Vermeer's Hat

by Timothy Brook

  This was not a new idea. It is set out in the terms of the original commission he received from Henri in 1603: that he should “try to find a route easy to traverse through this country to the countries of China and the East Indies, or elsewhere, as far as possible, along the coasts and on the mainland.” His charge then had been to search for “a passage that would facilitate commerce with the people of the East.” That is what continued to inspire his westward penetration of the continent.

  The two known routes from Europe to China, around the southern tips of Africa and South America, were notoriously long and difficult, and were in any case heavily patrolled and defended by the Portuguese and Spanish. Then there were the Northwest and Northeast passages, one around the Americas and the other above Russia. The Dutch and English had already shown the Arctic routes around Russia and Canada to be infeasible, though some still hoped that the passage Henry Hudson found into Hudson Bay might yield a connection to a route through to the Pacific. France’s sole hope of getting to the fabled East without being knocked about by icebergs or the other European powers was to find a passage across the North American continent. Champlain needed Native knowledge to show him this hidden way, and he also needed Native trade to provide him with commodities profitable enough to pay for the costs. He was not interested in conquest or colonization for their own sakes. He had one dream only: to find a passage to China.

  Jacques Cartier before him had explored the mouth of the St. Lawrence, and Jean Alfonse de Saintonge had sailed along the Labrador coast in the 1540s, though neither succeeded in finding a route to China. But that was the reason why they and others after them were exploring these waters. When the Englishman George Weymouth sailed into the Arctic during Champlain’s first visit to the New World, he carried a letter from Elizabeth I addressed to the emperor of China, with translations in Latin, Spanish, and Italian just in case a Jesuit missionary who knew no English was handy to translate from one of these languages into Chinese. Weymouth never reached his destination or delivered Elizabeth’s letter to her brother-monarch, but that had been his hope. Champlain was fired by the same hope. He, however, decided that the route to China lay not around the continent but through it. His hope was that the St. Lawrence River would lead to China. A memory of that dream still lingers at Sault St. Louis, a set of rapids near the top of the St. Lawrence where Champlain had to turn back in 1603. Fifteen years later he proposed this as the location for a riverside customs house that would tax the trade goods passing this point once the connection had been made. The place is now called Lachine—“China.”6

  THE DREAM OF GETTING TO China is the imaginative thread that runs through the history of early-modern Europe’s struggle to escape from its isolation and enter the wider world. The thread begins where the fourteenth century ends, when a Venetian merchant returned from his travels in China and regaled anyone who would listen with stories of strange lands and fabulous wealth in the East. The Venetians called him Il Milione, “the Man of a Million Stories,” Marco Polo. His enthralling Travels, written down for him by a writer of popular romances while they were both whiling away their time in prison, became the bestseller of the fifteenth century. Polo’s vision of China under the Mongol rule of Khubilai Khan—“the great Cham,” as Europeans knew him—was compelling for the simple reason that there was no court as splendid, no realm as vast, no economy as large, and no cities as grand in fourteenth-century Europe. The place called Cathay was the epitome of wealth and power at the far, unreachable end of the Eurasian world.

  When Christopher Columbus launched his fleet of three tiny ships westward across the Atlantic a century later in 1492 (taking a copy of Marco Polo’s Travels with him), he already understood that the world was round, and that sailing west would convey him to Asia. He knew enough to expect to reach Japan first, with China just beyond it. What he didn’t know was how great a distance separated Asia from Europe. And what he didn’t expect was that a continent lay between them. When he returned to Spain, he reported to King Ferdinand that, upon reaching the island of Hispaniola (now the Dominican Republic), “I thought it might be terra firma, the province of Cathay.” It wasn’t, so Columbus had to convince the king that the first voyage had almost reached its destination, and that the second could not fail to complete the journey. If the island wasn’t China or Japan, then it must be an island off Japan’s east coast. The fabled riches of China were therefore within reach. In the meantime, he assured Ferdinand, the island he had discovered was sure to yield gold, once his sailors went looking for it. He thus turned his losing card—Hispaniola wasn’t Japan or China—into a winning card. But he believed that the next island would be Japan, and beyond that would be China.

  China’s fabled wealth was Europe’s obsession, which is why Ferdinand agreed to fund Columbus’s second voyage. As Europeans developed a better sense of global geography, the passion for getting to China only grew stronger, and the possibility of actually doing so more within reason. Shakespeare echoes this fantasy when he has Benedick scorn the company of Beatrice in Much Ado About Nothing by declaring that he would rather fetch “a hair of the Great Cham’s beard” than speak to her. His London audience knew what he was talking about. They would have agreed that it might be about the most difficult vow a man could put on himself, but it could be done. At the turn of the seventeenth century, the idea of this fabled realm was very much alive, and the dream of riches that went with it only shone brighter. A Chinese proverb of the time held that Chinese have two eyes, Europeans have one, and the rest of the world is blind—a backhanded compliment for a people consumed with a single vision.

  This is why Champlain was journeying up the St. Lawrence: to find a transcontinental water route to China. The idea was well-established, for the great Antwerp mapmaker Abraham Ortelius marks such a channel in red on a map he printed in 1570. Even after Champlain, the French cartographer Jean Guérard perpetuates the idea on the map of North America in his Universal Hydrographical Chart of 1634, noting in the blank space west of the Great Lakes that “it is believed there is a passage from there to Japan.”7

  Asking Natives what route to take to get to China elicited no response, so Champlain instead asked them about saltwater. One Native up the St. Lawrence River told him in the summer of 1603 that the water of the lake (today’s Lake Huron) beyond the lake (Lake Erie) that flowed into the next lake (Lake Ontario) was salty. This was the news Champlain thirsted after, but other Algonquins in the area contradicted this report. Still he kept asking. An Algonquin youth claimed that the water at the far west end of the first lake he would come to (today’s Lake Ontario) was brackish. This was all the encouragement Champlain needed. He vowed that he would return and taste it for himself, though it would be years before he could go that far into the interior. In 1613, Étienne Brûlé, the symbolic son Champlain had exchanged with Ochasteguin, reported to him that Lake Huron was after all not salty. It was two more summers before Champlain himself visited the lake. He tasted the water and found it douce, “sweet.” This confirmed the sad fact that Lake Huron was not linked to the Pacific Ocean.

  Champlain was a cartographer—it was his mapmaking skills that first brought him to the attention of his superiors on his first voyage—and through his life he drew a series of detailed maps of what was then called New France. His third map, produced in 1616, is the first to show Lake Huron. He labels it Mer Douce, the Sweetwater Sea, acknowledging the new truth while perhaps reminding himself that the search was still underway. Champlain introduces one ambiguity into this map, and one exaggeration. The ambiguity is where the Sweetwater Sea ends—he has allowed it to extend mysteriously off the left-hand side of the map, for who knows where it might lead? The exaggeration lies to the north. He has drawn the shoreline of the Arctic Ocean, the Mer du Coté du Nord, such that it sweeps south and comes very close to Lake Huron—a link to saltwater was surely out there somewhere. His message? The French need only to persevere with their explorations and they (he) will find the hidden trans
continental passage connecting France to China.

  Sixteen years later, Champlain published his final map of New France. This version provides a much fuller portrait of the Great Lakes, though Erie and Michigan have still not appeared. Champlain has learned that Mer Douce, the Sweetwater Sea, does not stretch on forever westward to the Pacific but comes to an end (this name would soon fade away in favor of Lac des Hurons, or Lake Huron). Beyond this freshwater lake and connected by a series of rapids, however, there appears yet another body of water, a Grand Lac of unknown size and extent (today’s Lake Superior): another lake in a chain that might one day prove to be the route to China.

  Champlain never got to Lake Superior, but Jean Nicollet did. Nicollet was one of Champlain’s coureurs de bois, or “woodland runners,” who were infiltrating the interior and operating extensive networks of trade. A year or two before Champlain published his map of 1632, Nicollet reached a tribe that no European had yet encountered, whom he, or someone, called the Puants, the Stinkers. Champlain includes them on his final map, on which he indicates a “Nation des Puants,” or Nation of Stinkers, living beside a lake that drains into the Sweetwater Sea. “Stinkers” is an unfortunate translation of an Algonquin word meaning dirty water—which is the term Algonquins used to describe brackish water, that is, water that tasted of salt. The Stinkers did not call themselves Puants. They were Ouinipigous, a name we spell today as Winnebagoes.8 But the word got attached to them by a convoluted logic that was always insisting that the next body of water over the horizon must be salty, must be “stinky”—must be the Pacific Ocean.9

  The chief of the Winnebagoes invited Jean Nicollet to be his guest at a great feast of welcome. Nicollet understood the importance of protocol. When he presented himself before the thousands who came great distances to attend the feast hosted in his honor, he wore the finest item he had in his baggage: a Chinese robe embroidered with flowers and birds.

  There was no way that an up-country agent such as Nicollet acquired this garment on his own. He would not have had access to such a thing, let alone the money to buy it. The robe must have been Champlain’s. But how did Champlain acquire it? Only in the early years of the seventeenth century were curiosities of this sort starting to make their way from China to northern Europe. As this garment no longer exists, we have no way to trace it. The likely origin was a Jesuit missionary in China, who brought or sent it back to Europe as a testimonial of the cultured civilization to which he had devoted his life. The English traveler John Evelyn saw a set of Chinese robes in Paris, and marveled at them. They were “glorious Vests, wrought & embroidered on cloth of Gold, but with such lively colours, as for splendor and vividnesse we have nothing in Europe approaches.” Nothing like Nicollet’s robe could have been obtained in Paris during Champlain’s early years in Canada, so he must have bought it on his two-year furlough in 1624–26—and paid an exorbitant price—because he believed the thing had value for his enterprise in Canada. He knew that Jesuits dressed themselves in the Chinese manner when they appeared at court, and if he himself did not have a chance to wear the Chinese robe, then his envoy might. When you show up at court, you have to be correctly dressed. As things turned out, it was the Winnebagoes, not the Chinese, who got to enjoy the sight.

  Nicollet’s robe is simply another sign that Champlain’s dream was to reach China. The dream had been with him right from the beginning of his adventures in North America. As a poet friend who composed a dedicatory verse for his first memoirs in 1603 wrote, Champlain had dedicated himself “to travel still further, convert the peoples, and discover the East, whether by North or South, so as to get to China.” All his exploring, alliance building, and fighting was for this purpose alone. China was the reason why Champlain risked his life to shoot and kill the three Mohawk chiefs on the shore of Lake Champlain. He needed to control the trade that supplied the felt makers of Europe, but far more than that, he needed to find a route to China. Nicollet’s robe was a prop for this vision, Vermeer’s hat a by-product of the search.

  CHAMPLAIN’S GREAT VENTURE DID NOT succeed, of course. The French would never get to China by canoeing across Canada. Whether they failed or succeeded, their effort imposed terrible losses on the inhabitants of the eastern woodlands. Worst hit were the Hurons. Waves of infectious diseases spread from the Europeans into the Huron Confederacy in the 1630s, climaxing in 1640 with a virulent smallpox epidemic that slashed the population to a third of its original number of 25,000. Desperate to save their communities from annihilation, some Hurons turned to the teachings of the French Jesuit missionaries, who started infiltrating Huronia in the 1620s. Some may have gained comfort from Jesuit lessons in Christian humility, but that benefit did little to offset the more tangible effect of a collapse in their capacity to resist the Iroquois. The French decision to reverse the ban on firearms sales to the Hurons in 1641—though only to Christian converts—came too late for this nation to arm itself effectively against its enemies.

  In the summer and fall of 1649, several thousand Hurons withdrew to Gahoendoe, an island in the southeastern corner of the Sweetwater Sea. Some four dozen French missionaries, artisans, and soldiers joined them. The Hurons preferred to set up camp by the edge of an inland lake, whereas the French decided to construct a visible palisade by the shore, preparing for a last stand against the Iroquois. This last stand is commemorated in today’s name for Gahoendoe, Christian Island.

  That last stand turned out to be a battle not against Iroquois warriors but against hunger. The island was too small to support enough game to feed so many refugees, and the corn they planted went in the ground too late to ripen. As fall lengthened into winter, the fish they could catch and the six hundred bushels of acorns they bought from tribes further north proved insufficient to feed everyone, and famine struck. Hardest hit were the children. A Jesuit missionary who visited the village describes a slack-breasted mother who watched her children “die in her arms, one after another, and had not even the strength to cast them into the grave.” The melodrama of his account communicates the severity of the suffering that winter, though he was wrong about that last detail. When a team of archaeologists and Native assistants excavated the site some three decades ago, they uncovered in the sandy soil next to the village the skeletal remains of children who died of malnutrition, and those remains had been buried with care. After the dig was completed, the bones were just as carefully relaid, and the young deciduous forest allowed to reclaim the site so that no one would know where the graves lay, and none could come again to disturb them.

  Toward the end of the winter, several hundred Hurons decided to take their chances crossing the ice and surrendering to the Iroquois parties patrolling the mainland, but the ice underneath their feet gave way and many drowned. The rest waited for the thaw, then set out on different courses. One group disappeared northward into the interior, and another escorted the French back to Québec. Their descendants, the Wendat, still live there today. An airy grove of beech and birch trees has grown over the site of the last Huron village on Christian Island. Unless you happen to know where the village was, you will never find it. I spend my summers on Christian Island, which is now an Ojibwe reserve, and I cannot walk the dappled path that angles past the place where the children are buried without thinking back to the starvation winter of 1649–50, marveling at the vast web of history that ties this hidden spot to global networks of trade and conquest that came into being in the seventeenth century. The children are lost links in that history, forgotten victims of the desperate European desire to find a way to China and a way to pay for it, tiny actors in the drama that placed Vermeer’s hat on the officer’s head.

  3

  A DISH OF FRUIT

  VERMEER PAINTED Young Woman Reading a Letter at an Open Window (see plate 3) around the same time he painted Officer and Laughing Girl. We see the same upstairs room, the same table and chair, the same woman wearing even the same dress, again his wife Catharina Bolnes, or so I believe. Although the action in th
e two paintings is different, both narrate much the same story: the story of courtship between a man and a woman. The story is overt in Officer and Laughing Girl, where we see courting in action. In Young Woman Reading a Letter, on the other hand, we see only the woman. The man has a presence in the picture, but only in absentia: the letter the woman is reading. He is away, possibly half a world away. She reads by the window for the light, but the window is not just ajar this time. It is wide open. The man is out there somewhere, able to speak to her only through letters. His physical absence induces Vermeer to construct a different mood. The brilliance of light conversation has been replaced by an internalized tension, as the young woman concentrates on words that we, the viewers, are not allowed to read.

  If the two paintings share space and theme, they differ in the objects they display. Young Woman Reading a Letter at an Open Window is uncluttered, but there are more objects in the painting, and they are doing more of the work of creating visual activity. To balance the busyness of these objects, Vermeer has left the wall empty. Empty but far from blank, this is surely one of the most richly textured empty walls in Western art. X-ray analysis reveals that Vermeer originally had hung a cupid painting on that wall (he used it later in Lady Standing at the Virginals) to let the reader know that she is reading a love letter, but he later decided against such obvious symbolic hints and painted it out. To lend a sense of depth and volume to the room, he has used the conventional technique of hanging curtains, one draped over the open window, the other pulled to one side in the foreground as though drawn back to reveal the painting (it was common practice to hang curtains across pictures to protect them from light and other damage). The table is covered, this time with a richly colored Turkish carpet—such carpets were too valuable to throw on floors, as we do today—which has been bunched to one side to lend vitality to the scene. And there, askew on the carpet in the middle of the table, is an object that, like the officer’s hat, points toward the wider world into which perhaps her lover or husband has gone: a china dish under a heap of fruit.