Even in his own time Vespucci was controversial. Some alleged that he was trying to usurp Columbus as the discoverer of America; others that he inflated both the extent and achievements of his voyages, none of which he commanded; still others doubt (and modern scholars continue to dispute) that his fourth voyage occurred at all. Waldseemüller too had his suspicions; on subsequent maps he abandoned the designation America and called the new land mass Terra Incognita. Three genuine letters by Vespucci to Lorenzo de’ Medici surfaced in the eighteenth century and it now appears that the material Waldseemüller used had indeed been fabricated, though not by Vespucci: some other hand, or hands, perhaps in Florence, had based these fabrications on Vespucci’s genuine letters. And yet it was from these partial forgeries that much of Europe learned of the incontrovertible New World.
This is the context of More’s use of Vespucci: not as a reliable source but one tainted by rumour and possible fraud. Raphael Hythloday is allegedly one of the twenty-four men Vespucci says (in Waldseemüller’s version) he left for six months at Cabo Frio near present-day Rio in Brazil. Hythloday then travelled further south and found the island of Utopia, where he spent five years observing the customs of the natives. The Portuguese traveller is himself an equivocal figure: he is Raphael, after the guiding angel of the Book of Tobit, but also Hythloday, from the Greek, meaning one who is expert at gossip, or at the purveyance of nonsense, or perhaps simply at beguiling speech. We may choose if this name is to be interpreted as one who proclaims nonsense or as that of a proclaimer whose wisdom will be received as nonsense.
The dream of a society without private property was already very old, as old as Plato’s Republic or the Bible, where the Apostles were said to have held all things in common. Or even older, as old as the myth of a golden age. It is perhaps peculiar to find it resurfacing in the mind and thought of a lawyer, politician and statesman, later to be a saint, in early sixteenth-century England. Was it a true dream or a satire? Or are elements of both mingled therein? More’s preaching against enclosure of the commons for the purposes of sheep husbandry gives a clue; as does his self-conscious role as the great Catholic antagonist to Martin Luther’s attempts to reform the one church.
More was not opposed to reform as such but he, and others like his friend and contemporary Desiderius Erasmus, remained intellectually committed to the Catholic Church, to papal authority and to the idea of free will, as opposed to the Protestant doctrine of predestination. More’s accusation was that Luther and his followers, some of whom he had burned at the stake, incited disorder which, along with newefangyless, he hated. He is an early user, perhaps the first in English, of the Greek word anarchos, anarchy, and might therefore be seen, particularly in his disputes with Luther, as the voice of the past arguing with the future. Or, to put it another way, his was a medieval mind locked in dispute with the early modern, Protestant consciousness then rising.
All utopias are prospective but they are not future realms the way arcadias are almost always in the past; instead, they are typically alleged to exist in the present which, as no-places, they cannot be. The impulse to make them is thus always to some degree both authoritarian and despairing; and there is no suggestion Thomas More ever intended attempting, as later utopians sometimes did, to found his own ideal community. Most of those who read him would have been his fellow scholars in Europe, like his friend Erasmus who arranged the original publication. How he was read is another question, perhaps unanswerable: the nearest we might come to it is to suggest that the point of his book was not so much to answer questions as to raise them.
More’s Latin was not translated into English until 1551, nearly twenty years after he had gone to the scaffold for refusing to admit Henry VIII’s ultimate authority over the English Church. In his portrait by Hans Holbein the Younger, we are told, beneath the heavy gold chain, under his gorgeous robes of brown fur and black and red velvets, he was wearing a hair shirt. When his daughters erred, he would chastise them with a rod made from peacock feathers. The single name allowed the divine majesty in his Utopia is Mithra, the ancient Zoroastrian deity usually identified with sun worship, whose cult Roman soldiers had brought to Britain a millennium and a half earlier. This was the contradictory man who stands at the head of the English utopian tradition.
ONE OF HIS SUCCESSORS was Francis Bacon. In the note to the reader that introduces Bacon’s New Atlantis, subtitled A Work Unfinished, Bacon’s chaplain, secretary and literary executor, William Rawley, writes that his lordship thought also in this present fable to have composed a frame of Laws, or of the best state or mould of a commonwealth; but foreseeing it would be a long work, his desire of collecting the Natural History diverted him … The New Atlantis was indeed unfinished, and appended to Bacon’s Natural History when first published in 1627, just seven years after the Mayflower set out with the Pilgrim Fathers aboard to found the Plymouth colony in Massachusetts. This was not the first permanent English colony in North America: Jamestown, Virginia, was established in 1607 and there had been by one count eighteen previous failed European attempts, by both Spanish and English, to colonise the New World; the only successful settlement before Jamestown was the Spanish town established in 1565 at St Augustine in Florida.
The New Atlantis is innovative in several respects: the island of Bensalem is found by the unnamed mariners not in the Atlantic, where Plato’s original and More’s Utopia were, but in the Pacific Ocean. It is discovered during a voyage from Peru for China and Japan, like Dante’s Mount Purgatory in the midst of the greatest wilderness of waters in the world; and is found only after the mariners have given themselves up for lost and prayed to God that he would now discover land to us, that we might not perish. God’s voice, out of Genesis, moving upon the waters of the deep, is explicitly evoked in this passage and, appropriately enough, the land turns out to be inhabited by Christian people who speak several European languages: Hebrew, Greek, scholastic Latin and Spanish. This last is the language used in negotiation between the mariners and the Bensalemites before the voyagers are allowed ashore.
The world evoked during the first conversations between the mariners and the ruler of Bensalem is one of a larger antiquity in which the civilisations of the ancient world – Phoenicians, Egyptians, Chaldeans, Persians and Arabs – visited and traded with each other; the age of discovery that Bacon lived in is thus addressed as one that will recover a former glory of the world. Bensalem was converted mystically by means of a book sent by the Apostle Bartholomew – traditionally he who took the Gospel of Matthew to India – which could be read by anyone in his native language and included mysterious gospels that had yet to be written. Subsequently a king by the name of Salomon, a kind of spiritual heir of the biblical Solomon, established the principles upon which the nation lived. The people of Bensalem retained in their cultural or historical memory knowledge of the first Atlantis, the one spoken of by Plato, which in one passage is identified with America; but in their tradition it was overwhelmed not by earthquake but by flood.
It is a Pacific island then; both Christian and Platonic; but the third innovation, present partly by default, is the association of this ideal land with Bacon’s desire to collect a natural history. Science has entered the quest for paradise, with its descriptive armature, its belief in empirical truth, its mania for the collection of facts. Bacon’s Natural History was a vast compilation of data, beginning with a history of Winds, followed by histories of Density and Rarity, Heaviness and Lightness, Sympathy and Antipathy of Things, Sulfur, Mercury and Salt, and then Life and Death. In the event, only the first and last of these were published in his lifetime.
The rest appeared soon after his death in 1626, edited by Rawley and published under the title Sylva Sylvarum: or A Naturall Historie. In Ten Centuries. It is an anthology of one thousand paragraphs consisting of extracts from many books, mostly from antiquity, along with accounts of Bacon’s own experiments and observations; and attempts to present universal knowledge in the light of his co
nviction: Men have sought to make a world from their own conception and to draw from their own minds all the material which they employed, but if, instead of doing so, they had consulted experience and observation, they would have the facts and not opinions to reason about, and might have ultimately arrived at the knowledge of the laws which govern the material world.
That part of The New Atlantis which was completed is in accord with this empirical ambition – it delineates a design for a great college or institute devoted to the interpretation of nature. Called Salomon’s House or the College of the Six Days Works, it is a model for a centrally organised research facility where teams of trained investigators collect data, conduct experiments and apply the knowledge they gain to produce things of use and practice for man’s life. These new arts and inventions are to be – eventually – shared with the outside world. As such, and despite its antique and biblical titles, Salomon’s House is very like a plan for the British Royal Society, founded later in the seventeenth century; and also, more prospectively, an early blueprint for, and a prophecy of, the modern research centre as employed in the present-day international scientific community.
This was not, however, a godless enterprise. Near the end of the Natural History Rawley writes: I will conclude with an usuall speech of his Lordships. That this work of his Naturall History, is the world as God made it; For that it hath nothing of imagination … Despite this boast, Bacon preserved much that is fanciful and, to our minds, absurd; but he can also sound a characteristically modern note, as when he wrote elsewhere of printing, gunpowder and the compass: These three have changed the whole face and state of things throughout the world; the first in literature, the second in warfare, the third in navigation; whence have followed innumerable changes, in so much that no empire, no sect, no star seems to have exerted greater power and influence in human affairs than these mechanical discoveries. It is the third of these, the compass, that so motivated the man to whom we owe the first glimmering of knowledge that the fabled Great South Land was just that, a fable.
THERE IS AN ODD moment in Abel Tasman’s journal of his voyage of 1642–43. His two ships are sailing, as instructed, eastward from Mauritius at high latitudes, hoping to find the Great South Land. Two days before land is sighted, on 22 November 1642, Tasman writes: at noon observed latitude 42 degrees 49 minutes, also our compasses did not stay stable as they ought or here are some mines of Loadstones, is indeed possible for our Compasses do not stay stable up to 8 points, there is continually Something which makes the compasses move or run. One of the enduring myths of medieval voyaging was that ships in unknown seas risked encountering magnetic mountains, or lodestones, strong enough that any iron aboard would be disastrously attracted; it was believed that nails might be pulled from the timbers and so the ships disintegrate and sink. Arab ships, which were sewn not nailed, were thought to be able to sail where the iron-bound ships of Europeans could not go. These magnetic mountains proliferated on early medieval oceanic maps and in the lore of travellers; it is strange to find a memory of the tradition in Abel Tasman’s mid-seventeenth-century journal.
He was obsessed with the mysterious phenomenon of magnetic variation – the tendency of a compass needle to stray by degrees from true north – and logs its occurrence throughout his voyage to the Great South Land as if seeking the occult configuration of the planet. In his time, as the note makes clear, such variation was ascribed to excavations or hollows in the earth or to veins of lead, stone or magnetised iron; it was yet to be understood why the variation itself varied, so that a reading at one time might be different from a later reading in the same place. There was a practical side to this obsession: Tasman and others like him were, perhaps without knowing exactly what they were doing, mapping the earth’s magnetic field as a way of perfecting, or at least improving, their navigational skills. This was an era before sailors could accurately measure longitude, so that although they generally knew what latitude they were in, longitude was still a matter for estimation, and estimations could prove wildly out.
Tasman’s task, given him by the VOC or Dutch East India Company in Batavia, was threefold: to find the Great South Land; to seek a passage to Peru; and to determine the relationship between New Guinea and the Land of Endraacht, which is what the Dutch at that time called Australia. Since 1616 their ships had been formally instructed to sail to the East Indies by heading directly east a thousand miles from the Cape of Good Hope before turning north, thereby avoiding the Portuguese routes and forts; but this course, because of the difficulty in reckoning longitude, inevitably led to landfalls on the West Australian coast. By Tasman’s time most of that coast, and much of the northern coast as far as Cape York Peninsula, were known at least in outline; but Torres Strait remained a mystery, as did the relationship between New Guinea and the Land of Endraacht.
ABEL TASMAN, BORN 1603 in the village of Lutjegast in Groningen Province, was a common sailor who made a career for himself as a servant of the Dutch commercial empire in the east. Leaving his second wife and a daughter from his first marriage behind in Amsterdam, he went out to Batavia in the early 1630s and spent the three years of his term of service, first as mate on the Weesp, then as skipper of the Mocha, exploring and patrolling the waters of the Moluccas. On his first voyage of command on the Mocha he surveyed a possible new route, passing to the north of Ceram, between Ambon and Batavia. Going ashore to trade on Ceram, Tasman saw three of his men killed, more were wounded, and he himself barely escaped with is life; it may be that this incident initiated a lifelong hesitation towards landing on unknown shores. Long periods of monotonous cruising, enlivened occasionally by clashes with smugglers and rebels, followed. He wasn’t uncontroversial: there were allegations by the crew of the Mocha that he kept from them a part of their victuals (arrack, oil and vinegar), which he then sold for his own profit; but they never went to court. He returned to Amsterdam in 1637 or ’38, sold his house, collected his wife and signed up for ten more years’ service in the east; he never returned to Europe.
In 1639 two Dutch ships under the command of Matthijs Hendrickson Quast in the Engel, with Tasman as captain of the second ship, the Gracht, set out from Batavia to sail north in search of Rica de Oro and Rica de Plata (rich in gold, rich in silver), two islands said to be somewhere in the seas east of Japan. The rumour of these fabulous places derived from a Portuguese voyage, perhaps in the 1520s, the ship, or ships, of which had been blown thence by a storm. An Armenian merchant aboard traded successfully with the people there, who spoke a language different from that of China or Japan; the islands were thus sometimes known as the Islands of the Armenian. Various Spanish ships had tried, without success, to find them. Now it was the turn of the Dutch.
Quast and Tasman never did discover the Islands of Silver and Gold, despite twice sailing far into Pacific waters east of Japan; perhaps they were, after all, only a misunderstanding of an impromptu Portuguese visit to northern Honshu or to Hokkaido. The Dutchmen’s brief also anticipated exploration of the coasts of Korea, Tartary (Siberia) and China; or even a trans-Pacific voyage to try to find the route of, and to raid, the Spanish silver ships to Manila. Instead, with leaky ships, they returned to the Dutch fortress of Zeelandia on Formosa and thence to Batavia. Tasman subsequently made another voyage to Formosa and spent about four months in Firando (Hirado) in western Japan, where Francis Xavier had been and where the Christian Japanese community was facing persecution and massacre. Portuguese traders were soon to be expelled from Japan and the Dutch, while allowed to continue to trade, severely restricted in their activities.
Further trading voyages to Cambodia by way of Formosa took place; on one of them Tasman carried an embassy of Lao traders back to Batavia; on another he seized two of three Cambodian junks carrying Portuguese trade goods to Japan: the Dutch authorities in Formosa fined him two months’ pay after one of the captured vessels escaped. Nevertheless, on his next return to Batavia, and despite further legal difficulties, he was given a rise in pay and his
contract extended. He made one more voyage, partly punitive, partly to trade, to Palembang in Sumatra before his commission to search for the Great South Land was issued.
DUTCH CAPTAINS IN the employ of the VOC were required to be Calvinists. Decisions on board ship were generally made by a council that might include the mate, the pilot and the merchant; if there were two ships, as there were on the 1642–43 voyage, representatives from both would gather to confer. It seems an unwieldy arrangement, especially when the officers of one ship had to row in bad weather across to the other; but that is how it was done. Tasman had among his officers men he had sailed with over a period of years, including two close colleagues: Francoijs Visscher, a pilot and cartographer who had spent time mapping the waters around Japan and the Gulf of Tonkin; and Isaac Gilsemans, who travelled as under-merchant and was a well-educated man, a talented artist and an extravagant calligrapher. These three, one scholar has suggested, might have put the plan for a voyage to discover the Great South Land to the VOC: not as a venture that would add to the knowledge of the world but as a commercial proposition. As ever, gold, silver and the possibility of a rich trade were the lures.
Zone of the Marvellous Page 11