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).

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.

 

 

Cabinets of Curiosities in the Seventeenth Century

"There is no man alone, because every man is a Microcosm, and carries the whole world about him... There is all Africa, and her prodigies in us."- Sir Thomas Browne, Religio Medici, 1642

Early modern Europeans envisioned their own bodies as miniature worlds which echoed God's Creation in every detail. And in the expansionist, acquisitive and globalizing era of the seventeenth century, the wonders of Creation frequently became conflated with the treasures of the tropical world that Europeans were busy exploiting. The physician and mystic philosopher (and favorite author of Virginia Woolf) Sir Thomas Browne opined that we all carry the "prodigies" of Africa within ourselves, while the poet John Donne famously wrote that "both th' Indias of spice and mine...lie here with me." The early modern curiosity cabinet (often called Kunstkammer or Wunderkammer, "Wonder-rooms") stood at the intersection of this dual preoccupation with microcosms and the treasures of Africa and "the Indies." A great deal has been written on cabinets of curiosities and wunderkammeren (here are some Kunstkammer whose contents have been digitized and here's a good essay on the subject by a curator at the Met; see the end of the post for some book recommendations), so I'm not going to elaborate too much on their history here. Instead, here are some beautiful paintings and engravings of curiosity cabinets, most from Wikimedia Commons.

The Danish naturalist Ole Worm's cabinet of curiosities was a famous early wunderkammer containing many creatures and shells drawn from Arctic waters. This is the frontispiece to Worm's 1655 Museum Wormianium.

This engraving from Vincent Levinus's 1715 Wondertooneel der Nature almost seems to function as a companion piece to Worm's cabinet - as if one of his drawers of marine specimen had been pulled upon and meticulously recorded.

Domenico Remps, A Cabinet of Curiosity, 1690s. Note the paintings of Dutch shipping vessels - the mechanism by which most of these eclectic objects reached the Flemish-Italian painter's studio.

Kunstkammer, a similar but somewhat older work by the Flemish artist Frans Francken II, 1636.

A panoramic view of a vast Dutch hall of curiosities (fanciful, I assume), again from Levinus Vincent, 1715.

One of my favorite things about visual depictions of curiosity cabinets is the immense amount of detail that painters and engravers lavished upon their contents. Here are some cropped details that I picked out from the images above:

A seahorse from Francken's painting.

Shells, precious gems, a perfume or medicine bottle and a notebook - all of which would not have been out of place in the treasurebox of an East India merchant. Again from Francken.

 A mean-looking tropical fish lurks above.

 And in the far background, some virtuosi inspect printed reference works.

A macabre detail of preserved animals (embryos?) from Levinus Vincent.

A 2008 BibliOddysey post on Levinus Vincent's amazing illustrations of curiosity cabinets contains some more images and some good details on Dutch collecting. Another very interesting site I came across is the King's Kunstkammer, a virtual exhibit of the Danish Royal Kunstkammer from 1674. Finally, for those interested in scholarly treatments, I can recommend Paula Findlen's Possessing Nature: Museums, Collecting, and Scientific Culture in Early Modern Italy. Lorraine Daston's Wonders and the Order of Nature, the edited volume Making Knowledge in Early Modern Europe by Benjamin Schmidt and Pamela H. Smith and the works of Anthony Grafton are also great guides to the cultures of collecting and curiosity in pre-modern times.

The Baroque Monsters of Father Schott

In Portuguese, barroco means "imperfect pearl": a fitting name for the Baroque era, a period that combined ornate beauty with a distinct taste for the odd, macabre and irregular. This interplay between the beautiful and the monstrous -- and its connections to the rise of the "New Science" in the second half of the seventeenth century -- is vividly exemplified by the Jesuit Father Gaspar Schott's Physica Curiosa (1662), a compendium of abnormal births, strange animals and fabulous humanoid creatures thought to inhabit the far reaches of the world.

Frontispiece of Physica Curiosa. Source: University of Iowa Digital Library, John Martin Rare Books Room.

The work's Latin title page.

The German-born Schott (1608-1666) was a Jesuit with a keen interest in a number of disciplines, from hydraulic mechanics to medicine and optics. One can surmise that Schott acquired his wide-ranging interests from his mentor, the celebrated Jesuit genius Anathasius Kircher (a polymathic marvel, Kirchner was a founder of Egyptology, used an early microscope to study microbes, lowered himself into an active volcano to learn about the earth's crust, constructed automatons, invented a magnetic clock and authored an immense encyclopedia on China). Below are a selection of images from Schott's Physica Curiosa, all of which I selected from the digital collections of the John Martin Rare Books Room at the University of Iowa. I've cropped some of the engraved plates to show interesting details and added my attempt at translations of the Latin captions and occasional explanatory notes. As the work's extended title dryly notes, Schott seeks to document "Angels, Demons, Men, Spirits, the Devil-Possessed, Monsters, Portents, Animals, Meteors, and other rare, arcane and curious things... and to illustrate them by many examples."

Schott, 579. "Seven-headed monster."

Schott, 393. "Shaggy man who walks with hands on the ground."

Schott, 393. "Woman of the woods in Java." This creature was probably based on the reports of seventeenth century Dutch mariners in Indonesia, who, in turn, may have been drawing upon indigenous knowledge of the orangutan -- "Man of the Forest" in the Malay language.

Schott, 395. "Hair-covered girl of eight years." Clearly a girl born with hypertrichosis.

"Boy with the head of an elephant." His companion is "a horned infant with spread eyes." I have no idea what to make of this one.

The images in this section of the work appear to be a strange combination of depictions of actual birth defects or hereditary abnormalities and pictures of mythical man-beasts that were said by medieval travelers to inhabit the Antipodes. In a later section, the book turns to the interesting and fantastical creatures that were being 'discovered' by European overseas voyages at the time. Many of these illustrations were evidently drawn from a book I wrote about in my post on Edward Topsell's Historie of Foure-Footed Beasts -- others were more fantastical:

Schott, 616. Here we find a "winged bird-centaur with the head of a human" and "a three-headed monster with the heads of a fox, a dragon and an eagle."

And here are the more familiar raccoon and river otter. Note, however, that the raccoon (here identified by its Spanish name, "mapache,") is from the New World and thus would have been as unfamiliar to European audiences of the time as many fantastical beasts.

Cat piano from Schott's Magia Naturalis (Natural Magic).

Finally, an interesting aside: Schott was also the first to describe what may well be the most bizarre musical instrument in history. This was the so-called the Katzenklavier or 'cat piano.' See this blog post on the subject to learn more about this strange creation, apparently real, which was said by Kircher to have been invented to relieve the melancholy of an Italian prince. PETA would have been appalled. For those interested in learning more, I haven't been able to find much written on Schott. However, his teacher Athanasius Kircher has generated a large body of fascinating scholarship -- see Paula Findlen's edited volume Athanasius Kircher: the Last Man Who Knew Everything (2004) for a good introduction.

"It is an error to suppose that lions do not approach a fire": Observations of Jean-Baptiste Tavernier

 "It is the custom of the Dutch to send parties from time to time to explore the country, and those who go furthest are best rewarded. A number of soldiers went in a party with a sergeant who commanded them, and advanced far into the country, where they made a large fire at midnight, both to protect themselves from lions and for warmth, and lay round it to rest. When they were asleep, a lion seized one of the soldiers by the arm, and immediately the sergeant fired a shot and slew the animal. When it was dead its jaws had to be forced open, with great effort, in order to release the soldier's arm, which was pierced from side to side. It is apparent from this story that it is an error to suppose that lions do not approach a fire." -Jean-Baptiste Tavernier, Travels in India, pg. 305.

Don't make the mistake of thinking that a hungry African lion will be scared away by fire. Such was the laconic moral of this rather gruesome story, related by the seasoned French traveler and jewel-merchant Jean-Baptiste Tavernier (1605-1689) in his highly entertaining Les Six Voyages de Jean-Baptiste Tavernier (1676).

Tavernier made his considerable fortune as a jewel merchant for Louis XIV (the illustration at left is a typical example of the contents of his book - he was obsessed with enormous stones such as the Hope Diamond, which he once owned and dubbed le Tavernier), but he was also a highly perceptive observer and competent writer, which makes his printed work one of the most valuable resources for those interested in the countries of the Indian Ocean region (especially modern-day India, Pakistan, Myanmar and South Africa) in the seventeenth century. Below are some particularly interesting descriptions of Tavernier's experiences accompanying one of the earliest Dutch colonizing missions to South Africa. Here, with the disdain for Africans typical of a European of his time, he describes the 'Hottentots' or 'Cafres' who were indigenous to the region around the Cape of Good Hope (I posted two weeks ago about a contemporary French map depicting the same peoples -- see here):

"On the fifty-fifth day of our voyage we came in view of the Cape of Good Hope... When [the Cafres or Hottentots] speak they make the tongue click (peter) in the mouth, and although their voice is scarcely articulate they easily understand one another... When they see vessels arriving they drive cattle to the shore and bring what they have to barter for tobacco, spirits, and beads of crystal and agate, which are cheap at Surat... "

Tavernier also displayed a common curiosity about the blackness of African skin -- how could the inhabitants of a temperate region like the Cape be so dark-complected? He concludes that it was due to an ointment made of "different simples" - an early modern term for the active agent in drugs and medicines:

"It is a very good country, as I have said, at the 35th degree and some minutes of latitude, and it is neither the air nor the heat which makes these Cafres so black as they are. Desiring to know the explanation of it, and why they smell so strongly, I inquired from a young girl who was taken as soon as her mother had brought her forth, and was nursed and reared in the fort, being as white as one of our European women. She told me that the reason that the Cafres are so black, is that they rub themselves with an ointment which they make of different simples known to them, and that if they do not rub themselves often, and as soon as they are born, they become dropsical."

Indeed, it was this knowledge of drugs and "simples" that struck Tavernier as the special gift of the otherwise barbarous natives of the Cape (for more on early modern drugs and drug merchants, see my earlier posts here and here):

"It is true that these Cafres, brutal as they are, have nevertheless a special knowledge of simples, and know to apply them to the maladies for which they are specifics; this the Dutch have very often proved. Whether the Cafres are bitten by a venemous animal, or that an ulcer or other disease appears, by means of these simples, which they know how to select, they accomplish the cure in a short time. Each sick man [of the Dutch ship] had two of these Cafres to attend upon him, and as soon as they saw what the condition of the wound or ulcer was, they sought for the drugs, crushed them between two pebbles and applied them to the sore. As for the four others, they were not given into their hands, being so infected with veneral disease that they could not be cured at Batavia. All four died between the Cape and the Island of St. Helena..."

An elderly Tavernier in elaborate Persian dress, posing proudly after he had made his fortune and settled into retired life in France. 

The complete illustrations from Tavernier's Voyages are available for free online thanks to the French Bibliotheque Nacional. Some samples:

 "Animal which produces musk" -- a greatly treasured commodity/drogue in early modern times, used as a medicine and perfume (as, indeed, it still is today).

Tavernier calls this an "Indian poignard." It is in fact a katara, a weapon used in the Indian subcontinent since ancient times for close-quarters combat and assasinations.

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.