil's flora, fauna, landscapes and peoples. All images are from the National Museum of Denmark in Copenhagen unless otherwise noted, and were painted during Eckhout's travels in Brazil between 1637 and 1644:

"East Indies Fruits."

Tupi Indian woman with child.

Coconuts.

Tupi Indian man. Interestingly, this figure appears to be the model for one of the flanking figures in Piso's Natural History of Brazil.

Willem Piso's 1668 Historia Naturalis Brasilia (Natural History of Brazil), hand-colored frontispiece. Compare the figure at left to the Tupi Indian painted by Eckhout above. Piso traveled on the same expedition as Eckhout and fellow painter Frans Post, serving as a physician.

The Dutch-Portuguese wars also led to a vacuum of European power in Formosa, present-day Taiwan. Weakened Dutch forces were chased from the island by Chinese military leader and admiral Zheng Chenggong ( 郑成功), known to Europeans as Koxinga, in 1662. The resulting cut-off of European communication with the island allowed the famous eighteenth century impostor George Psalmanazar to invent a series of outlandish falsehoods about Formosa, as detailed in my previous post on this fascinating figure.

For more on these beautiful paintings, see Rebecca Parker Brienen's Visions of Savage Paradise (2007).  Charles Boxer's monograph The Dutch in Brazil is unfortunately out of print, but Benjamin Schmidt's Innocence Abroad: the Dutch Imagination and the New World (2006) is a great general survey of Dutch empire and observation in the seventeenth century Americas - highly recommended.

A Borgesian Index and Images of the Indies

My apologies for the gap in posts recently - recently I've had to concentrate on my actual work a bit more. But I wanted to share two things: some extracts from the bizarrely detailed index of the seventeenth century buccaneer William Dampier's Voyages (1697) and two gorgeous images of the East Indies from the 1599 Itinerario of Jan Huygen van Linschoten. 

First, the index -- which reminds me a bit of Jorge Luis Borges' famous citation of a fictional

"Chinese encyclopedia called the Heavenly Emporium of Benevolent Knowledge. In its distant pages it is written that animals are divided into (a) those that belong to the emperor; (b) embalmed ones; (c) those that are trained; (d) suckling pigs; (e) mermaids; (f) fabulous ones; (g) stray dogs; (h) those that are included in this classification; (i) those that tremble as if they were mad; (j) innumerable ones; (k) those drawn with a very fine camel's-hair brush; (l) etcetera; (m) those that have just broken the flower vase; (n) those that at a distance resemble flies."

Whoever compiled Dampier's index does not go quite this far, but some of its hair-splitting distinctions are both utterly surreal and at times quite funny (such as the first example below, which distinguishes between "Bells, musical, struck upon, 342" and "Bells, with claws, worshipt, 411.") Its also a testament to the amazing variety of Dampier's observations and writings. Some examples, taken from the Google Books link given above:

In some cases, the index even seems to tell a story, or at least hints of one. The entry for 'night' for instance, has a palpable flavor of the uncanny: 

Now on to Linschoten's beautiful images. A Dutch-born mariner in the service of the Portuguese during the height of their Estado da Índia (the Portuguese empire in the Indian Ocean, centered on the city-state of Goa), Jan van Linschoten (1563-1611) was a careful observer of foreign customs. He published his findings in the Netherlands , and in the process helped turn the tide of world trade toward the nascent Dutch Republic by revealing many of the secret spice routes and sea charts of the Portuguese in India, who held a virtual monopoly on key commodities such as cinnamon and pepper at the time.

The following images come from Linschoten's 1599 book of travels, the Itinerario:

"Fusta, which was used by the Portuguese and their enemies, the Malabares, for trading and
warfare." Hand colored engraving.

The main street of the city of Goa, hand-colored illustration. A fascinating image of daily-life
in a colonial capitol, complete with money-changers, merchants, porters and slaves.

The title page of the original Dutch edition.