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).

"They are very expert in Diabolical Conjurations": Magic and Medicine in Panama, 1681

A detail from an engraving by Theodor de Bry showing indigenous Brazilians tormented by devils. 

"I sat awhile, cringing upon my Hams among the Indians, after their Fashion, painted as they were, and all naked but only about the Waist, and with my Nose-piece… hanging over my mouth. … 'Twas the better part of an Hour before one of the Crew, looking more narrowly upon me, cried out, Here's our Doctor; and immediately they all congratulated my Arrival among them. I did what I could presently to wash off my Paint, but 'twas near a Month before I could get tolerably rid of it." — Lionel Wafer, 1681

The pirate-surgeon Lionel Wafer (1640-1705) has won some modest attention from historians and fans of pirate lore due to his participation in the South Seas voyages of more famous buccaneers like William Dampier and Bartholomew Sharp.

Surprisingly, however, by far the most interesting era of Wafer's life — which hinges on a period of four months during which Wafer lived with the Kuna people of Panama, adopting their mode of dress, customs, and language — has gone without much notice. Wafer's account of this period is utterly fascinating, abounding with intriguing details about Kuna spirituality, surgical techniques, and even what Wafer, rather uncharitably, called the "Diabolical Conjurations" of the Kuna elders who nursed him back to health following a freak accident in the jungle. 

Title page of Wafer's Voyage.    

When Lionel Wafer published his New Voyage and Description of the Isthmus of America in 1699 (which you can read in full thanks to the Internet Archive), he was working as a surgeon in London. But if we go back to the fall of 1681, we find Wafer living not as an Englishman, but as a member of a Kuna village in what is now Panama. Grievously wounded by a gunpowder explosion that damaged his knee, Wafer had been abandoned by his fellow buccaneers on a trek across Mesoamerica.

After a few delirious days wandering in the jungle, Wafer was lucky enough to make his way to a village led by a Kuna leader named Lacenta, where he was given shelter and his injuries were slowly healed. By Wafer's account, at least, he then proceeded to learn the Kuna language, befriend Lacenta, and gain much knowledge of local plants and medicines. Wafer even claimed that he used his surgical skills (specifically, his practice of phlebotomy, or blood-letting) to “save the life” of one of Lacenta’s wives.

And he had witnessed the work of shamans who had predicted the circumstances of his own eventual return to the Christian world with uncanny accuracy. They had done so, Wafer claimed, by summoning the devil.

Lacenta with his family and attendants. From Wafer, New Voyage and Description of the Isthmus of America, 140.

The Kuna method of blood-letting, performed on one of Lacenta's wives (Wafer, 28).

“The Indians in their Robes in Councel, and Smoaking tobacco after their way" (102).

Wafer’s vision of the indigenous cultures of the New World as haunted by Satanic magic was not new. Spanish and Portuguese chronicles of American conquest described indigenous Americans who wielded the power of the devil both to curse and to cure. But Wafer’s account further provoked unsettling questions about the potentially supernatural (and Satanic) origin of knowledge about the Americas in a specific time and place – Britain during the Scientific Revolution – when such knowledge had never been more valuable.

As David Livingstone, Simon Schaffer and Harold Cook have shown, traveler’s accounts provided the first-hand reporting of phenomena that fueled the development of the natural sciences. The big question among early modern European scientists was not about whether travel accounts were scientifically valuable. It was which ones to trust. Who was an acceptable source for scientific data? Could indigenous knowledge be trusted if, as many Christians believed in the seventeenth century, it had been shaped by witchcraft, magic, or Satan himself?

Tupi Indians in Brazil fighting with demonic beings (detail). Theodor de Bry, Americae tertia pars (Frankfurt, 1592), 223.

By the close of the seventeenth century, ‘buccaneer ethnographers’ such as Lionel Wafer’s travel partner William Dampier had demonstrated that even pirates could collect empirical data that was acceptable to scientists like the members of the Royal Society of London. Yet the personal histories of such individuals, who frequently resided among non-Christian indigenous peoples for extended periods, put them in the complex position of serving as mediators between what historians call "scientific travel" and indigenous spirituality. 

Wafer was among the most dramatic examples of this unfolding story. As Britain’s preeminent firsthand witness of the Panama region, he was a key figure in early attempts to understand the American tropics — and in efforts to exploit tropical resources via new colonies. Indeed, in July of 1687 Wafer had been interviewed regarding the Darién’s colonization potential by none other than John Locke. Wafer’s account had also been printed and bound together with an account of Darien written by an unspecified “member of the Royal Society,” suggesting close links between Wafer and that institution.

What can these negotiations tell us about the transformations of science and of the British Empire at the dawn of the eighteenth century?

Wafer served as a courier of knowledge about a tropical world that was still largely unknown to European science. But Wafer’s time in this space had bestowed on him a form of indigeneity that also rendered his testimony suspect among European Christians. Wafer’s adoption of Kuna dress and ceremonial body paint, in particular, raised concerns among Europeans that were tied to larger debates about demonology.

Take John Bulwer’s 1656 frontispiece to Anthropometamorphosis, or the Artificial Changeling, for instance.

This utterly fascinating and bizarre image shows a European woman, a hair-covered man and a South American Indian with full body paint standing side by side. They are being judged by Nature, Adam and Eve and a body of disapproving magistrates (including the ghost of Galen) for transforming their bodies, while the devil flies above them laughing and saying, “In the image of God created he them! But I have new-molded them to my likeness.”

Europeans and indigenous Americans being judged by Nature for modifying their bodies. 

Wafer had written that his Kuna body paint eventually rubbed off, often with the “peeling away of flesh and all,” to reveal a European underneath.

But did his time in the world of the Kuna leave traces of the indigenous that took longer to disappear?

In the preface to the second edition to the New Voyage and Description, printed in 1704, Wafer attempted to reaffirm his status as a credible Christian observer, writing that he wished to “vindicat[e] my self to the World” regarding his previous account of “the Indian way of Conjuring,” which, he explained vaguely, had “very much startled… several of the most eminent Men of the Nation.” In this preface Wafer continued to maintain that the Kuna shamans practiced Satanism, and he buttressed his authority by citing parallel accounts produced by Scottish settlers in the Darién.

He pointedly refrained, however, from defending his earlier claims about the accurate predictions this method had supposedly produced.

In the end, Wafer decisively abandoned the Kuna version of his identity. His face paint was wiped off, his nose piercing removed, his tropical clothing replaced with the scratchy wool and close-bound cotton of a seventeenth-century Englishman. But his story reminds us that place can powerfully reshape identity, not just in the globalized present, but even during the height of European colonialism, when religious bigotry and prejudice ran rampant.

For a brief period, a British pirate surgeon became a Kuna healer. And then, just as suddenly, that identity was stripped off and discarded, no more permanent than the paint and piercings which had once sustained it.


Further reading

You can read Wafer's New Voyage and Description free of charge on Google books here. Ignacio Gallup-Diaz's The Door to the Sea and the Key to the Universe: Indian Politics and Imperial Rivalry in the Darién, 1640-1750 is the best account of the region's colonial history that I have found - it comes highly recommended, and is available free as a Gutenberg e-book via Columbia University Press.

The University of Ohio library has a great blog post on its copy of Bulwer's Anthropometamorphosis with accompanying scans here. Finally, for those interested in the larger questions surrounding exploration, indigenous-European interaction and science, I highly recommend William Hasty's essay "Piracy and the Production of Knowledge in the Travels of William Dampier."

Originally written: April, 2011. Last updated: January, 2020. 

"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.

Scurvy, Shipwreck and Spaniards in the West Indies

Today I read an interesting manuscript held by the British Library entitled "A Voyage to Guinea,  1714-15" (shelfmark: Add Ms. 39946). The work is anonymous, but some clues on the final page and a mailing address tell us that the author probably wrote it in Jamaica around 1726 and then sent it to his sister in Leicester, England. What follows is a short synopsis of its contents and some extracts from the author's detailed descriptions of daily life in early eighteenth century Cuba.

The manuscript's author appears to have been reasonably well-educated since he writes with a good cursive hand and speaks Latin, but his memoirs begin with him serving as a common crew-member on a slave ship off the Calabar Coast of West Africa. After an appalling description of the horrors of the Middle Passage (including some gruesome passages involving feeding dead slaves to sharks, discussed in this essay), we next find the author penniless in the West Indies, where he enlists on a merchant vessel to harvest logwood along the Gulf of Mexico. Here he promptly falls deathly ill with scurvy and seeks aid from a frontier doctor who treats the local loggers (quasi-piratical outlaws known as “Baymen”). This doctor convinces the author to journey with him to Jamaica to get medicine and provisions, but their ship soon runs out of food and water and begins to sink. The small crew of six men jump ship and wash up on a nearby desert island where they are sustained by raccoon meat obtained thanks to the hunting prowess of a “Spaniel Bitch, which one of the men brought of the Bay of Compeachy with him." After ten days the crew decides to attempt the passage to Cuba. While floating off the coast of the island they are boarded by some local sea ruffians who seize their belongings but give them food and portage to a local village, where they’re taken to “one Don Diego Ruez, who was Secretary of the Town."

Van der Aa's map of the Caribbean (Leiden, 1707)

Detail showing shipwreck.

It is at this point that the author's tone changes from a rather matter-of-fact catalogue of his travels to a richly detailed account of daily life in early eighteenth century Cuba, with particular attention paid to religious matters. Here the author describes a boisterous Christmas celebration, December, 1715:

On Christmas day in the morning I went to Church, but could hardly hear any thing of the Mass for the noise of Drums, Trumpets and other Musick, at the end of every prayer, there was a Volley of Muskets, and Chambers fir’d in the Church-Yard. At night I went again, when the Devotion for the day was over, and found the great Altar-table all set with little Images of clay, representing some people of the Town, some were deform’d, others in obscene postures, and every one had a piece of paper tied to it, to distinguish his Character; this was a great diversion to the Mob. After this there was a kind of farce acted, representing a Battle betwixt St Michael and the Devil; the two Champions began with verbal expostulations, and afterwards came to a furious attack with their Swords, till the Victory seem’d doubtful for a good while, till Michael with a bit of fire at the end of his flaiming Sword, touch’d a parcel of Crackers that were tied to the Devil’s back-side, and made him glad to run out of the Church under the cover of fire and smoke. I my self once bore a part in one of their Drolleries by the perswasion of the Secretary.

Based on his experiences in this small town and a later stay in Havana, the author offers an account of "the Character of the Spanyard" with many interesting details mingled with the national steretypes:

The Spaniards as to their temper are generally Proud, and Reserv’d, valuing themselves much on the reputation of their country. They represent the Kingdom of Spain as a large Cow, and all other nations as so many calves sucking her; this alludes to the Silver, and gold of the West Indies, which furnishes a great part of the World…

The Women seem to be little akin to the Men, for as the men are stiff and Reserv’d, the women are Gay, and Pleasant and much more free and communicative in their conversation…

They drink Chocolate four or five times a day, of which they have two sorts, the best is call’d Regalo, which is pure Chocolate; the other is call’d Chocolata de Maiz, which is mix’d up with Indian Corn, and is us’d by the ordinary people...

Musick is in great vogue among them, and singing in Consort with it; their chief Instruments are the Harp and Guitar, which one may hear in most houses about Sun-set.

The work of the historian Marcus Rediker offers a fuller account of both this particular text and of the world it describes than I can offer here -- see especially his The Slave Ship: A Human History and Between the Devil and the Deep Blue Sea: Merchant Seamen, Pirates and the Anglo-American Maritime World, 1700 - 1750.

More extracts from my recent archival research to follow in the next few days!

Brasil.

I leave for Brazil (S.P. and Rio) today and will be there until the end of the month. While traveling I plan to use this blog as a clearinghouse for the interesting history-related things I find there, and for the occasional photo I take with my friend's fancy DSLR camera.

Inspired by my impending visit, I present some color illustrations from Jean-Baptiste Debret's famous and extremely out of print Voyage Pittoresque et Historique au Brésil (1834-39).

 "Valley of Serra do Mar (mountain chain near the sea)"

 "Family of a Camacan chief preparing for a feast."

'

"Mummy of a Chief of Coroados" 

"Black slaves of different nations."

"Black hunters returning to town (left); the return of the slaves of a naturalist (right)."

For more on these images see this 2006 BibliOdyssey post on the Voyage Pictoresque, and for a complete, searchable database of all the images, see the New York Public Library's excellent Digital Gallery. 

Finally, here's a link to one of my favorite bands, Os Mutantes, then still teenagers, backing up Gilberto Gil and his song 'Domingo no Parque' on national television, circa 1966. Its a wonderful live performance -- highly recommended to anyone with an interest in Brazilian music, or just music in general.

Um abraço!