Zone of the Marvellous

by Martin Edmond

  IT WAS SAID IN PERU that the Inca Túpac Yupanqui had in 1480, with 20,000 men and a great fleet of balsa ships, sailed into the Pacific and found there two islands where there were black people, gold, brass and horses. These islands, Avachumbi and Ninachumbi (Outer Island and Fire Island), have been variously identified with one or other of the Galápagos Islands or with Rapanui, Easter Island, none of which have gold or are inhabited by black people. The Spanish of Peru, and especially one Pedro Sarmiento de Gamboa, were both credulous and attentive whenever there was mention of precious metals; and Túpac Yupanqui’s islands were added to a list that included the still-unknown Tarshish and Ophir; the Isles of Gold or the Golden Chersonese that Ptolemy had spoken of; the misbegotten progeny of Polo – Sondur, Locach, Maletur and the rest – and other enigmas such as the Land of Parrots. There were also current in Spanish circles on both sides of the Pacific rumours of fabulous wealth at an Island called Solomon.

  An indefatigable quester after these delusive places was Álvaro de Mendaña, nephew of the governor of Peru, who as a young man was sent forth in two ships in 1567 to find the Island of Solomon, a rich land between New Guinea and this coast. Sarmiento was with him as captain of one of the ships and their mission, at least in his eyes, was first to find those seductive Western Isles and then to discover the Great South Land, now once more revised to stretch from the coast of New Guinea south and east to so-called Magellanica, of which Tierra del Fuego was still thought to be a peninsula. Mendaña was at least as interested in colonisation and the conversion of the heathen as he was in gold; so that when, three months after leaving Callao, they sighted a high wooded island he called Santa Ysabel, he set to his godly work.

  The Spanish ships docked under a star so bright it was visible in daylight and the men and women (both wives and prostitutes) aboard were delighted at the friendly reception they received from the people of the islands Mendaña called Solomon’s. It was not to last: the local economy was too finely balanced to sustain the depredations of the Spanish and soon the exchange of music (pan pipes for fifes and guitars), names and rituals turned to the more familiar thieving by the hosts and plundering by the visitors. Mendaña’s piety was not equal to the demands of his people for food, especially the prized pigs, and a plan by the Franciscans to take only provisions and always leave something in return did not work. Villages were burned, men were killed on both sides and, after six months, the starveling colony was abandoned and what was left of the expedition returned by the northern route to New Spain. Even the great white cockatoo they carried away went into the pot before America was seen again.

  It took Mendaña nearly thirty years to arrange his next attempt to found a colony in the Pacific; in 1595 he sailed once more from Callao in Peru for the Solomon Islands. He took with him 377 people aboard four ships, including his wife, Doña Isabel Barreto, and her three brothers; the chief pilot, Pedro Fernández de Quirós, a Portuguese, whose secretary, the poet Luis de Belmonte Bermúdez, wrote an account of the voyage; and the camp master, Pedro Merino Manrique, a cantankerous, brutal old soldier who commanded the expedition’s small, undisciplined and fractious army. The purpose of the colony was to spread the light of the gospel among the heathen and to this end there were also six priests of the Catholic faith aboard. They were kept busy in the first part of the voyage celebrating marriages among the prostitutes and convicts who made up a portion of the colonists. But squabbles had broken out even before the coast of South America was out of sight and continued until internecine strife and the ungovernable soldiery left the islanders hostile and both Mendaña and Manrique dead after only two months at Santa Cruz. Quirós took what remained of the expedition to Manila in the Philippines and then sailed back across the north Pacific to Acapulco.

  IT SEEMS THAT QUIRÓS could not forget the angelic face of a doomed child he saw at the Marquesas during the first fatal meeting between Europeans and Polynesians there. Nor accept that the islands he and Mendaña had found, the present-day Solomon and Santa Cruz Islands, were in fact just that and not outliers of the Great South Land. Nor that all the souls that must exist in so vast a country should go to hell without at least the chance of salvation intervening in their pagan lives. In Manila in the aftermath of Mendaña’s death Quirós was already planning another voyage; and as soon as he returned to Peru in 1597 he petitioned the viceroy for a ship. The request was neither granted nor denied so Quirós went to Europe, first to the Spanish court and then as a pilgrim in the Holy Year of 1600 to Rome, where he had a personal audience with Pope Clement VIII and secured his blessing for further voyages to those imaginary places that haunted his mind.

  He received his royal authorisation in 1603 and was given three ships, about 300 people, including six Franciscans, a year’s provisions, plus seeds and animals with which to feed his colony. Also a command structure that was, typically, almost certain to cause trouble and may have included, as Magellan’s did, men specifically appointed to spy on him and report back on his conduct to the Spanish viceroy. Their mission was to find a Great South Land beyond the discoveries of 1568 and 1595; and, if that proved impossible, to explore New Guinea and learn whether or not it was an island. And if the Great South Land could not be found, they were to return to Europe via the East Indies, a practical option now that Spain and Portugal were officially one country.

  They left Callao on 21 December 1605, sailing northwest, too far south to see the Marquesas again but sighting Ducie and Henderson Islands as well as some of the Tuamotus; at Hao Atoll – where in the 1980s two of the French bombers of the Greenpeace ship Rainbow Warrior would be briefly sequestered – they landed, finding the people friendly. Here Quirós, who seems to have been particularly drawn to Polynesians, wanted to stay but his captains would not let him. Subsequently they also sighted Caroline Island and made another landfall, probably at Rakahanga in the northern Cooks. Again the people were friendly, at least at first, and there were amorous interludes between the Spanish sailors and the island women, perhaps leaving red-haired babies behind; but the expedition made war as well as love and although the usual Spanish name for the islands, Gente Hermosa, or beautiful people, derives ultimately from Quirós, he himself called them La Peregrina, the pilgrim, and the captain of his second ship, Luis Vaez de Torres, preferred La Matanza, the killing.

  By Easter Quirós was facing mutterings among both officers and crew if not yet outright mutiny; but on 7 April they came to Taumako in the Duff Islands, Polynesian outliers to the northeast of Santa Cruz. Here again the people were friendly and a chief called Tumai told Quirós the names of about sixty islands, including some of those of the Fiji and Tonga groups away to the south and east. He also said that Santa Cruz, with its active volcano, was only five days west; but the Spanish, after kidnapping four young men for the salvation of their souls and possible usefulness as interpreters, turned southeast, looking for a large land called Manicolo that Quirós had also heard about at Taumako. Three of the captives jumped into the sea and swam away at Tikopia; the fate of the fourth is unknown. South of there, past the Banks Islands, on 1 May a great mountainous land came into view. It was for Quirós the fabled place he had long been looking for and he named it La Austrialia del Espíritu Santo.

  The bays they came into he called St Philip and St James; the river was the Jordan; the port, Vera Cruz; and the settlement, New Jerusalem. A church was built of wood and leaves, to be replaced later by one made of the marble that Quirós said he found here; it never was. And on Pentecost Day, 14 May, Quirós claimed all the land as far as the pole in the names of the Trinity, Jesus, St Francis, John of God and Phillip III of the Iberian Union. All the offices that a well-organised city should have were instituted, including a registrar of mines. And a chivalric order, The Order of the Holy Ghost, with a blue cross as the insignia, was proclaimed to defend the Indians from their enemies. Even the two Negro cooks were inducted into this order, which Fray Martin, a Franciscan, derided as possessing a diversity of knights … negro-knights
and Indian-knights and knights who were knight-knights.

  It was of course the Spanish themselves that the Indians needed protection from. When, a week after their arrival, Torres led a reconnaissance party inland, he was met by a large crowd of locals whose chief drew a line on the ground beyond which he indicated the Spanish should not go. The Spanish, naturally, crossed the line and the killing began. Quirós’ hope of bringing salvation to the heathen disappeared with the sound of the guns; perhaps the more bizarre among his (imaginary) institutional arrangements might be understood as a form of compensation for that failure. A larger failure beckoned: after the celebrations were over on Corpus Christi, 25 May, Quirós walked inland a mile or so, past the already germinating gardens he had planted, and on his return announced that, since they stood little chance against native hostility, they would leave the next day to visit the islands to the windward. The colony had lasted just one month, half the time of the previous attempt at Santa Cruz.

  There were various delays, including an episode of fish poisoning, before they did leave and almost immediately contrary winds separated the ships as they tried to return to the safety of Vera Cruz. Quirós, possibly under duress after a mutiny, sailed north, seeking the galleon route between Manila and Acapulco, and in time returned to Mexico, having seen only one of the northern Gilbert Islands on his traverse; while Torres, with the two remaining ships, attempted to follow the original plan and went west. Failing to weather the southeast extremity of New Guinea, he sailed instead through the strait that now bears his name, perhaps sighting the northern tip of Australia at what is now Cape York and certainly killing some, and kidnapping other, islanders on his way through the mazy archipelagos of those seas to Ternate.

  If so, this early glimpse of Australia was without consequence: the Dutch ship the Duyfken, out of Bantam, under Willem Janszoon, had already, earlier that same year, sighted the mainland, cruising the eastern shores of the Gulf of Carpentaria until nine of the crew were murdered by wild, cruel, black savages. The Duyfken did not follow the land beyond Cape Keerweer (Turnagain), on the western side of Cape York, and her captain returned to Bantam in the belief that the south coast of New Guinea was joined to the land along which he had coasted, an error that Dutch maps reproduced for many years to come. As for Torres, as soon as he learned that Quirós had survived, he wrote an account of his own voyage and sent it to him; it is lost and Torres himself disappears from the record after reaching Manila. His discovery also disappeared into the Spanish archives; but later, somehow, a map of the strait he had found came to England, where Joseph Banks made sure a copy sailed with him and James Cook on the Endeavour.

  AT NEW JERUSALEM Quirós had been told by one of his subordinates, Prado: you would give us so much gold and silver that we could not carry it, and the pearls should be measured by hatfuls … We have found only black devils with poisoned arrows; what has become of the riches? … all your affairs are imaginary and have gone off in the wind. And yet, once back in Spain, he began writing an extraordinary series of memorials, couched in the most extravagant terms, asking the king to fund yet another voyage to find the Great South Land: The riches are silver and pearls which I myself saw, and gold which was seen by the other Captain … and certain small things worked out of pieces of marble and jasper … There are poignant images of him, in penury, afflicted by mania, trying to write his missives late at night with the ink freezing in the inkwell, making fantastic demands – a thousand men and half a million ducats.

  Did he really believe he had seen silver and pearls, that there was gold in what became the New Hebrides and is now Vanuatu? What about the ocean floor bestrewn with emerald, pearl and turquoise … that a later commentator attributed to him? The jewelled sands of that fabled shore? We can’t know. Quirós was at length allowed to return to Peru, with at least the possibility of making another voyage to the Great South Land; but he died, probably at Panama, on the trip out. Nevertheless, there is a strange coda to his story. In the later nineteenth century Archbishop Moran, of the Sydney diocese and Australia’s first cardinal, taught that Quirós’ New Jerusalem was actually part of the Australian mainland – it was, he said, at Port Curtis near Gladstone on the central Queensland coast. Thus two generations of Australian Catholic school children grew up believing that Quirós’ fiction, which he pursued past extremity into madness, was not that at all but a solid gold fact.

  While the Portuguese were consolidating their empire in the east, in England Thomas More was inventing a new literary genre, utopian fiction. His example would be followed a hundred years later by Francis Bacon’s The New Atlantis, which some see as a blueprint for a colony in the Americas. Meanwhile real, as opposed to imaginary, travellers were still seeking the Great South Land. With the advent of Abel Janszoon Tasman, a new empiricism allegedly entered the search; yet some of Tasman’s ideas are as fanciful as anything the medieval chroniclers imagined, as he sought in the Pacific clues to the occult configuration of the planet. The disenchantment of his superiors and his abortive second voyage were perhaps consequent upon his strange obsessions; later he was suspended and fined for harsh treatment of subordinates. Another, slightly younger contemporary, William Dampier, buccaneer, privateer, explorer and controversialist, was also court-martialled for mistreating an officer, but there was nothing of the mystic in him. Dampier was implicated in the marooning of Alexander Selkirk, the original of Daniel Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe, and in his rescue. He was also the first to describe Australian Aborigines.

  IV

  UTOPIAN PROJECTIONS

  THOMAS MORE’S UTOPIA, WRITTEN IN ANTWERP, Bruges and London and first published in Louvain in 1516, is contemporary with the beginning of the Reformation in Europe and the consolidation of the Catholic and Portuguese empire in the east. It is also a bridge between the writings of Plato, to which it owes a great deal, and the modern world, not least because More invented a word the peculiar resonance of which continues to haunt us. It is in fact a pun – utopia, no-place, is pronounced the same way as eutopia, good-place. The ambiguity in the title echoes the ambiguity in the work: like so many attempts to frame and describe a perfect society, the Utopia can be read in different ways. Is it the delineation of an ideal or is it a warning against those tendencies in human organisation that threaten our freedom for the sake of an ideal? Is Utopia a paradise or is it a kind of hell?

  The book, in two parts, was written in reverse order: part two was composed while More was in the Low Countries on a diplomatic mission, attempting to renegotiate tariffs that had been placed on English wool by the Spanish Crown – which also ruled in Flanders. The first part, which is much shorter, was written once he had returned to England and is mostly concerned with the nature of English society at that time. The book as a whole is introduced by letters to real people More had met and knew in the Low Countries; and his fiction too is introduced as non-fiction. This device, or suggestion, that an allegedly real traveller should introduce a clearly fictional narrative, emphasises an intrinsic connection between More’s book and the geographical discoveries of the time. Utopian fiction is a sedentary equivalent of the travel journal; More sends not his body but his mind to the antipodes. His work includes a Utopian alphabet and samples of Utopian poetry, inevitably recalling the many exotic and inscrutable alphabets published in The Travels of Sir John Mandeville.

  In Antwerp More meets, courtesy of his friend Peter Giles, one Raphael Hythloday, a far-travelled Portuguese whom they invite to dinner. Hythloday begins to describe his travels and particularly a visit he has made to England. At a banquet at the house of Archbishop John Morton, with whom More had served as a page in his youth, the question of the death penalty for thieves arose and there followed a lengthy discussion upon the reasons why people are forced into a life of crime, including the enclosure of the commons for sheep raising and the consequent eviction of the rural poor from lands upon which they had been used to graze their animals. The focus of this discussion becomes the correct way to coun
sel a prince and hence to organise a polity – a role More would himself take on, ultimately disastrously, with respect to Henry VIII.

  Part two is a description of Utopia itself – a crescent-shaped island somewhere off the south of the South American coast, the latitude and longitude of which are unknown because, absurdly, somebody coughed at the vital moment and the information was lost. Utopia was a peninsula that had been hacked off the mainland to make an island. It is like England: the same size, the same distance from the equator, with the same number of city states as England had counties. Its principal city, Amaurote (dim or shadowy city), walled, and with a river running through it, is a version of London redrawn, in Peter Ackroyd’s words, by visionary imagination, a pristine city in which … there is no greed or pride or disorder. It is geometrical; property is held in common; houses are exchanged between citizens every ten years; each person works at the occupation to which they are best suited; and all dress alike in undyed wool, with the only distinctions being marital or sexual. People work six hours a day and spend the rest of their time studying or exercising; meals are communal with the supervisor of each hall collecting free stock from a common market; and silver and gold are not valued as precious metals but despised, being used as fetters for criminals or as chamber pots.

  More’s fiction relies for its credibility upon his interlocutor’s, Raphael Hythloday’s, alleged connection with Amerigo Vespucci, a Florentine who had sailed, apparently with both the Portuguese and the Spanish, on several voyages of discovery along the eastern coasts of the continent that derives its name from his. A German scholar and map-maker called Martin Waldseemüller, in 1507 at Saint Dié in Lorraine, published The Four Voyages of Amerigo Vespucci, actually a Latin translation of two letters sent by Vespucci: one to his patron, Piero di Lorenzo de’ Medici; the second to Piero Soderini, gonfaloniere of Florence. Waldseemüller’s book also included maps of the new continent which he named America, using the feminine form of Vespucci’s Christian name in its Latin version: Americus Vespucius.