What Did 17th Century Food Taste Like?

Diego Velázquez, Old Woman Frying Eggs, c. 1618, National Gallery of Scotland.

As the official portraitist for the Spanish monarchy at the height of its glory, Diego Velázquez painted queens, emperors, and gods. But one of his most famous paintings is a window into a much humbler world. A woman is frying eggs in hot oil, ready to scoop them out with a simple wooden spoon. Behind her, a servant boy carries a half-full jug of wine and a melon tied up in a loop of twine.

This painting is the type of thing historians love. A profoundly talented artist with a knack for realism, choosing the type of subject matter that is so normal that it rarely gets preserved (the same is true today—how many contemporary painters choose to depict taquerias or bagel shops?) Scholars suspect that Velazquez's own family members may have served as models in his early paintings. It's possible that the woman in this painting numbered among them, since she also appears in a religious painting he produced in the same year.

Diego Velázquez,  Christ in the House of Martha and Mary, 1618, National Gallery, UK.

But this post is not about Velazquez. It's not even about art history. It's about food.

What can we learn about how people ate in the seventeenth century? And even if we can piece together historical recipes, can we ever really know what their food tasted like?

This might seem like a relatively unimportant question. For one thing, the senses of other people are always going to be, at some level, unknowable, because they are so deeply subjective. Not only can I not know what Velázquez's fried eggs tasted like three hundred years ago, I arguably can't know what my neighbor's taste like. And why does the question matter, anyway? A very clear case can be made for the importance of the history of medicine and disease, or the histories of slavery, global commerce, warfare, and social change.

By comparison, the taste of food doesn't seem to have the same stature. Fried eggs don't change the course of history.

But taste does change history.

One example, chosen at random: the Mexican chili peppers hiding in the bottom edges of both paintings.

The pepper family (genus Capsicum) is native to the Americas, and it was still a relatively new arrival in the cuisines of Asia, Africa, and Europe when Velazquez was alive. As a non-elite person born in 1599, we can guess that his grandparents would not have been familiar with the taste of peppers and that his parents still thought of them as an exotic plant from across the seas. Even the name he, and we, apply to the plant was a foreign import: the word 'chili' is from Nahuatl, the language of the Aztecs. So is 'avocado' (Nahuatl ahuacatl), 'tomato' (tomatl) and chocolate (chocolatl).

The taste for these foods was a significant factor in the series of global ecological movements between the Old and New Worlds that historians call the Columbian Exchange. Any time we eat kimchi, or kung pao chicken, or pasta with red sauce, we are eating foods that are direct results of the Columbian Exchange.

Someone really needs to make a better map of the Columbian Exchange. This one, from a public-domain resource for teachers from UT Austin, is one of the best I could find, but it doesn't come close to capturing the full range of exchanges.

But we're also eating modern foods. That's not to say that there aren't older correlates to these dishes—there undoubtedly are. But food has changed since the early modern period. Globalization of food crops has transformed the flavors of regional cuisines. Meanwhile, factory farming has led to a homogenization of some of the varietals available to us, while also creating a huge variety of new strains and hybrids.

One example: I didn't realize until recently that broccoli, Brussels sprouts, cauliflower, kale, cabbage, and collard greens are all technically the same species, Brassica oleracea. The substantial differences between these sub-species are all due to patient intervention by human farmers over millennia. Many of these changes are surprisingly recent. Early versions of cauliflower may have been mentioned by Pliny and medieval Muslim botanists, but as late as 1600, a French author was writing that cauli-fiori "as the Italians call it" was "still rather rare in France." Likewise, Brussels sprouts don't appear to have become widely cultivated until the Renaissance.

A woman with Brassica oleracea in Pieter Aertsen, Market Scene, 1569.

One example of the substantial changes produced by the artificial selection of premodern farmers actually made the news a couple years back. In 2015, there was a wave of reporting about early modern watermelons. The watermelon is native to Africa and has a substantial amount of range in terms of color and taste. Seventeenth-century still life paintings record a substantially different phase in the artificial selection of watermelons toward the bright red, seedless varietal familiar in Western grocery stores.

Giovanni Stanchi, Watermelons and other fruits in a landscape, c. 1645, Christie's.

But focusing on unusual varietals and exotic imports can be misleading. Most people in the early modern world—not just in Europe, but everywhere—were illiterate farmers and pastoralists whose diet was hyper-minimalist by contemporary standards.

This is not to say that their food tasted bad, necessarily. But it was clearly very simple, and very starch-heavy. From China to Europe to sub-Saharan Africa, gruels and stews made out of staple grains or legumes were the daily fare. Italian farmers weren't eating eggplant parmesan or spaghetti with meatballs. They were typically eating either boiled beans or grains, day after day after day.

The Beaneater by Annibale Carracci, 1580-90.

The acute eyes of Bruegel the Elder captured one example of this universal food of the premodern peasantry. In Bruegel's The Harvesters, a team of peasants is taking a break for a mid-day meal which seems to consist entirely of bread and bowls of what I am guessing is a wheat-based gruel, something akin to Cream of Wheat. The jugs they're drinking out of probably contain small beer.

Pieter Bruegel the Elder, The Harvesters (detail), Antwerp, 1525-1530.

But paintings like these can only get us so far. A more promising approach, perhaps, would be to go directly to the textual sources and take a close look at early modern recipes. I spend a lot of time recording 'receipts' (an archaic form of the word recipe, but also a broader one, since it included drug prescriptions). Several actually look pretty tasty (like eighteenth-century "Maccarony cheese"), and I hope to cook a few one day, taking a page from my friend Marissa Nicosia's reconstructions of early modern food at Cooking the Archives.

But there are many others that I have no desire to make anytime soon. One example that stands out in my mind is this recipe for snail water from a circa 1700 English manuscript at Penn.

To make Snaill water, for a consumption, or anny weakness in old or young persons, and for the ricketts
take a quart of snails, wash them twince in stronge-stale-beere and dry them well in a cloth, then bruse them shels and all, put to them 3 quarts of red cows-milk 4 ounces, red rose leaves, Rosemary, sweet-marjoram, Ivery, of each a good handfull, distill altogether and sweeten your water with surrop of violets, and sugar candy lickerish sorrop, put in 6 penny-worth of naturall-ballsom, drink a quarter of a pint of this every night and morning. 

Snails, stale beer and ivory shavings certainly sounds like a challenging flavor combo to me, despite the addition of the fragrant herbs and sugar. But this is a medicine, not a food, and it wasn't intended to taste good. Another early modern manuscript owned by Penn (this one from 1655, and more inclined toward food recipes than drug recipes) contains a far more relatable dish:

To fricasie a chicken or rabbitt.
Take a chicking and scald it or Case it, and put it into a frying pan with halfe a pint of strong broth, a peace of buter with a little whole pepper and mace, and boyle them well upon the fire till yr  Chickin be tender then make a [illegible: looks like 'leare' or 'leane of uiriayce'?] and minced peaches* and ye yolkes of 2 eggs and a little drawne butter then put it into the frying pan keeping yr pan with shaking over the fyre till it bee thick, then dish it up strewing thereon a little minced parsley. 

* 11/19/17 update: a reader named Dev Gualtieri wrote to offer the suggestion that this word might be 'parsley' instead of 'peaches.' I think 'parsley' is a reasonable reading of the word, but hesitate to change it from 'peaches' because you can see at the bottom of the recipe that the author writes 'parsley' very differently there. I've added a link to the original manuscript page so the reader can judge.

Even this relatively simple recipe for pan-fried chicken has some surprises, however. One is the addition of mace, a fairly obscure spice that comes from the same plant as nutmeg (nutmeg's the actual seed, and mace is the covering). It's a highly potent spice that numbs the tastebuds and imparts a strong aroma to food. And it's combined here with stewed peaches and egg yolks—not a flavor combination that has survived into the cuisines of the modern era, so far as I know.

Guessing the true flavors of these ingredients—the taste of premodern chicken, or mace carried in a ship's hold from Indonesia to Europe, or butter that was churned by hand—is at some level impossible. Certainly, we can make some educated guesses. In the case of late medieval cooking, one scholar has looked at the transformations of recipes as they crossed cultural zones (such as the medieval Arabic sweet porridge called ma'muniya, which evolved into Anglo-Norman maumenee) and concluded that "as time went by, a dish tended to become sweeter, spicer, and more complicated." But so much has changed between the worlds of the past and the present when it comes to cultivars, modes of preparation and preservation, and, perhaps, an overall sense of what tastes good and bad. I often wonder what someone from the thirteenth or seventeenth century might make of a Snickers bar, for instance. I suspect they'd find it disgustingly cloying. But then again, maybe not.

Thinking about historical tastes reminds me of the French expression for words that seem to be analogous across two languages, but actually have totally different meanings: faux amis. (For instance, English-speakers in Spanish-speaking countries often say that they are embarazada—they intend to say they're 'embarrassed,' but they're actually saying they're 'pregnant.')

These early modern foods are culinary false friends. They seem like they'd be the same as our familiar correlates. But we can't be sure that they tasted the same.

Like so much in history, they're so close, yet just out of reach.


Further reading online:

The Recipes Project
Cooking the Archives
What did Byzantine food taste like?

Further reading in print:

 (Note: These are Amazon affiliate links, so if you buy one, a small percentage of the purchase goes to support this blog).  .

A Spaniard in Samarkand, 1404

Special note: an earlier version of this post appeared on a new blog I helped develop in partnership with Not Even Past of the University of Texas at Austin and Origins (Ohio State University). Check it out here: historymilestones.tumblr.com

On September 8, 1404, the Castilian diplomat Ruy Gonzales de Clavijo reached the Silk Road city of Samarkand. He had travelled over five thousand miles by foot, sail, horse and camel; passed through steppe, deserts, seas and mountains.

Now he had reached his destination: the capital of a vast new empire created by a military genius, mass murderer and patron of the arts named Timur (meaning “iron” in Persian). De Clavijo’s lord, King Henry III of Castile, had dispatched him to learn more about the man who Europeans called Tamurlane. If possible, he was to forge a peace treaty with the world-conqueror, whose sack of Baghdad alone caused the deaths of hundreds of thousands.

Clavijo recorded his entrance to the capital in great detail, noting the stores of “silks, satins, musk, rubies, diamonds, pearls, and rhubarb” carried from China, the painted elephants, vast tent pavilions with fluttering jeweled banners, and the frenzied pace of construction. He noted that work on the largest mosque in the city had been completed just before his arrival, but Timur ordered its gate to be torn down again because it lacked grandeur.

An orientalist nineteenth century Russian view of Samarkand in the time of Timur. Oil on canvas, Vasily Vereshchagin, 1842. [All images via Wikimedia Commons.]

The arrival of Clavijo and the party of other ambassadors who he accompanied to the cosmopolitan city provoked mild interest, but mainly on account of their strange clothes and quaint customs. Medieval Castilians, it seems, were regarded as rather backward and provincial in the world of the Silk Road. Upon their entry to the city, he recorded, the party passed through a “plain covered with gardens, and houses, and markets where they sold many things.” They came to the gates of the city after several hours travel through this lush hinterland, being greeted by “ six elephants, with wooden castles on their backs”:

The [Samarkand] ambassadors went forward, and found the [Spanish] men, who had the presents well arranged on their arms, and they advanced with them in company with the two knights, who held them by the armpits, and the ambassador whom Timour Beg [Tamerlane] had sent to the king of Castille was with them; and those who saw him, laughed at him, because he was dressed in the costume and fashion of Castille. [Source]

De Clavijo referred here to Hajji Muhammad al-Qazi, a Chagatai courtier who had visited the court of Castile in Toledo several years earlier. Al-Qazi had been sent by Timur to offer gifts and letters to the Iberian monarch – Clavijo was now in Samarkand to return the favor.

Sergey Prokudin-Gorsky's photograph of a Rabbi instructing Jewish youths in Samarkand circa 1911 offers a vivid glimpse at the costumes of Samarkand's citizens prior to the introduction of Western clothing. Via the Library of Congress photograph collection.

Why was a small Christian country on the farthest western fringe of Europe interacting with a Muslim emperor of central Asia in the first place? The era of Timur marked a high-point in what has been called the "archaic" or "early modern globalization" of the world, a period when travelers from the Christian, Muslim and Chinese worlds (like Clavijo's rough contemporaries Ibn Battuta and the Chinese admiral Zheng He) successfully travelled vast distances across Eurasia by land and sea.

As the Oxford historian John Darwin noted in his book After Tamerlane, Timur was a figure of crucial importance in world history because he was the last great nomadic warlord. Like the armies of Attila the Hun and Ghengis Khan, Timur’s forces were multi-ethnic conglomerations of Turkic, Mongol, Chagatai, Persian and north Indian peoples who were united under a common banner by the sheer charisma and military skill of a single man. His empire was not a state in the traditional sense, but a pan-tribal confederacy held together by military force.

A rare surviving letter from Tamerlane to King
Charles VI of France, written in Persian circa
1402. Archives Nationales, Paris.

Timur’s tactics were highly sophisticated, requiring years of planning and complex organization.
Yet in fundamental ways they were pre-modern: like Genghis Khan, Timur and his commanders relied upon the mobility of massed mounted archers who could repeatedly gallop toward opponents, launch a volley of arrows and hasten away. His horseback archers, fighting at the dawn of the advent of gunpowder weaponry, were the last nomad army that could threaten the settled, urbanized states of China, south Asia, the Arab world and Europe.

By contrast, the “gunpowder empires” that succeeded Timur – the Portuguese, Spanish, Dutch, British and French in Europe, the Mughals (who were themselves an offshoot of Timur’s dynasty) in India, the Qing in China – all relied on conscripted armies, state finances, and ‘hi-tech’ devices like musket rifles, cannons and sailing ships. The triumph of these more modern approaches to conquest and empire in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries marked an epochal transformation. Ever since agricultural city-states emerged in Mesopotamia and Egypt in the 4th millennium BCE, human societies had been divided between hunter-gatherer or pastoralist nomads and settled cultivators. The threat of invasions by nomads from the vast steppes of Eurasia had instilled terror in town-dwellers from the earliest written records in Sumeria to the Middle Ages. After Timur, the agricultural, urban model of human society decisively won out over that of nomadism. The winners modeled ‘civilization’ in their own image.

Yet although Timur was famous for his cruelty – in one grisly episode, he supposedly murdered all 70,000 inhabitants of the Persian city of Isfahan for resisting his occupation – he was by no means a barbarian. Indeed, Clavijo was clearly overawed by the society he encountered in a region that is today regarded as a desert backwater. He was impressed by the gardens surrounding Timur’s palace, by the enormous variety of goods that the Silk Road yielded, and by the splendid feasts that Timur’s men enjoyed:

When the lord called for meat, the people dragged it to him on pieces of leather, so great was its weight; and as soon as it was within twenty paces of him, the carvers came, who cut it up, kneeling on the leather… When the roast and boiled meats were done with, they brought meats dressed in various other ways, and balls of forced meat; and after that, there came fruit, melons, grapes, and nectarines; and they gave them drink out of silver and golden jugs, particularly sugar and cream, a pleasant beverage, which they make in the summer time [Source].

"The Defeat by Timur of the Sultan of Delhi, Nasir Al-Din Mahmum
Tughluq, in the winter of 1397-1398." Watercolor painting by
Zafarnama, from India circa 1600.

Clavijo seemed particularly eager to note the favor that Timur showed to the King of Castile. When he was presented to the world-conqueror, Clavijo was surprised to find that “he was sitting on the ground.” Timur sat cross-legged before a fountain “which threw up the water very high,” wearing a silk robe and a hat studded with rubies and pearls. The Castilian proudly related that when he entered his presence, “Timour Beg turned to the knights who had seated around him… and said, ‘Behold! here are the ambassadors sent by my son the king of Spain, who is the greatest king of the Franks, and lives at the end of the world.’”

Clavijo’s mission – to forge a treaty with Timur in order to fight their common enemy, the Ottoman sultans of Turkey – ultimately failed. Nonetheless, his account gives us a fascinating glimpse into a now-vanished world (as do the entrancingly vivid memoirs of Timur's direct descendant, emperor Jahangir of the Mughal empire). Timur was the final manifestation of a mighty world-historical force: the nomadic empire. Turkic and other central Asian warlords would continue to control the Russian steppe and the Silk Road cities for centuries, but never again would a leader from the center of what some called “the World Island” of Asia cast fear into the hearts of Chinese emperors and Christian kings alike.


Less than two hundred years later, Christopher Marlowe – the celebrated Elizabethan playwright known for his brilliance, homosexuality and violent death in a tavern brawl – would write his most celebrated play, the full title of which gives insight into the mixture of wonder and fear that surrounded Timur’s legacy: Tamburlaine the Great, who, from a Scythian Shephearde, by his rare and wonderfull Conquests, became a most puissant and mightye Monarque. And (for his tyranny and terrour in Warre) was tearmed, the Scourge of God (London, 1590).

Already by Marlowe's time, Timur and his Silk Road world of nomads and warriors had become the stuff of legend. The balance of power had now shifted from nomadic tribes to emerging nation-states. Charismatic warlords had been supplanted by maritime monarchs like Phillip II of Spain – the descendant of Clavijo’s Castilian king— or controllers of vast state bureaucracies like the Qing emperors of China. Yet for Marlowe, Timur’s legacy remained:

Then shall my native city, Samarqand…

Be famous through the furthest continents, 

For there my palace-royal shall be placed, 

Whose shining turrets shall dismay the heavens... 

Some more photographs of Samarkand by Sergei Prokudin-Gorski, who I posted about back in 2010:

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.

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.

A Pirate Surgeon in Panama

  It was in the evening when we came to an anchor, and the next morning we fired two guns for the Indians that lived on the Main to come aboard; for by this time we concluded we should hear from our five men that we left in the heart of the country among the Indians, this being about the latter end of August, and it was the beginning of May when we parted from them. According to our expectations the Indians came aboard and brought our friends with them: Mr. Wafer wore a clout about him, and was painted like an Indian; and he was some time aboard before I knew him.
- William Dampier, A New Voyage Round the World, (London: 1697)

I spent some time doing research in London this summer, and one of the things I was struck by was the large number of manuscripts written by late seventeenth century buccaneers. One is accustomed to thinking of buccaneers and pirates as illiterate sorts, and to a large degree they were -- but ships captains, surgeons and pilots were often exceptions to this rule, and they produced  some of the most fascinating travel narratives I've ever come across. I posted about one of them several months ago - today I want to share a few images and quotes from another that I'm currently working on: Lionel Wafer's A New Voyage and Description of the Isthmus of Darien (1699, London).

Wafer (1640-1705) sketches out a brief autobiography in the early pages of this book, in which we learn that he served as a surgeon's apprentice on board a number of British trading vessels as a youth, ultimately braving the hazardous voyage to the Indian Ocean on an East India Company merchant ship.  He next (1677) sought his fortunes on the island of Jamaica, at that time a relatively recent possession of the British crown which was beginning to gain a reputation as a place where working class Britons could make their fortune - largely via the savage exploitation of enslaved African sugar plantation laborers. Wafer seems to have worked as a surgeon for a time on the island, but he appears to have yearned for a more glamorous line of work (if that is the correct word), as he enlisted with a pirate expedition in 1679.

A map of the Darien peninsula (modern day Panama) compiled in part from Lionel Wafer's data, and printed to publicize the Darien Scheme (1699).

Wafer's travel narrative increases in pace at this point, since it was a year later, in 1680, that he enlisted with the famed pirate Bartholomew Sharp on a voyage to the South Seas (i.e. the rich Pacific ports of Spanish America) and became close friends with the fascinating buccaneer/naturalist William Dampier. It was in the isthmus of Darien, the land now known as Panama, that Wafer's troubles began. As Dampier related in the manuscript version of the book quoted at the heading of this post, one day in the jungle

our chirurgeon came to a sad disaster[.] [While] drying his powder a carelesse man passed by with his pipe lighted and sett fire to his powder which scalded his knee and reduced him to that condition that he was not able to march[,] wherefore wee allowed him a slave to carry his things being all of us much dissatisfied at the accident.

After a few days painful march, it was decided that Wafer should stay behind with the local Indians and wait for a rescue ship. One did not arrive for over two years, and in the meantime Wafer became fluent in the local indigenous dialect and made some acute observations about central American Indian medical, religious and political practices. In one episode, for instance, he witnessed a medicinal 'bleeding' of the chief's wife, as illustrated below:

In Wafer's manuscript account of the incident, which I had the opportunity to consult at the British Library in London, he portrays himself as a heroic 'civilized' physician who was able to convince the Indian medical practitioners that the European style of bleeding was far superior:

It soe happened that the day after our arrival at the Kings Pallace one of his Queens being indisposed was to be lett blood which their Drs. thus performe[:] The Patient is seated on a Stone in the River and the Doctors with a small bow shoot their arrowes into the naked body of the Patient from head to foote shooting their arrowes as fast as they can not missing any part[.] [B]ut the arrows are gaged soe that they penetrate noe further then wee generally thrust our Lancetts and if they hitt a veine which is fulle of winde and blood spurt out a little they will leape and skip about shewing many antick gestures in triumph of soe great a piece of Arte. I was by and perceiving their Ignorance told the King that if he pleased I would shew him a better way without putting the Patient to Soe much torments[.] ["]Lett me See[,"] Saith he and at his Comand I bound up her Arme with a piece of Barke and with my Lancett breached a veine...

Its rare to find such a detailed account of early modern Indian practices, and despite Wafer's apparent Eurocentrism on this occasion, he is actually a rather fascinating example of a European who appears to have freely adopted the trappings of indigenous American culture. Although he skirts around the fact in his own writings, Dampier's account makes clear that when Wafer was finally 'rescued,' he was found "painted like an Indian" (complete with large nose ring) and, as Dampier puts it, "he was some time aboard before I knew him." This lack of recognition is a striking and revealing detail, since Dampier and Wafer seem to have been extremely close friends.

Here are two other details of the remarkable images from Wafer's book. I encourage you to click to see an enlarged version, as they are highly detailed images (which I present courtesy of the John Carter Brown Library's wonderful Archive of Early American Images):

I know of no decent books on Lionel Wafer, but Anna Neil has written a great essay on William Dampier (which coins the excellent term "Buccaneer Ethnography") that touches on Wafer's story as well. A free online edition of Wafer's New Voyage is available as well. For those searching for a more in-depth scholarly treatment of British buccaneers in central America, I highly recommend Ignacio Gallup-Diaz's The Door of the Seas and the Key to the Universe: Indian Politics and Imperial Rivalry in Darien, 1640-1750.