Waterscapes of Desire: Composing with the Elements in Early Modern Drama and Travel Writing

by Lowell Nelson Duckert

B.A. in English, June 2004, Western Washington University M.A. in English, May 2007, Arizona State University

A Dissertation submitted to

The Faculty of Columbian College of Arts and Sciences of The George Washington University in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy

August 31, 2012

Dissertation directed by

Jonathan Gil Harris Professor of English

The Columbian College of Arts and Sciences of the George Washington University certifies that Lowell Nelson Duckert has passed the Final Examination for the degree of

Doctor of Philosophy as of May 30, 2012. This is the final and approved form of the dissertation.

Waterscapes of Desire: Composing with the Elements in Early Modern Drama and Travel Writing

Lowell Nelson Duckert

Dissertation Research Committee:

Jonathan Gil Harris, Professor of English, Dissertation Director

Jeffrey Jerome Cohen, Professor of English, Committee Member

Holly Dugan, Assistant Professor of English, Committee Member

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© Copyright 2012 by Lowell Nelson Duckert All rights reserved

iii Dedication

For my family, turbulent and tranquil.

iv Acknowledgments

Since this is a project that deals with desire, let me say that I have had the most desirable committee ever assembled: my director, Jonathan Gil Harris, who introduced me to watery Ralegh in my first graduate seminar at GW, who helped me find my element, and who never failed to give brilliant feedback even while he weathered the monsoons of

India—adbhut shukriya ada karta hoon; Jeffrey Jerome Cohen, whose generosity of heart and mind kept both me and my work flowing, and who believed in me through the most turgid times; and Holly Dugan, who asked the tough questions I was afraid to answer, who opened up new routes for me to travel. My internal examiner, Jonathan Hsy, contributed more than a designated reader should; I thank him for reminding me how fluid language really is, that translation should never be taken for granted. I must also thank Steve Mentz, my outside examiner and a true blue scholar, for making waves for me to follow. There are several others whose work has significantly shaped my own:

Stacy Alaimo, Alfred K. Siewers, and Julian Yates. I have been fortunate enough to meet thinkers like these through the George Washington Medieval and Early Modern Studies

Institute (GW MEMSI), a center I have had the honor to work for, present my work to, and whose mission is an inspiration to all disciplines. Long may it run. Special thanks to the BABEL Working Group for its intoxicating intellectualism – I am in your debt,

Eileen Joy and Myra Seaman, and I will see you soon. No ecological project would be complete without acknowledging the places that made my writing possible: Assateague

National Seashore, Old Rag Mountain, and Acadia National Park, to name a few.

Landscapes run through every word that follows. Lastly, I want to thank my immediate friends and family who have accompanied me on all kinds of adventures, both the ups

v and the downs. Elisabeth, Christina, Collette, Jude, and Loralei: you say that I take you places, but the feeling is mutual; you have given me the hope for the futures I imagine herein. Thank you for proving to me that recreation can re-create, and, most importantly, that creation truly is an act of love.

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Abstract of Dissertation

Waterscapes of Desire: Composing with the Elements in Early Modern Drama and Travel Writing

My dissertation argues that waterscapes of the early modern period – rivers, glaciers, monsoons, and swamps – form fluid networks in which the human and nonhuman mix.

Early modern writers demonstrate how the human body is intermeshed with the liquid environment. Examining works by Walter Ralegh, William Shakespeare, François

Bernier, and others, I attend to what water, in its diverse forms, does: streams drift, ice slips, rain precipitates, and mud bogs. The author flows with wet things and attains new material embodiments. Water suffuses the compositional process as a result. In their encounters with water in global contact zones, early modern travel writers composed waterscapes differently from those who stayed at home. Ralegh’s experience with

Guianan waterfalls that “drew me on” introduces a genre of literature unlike poetry devoted to the Thames. Contemporary drama tests the remarkable agency of water that travelers describe: when the first scene of Shakespeare’s The Tempest calls for “wet” mariners to appear, for example, their entrance signals an oceanic ecology in which the human and the nonhuman are co-implicated. Watery bodies materialize in the playhouse.

The significance of this project is twofold: in extending the work done by early modern ecocritics such as Steve Mentz and Robert Watson, I focus on waterscapes as sites of constant creativity; and I analyze the imperial and often violent histories behind waterscapes, especially when divisions between the human and the ecological are imposed. Early modern authors questioned such divides. Drama and travel writing of the

vii period – Ralegh’s Discoverie of Guiana, Twelfth Night, The Tempest, and more – helps us imagine ethical ways to reconceive the relationships between humans and nonhumans in our own geopolitical time.

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Table of Contents

Dedication...... iv

Acknowledgements...... v-vi

Abstract of Dissertation...... vii-viii

List of Figures...... x

Introduction: Enter, Wet...... 1

Chapter 1: Water Ralegh...... 32

Chapter 2: Going Glacial...... 101

Chapter 3: When It Rains...... 157

Chapter 4: Swamp Things...... 196

Conclusion: Exit, Wet...... 272

Bibliography...... 276

ix

List of Figures

Figure 1...... 35

Figure 2...... 39

Figure 3...... 108

Figure 4...... 133

Figure 5...... 133

Figure 6...... 134

Figure 7...... 147

Figure 8...... 192

Figure 9...... 263

x Enter, Wet

Instead of clarifying even further the relations between objectivity and subjectivity, time enmeshes, at an even greater level of intimacy and on an ever greater scale, humans and nonhumans with each other ... [T]he confusion of humans and nonhumans is not only our past but our future as well.

Bruno Latour, Pandora’s Hope

Feste: I am for all waters. Twelfth Night, 4.2.56

This is a story about water—and the stories water tells. What follows is an exercise in collaboration, an experiment in sensing wet worlds and words together in flow.

Laboratory 1: Life?

In a Japanese wet lab in the late twentieth century, Dr. Masaru Emoto discovers the concept of hado: “the intrinsic vibrational pattern at the atomic level in all matter, the smallest unit of energy. Its basis is the energy of human consciousness” (Hado 2006).

When water is shown a picture of dolphins, hears the word “peace,” or listens to Frédéric

Chopin’s Prelude No. 15 (“Raindrop”), its crystallized patterns are beautiful. But when water hears the word “war” or heavy metal, it turns ugly. Antarctic water is aesthetically pleasing, while water from Hiroshima City is a blur. Eureka: human consciousness affects reality. “We literally shape and have control over our world, our bodies, emotional well-being, and everything we come in contact with—through our thoughts, feelings and words” (2006). In 1999 he publishes his findings as The Hidden Messages in Water. This is no laboratory life for water, however, stuck in its Petri dishes of passivity. Water simply mirrors human emotions; once it performs its therapeutic duty for the human, its work is done. Ultimately, water’s “message” is really Emoto’s: good vibrations are good

1 for us, he announces. Is this moral lost upon a Japan (still) suffering from the Tohoku earthquake and tsunami of March 11, 2011 – a vibration that initiated multiple nuclear accidents? What do radioactive tsunami crystals look like?

***

Laboratory 2: Enter, Wet

In another lab in London sometime in the early seventeenth century, shipwrecked survivors take the wet stage. Enter actors from Pericles (1607-8) and The Tempest

(1611). The latter is Shakespeare’s wettest play. The word “wet” appears four times, the most in all of his works. It is easy to fathom, then, why Steve Mentz opens his book of blue cultural studies, At the Bottom of Shakespeare’s Ocean, with the oozy “sea- change” of this play obsessed with shipwrecks and storms, transformations and rebirth (1.2.404).

For Mentz, the “change” addresses “the physical and metaphorical qualities of the ocean

... salt water’s transformative impact on human flesh” (2009, 1). Mentz rightly cautions that if we read this line purely as a demonstration of the dramatist’s poetic prowess we lose the “real taste of ocean ... a sharp tang of nonhuman immensity” (1). For him,

Shakespeare meditates on the powerful sea changes the ocean performs in the early modern period. What is perhaps a little less noticeable than this critical “sea-change” – unless you happen to be the dramaturge – is a particular splash the ocean makes in the opening tempest (1.1). “Enter Mariners, wet” (1.1.45). The ocean’s varying “impact” on

“human flesh” that the play explores is performed, incredibly, right before our watery eyes. The stage direction attests to the ocean’s transformative powers to “change” things, but in a slightly different register than in Ariel’s song. The sailors not merely act drenched; they are profoundly acted upon. Water performs, collaborates, and commingles

2 with their “too too solid flesh” (Ham, 1.2.129). Water is an actor with agency, an “actant” in Bruno Latour’s vocabulary, a collaborative force that enlists the human and brings forth wonders like The Tempest. Enter, water. “Enter Mariners, wet.” Entertain: a combination of the Latin preposition inter (“between) and tenēre (“to hold”).1 They are, like the waterscape itself, held in-between human and nonhuman. “Enter, wet” is both a stage direction and multiple directions bodies may take, bodies poised in potential.

Little attention has been paid to the materiality of water in a stage direction like

“Enter, wet.” Pericles and The Tempest are the only two Shakespearean plays in which specific stage directions call for the actors to not just act wet, but to literally enter wet

(5.38 and 1.1.45, respectively). But why not make a dry run of it? In these global plays –

Where is the island located geographically? How vast is the Mediterranean? – characters ponder the turbulent relationship between oceans and humans in the early seventeenth century. The materiality of water questions the ontological divide separating human from nonhuman, dry subject from wet object. When watery bodies materialize on the early modern stage, they indicate embodiments in which water and human are co-implicated.

Wet characters show humans to be always “intermeshed with the more-than-human world,” a mobile space Stacy Alaimo calls a “trans-corporeal landscape” (2010 2, 48).

Once we realize that we are “interconnected in potent potential” with the world’s waters

(44), we become sailors across a site that Latour appropriately names the “vast ocean of uncertainties” (2005, 245). To make a wet entrance is to enter into non/human alliances of uncertain catastrophes and joys.

The difficulty is that we do not know exactly how the storms were staged and the actors were soaked. The Tempest had a wide theatrical range: it was performed at the

3 court of James I, at Blackfriars, and probably at the Globe. Blackfriars afforded

Shakespeare unique opportunities for special effects; Andrew Gurr believes the play was written specifically for the company’s newly acquired indoor venue. He lists the standard assortment of theatrics necessary to make a storm: thunder came from a “‘roul’d bullet on a sheet of metal, or a ‘tempestuous drum’ ... lightning from squibs, and mists from smoke” (1980, 170). Shakespeare produced a tempest of unprecedented magnitude.

Certain senses, though, take precedence. Storms are indicated by what they sound or look like. Yet stages were wet; directions call for rain in Thomas Heywood’s The Brazen Age

(1610-13) and Thomas Dekker’s If It Be Not Good, the Devil is in It (1611-12) staged at the Red Bull (Stage 170). What is different about The Tempest is that it stages what the ocean feels like on the skin – its material touch – through the saturated bodies of the mariners. And it could do so indoors, even. A wet entrance is a “realistic device,” says

Gurr, “an emphatic though momentary illusion of reality” that precedes Prospero’s explanation to Miranda that the wreck was only illusion and all victims are, in fact, safe and dry (1989, 101). Wetness is only a momentary lapse into reality. “The wetting of the mariners is a wonderfully literal-minded and yet strikingly minimal realization of the storm effects” (99). Gurr places water in a binary with reality on one side and representation on the other. Read this way, I think we lose its touch; understanding water solely as a backdrop for human culture does the same. Class is certainly an issue during the storm: the mariners’ clothes are wet, not the noblemen’s, just as the groundlings’ would have been during a rainy day at the Globe. The Tempest meditates on the affective agency of water by calling for its material presence on stage. And chances are the rain

“raineth every day” upon Shakespeare’s audience watching Twelfth Night (1601) in the

4 damp month of January, the time when Twelfth Night festivities were held. (I turn to

Feste’s rain song and the monsoons of India in my third chapter.) Where has all the water gone from our critical interpretations?

Admittedly, the mariners’ entrance is an editorial dilemma. The Tempest’s manuscript was prepared by Ralph Crane and printed for the first time in the 1623 Folio.

Whether “Enter Mariners, wet” is an insertion of Crane’s or Shakespeare’s is impossible to determine. But the question is not just who enters wet, but how and why they do so.

Trevor R. Griffiths’s recent handbook to the play argues that the direction

is more likely to describe either an author’s thoughts on what he wanted to achieve or an audience’s visual impression of the storm, rather than to act as an instruction to a stage manager, who is more likely to have needed to be reminded to have a bucket of water ready at an appropriate time and place than what the result of having the water available would be. (2007, 4)

But the “result” is crucial – it moves audiences away from a purely “visual impression” of oceans kept at a safe distance to a more embodied reaction to wetness, of bodies impressed (marked) by water (especially in an outdoor venue subject to the elements, we might add). What is the “result” of Griffiths’s summation? Less materiality and more art.

I suggest that this stage direction does all three things at once: it cues the stagehand (a reminder), it gestures to the intended aesthetic effect (a storm), and it introduces an oceanic ecopoesis that breaks down, rather than widens, the separation between art and world. Neither representation nor cultural construction, staged wetness is what Latour would call a “circulating reference,” a chain of transformations that refuses to separate language and nature, world and word, into isolated domains (1999, 24). Enter reality, wet.

5 Let us stop trying to save the ship of (too-human) authorial invention. If, as

Griffiths speculates, wet entrances could be achieved from “a judicious backstage application of water,” let us see how water works upon Shakespeare’s plays (17). As a mediator, onstage water underscores The Tempest’s theorization of humans becoming watery via their material entanglements. “Enter, Mariners, wet” to utter one line in unison before they exit: “All lost! To prayers, to prayers! All lost!” (1.1.46). Caliban, Stephano, and Trinculo enter “all wet” (4.1.193) after their sojourn through the “foul lake” in which

Ariel left them (4.1.183). Trinculo drunkenly laments his lost bottle in the pool: “That’s more to me than my wetting. Yet this is your / harmless fairy, monster” (4.1.210-11). All three circumstances of becoming wet are coded negatively: the mariners’ drowning; the assassins’ soddenness in a fen outside Prospero’s cell; and the body’s drying up (sobering up) while simultaneously being bogged down. Nevertheless, all three examples perform the more-than-human. Trinculo’s body becomes a watery bottle of liquor, a movement accentuated by the actor’s literal saturation. The storm stages the permeability of the human, a precariousness emphasized by their dripping prayers. Such scenes explode the

(insupportable) idea of the human severed from its environment. To enter wet is to show the body being entered by water. Interestingly, these moments of entrance are experienced collectively, and, in the case of the mariners, spoken as such. In the end, even Prospero is never “free” from his material bonds, as if some kind of magically autonomous thing (Epilogue, 20). His first line is more telling: “Be collected” (1.2.13).

We are left with “bands” and “hands” at the end of the play, symbols of cords and contracts that betoken better relationships with oceanic matter rather than terms of enslavement (Epilogue 9, 10).2

6 “Enter Pericles, wet” (5.38). Pericles similarly theorizes what happens when human bodies enter and are entered by the sea. Within a “fish-story” like this one (Mentz

2009, 68), enmeshment with the sea churns out non/human hybrids. It is from the “finny subject of the sea” that the fishermen are able to tell their well-known moral about how fish are like men – the great ones swallow the smaller – and also how fish are men: the third fisherman “saw / the porpoise how he bounced and tumbled ... They say they’re half fish, half flesh” (5.38, 5.63-4). It is from this oceanic mixture that Pericles enters. Tossed about on the waves, the hero eventually washes up on the shores of Pentapolis: “Wind, rain, and thunder, remember earthly man / Is but a substance that must yield to you”

(5.42-3). A humbler statement than Lear’s “Blow, winds, and crack your cheeks!” to be sure (3.2.1). But Pericles’s wet entrance also calls the “substance” of the human into question: “What I have been, I have forgot to know, / But what I am, want teaches me to think on” (5.106-7). The stage direction is more than a Jacobean stage practice that signals to the audience that Pericles is shipwrecked. (Viola’s entrance, for instance, is not

“wet.”) Stressing becomings over being, Pericles – soaked on shore and on stage – performs the contingent “am” that forever transforms. There is no perdurable substance known as identity, only a relationality tied to the ocean. More significantly, the play invites us to see this liquid nature of identity through the very substance that drenches the actor’s body: “Enter Pericles, wet.” And exit Pericles, wet: in the end he asks to be

“put...to present pain, / Lest this great sea of joys rushing upon me / O’erbear the shores of my mortality / And drown me with their sweetness!” (21.177-181). Pericles’s body is still wet, still not quite dry from the shores of Pentapolis. More water, judiciously or not, is thrown on him. His oceanic body might risk personification here. Yet in a relatively

7 obscure play full of “humming water” (11.62), transformative “ooze” (11.59), and a host of sea changes, the “humming water” is ultimately a non/human assemblage speaking to us: the wet body of the actor “humming” the lines onstage.

Shakespeare’s dramatic dip-tych invites audiences to see the world as

“transcorporeal” waterscapes of watery bodies constantly on the move. Both plays materialize these bodies on the early modern stage because they engage the oceanic stage beyond them, mobile and material networks in which the English were (increasingly) participating. The plays are dependent upon global travel and its waters. What if the nearby Thames supplied the water for these stage directions? Even though a local river, the Thames is tied to the global hydrosphere: a complex mixture of merchants’ passages, explorers’ discoveries, elemental atmospheres. In their material interactions with wetness that acts as much as it is acted upon, Pericles and the mariners demonstrate how the human commingles with, and is redefined by, the ocean. Much has been said about the parallels between The Tempest and contemporary travel literature like William Strachey’s shipwreck narrative (1625). What is not given enough attention is how the form of the travel narrative – the narration of embodied experiences with water – influences (that is:

“flows into”) the play genre. It is no coincidence that these two plays – both fascinated with movement upon and within the sea – are the only two Shakespearean plays with inundated characters. With a splash of water, audiences could recognize the collapse of local and global distinctions. They could reflect not only on the place of England in a world of increasing trade and travel, but also on the infinitely varying and variable nature of place itself. Could we? Or are our river-revels ended? Enter, braver new worlds.

8 What of the world? As I have suggested, Strachey’s geographical Bermudas had a role to play. And so do the waterscapes of the present. Pericles, and by my extension, The

Tempest, expands upon the “aquaman fantasy” Marina represents to Mentz: the hope that a “proto-ecological intermingling” will “demonstrate the power of coming to terms with the sea ... [and] that living in an oceanic world may be possible” (80, 69). The ocean may not be our home, writes Mentz; it may be an “alien globe” instead: “[T]he sea throws cold water on the happy dreams of environmentalism ... destabilizes our fantasies of sustainable growth and a harmonious relationship between human culture and the natural world” (xiii, xii). To study Shakespeare’s oceans is to study “limit cases” (18). I believe this is the very reason why we need to de/re/compose our households (oikos) altogether.

If it seems strange to place Latour and Shakespeare into conversation with each other, I have done so deliberately. The early modern stage is a wet laboratory of science studies. Shakespeare’s wet entrances speak of an ecotheoretical limit case: the limits of the human fantasy of impenetrability. What is alien is precisely the idea of the human, the subject, and the playwright, alienated from the nonhuman, the object, and the world. The human and the nonhuman are coconstitutive actors, never discrete players oceans apart, and always on the verge of becoming. Inter-, wet. Pericles’s sea of both “pain” and “joys” proves that Shakespeare thought about the uncertainties of his time. And he helps us face those of our own. Once we realize our always-already – and unpredictable – entanglement with oceans, the potential outcomes are bottomless. “Enter Mariners, wet” to tell us that all is not lost. Just as importantly, the stage experiments with the findings of other wet laboratories miles away. In these places are the historical “Mariners” like

Strachey who visited the world’s physical waterscapes, narrated their experiences, and

9 introduced their living waters to others—others, like Shakespeare-upon-Thames, who could then recompose the human in his experiments known as Pericles and The Tempest.

Enter travel writers, wet.

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Laboratory 3: (A) Life

Standing on a rimy ship deck somewhere between Greenland and Newfoundland in the late 1580s, an English captain flips an ice cube with his fingers, places it in a glass vessel with a little water, and takes a closer look. He ponders the size of this tiny iceberg in comparison to the submerged stuff around him when – crash – a massive chunk of ice drops from a cliff, nearly flipping his nautical lab. Five years later, in a steamier place much father south, an English explorer readies his quill. This time, he assures himself, he will finish the great “Chart of discouerie.” The map will have to wait, however; his clothes refuse to dry off from his latest discovery in the Guianan riverscape, the waterfalls, and he desires to find more. A century later in the eastern Indies, a Frenchman debates with his European correspondent. He has promised to unlock the secrets of the monsoons; they are coming, monsieur. He must go. He hears Bengal is a beautiful place for analysis. Swampy New England is not: at about the same time it is raining in India, a

Puritan chronicler thanks God under a sturdy roof. They have been delivered, he praises, from the filth of the swamp and the dark things it breeds. But something breaks his meditation: the marsh has flooded again. As if he lived on dry land.

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10 The Waves: The Future of Early Modern Environmental Criticism

Olivia: Go to, you’re a dry fool. Twelfth Night (1.5.35)

It’s as if at some point you had to leave the solid land and go to sea.

Latour, Reassembling the Social

Focusing on the “environmental turn” at the turn of the twenty-first century that he sees “less as a monolith than as a concourse of discrepant practices,” Lawrence Buell charts our movement away from “first wave” ecocriticism to the second (2005, 11). If the first was characterized by objectified, mimetic representations of nature that define the environment as the “natural,” the second is more politically driven. Mixing the natural with the built, ethics with politics, second-wave criticism challenges organicist/holistic models of ecology and favors the interpenetration of the natural and the social. Queer ecology, ecofeminism, and environmental justice movements are such types of “social ecocriticism.” Buell discerns two important contributions: first, the “environment- constructed body [is] defined for better or for worse by environmental entanglement ...

Whether individual or social, being doesn’t stop at the border of the skin” (23). Second,

“environmentality [is] a property of any text ... all human artifacts bear such traces, and at several stages: in the composition, the embodiment, and the reception” (25). The complexities of environmentally embedded bodies and texts are in store for us. The real difficulty now, he observes, is balancing the desires of ecocentrism (earth-oriented) with ecojustice (human-oriented) approaches. The second wave is a ride worth taking, nevertheless. There are surprises still in store, alliances to be made, and work to be done.

11 In the end, Buell makes a hopeful prophecy: environmental criticism is a “project in motion” (ix).

Poised as we are for better futures, we still need direction(s). Early modern travel writers take us along slightly different “waves” of ecocriticism by entering waterscapes, the material in-between spaces of not-quite water and not-quite land. Where all inter-, wet. If ecocriticism is a “project in motion,” water is the matter behind the “waves” that take us backward and forward in time simultaneously. Explorers rode these waves:

Guianan rivers, Arctic glaciers, Indian monsoons, and New England mud (it moves!).

And by cohabiting these liquid environments, early modern travelers made waves, and worlds, of their own. The eco- (from the Greek oikos, “household”) is a house constantly being re/assembled via various matter flows.3 It is a project perpetually under construction. Despite Michel Serres’s avoidance of the word “environment” in The

Natural Contract, the world need not “environ” us (1995a, 33).4 Viro (“to turn, veer”) derives from the Old French/Middle English virer.5 Early modern waterscapes, both pleasurable and dangerous, may veer us into better ways of thinking ecologically right now—or at least veer us away from harmful modes already in place. But how do we get there? “Go to, ... dry fool.” Early modern travel writers tell us to “go to,” to should stop being such dry fools who believe that we live and compose ourselves without the watery world. “It’s as if at some point you had to leave the solid land and go to sea” (2005, 244).

The last decade has witnessed a notable upsurge in early modern ecocriticism, dominated mostly by dramatic (Shakespearean) studies. This work significantly diverges from “first wave” studies of nature devoted to the paradigmatic “green space.” Special issues of Shakespeare Studies, Renaissance Drama, and Interdisciplinary Studies in

12 Literature and Environment join edited collections like Ecocritical Shakespeare and

Early Modern Ecostudies.6 This renewed interest incorporates feminist, postcolonial, and queer approaches.7 Book-length studies are prevalent: Todd Borlik’s ecoformalism enjoins “the task of planetary stewardship” (2010, 21), while Gabriel Egan’s Marxist- inflected ecopolitical treatise on “Green” Shakespeare declares, boldly, “Political action is where we save the Earth” (2006, 50). Robert N. Watson’s eco-epistemological study views the Renaissance movement “back to nature” as an effort to “get back to things in themselves ... a craving for unmediated knowledge in any form” (2006, 22), while Ken

Hiltner argues that pastoral writers chose not to represent nature, “choosing instead to gesture to what lies outside of the work” (2011, 3). Or, there is Simon C. Estok’s

“ecophobia”: humanity’s “irrational and groundless fear or hatred of the natural world” fed by our anxieties over control and unpredictability (2011, 4). All in all, if the field of early modern ecostudies is growing, it is gradually spreading in multiple directions.

I agree with Buell: the ability to go in many directions is ecocriticism’s greatest strength. And yes, the “residual potentialities” in early modern studies are multiplying even as I write this (48). But as we can see from the short list I have provided,

Shakespeare seems to be the common eco-denominator. Greg Garrard has gone so far to announce:

[E]nter Shakespearean ecocriticism. By that I do not mean only the application of pre-existing ecocritical approaches to Shakespearean texts, but rather the possibility...that ecocriticism itself might be Shakespearean. (2011, xxiv)

Such a “natural” conflation of Shakespeare and ecocriticism is worth investigating. We should ask not just how Shakespeare is ecocritical, but why he – and primarily he – leads the field. Indeed, Julian Yates and Garrett Sullivan have recently pitched their special

13 issue of Shakespeare Studies, “Shakespeare and Ecology,” as a question, thereby inviting readers to meditate on the conjunctive “and” (2011, 25-6). Garrard invokes (what he believes to be) a popular truism: Shakespeare is ecocritical precisely because his work explores ecological issues like climate change—events that continue to affect us today.

And due to ecocriticism’s “activist” inclinations, for example, Sharon O’Dair (2011) has recently declared that it is not Shakespearean ecocriticism if it is not presentist. But what if it is not even Shakespearean? I suggest we go elsewhere: to the “potentialities” of travel writing as an eco-genre.

***

Waterscapes of Desire

A text truly speaks of the world. Latour, Pandora’s Hope

This dissertation argues that waterscapes of the early modern period – rivers, glaciers, monsoons, and swamps – form fluid networks in which the human and nonhuman interpenetrate, creating fleshy and textual assemblages of non/human things that redefine notions of the “human” and of narrativity. Although I situate myself alongside the excellent early modern oceanic studies of Mentz and Dan Brayton (2012). I also depart slightly from these critics, and, at times, the centrality of Shakespeare in “blue cultural studies.” Here I offer other horizons. The early modern travel writers I discuss –

Walter Ralegh, George Best, François Bernier, William Hubbard, and others – demonstrate how the human body is always-already enmeshed with the waterscape. Their works attend to what water, in its diverse forms, does: rivers carry, ice slips, rain precipitates, and mud bogs. As Karen Barad notes, “matter is substance in its intra-active becoming—not a thing, but a doing, a congealing of agency” (2007, 151). The author

14 flows with wet things and attains new material embodiments. As a result, water suffuses the compositional process. Water’s ability to compose new forms by interacting with the human is simultaneously desirable and devastating. Crucially, though waterscapes are sites of constant creativity that ceaselessly produce non/human assemblages, the imperial and often violent histories behind waterscapes cannot be overlooked, especially when divisions between the human and the ecological are imposed. By getting wet, early modern authors questioned such divides. They help us imagine ethical ways to reconceive the relationships between humans and nonhumans in our own geopolitical time. To be clear: this is not nostalgia for lost water worlds; this is an eco-genre that considers ways in which both humans and nonhumans may benefit in worlds to come.

Ralegh might well have said, “I am for all waters.” Early modern travel narratives remarkably demonstrate the eco-ontology I am suggesting. Through their bodily experiences with water, travel writers reconfigured the idea of the household altogether.

Their interactions with water in global contact zones produced waterscapes different than those who stayed at home: for example, the Thames of “The Water Poet” John Taylor

(1578-1653) or Izaak Walton’s The Compleat Angler (1653). Author-discoverers left

England and entered unknown ecologies where they encountered water’s monstrous immensity, wondrous forms, and strange beauty. Their bodily experiences with waterscapes unfamiliar to them necessitated an eco-genre in which the living waters of global places gained co-authorship: a wet and writerly process I call eco-compositionism.

Contemporary drama, in turn, indicates this remarkable agency of water felt by travelers like Ralegh. As I suggested in the Shakespearean dip-tych above, the two genres of drama and travel writing suffuse one another. Guianan waterfalls that “drew” Ralegh

15 “on” in The Discoverie of Guiana (1596) constitute a waterscape in which the human and the nonhuman are co-constitutive beings. When the mariners enter wet in the first scene of The Tempest, the watery bodies read about in the Discoverie surprisingly materialize.

“Travellers ne’er did lie, / Though fools at home condemn ‘em” (Tem, 3.3.26-7). Soaked early modern travel writings relate to our uncertain, and surprising, collaborations with water today. But I do not want you to drift away so soon—no, not yet. Allow me to outline my ecotheoretical terms.

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Theorizing Ecology: The Ecomaterial Turn

[T]he more nonhumans share existence with humans, the more humane a collective is. Latour, Pandora’s Hope

In ecocritical parlance, “deep ecology” expresses the decentering of the human.

While it rightly challenges anthropocentric modes of existence, deep ecology is problematic in that it often places the human in the dominating position in order to dethrone it. We need to go deeper, and I believe sociologists of science can aid our journey.8 Latour, Serres, and Andrew Pickering dispute hierarchal models of relations by reconfiguring (not just decentering) the human on the ontological playing field. Latour’s actor-network-theory is perhaps the most notable; challenging what he calls the

“Modernist Constitution,” he has famously stated that the divide separating Nature and

Culture – the hallmark of modernity – is not and has never been intrinsic.9 Although things constantly interact with us, Latour argues, agency is delegated to the human.

Likewise, any attempt to bring nature into politics (or vice versa) is inevitably flawed.10

In a work that has become a benchmark of “science studies,” Pandora’s Hope, Latour

16 sketches his model of relationality: “There is no sense in which humans may be said to exist as humans without entering into commerce with what authorizes and enables them to exist (that is, to act)” (1999, 192). Reality for him is comprised of hybrid nonhuman and human things called “actants” that are defined by their complex (and creative) relationships with one another. Instead of a world divided into autonomous subjects and objects or reduced to essential substances, Latour articulates a world of endless assemblages, collaborations, and “collectives” of heterogeneous things. What is more, this “confusion of humans and nonhumans” is our “future” (200).

More confusion? Actor–network waterscapes deny any originary division between humans and nonhumans, describing them instead as co-constitutive actants without hierarchical order or telos. The watery forms I trace resist our attempts to know their intentions, yet they also resist re-drawing the separations between subject and object. Thus any attempt to bridge the gulf separating human from water, though admirable, is misguided. I have chosen these travel writers because they exhibit, willingly or not, elemental enmeshment. If “[a]ction should remain a surprise, a mediation, an event”, their narratives of nonhuman agency exhibit that “slight surprise of action”

(Latour, 2005, 45).11 In both “slight” and severe ways, water will continue to surprise us as it did them. The citizens of Tohoku were certainly surprised; ecological refugees like them demand a re-thinking of scientific practice. Pickering calls his approach

“mangling:” “an open-ended, reciprocally structured interplay of human and nonhuman agency, a dance of agency” (2008, vii). Scientists and their instruments, humanities and the social sciences—“the mangle [is] a ‘theory of everything’” (viii). Pickering argues that “mangling” can help us make more informed decisions, even if its outcomes are

17 unpredictable. After surveying the levees on the Mississippi River, for example, he suggests preemptive evacuation: “The Corps of Engineers should stop fighting the river and let New Orleans go” (8). The blue natural-cultural studies I am proposing here would not “save” or “prevent” nature from the ravages of culture (or the other way around), but rather preserve and explore the terms’ ontological inseparability. My hope is that waterscapes do not merely force us to cope with a fluctuating world, but actually take us to a better ontological humility with potential for more humane kinds of relations. Call it a posthumanist ethics.

I am not alone. Several ecocritics have developed valuable connections between ecology and theory.12 The “mesh” of Timothy Morton is a case in point.13 But few have seized upon the possibilities of ecopoetics in conversation with actor-network modes of enquiry, especially in premodern periods.14 There is ample space for my ecotheoretical project. Nevertheless, I must address a frequent objection that goes something like this: just as “applying” ecocriticism to early modern literature is critically presumptuous, so, too, is the application of postmodern theory to ecocriticism. First, early modern travel writers are ecotheorists because their wet narratives theorize the human’s embodied material becomings with waterscapes. Second, the dialogue I create between early modern literature and actor-network-theory suggests how we might reconceive the latter in turn. Admittedly, ecocriticism has yet to overcome its phobia to theory. Serpil

Opperman has written extensively about “ecocriticism’s theoretical discontents”: “Just as ecocriticism’s socio-political engagements with the pressing issues of local and global ecological crises are driven by relevant theories, its analyses of the textual representations of these issues in literature should also be theoretically informed” (2011, 154). The

18 “material turn” in the posthumanities requires more ecocritical engagement.15 With this ecotheoretical discussion in mind, I argue that early modern studies, ecocriticism, and the

“material turn” are mutually informative. I stage my intervention in three interrelated ways:

(1) Waterscapes invoke the agency inherent in the very word “landscape.”

“Landscape” comes from the Old English -sciepe, -scipe, and –scype which means “to create, ordain, appoint.”16 “Land-scape” is land that has been created – though syntactically, the land is also in a position to create. Waterscapes do the same. In the word’s precise insistence upon a redistributed network of agency, we may glimpse what political theorist Jane Bennett calls an “out-side” world of things that has the power to shape and be shaped – in essence, an ecopoesis that necessitates a reworking of agency.

“Matter itself,” she asserts, “is lively” (2010, 13). Her “vital materialist” creed defines vitality as “the capacity of things – edibles, commodities, storms, metals – not only to impede or block the will and designs of humans but also to act as quasi agents or forces with trajectories, propensities, or tendencies of their own” (viii). Vibrant water runs throughout my project, opening up the definitions of (a) life to nonorganic forms. Living rivers, ice, rain, and swamps: my project accepts Bennett’s challenge to rethink landscape and environment in “vital materialist” ways: “to encourage more intelligent and sustainable engagements with vibrant matter and living things…to articulate a vibrant materiality that runs alongside and inside humans ” (viii). Early modern authors expressed the vitality of water in the exact words they used to describe it. “Prospect,”

“glacier,” “precipitate,” and “mushroom” divulge their thoughts about non/organic vitality that we are just beginning to rediscover.

19 (2) Waterscapes involve a metonymic relationship with the environment based on desire rather than lack: a desire to touch and be touched, to cohabit, and to interconnect – what Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari believe to be the “material process of connection”

(Bonta and Protevi, 2004, 76). Desire as movement, movement as desire. Within travel narratives, the waterscape moves, picks up actants, and is moved in return; multipliable non/human bodies engage in rhizomatic processes of becoming; newness and creativity with the environment is imperative. Seemingly infinite locales – the interminable rivers of Guiana, the melting waterways of the Arctic Circle, the monsoonal cascades of

Bengal, and the labyrinthine swamps of New England – keep desiring-bodies going. As such, waterscapes energize Manuel De Landa’s non-linear histories: “[R]eality is a single matter-energy undergoing phase transitions of various kinds, with each new layer of accumulated ‘stuff’ simply enriching the reservoir of nonlinear dynamics and nonlinear combinatorics available for the generation of novel structures and processes” (1997,

21).17 Each flowing aquascape is just that place of “feedback” between human culture and nonhuman environment. “Becoming Water,” “going glacial,” and “the cascade effect” are dynamic processes that push desire-as-movement to the extreme. “Trans- corporeal” waterscapes highlight movements “across bodies” as well as “across different sites” (Alaimo, 2010, 2). At the same time, not all movements (or interpenetrations) are desirable. We must also “acknowledg[e] the often unpredictable and unwanted actions of human bodies, nonhuman creatures, ecological systems, chemical agents, and other actors” (2). The colonialist rhetoric of Ralegh, for instance, can serve as origins for, and analogies to, contemporary environmental justice movements. But it should also

20 influence future policies: how we treat emplaced and displaced inhabitants, the desires they have, and the stories they tell. This brings me to my final point.

(3) Waterscapes speak. In doing so, they redefine the human voice as an assembly of vociferous non/human things. Ethically, the question of who is and who is not allowed to speak is also the question of who is and who is not excluded from a given ecology.

Latour’s imagined Parliament of Things grants both nonhumans and humans a say in global events. Yates and Sullivan are optimistic:

[W]hile policies might remain written or authored by human persons, there is every possibility that those persons will now, in truth, exist merely as factors or occasions by which the interests of the ozone layer, the coastline, sea lions, lichen, and so on, come to serve as co-authors in a collective writing of the world. (25)

But how can something like water speak? Latour believes that “Articulation between propositions goes much deeper than speech. We speak because the propositions of the world are themselves articulated, not the other way around. More exactly, we are allowed to speak interestingly by what we allow to speak interestingly” (1999, 144). Early modern writers were remarkably attuned to the calls of living water, for better and for worse. The

Puritans’ silencing of “swampspeak,” the hideous groans of living ice, the touching vibrations of waterfalls—all grapple with the essential question of what to do when the world speaks, whether or not we will listen. By framing their embodied experiences with waterscapes as lively conversations rather than lonely rhapsodies, I argue that early modern authors were actually co-authors with the water they described. Water is more than a metaphor for the (human) author’s art at these moments. Travel narratives do not illustrate the human entering mute waterscapes—they are the material result of humans exchanging words with vociferous matter. Our shared bodies – texts included – derive

21 from material meshworks. Can we better hear the calls of things by returning to these collaborative non/human narratives? We will have to radically rethink composition in order to compose ourselves this way. It shall go slow, to be sure, but the prospects are many.

***

Our Slow Designs: Composing with the Elements

Helen: Our remedies oft in ourselves do lie Which we ascribe to heaven. The fated sky Gives us free scope, only doth backward pull Our slow designs when we ourselves are dull.

All’s Well That Ends Well (1.1.199-202)

Helen’s soliloquy is typically read as a challenge to a providential universe. Here the cosmos loses some, but not all, of its basis upon divine origination and justification, thereby anticipating a more modern cosmological view based upon scientific explanation and the “scope” of reason. Egan sees Helen’s skepticism caught in such a contest: “there is stellar influence, but it does not entirely constrain human behaviour” (134). What is more, “old ideas” (like early modern geohumoralism or stellar influence), despite their trappings of “superstition”, crucially remind us now that our actions have real cosmic consequences. Regrettably, our “designs” do not seem to “pull” hard enough for society to (1) recognize this disjunction between cause and effect and (2) offer potent environmental “remedies.” Thus Egan’s analysis more accurately depicts the persistent post-Enlightenment bifurcation between the (active) human subject and the (passive) nonhuman object, Nature and Culture, stars and stargazer. In his terms: organic/mechanical, in/organic, and parts/wholes. The epistemological break is an

22 inconvenient divide that we have taken for granted, and a rift that ecostudies in general has worked hard to heal with a call for better pedagogical practices and/or political expediency.

It is this precise idea of rifts that ecocriticism interrogates so well. But what if we slowed down and examined Helen’s speech for other methodological “designs”? Helen insinuates a critical mode that moves us beyond Enlightenment chronology (whether we are pre- or post-) and its sticky epistemological categories that we have inherited: the

Cartesian mind-body duality and the binary terms it engenders. Helen’s skepticism is not so much a theological prelude to a greater epistemological crisis, but rather a challenge to how we understand, describe, and critique these binaries in ecostudies (and other disciplines as well). In other words, Helen questions the existence of the rift itself; she begs a question of ontology. Indeed, what does Helen mean when she says “our”? Are we ever just “ourselves”? And are our collectives restricted to specific non/human members?

What happens when agency is redistributed and redefined as action between non/human things – like the “sky,” for instance, on the act of composition? Slowness is the key to composing better “designs” for ecological futures. Ecomaterial can be fast stuff, of course: rain falls, swamps stagnate, rivers flow, and glaciers crawl. Yet “slowciology” is more about methodology than measurable speed (Latour, 2005, 25). The goal is to follow the actors themselves – and thus the relationships they assemble, interrupt, or disturb – even if it seems painstakingly slow.18

In a recent essay, “An Attempt at a Compositionist Manifesto,” Latour tries to check the “progressivism” of progress. He opens with the scene of stymied colonial progress in the eco-conscious blockbuster Avatar (2009). For Latour, progress involves a

23 unilinear and irreversible concept of time: that of progressing forward to an imagined end-point, a perceivable truth or telos yet to be achieved. Addressing the bifurcation between Nature and politics, he argues for a new definition of progress altogether: “that is, to process forward and meet new prospects” (2010, 473). At stake is how we can relearn the social as a “collective adventure,” to feel what it is like to live together and with things, to process with the earth (472). Like Latour’s argument in The Politics of

Nature (2004), the choice is not between politics or Nature; Nature as a holistic concept renders politics impotent. We cannot reuse the ontological separation and reconnect the terms, either – this is perhaps his most provocative point. Instead, the bifurcated categories need to be recomposed. “It is time to compose—in all meanings of the word, including to compose with, that is to compromise, to care, to move slowly, with caution and precaution” (487). Compositionism therefore is a “slow process”: it carefully traces how heterogeneous actants interact and construct, like “good” or “bad” composers; it notices how things fail, decompose, and recompose like compost; like compromise, it highlights how we move forward and also with (com-) things into new treaties. And we are never trapped in the same trajectories as before. Process allows for reversibility and disputability, especially in the sciences, and questions the attainability of truth itself:

“compositionism takes up the task of searching for universality but without believing that this universality is already there, waiting to be unveiled and discovered” (474). Thus compositionism eschews the dead ends of progressivism in favor of the infinite prospects we encounter as we process with things into collective futures. Composure, after all, is part of the process, but this type of composure is never at rest: “we are progressively

24 discovering that, just at the time when people despair at realizing that they might, in the end, have ‘no future’, we suddenly have many prospects” (486).

Helen’s speech reads like a compositionist manifesto. She announces a slow design that traces non/human collectives and exposes the fragility of the “our.” Her

“scope” expands the borders of the -scape. Likewise, Latour’s manifesto is ecological in

“scope;” he gestures towards a common oikos: “We need to have a much more material, much more mundane, much more immanent, much more realistic, much more embodied definition of the material world if we wish to compose the common world” (484). The prospect for Latour is “the shape of things to come” as we “search for the Common”

(486, 488). Helen’s motto has vast potential for ecostudies. We suddenly have many prospects. To live by an eco-compositionist manifesto would mean to interrogate the binaries ecocritics set up only to expose, blur, or undermine. We need not chose, for instance, between hyper-rationality (of new sciences and technologies) and irrationality

(of new age tactics of cosmic connectivity). Just as Latour reminds us of the false choice between politics or Nature, we suddenly realize that the break never really occurred: it is a “radical divide that has always been radically thought but never actually practiced”

(481). Eco-compositionism is less a solution to the post-Enlightenment crisis of mediation and more of a realization that we have taken the crisis’s consequences mistakenly as matters of fact. The rifts that we must hurriedly reseal, recalibrate, and remedy are social constructions rather than ontological presets. Recent studies in early modern ecocriticism (by Egan and others) have done important work by attending to the gaps’ environmental repercussions. But an eco-compositionist design moves us beyond

(or at least complicates) our insistence on binary breakdowns or their reconfigurations.

25 New prospects, peaceful collectives, and even joys may come once we rediscover how we slowly compose with and are composed by the world: that we are never “ourselves” since we are always entering and exiting non/human alliances as we “search for the common,” mediating with the material world, processing forth.

When early modern travel writers composed with the elements, the waterscape proved to be an ideal site for collaboration. The “slow process” of a glacier, we will see, made it an ideal co-composer with the human. Ice widens the “scope” of human and nonhuman relationships through its –scaping. Because he lived during the Little Ice Age

(1300-1850), Shakespeare probably had good reason to dwell on “slow designs” in his play (1605). Perhaps he had even read some of the Arctic narratives published several decades before. Similarly, contemporary ecocriticism would benefit by collaborating with early modern travel literature. Latour likens our present situation to the Renaissance’s

“thirst for material connections” (481). We have a lot to learn from their cravings. Like the thirsty early moderns, he says, we feel poised at the point before the (supposed)

Enlightenment break took place. Latour continues: “Once again, our age has become the age of wonders at the disorders of nature” (481). Although compositionism entails a process forward into the future, he plays with the etymological meanings of “prospect” – we “look forward” to future “views” – in order to say that we must face the future while nevertheless confronting the past. Walter Benjamin’s Angel of History is limiting in

Latour’s opinion “[f]leeing from the past while continuing to look at it will not do” (487).

The past confronts us. We process forward (movement) while going backward (direction) in time.

26 In this sense, Watson’s early modern flight “back to nature” seems too unidirectional: backwards. For him, early modern progress meant a “function of regress” that was perpetuated by fantasies of uncorrupted nature, unambiguous epistemology, and unmediation (7). Mediation was an uncomfortable present for some early modern authors, certainly. Others, however, did not nostalgically try to get back to the epistemological Garden of Eden whenever they could; in fact, some welcomed a mediated environmental future. More to this prospective point I am making, Borlik significantly puts early modernity’s “nascent environmental ethic” in line with our own, and furthermore asks what happens when we consider “environment” as a “verb, a process” (140, 206). If “time enmeshes, at an even greater level of intimacy” the confusion of human and nonhuman (Latour, 1999, 200), I believe an enmeshment of times – early modern and our own – can make us more intimate with non/human things as we enter uncertain futures with them. An eco-compositionist process does not stop at collapsing boundaries between human and nonhuman, past and present. It argues for these categories’ ontological inseparability—and it slowly explores their alliances. So let us go slower; let us face better futures with “our slow designs.” Each chapter urges early modern ecostudies to compose in this way, in all senses of the word.

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Inter-, Wet: Chapter Abstracts

My first chapter, “Water Ralegh” explores the writer’s fluid relationships with the nonhuman world in the Discoverie of Guiana (1596). For Ralegh, the Guianan waterscape is a capillary meshwork of human and nonhuman things, a place of unlimited horizons and sinuous pathways. Guiana’s rivers and waterfalls permeate Ralegh and his

27 eventual narrative, thereby displaying how water connects the most diverse bodies, transforms them, and renders their relationships desirable. The Discoverie’s meditation on how the subject writes about water – but also how water writes – lays the foundation for the rest of my chapters. He also introduces the questions of environmental ethics I will return to throughout my project: here, the masculinity of ecological conquest

(Guiana’s “maidenhead”) that staunches the flows of certain bodies and desires (the native’s).

“Going Glacial,” my second chapter, explores three early modern Arctic narratives shaped by glaciers: George Best’s A True Discourse (1578), John Davis’s The worldes hydrographical discription (1595), and Thomas Ellis’s A true report (1578). As explorers search for the Northwest Passage, they discover ice’s monstrosity – but also its wonders. Glaciers are networks of human and nonhuman things capable of freezing, thawing, and reassembling – a process I call going glacial. Ice mingles; transports bodies into frosty mixtures of material becomings; and sculpts texts, dreams and desires.

Attending to the ways early modern travelers’ participated in this process – and confronting the inability of others, like the Inuit, to do so – helps us reconceive our own relationships with the retreating icescapes at present and the vanishing ones (we are told) in future.

“When It Rains,” my third chapter, argues that rain is living matter that disintegrates the division between human and nonhuman things. Rain reorganizes (or disorders) ways of relating climate and culture – epistemologically, ontologically – and, in turn, enables new ways of narrating our relationships with the showering world.

William Shakespeare’s Twelfth Night (1601) and François Bernier’s Travels in the Mogul

28 Empire (1670) investigate the possibility of inorganic life, or, a life of the “it” in the phrase “it rains.” Rain actively hurls things and brings about events. François Bernier’s narrative (translated 1671), like his body, is drenched by the Indian monsoons. Feste’s song that “the rain it raineth every day” performs the permeable and penetrable body as well. Both writers illustrate how the human is constantly being precipitated into new connections, even in dry times. Whenever “it” rains, we might understand reality as a cascade of collaborating human and nonhuman things.

My last chapter, “Swamp Things,” inhabits the New England swamps during one of the bloodiest conflicts in North American history: King Philip’s War (1675-6) waged between the English Confederation and the indigenous tribes. William Hubbard’s description of the conflict, A narrative of the troubles with the Indians in New-England

(1677), imagines swamps as sticky networks of human and nonhuman things. Swamps materialize and exacerbate Puritan fears about things that bog the body down or invade it.

Hubbard renders Puritans as pure, enclosed, firm, and human, while Indian bodies are invisible, toxic, fluid, and animalistic. This chapter confronts the violent consequences of an ideology that relies upon utter nonhuman and human divisibility. Swamps demand that we pay attention to how some actors distribute (or manipulate) agency to the detriment of others. I leave us in the Slough of Respond, an ethical as well as spatial place that reveals the human’s co-extensiveness with the swamp things – with everything – of the world.

Sinking into the thick or things is my attempt at a posthumanist ethics, a way to get closer to the matter at hand, to listen to the calls of humans and nonhumans—to be, in a word, responsive. My conclusion, “Exit, Wet,” is an experiment in experimentation, an entrance into the wet laboratories of today: a way to sensitize and compose ourselves

29 with waterscapes discovered and yet to be, a way to collaborate with water that not only makes a world of difference, but new words and worlds as well.

1 See entries for inter, prep. and entertain, v. in the OED. 2 Although I have Michel Serres’s The Natural Contract (1995) in mind, see Latour’s explanation of attachment within the actor-network: “It was impossible before to connect an actor to what made it act, without being accused of ‘dominating’, ‘limiting’, or ‘enslaving’ it. This is no longer the case. The more attachments it has, the more it exists. And the more mediators there are the better” (2005, 217). 3 See entry for ecology, n. in the OED. 4 In full: “So forget the word environment, commonly used in this context. It assumes that we humans are at the center of a system of nature.” 5 See entry for enˈvire, v. in the OED. 6 See, respectively, Shakespeare Studies 39 (Zimmerman and Sullivan 2011); Renaissance Drama 35 (Floyd-Wilson and Sullivan 2006); Interdisciplinary Studies in Literature and Environment 12:2 (Slovic 2005); Bruckner and Brayton (2011); Hallock, Kamps, and Raber (2008). 7 Jeanne Addison Roberts’s study of women as “projections of male fantasies of the Wild female other” (1994, 14), for instance, has led directly to the collection Ecofeminist Approaches to Early Modernity (2011). 8 Laurence Coupe’s definition of “deep ecology” is “a radical form of ecology which challenges anthropocentrism and which insists that human beings must subordinate their interest to those of the planet” (2000, 302). I question the need for subordination, however; exploring assemblages of humans and waterscapes challenges anthropocentrism just the same, and does so with a more posthumanist ethics in mind. 9 This thread runs through all of Latour’s work, most famously in We Have Never Been Modern (1993). 10 See Politics of Nature: How to Bring the Sciences into Democracy (2004). Chapter One, “Why Political Ecology Has to Let Go of Nature,” is especially useful. 11 Also see Chapter 9 in Pandora’s Hope, “The Slight Surprise of Action: Facts, Fetishes, Factishes” (1999, 266-292). 12 Notably, Axel Goodbody and Kate Rigby (2011). 13 See The Ecological Thought (2010). “The ecological thought is the thinking of interconnectedness” (7). What he describes as a “mesh” is similar to my idea of a natural- cultural meshwork of matter-flows. “The ecological view to come isn’t a picture of some bounded object or ‘restrictive economy,’ a closed system. It is a vast, sprawling mesh of interconnection without a definite center or edge” (8). 14 Stand-outs include Jeffrey J. Cohen (2010), Alfred K. Siewers (2009), Jonathan Gil Harris (2009), and Julian Yates (2003). 15 For more on the “material turn” see Serenella Iovino (forthcoming 2012). 16 See the main entry of –ship, suffix in the OED.

30

17 His work is potentializing in its scope: “The call for a more experimental attitude toward reality and for an increased awareness of the potential for self-organization inherent in even the humblest forms of matter-energy” (273). 18 O’Dair (2008) has argued for “Slow Shakespeare.” In her opinion, ecocriticism is growing at an environmentally destructive rate (plane tickets for conferences produce carbon emissions, for example). I am concerned with more than a reduction in technology, however. Composition means slowing down with the physical world and tracing its actants.

31 Water Ralegh

Contemplating the lace-like fabric of streams outspread over the mountains, we are reminded that everything is flowing—going somewhere, animals and so-called lifeless rocks as well as water...

John Muir, My First Summer in the Sierra

Due to “well integrity failure,” the BP Deepwater Horizon oil rig exploded off the coast of Louisiana on April 20, 2010. At least ten different strategies failed before the well was finally sealed on September 19, 2010. Dubbed one of the worst disasters in the history of the petroleum industry, the Deepwater accident killed eleven workers, leaked millions of gallons of oil across thousands of miles in the Gulf of Mexico, and choked numerous species of marine life.1 Along with millions of others worldwide, I watched live feeds of the underwater leak on websites like Youtube. As time went on, the initial shock turned to dismay, then fury. An impatient President Obama called meetings to decide “whose ass to kick” (“Timeline,” 2010). Gruffly ordering BP to “plug the damn hole” at first, he later called the company’s ineptitude “enraging as it is heartbreaking”

(Fahrenthold and Eilperin, 2010). The delayed reaction underscored, uncomfortably, our inability to save a (domestic) marine ecology in crisis. What becomes of the broken- hearted? United under the banner that water is worth saving, ralliers defended the Gulf against the oily greed of capitalism. It is a good battle to fight, even if it raises some difficult questions: Can we be reminded of our material enmeshments with water at times other than catastrophe? Even better: do we desire waterscapes only to save them? What desires might water have for humans—or just have?

32 In the spring of 1595 another maritime disaster occurred, this time on a delta in present-day Venezuela. About midway through the Discoverie of Guiana (1596), Walter

Ralegh finishes retelling the “proceedings past and purposed” of his Spanish predecessors and begins to describe his own journey (69).2 Soon lost at an aquatic intersection, the narrative takes a series of terrifying wrong turns. Ralegh had been disoriented before; even with the aid of native pilots he frequently gets lost in the rivers of Guiana. It was a wet trip overall. “[B]eing al driuen to lie in the raine” and “with the weete clothes of so many men thrust together,” his situation was more “vnsauory” than “any prison in

England” (16, 51). But never had he encountered a liquid landscape as meandering as this one. An Arwacan guide promises to bring Ralegh and his company to the great Orinoco

River—only to forget the route. “[H]e had not seene it in twelue yeeres before” (36). The fear is palpable. Ralegh recounts their close call:

[A]nd if God had not sent vs another helpe, we might haue wandred a whole yeere in that laborinth of riuers, ere we had found any way, either out or in, especiallie after we were past the ebbing and flowing, which was in fower daies: for I know all the earth doth not yeeld the like confluence of streames and branches, the one crossing the other so many times, and all so faire and large, and so like one to another, as no man can tell which to take: and if we went by the Sun or compasse hoping thereby to go directly one way or other, yet that waie we were also caried in a circle amongst multitudes of Ilands, and euery Iland so bordered with high trees, as no man could see any further than the bredth of the river, or length of the breach. (36)

Ralegh here loses his readers in the labyrinthine prose of the Discoverie, situating himself within the turbulent connections between “confluences” and “crossings.” Ways “out” are simultaneously ways “in.” The “ebbing” (withdrawing) water is also “flowing”

(increasing). Enter Ralegh, the human, into the middle of deltaic things in flow. Although these endless intersections beg a direction to take, “no man can tell” which direction to

33 go. Instruments are ineffective, sight is limited, and the traveler endlessly circulates around self-repeating island “multitudes.” This hapless spot of multiplicity would not seem ideal for an assuring English explorer like Ralegh who promises repeatedly to lead his readers and country to the promised gold of El Dorado. It stymies the progress of

English imperialism as well as his golden dreams. It seems there is only fruitless labor in this “laborinth.” Ralegh is Theseus without Ariadne, aimless and anti-heroic, utterly and hopelessly lost. Carried away by his artful language, bested by the environment, he and his voyage fail. It is Ralegh versus guiana (the Indian word for “land of water”). Water wins.

We might read his near-death experience as ecopoetic irony. According to the famous apocryphal story, Ralegh’s career began with water: he entered the English court in the early 1580s after spreading his cloak over a puddle in front of Queen Elizabeth I

(Fuller 1662, 262). Born into a humble household in 1554, his bountiful energy and good looks allowed him to rise quickly in society. As a soldier, he distinguished himself in

France and Ireland; as a budding poet, he introduced Edmund Spenser to the court; as an adventurer, he sponsored the voyages to Roanoke (North Carolina) in the mid-1580s and embarked on one of the first voyages to the Northwest Passage in 1578-9 with his half- brother, Sir Humphrey Gilbert. His ship played a pivotal role against the Spanish Armada in 1588. The epitomic “Renaissance man,” his fortunes fell in the early 1590s when he secretly married Elizabeth Throckmorton, the Queen’s lady-in-waiting. He was thrown into the Tower of London. Thus Ralegh’s voyage to Guiana in the spring of 1595 is typically seen as a “locus of redemption” with an audience of one, a story of a disgraced courtier in search of royal forgiveness (Schmidt 2008, 23). But there were multiple

34 reasons for going: to plot a route to El Dorado and snatch its fabled gold for England; to cast a preemptive strike against Hapsburg Spain and establish an English geopolitical presence; to regain his standing at court; and to satisfy his own curiosity for new lands.

We might now call the voyage a “publicity stunt.” And rightly so—the Discoverie’s title page promises to depict all that was “performed” (1). “Guiana,” according to historian

Benjamin Schmidt, “took on a distinctive meaning for Ralegh. It served as an extension of the court, a stage on which to perform knightly actions and seek redemption from the queen” (25). Ralegh returned in the fall of 1595. Although he did not discover El Dorado, the Discoverie was a stupendous success when it was published in 1596; multiple translations quickly followed.3 By initiating a “wholly new vehicle for travel literature”

(31), his narrative helped him regain favor at home. Ralegh continued to campaign against the Spanish until Elizabeth’s death in 1603. James I imprisoned him in the Tower on treason charges the same year. Released in 1616 to undertake one final voyage to the

“land of water,” Ralegh not only returned empty-handed, but he had engaged the Spanish against James’s express orders. He was beheaded in 1618.

Ralegh is haunted by waters. “Is it unreasonable to wonder whether Ralegh ever existed?” asks C.A. Patrides (1971, 1). If we buy into his larger-than-life legacy, no.

When we resist casting him as a hero of mythic transcendence, we glimpse a man bound to a more material place instead: the “plashy place” of puddles and guiana (Fuller 1662,

262). These are waters of disaster, unfortunately: the Guianan rivers did not deliver gold, and a puddle invited him into a courtly world that eventually ordered his death. Ralegh drafted a “Chart of discouerie” upon his return to England (40; Fig. 1). According to

35

Figure 1: Ralegh’s “Chart of discouerie”

Charles Nicholl, in the middle of Guiana’s liquid labyrinth is a Minotaur-like “creature in the map.” Dead center is the monstrous Lake Manoa, the home of El Dorado:

There is no doubt about it. The lake at the center of Ralegh’s Guiana chart is quite unequivocally something animate. It looks like a monster, a creepy-crawly, some nightmare cucaracha. (1995, 15)

While the creepy amoeba of water plagues Ralegh, I think there is a more pernicious thing crawling around Nicholl’s summation: the persistent theme of failure in the

Discoverie’s scholarship. Critical reception tends to center on the voyage’s catastrophes and offers its meet “helpe” to salvage something of significance. Although he did not find the gold, Ralegh’s historical defenders often recuperate his failure in terms of his

“legacy.” D.B. Quinn (1949), for example, sees Ralegh’s toehold in Guiana as the first

36 step toward the British Empire. Contemporary critics saw the Discoverie as a fabulous story that led readers astray. In the History of England (1754-63), David Hume said it was “full of the grossest and most palpable lies” (1864, 4: 289, 564). Present literary critics schooled in poststructuralism focus on Ralegh’s slippery language as an asset, however. They are less interested in the difference between “lies” and “fiction” and read him as a paradigmatic self-fashioner; an early literary protagonist and a symbol of subjectivity; or a manipulator of linguistic-economic credit.4 Whether in history or criticism, Ralegh’s gaps take center stage. We are reminded of the failure to find El

Dorado, to line up signifier and signified, to sustain a stable identity for the English. The

Discoverie, in a phrase, is a come down: “catastrophe” comes from the Greek kata-

(“down”) and strophe (“turning”), a “sudden turning” or a “turning down” that indicates the denouement of classical Greek tragedy.5 The curtain falls on his wet stage.

I think this critical recuperation of Ralegh’s failures betrays our own desires to exit the wet “laborinth” and straighten out our relationships with an increasingly unpredictable world. Likewise, if water’s amebic agency is always configured against the human intruder, it explains why antagonistic language is so prevalent. We have a lot of

“ass to kick” ahead of us. No wonder Nicholls converts the “creature in the map” into a projection of human psychology. But why must we be haunted by water and the failures it signifies? Why is water automatically a bad creature? And why is failure, for that matter? Failure, according to Bruno Latour, uncovers the modernist tendency of

“blackboxing,”

the way scientific and technical work is made invisible by its own success. When a machine runs efficiently, when a matter of fact is settled, one need focus only on its inputs and outputs and not on its internal complexity.

37 Thus, paradoxically, the more science and technology succeed, the more opaque and obscure they become. (1999, 304)

Watery errors disclose the “invisible” operators that had been hidden from view but have always been working with and upon us. The Deep Horizon and Guianan failures discussed so far are really opportunities for us to reimagine waterscapes as networks of interdependent material things (such as oil, islands, fisherman, marine fauna, and so forth). Obviously, massive ecodisasters like Deep Horizon should be avoided. The

“internal complexity” of our relationships should be laid bare, never concealed, if we are to prevent future ones. They are lessons in failure for us to learn from. The “length of the breach” Ralegh bemoans is precisely the “breach” that divides human from nonhuman

(36). The valiant call to plug the “damn hole” – once more unto the breach! – only maintains the separation between nature and culture because it assumes that the two opposing sides are ontologically separate. Once the crisis is averted, once the gulf is sutured, once efficiency is restored, the black box closes—at least until the next time the

Gulf-machine surprisingly breaks. It probably will.

I believe Ralegh can help us rediscover the human’s coconstituitiveness with watery things in more productive, even desirable, ways. It is reasonable to wonder how we coexist with waterscapes. Andrew Pickering looks to the recalcitrant Mississippi

River to describe the “mangle,” even if he offers a grim pronouncement to “stop fighting the river and let New Orleans go ... The trick is to let go of attachments and to be as fluid as the flow” (2009, 8, 10). It is precisely because of the complications of going with the flow that we need to think through current narratives. Or perhaps we should return to older ones. Simply put: the Discoverie shows us that there is no way “out” of the dis/orienting waterscape (36). But instead of intensifying our anxiety, it implores us to

38 linger in its liquid labyrinths some more. We are “in” and “out” of a deltaic realty at once, caught in medias res (36). I suggest an alternative to the perdurable tropes of catastrophe, failure, and monstrosity that characterize the Discoverie’s critical reception.

So let us turn down the labyrinth of rivers, for there are other actors on the stage. Ralegh performs—and so does water. He is not the principal playwright, just one actor of many in the watery drama that unfolds. Do not drop the curtain of catastrophe so hastily: there is more to be “performed.”

***

Water Ralegh

Ralegh was always drawn to water. He grew up in the West Country of England, in Devon, bordering the English Channel. And we may still walk, as he did, from Hayes

Wood to the sea. Water played such a significant role in Ralegh’s life that the British painter Sir John Everett Millais included the sea cliffs of nearby Exeter in his 1870 painting “The Boyhood of Raleigh” (Fig. 2). Millais’s seascape illustrates some of

Figure 2: Sir John Everett Millais, “The Boyhood of Raleigh” (1870)

39 Ralegh’s signature characteristics: a cloudless horizon represents his fascination with distances that infinitely recede; a toy ship for his restless enterprising; a rapt stare for his love of stories and the imagination. The young Ralegh’s suspended gaze is the most telling, however. Captivated by the sailor’s words, Ralegh inhabits the meeting place between language and landscape. The sea and the imagination, like water and earth, touch at seaside. Stories and the sea flow together by Ralegh’s Devonshire home in a kind of imaginative commerce. What direction will water take him? Guiana was but one. More encounters followed: during his imprisonment in the Tower from 1603-16, Ralegh could not stop thinking about water. He surely thought about Guiana as he described the great rivers of antiquity in the History of the World (1614), maybe pausing now and then to remember the river garden he planted around his house, Sherborne Castle, on the Yeo. He had an intimate relationship with waterscapes both close to home and abroad. A fastidious gardener, he owned approximately fourteen thousand acres of land. Dotting the landscape were red cedars grown from seeds supposedly brought back from Virginia. He cleared and planted Black Marsh, for instance, spending much time and money, according to Sir John Harington, “drawing the river through rocks into his garden”

(Nicholl 1995, 46). Listed among his last possessions is a “description of the river

Orenoque.”6 Moving rocks by hand, drawing water, gardening: Ralegh understands the interpenetrability of nature and culture firsthand. He is pleasured, not just haunted, by waters.

I have presented two portraits of Water Ralegh: the failed aquaman within

Nicholl’s map and the sea-dreamer on Millais’s shore. True to Ralegh’s performative nature, there are multiple selves he may take on. In what follows I wish to avoid reading

40 water as a metaphor for “fluid” identity. One of the most notable studies of Ralegh’s selves is by Stephen Greenblatt, who calls the first Guiana voyage “theatricalism in action,” a “calculated performance” of propaganda that displays Ralegh’s powers of self- fashioning and self-dramatization (1973, 99). Ralegh thought about his body as watery far before it became common knowledge that the human body is, on average, made up of sixty percent water. His nickname is telling. “Walter” became “Water” for mainly a linguistic reason: it was a moniker derived from his broad Devonshire vowels. It was also his queen’s personal term of endearment; the rival courtier Christopher Hatton once sent an empty bucket to Elizabeth to show his displeasure (Schama 1995, 307). Here lies one whose name was writ in water. Ralegh’s wateriness did not stop at the borders of the body, though. He had a blue thumb as well as a green one. He even wrote about the water-body in the History, comparing mankind to a watery network: the “blood which disperth itself by the branches or veins through all the body, may be resembled to these waters which are carried by brooks and rivers overall the earth” (1829, 2:59). Organic and inorganic bodies of water flow together in Ralegh’s sinuous veins. Is this more than mere resemblance? He could certainly reference contemporary theories of climatic influence and embodiment, what Mary Floyd-Wilson calls “geohumoralism” (2003, 23).

The “spleene stones” he finds in Guiana supposedly cure one’s gallstones and, presumably, a humoral imbalance of spleen (or choler) (27). But as we will see, he could also break out on his own, theorizing water’s agency and his environmental embodiment.

His legendary love of tobacco, his experiments in “biotropic drugs,” and his connections to chemist-occultists like Thomas Hariot, John Dee, and the “Wizard Earl” of

Northumberland, reveal a keen interest in the power of material objects (Whitehead 1997,

41 100). Besides the “Renaissance man,” Water Ralegh is the more-than-human, the

“Renaissance posthuman” in flow.

Like a curious scientist, Ralegh sets down some posthuman inquiries for us. How can we move beyond the metaphor of fluidity when discussing the interactions between humans with the waterscape? Can stories be shaped by water? Can the human and the waterscape be thought of not as separate entities that cross only at points in the literary imagination, or at certain places, but as conjoined layers of multiple and material times, places, and agents – an ecological meshwork, or, a living “lace-like fabric” (Muir 1997,

292)? Can a river, for example, challenge the bifurcation of nature and culture, human and nonhuman, and even question how we delimit these terms? Cannot the fluvial also produce new modes of experiencing the world, and not just damn Ralegh and his mission as unmitigated catastrophe? Lastly, and relative to our own shores, why is it primarily during ecodisasters that we are reminded of the “invisible” and “internal complexity” of rivers and other watery things? By reconceiving landscape as a mediary rather than intermediary image, Ralegh’s Discoverie inhabits the interchange, not the “breach,” between nature and culture. The Guianan riverscape (or waterscape, or any –scape) challenges the separation between the human body (flows of blood), the narrative text

(flows of meaning) and the natural world (flows of in/organic matter-energy). Like him, we have much to discover.

***

Rolling on the River: Argument

In this chapter I trace the Discoverie’s living rivers and the powerful acts they perform. Ralegh’s failure is less an instantiation of aquatic mission impossible than it is a

42 reminder that humans and nonhumans cooperatively engage in social production. Also referencing Latour’s idea of “blackboxing”, Julian Yates rethinks failure as an “object lesson” that announces the “silent work of ‘things’” (2003, xix). His reading of

Musidorus’s shipwreck in Sidney’s Arcadia (1590) views the sea as an “alternative logic of existence, an alternative understanding of what it means to be ‘human’” (22). Adding to his discussion, I consider rivers to be elemental things in addition to being conveyors of agentic things that enter our consciousness. Liquid forcefully attracts Ralegh: waterfalls, storms, and the motion of tides saturate everything. Solid gold melts in the native furnace; even the golden man must dive into the lake to wash the powder from his skin. Water reworks boundaries as much as it bounds; it territorializes as it deterritorializes. Ralegh’s riverscape is a place of unlimited horizons that always secretes new paths and new connections, like the garrulous sailor who points indefinitely elsewhere. Its shores constitute a capillary network where ecoregions (land, water) fortuitously meet and mutually transform, jetting various actants in endless directions.

Ultimately, Guiana’s riverscape demonstrates the potential for a “vibrant materialist” ecocriticism (Bennett 2010, viii). Water is more than “something animate” (Nicholl 1995,

15) animated from without. It has its own affective agency within: it is a matter-flow of energy that makes connections with other non/human things.

Although rivers carry Ralegh to alternate modes of being in the environment, his unlimited movement through the riverscape meets certain impediments: cartographic moments of inertia; the orientating gaze of the empirical naturalist; barges immured in mud. But by cohabiting the riverscape’s flows of constant connectivity, new directions always arrive. A map cannot wholly enlimn a liquid landscape; things gaze back; water

43 touches and is touched. Guiana’s flowing riverscape is just that place of “feedback” between human culture and environment. In other words, Ralegh’s desire to dwell in the riverscape is relative to his desire to dissolve in it. As much as he vows to know the riverscape and move through it, he is constantly moved by its matter-flows. His fluidic reality opens up new possibilities even in the narrative’s most authoritative moments. At the same time, we may identify the non/human beings who are unable (or unwilling) to participate in Ralegh’s water-travel: kidnapped natives, Amazons, and Acephali within a femininized landscape (to name a few). While postcolonial and feminist critics have focused on these voices in the narrative, I contribute to the conversation about the

“romance of the new world” through the lenses of ecological imperialism and environmental justice.7 The Discoverie’s unanswered, and unsettling, ethical dilemmas ask us to consider how the lives of humans and nonhumans may be improved together.

In what (over)flows below, I have at least three destinations in store for us: (1) the

Guianan riverscape is a fluid network of human and nonhuman actants whose material becomings can be both catastrophic and desirable. The Discoverie is a meditation on how humans are always-already flowing with the nonhuman waterscape. (2) Ralegh’s narrative demonstrates not just how Walter becomes “Water,” but also how rivers and imagination influence (“flow into”) one another. The riverscape infuses Ralegh’s text, thereby configuring his language as liquid and mobile. “Liquid narrativity” defines

Ralegh’s rhetorical strategy of deferral, ambiguity, and slippery promises, eventually approaching a kind of authorial alchemy. What is more, Ralegh’s cartographic interests theorize the way water writes, how rivers shape (-scape) textual and fleshy bodies. The

Discoverie is a compositionist credo, an aquatic assemblage in itself. Thus his narrative

44 demonstrates how the subject writes about water and how water writes the subject, confusing these subject-object categories and disorienting our anthropocentric perspectives. (3) By cohabiting the riverscape, Ralegh compels us to think on the inequalities of habitation. Yet his imperial motives may lead us to a posthumanist ethics that resists precolonial or prelapsarian nostalgia. My hope is that by exploring the inner complexities of the early modern riverscape, we may better understand (and even improve) our fluvial relationships at present.

***

A Perfect Search: Navigating the Riverscape

Let us begin at sea, since Ralegh himself begins there: “On Thursday the 6 of

Februarie in the yeare 1595, we departed England, and the Sunday following had sight of the North cape of Spayne, the winde for the most part continuing prosperous” (11). The search for El Dorado is a search for water routes. Approaching Trinidad, Ralegh notes,

“my selfe coasted it in my barge close abord the shore and landed in euery Coue, the better to know the iland” (11). Once closer, he begins his geographical explorations outside Port of Spain: “I left the shippes and kept by the shore, the better to come to speech with some of the inhabitants, and also to vnderstand the riuers, watring places and portes of the iland which (as it is rudely done) my purpose is to send your lordship after a few daies” (11). In the opening lines of the narrative, Ralegh desires to gain ground in a watery landscape. He is a naturalist and a geographer in these moments, noting the valuable pitch for his ships as well as the delicious oysters from mangrove trees.

Referencing Pliny and Andre de Thevet, he describes “plante[s] verye straunge” and other natural things. These empirical moments serve to ground him in the center of the

45 environment. Ralegh’s ecological research is the study of ecology from his subjective point of view; he is a knowing, and well-read, narrator.8

Ralegh’s re-orienting strategies quickly slip away from him, however. He reminds his readers too often that his company is threatened by hostile nature: “When three daies more were ouergone, our companies began to despaire, the weather being extreame hot, the riuer bordered with verie high trees that kept away the aire, and the currant against vs euery daie stronger than other” (40). They are imperiled even exiting the riverscape downstream: “All the night it was stormie and darke, and full of thunder and great showers, so as we were driuen to keepe close by the bankes in our small boats, being all heartely afraid both of the billowe, and terrible Current of the riuer” (67-8). Not only do they not complete their mission, they almost do not return home at all:

To speake of what past homeward were tedious…we will leaue all those to the generall mappe: And to be short, when we were arriued at the sea side then grew our greatest doubt, and the bitterest of all our iourney forepassed, for I protest before God, that wee were in a most desperate estate. (68-9)

Even the promise of orientation, the “Chart” (Fig. 1), falls short in these moments of terrifying tedium. The chart must be drawn up in a drier and more secure location. The riverscape nearly drowns Ralegh and his men: this is nature blue in tooth and claw.

Stuck in an antagonistic relationship with water, Ralegh must forever fight his way to El Dorado. Expectedly, he recounts numerous episodes in which he finds himself stranded on the journey upriver. Trying to set off down the Capuri, for example, is impossible: “but they [his captains] laboured in vain, for neither could they turne it vp altogither so farre to the east, neither did the flood continue so long, but the water fell ere they coulde haue passed the sands, as we after founde by a second experience” (35).

46 Stuck in the sands, Ralegh fears the worst. Fashioning even smaller boats from larger ones, he decides to measure the depths:

I sent Io. Douglas againe in my long barge, as well to releeue him as also to make a perfect search in the bottom of that baie: For it hath beene held for infallible that whatsoeuer ship or bote shall fall therein, can neuer desemboque againe, by reason of the violent currant which setteth into the said bay, as also for that the brize and easterlie wind bloweth directlie into the same. (35)

Even his tedious work of charting water is of no use at this moment. The company simply wants to get going. Douglas eventually finds several “goodly entrances” for the diminutive fleet (35), but the watery surroundings have irrevocably unmoored his command. No ship can ever disembark from the abysmal bay, and this is an “infallibility” that even Ralegh will not question. Seeking knowledge at the banks of the Capuri is different from his earlier attempts to control his environment; here Ralegh must obey the water and the shifting sands.

Ralegh fittingly discovers that the soluble riverscape is insoluble in another sense of the word – impossible to solve. Water resists objectification by human gaze and control. Like trying to hold water in your hand, its knowledge is harder to grasp the more you squeeze; water takes Ralegh places against his will or it impedes his progress somewhere else. Sounding an endlessly shifting riverscape reconfigures knowledge as similarly shifty: there can never be a “perfect search” so long as water constantly moves and shapes the environment. Just as river floors accumulate and shed material layers, watery knowledge, once discovered, is already on the move. Ralegh’s attempt to plumb the depths exposes a penetrable but nonetheless illimitable riverscape. His soundings are without stable bottom or end. In other words, Guiana is a place that may be penetrated but never completely understood. The Discoverie’s emphasis therefore shifts from the

47 knowledgeable explorer (Ralegh) to the unknowable substance (water). Rivers possess their own mysterious dynamism that Ralegh cannot master—only probe, cohabit, and feel.

***

Riverscapes of Desire: Becoming Watery

“[T]he currant against vs” (40). The “terrible Current” (67-8). The “violent currant” (35). Ralegh understands that water possesses its own physical force. He too often notes the impossibly knowable and navigable flows of the Guianan riverscape to go unnoticed. The Discoverie’s interest in water is more like an obsession with water’s liveliness. Ralegh’s experimental riverscape is what Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari call the Body without Organs, a form of nonorganic life operating by self-organizing principles, “that glacial reality where the alluvions, sedimentations, coagulations, foldings, and recoilings that compose an organism – and also a signification and a subject

– occur” (1997, 158-9). Water as BwO draws Ralegh; he must work with water and its dynamic permutations, not just against it. Thus Ralegh enters a pre-positional relationship with water that Michel Serres defines as “those relations that precede any position”

(1995b, 105). Ralegh’s position – and subjectivity – obtains motility as a result. In its affective fluidity, water exemplifies the “turbulent fluids or fluctuating networks” intrinsic to actor-network modes of ecocriticism (26). Entered and entranced, he might battle upstream at times, but he also goes with the matter-flows of water to constantly create new assemblages with the riverscape, those “goodlie branches” they pass through

“[e]uerie daie” (40).

48 Despite the danger involved, these ever-burgeoning routes through Guiana may actually be desired. Ralegh’s desire for interminable connections with the riverscape and for an endpoint at El Dorado seems contradictory, however. In a poem written before

1602, “A Poesie to Prove Affection Is Not Love”, he equates the goal of desire with the death of desire:

Desire himselfe runnes out of breath, And getting, doth but gaine his death: Desire, nor reason hath, nor rest, And blinde doth sildome chuse the best, Desire attain’d is not desire, But as the sinders of the fire. (1929, 41-2)

According to Ralegh, desire remains desire as long as it never attains its object. It seems, then, that to reach El Dorado would spell “death” – at least the death of the desire for the fluvial that propels his entire narrative. But Ralegh’s desire in the Discoverie is constituted, and given life, by the riverscape’s lively matter-flows. Desire is immanent in the riverscape; desire is movement. As Deleuze and Guattari write, “desire no longer lacks anything but fills itself and constructs its own field of immanence” (1997, 156). The flow of water moves Ralegh into a state of constant connectivity with the environment.

His desire likewise flows: “Everything is allowed: all that counts is for pleasure to be the flow of desire itself, Immanence, instead of…internal lack, higher transcendence, and apparent exteriority” (156-7). Whether or not the golden city actually exists, or whether or not he reaches it, is therefore beside the point; as long as the riverscape opens up new possibilities and new desires in its capillaries Ralegh will toil terribly, pleasurably. He keeps moving, desiring, becoming – but never at a lack for material connections. He keeps on “getting” without fulfillment; he does not stop “getting” wet.

49 To deliquesce is to delight. If Walter Ralegh is the weary English discoverer lost in water, desiring some kind of orientation through knowledge, Water Ralegh is obsessed with water and abilities to dissolve the solid self. The riverscape’s aleatory twists and turns are fonts of possibility. Water Ralegh illuminates the material connections to be had between humans and living water once attention shifts from the individual (the anthropocentric narrator) onto aquatic assemblages of actants. I now turn to several of the

Discoverie’s key examples of becoming-water (or Water). Appropriately, Ralegh is most watery when drinking. His captains “garoused” of native wine “till they were reasonable pleasant” (46). Ralegh himself often resists drinking with the natives – they are notorious drunkards, supposedly – but late in the narrative he eventually relents. In the town of

Winecapora he meets the chief who promises to lead him up the mountain Wacarima:

But when wee came in first to the house of the said Timitwara, beeing vppon one of their feast daies, we founde them all as drunke as beggers, and the pottes walking from one to another without rest: we that were weary, and hotte with marching, were glad of the plenty, though a small quantitie satisfied vs, their drinke beeing very strong and heady, and so rested our selues awhile. (66)

Ralegh’s repast is notable for his curious grammatical phrase “pottes walking.”

Technically meaning the passing of a pot from one guest to another, Ralegh hints at something agentic about the objects that participate in the drinking experience.9 Ingestion is one of the most apparent forms of non/human proximation. Jane Bennett argues that eating demonstrates “the formation of an assemblage of human and nonhuman elements, all of which bear some agentic capacity” (49). Drinking the wine of Winecapora does similar work: pot, water, alcohol, and Ralegh’s body all aquatically assemble in the drinking house. Alcohol is the key active ingredient in water that affects Ralegh, most likely, but “walking” pots also play a role. If a jealous courtier had previously likened

50 Ralegh to an empty bucket, here he is one here: Water Ralegh, an ever walking pot continually filled by the walking waters of Guiana that always enter and affect his permeable body. Ralegh’s “heady” anecdote reveals how aquatic assemblages in the riverscape are never “rested” but are always at work.

If ritualized drinking blurs the separation between a walking pot and Ralegh – thus challenging the boundaries of the human – another thirsty episode demonstrates the potential and possibility of flowing with water. For most of the narrative’s first half,

Ralegh reflects on his Spanish predecessor – and now captive – Antonio de Berrío, noting the numerous mistakes his prisoner made in his quest for El Dorado. One particularly grievous error occurred at the red marsh of Amapaia:

[B]y reason of the red water which issueth out in small branches thorow the fenny and boggie ground, there breed diuers poysonfull wormes and serpents, and the Spaniards not suspecting, or in anie sort foreknowing the danger were infected with a grievous kind of flux by drinking thereof, and even the very horses poisoned therewith. (28)

Berrio’s company is decimated and Ralegh uses the Spaniard’s drinking problem to shore up his advantage as a narrator. Unlike Ralegh, Berreo’s strategy to map and master the riverscape is “vnlearned”:

[H]e knew not the names of any of these [rivers], but Caroli only, neither from what nations they descended, neither to what Prouinces they led, for he had no meanes to discourse with the inhabitants at any time: neither was he curious in these things, being vtterlie vnlearned, and not knowing the east from the west. But of al these I got som knowledge, and of manie more, partly by mine own trauel, and the rest by conference. (29)

Dependant upon his Indian interpreters – the old, the traveled, and the powerful chieftains of provinces and towns – Ralegh assures his readers that he can make these potent waters potable:

51 I demanded of those in Guiana that had trauelled Amapaia how they liued with that tawnie or red water when they trauelled thither, and they told me that after the Sun was neere the middle of the skie, they vsed to fill their pots and pitchers with that water, but either before that time, or towards the setting of the Sun it was dangerous to drinke of, and in the night strong poison. I learned also of diuers other riuers of that nature among them which were also (while the Sun was in the Meridian) verie safe to drink, and in the morning, euening, and night, woonderfull dangerous and infectiue. (28)

The red waters, however, do more than implicitly assert Ralegh’s dominance over his

Spanish rival and the antagonistic environment. Amapaia is a powerful example of living water. As a capillary site harboring bogs and mud – elemental cojoinings of earth and water – the red marsh is the most likely part of the riverscape to bear aquatic assemblages. The pharmakon-like fen is a place of non/human “conference”: water, serpents, sickening bacteria, red silt, and parched explorers are brought together. As an ingestible actant, fluctuating water puts the human in flux, either rejuvenating or debilitating its drinkers. Drinking the red water moves the walking pot of Water Ralegh once more, but this time the red water possesses even more motility. Ralegh significantly notes that only “while the Sun was in the Meridian” could he drink the water. Thus the exact middle of the day is the safest time to drink. Likewise, Ralegh is perpetually “in the

Meridian” whenever he imbibes the red water. To be “in the Meridian” is to be constantly plateauing in the middle, to be engaged in endless becomings. Even if he appears to be going either up- or downriver, the current never moves unidirectionally. By drinking in the middle, Ralegh intimates how aquatic assemblages – of any color – always have the potential to accrue, reflow, and retouch. All water and its actants are perpetually “in the Meridian” of this synergetic activity, caught-up in the “flux” of becoming.

52 Acting somewhat differently from Timitwara’s wine, however, the red marsh surfaces multiple forms of desire. The light of the sun is a vibrant form of inorganic life, transforming the waters from “dangerous” to “safe.” The red water itself is in “flux.”

Importantly, the connection between water and sun also suggests that water might have desires for the sun and other non/human actants. While Ralegh is, once again, part of an ecological process of “flux” regardless of his incomplete understanding and indefinite destination, his anthropocentric decentering in the marsh insinuates a mutual desire to touch and be touched by the riverscape that is not dependant upon his exclusive powers of observation. Henceforth Ralegh’s narrative opens up to nonhuman desires and nonhuman perspectives as well. Water and anything else it carries in its “lace-like fabric” of matter-flows start to answer back.

The episode at Amapaia importantly precedes Ralegh’s first descriptive portraits of the Guianan riverscape. His entanglement with the “fenny and boggie ground” leads him to see the riverscape as a meshwork of coconstitutive actants. Consequently, he begins to draw pictures for his readers that foreground both hostile and desirable material connections. Cohabiting the liquid landscape puts Ralegh in full flow; water leads him to new vistas and new worlds even if he must row against its routes. Although Ralegh and his men seldom lack sustenance in their abundant surroundings, Ralegh tells of another near-disastrous moment in which he and his men almost starve on the Amana River.10

Their problem is compounded by the fact that their unreliable pilot promises their destination is “but a little farther” (41). Finally arriving at the Arwacan town shortly after midnight, and rejuvenated by the victuals of the town, including “Indian drinke” (41),

Ralegh continues down the unknown river. Now the riverscape appears beautiful:

53 On both sides of this riuer, we passed the most beautifull countrie that euer mine eies beheld: and whereas all that we had seen before was nothing but woods, prickles, buses, and thornes, heere we beheld plaines of twenty miles in length, the grasse short and greene, and in diuers parts groues of trees by themselves, as if they had been by all the art and labour in the world so made of purpose: and stil as we rowed, the Deere came downe feeding by the waters side, as if they had beene vsed to a keepers call. (42)

Ralegh is shocked at the shift from aquatic wilderness to pastoral plenty. Anthropologist

Neil Whitehead helps explain Ralegh’s confusion over the “made”: “Landscape features in Amazonia are often far from ‘natural’, being a result of the conscious ecological management of flora and fauna by the indigenous population over many centuries.”

According to him, the other unknown presence in the landscape – the “keepers call” – could come from “a shamanic keeper or ‘master-of-animals’” (163n70).

Ralegh’s astonishment reveals more than a missed chance at native appreciation.

While his full stomach undoubtedly contributes to his sudden shift in perception, the riverscape’s menagerie of natural things has a transformative affect: “whereas…[he] had seen before” a foreboding shoreline, the riverscape is shockingly inviting. It extends itself to him through his labor as he works upstream. More and more of its beauty appears “as

[they] row.” Although Ralegh appears to have found a sculpted garden in the middle of the wilderness, the difference between nonhuman and human forces is unclear. He is not so much startled by the fact that nature could produce something so artistic – or the opposite, that humans could produce something so natural – but that the two realms are indistinguishable. “Made of purpose” is a purposeless statement if both art (labor) and nature (riverscape) are already one and the same. Thus this seemingly cultivated shoreline blurs the lines between nature and culture rather than enforces them. In turn,

Ralegh’s description shows him to be more open to water’s impressions. He avoids

54 outright comparison to an ideal (Edenic) landscape, thereby avoiding a prelapsarian nostalgia that would render the riverscape (and the natives’ ecological consciousness) static and timeless.

Ralegh rarely makes any nostalgic remarks about home, either. His few allusions to England cursory at best: an island “twise as big as the Isle of Wight”, or a distance equal to that between Gravelyn and Dover (47, 68). The most specific reference precedes his experience at Winicaparo falls. He seems more objective than awe-struck:

Beyond [Tuteritona] lyeth another towne towardes the south, in the valley of Amariocapana, which beareth the name of the saide valley, whose plaines stretch themselues some 60 miles in length, east and west, as fayre grounde, and as beawtifull fieldes, as any man hath euer seen, with diuers copses scattered heere and there by the riuers side, and all as full of deare, as any forrest or parke in England, and in euery lake and riuer the like abundance of fish and fowle, of which Irraparragota is Lord. (64)

The “beawtifull” affect here is not as intense as we witnessed in the previous passage about the “beautifull countrie” (42). The “beawtifull fieldes” are there, to be sure, but it appears that simile diminishes the riverscape’s power to captivate. The comparison to

“any forrest or parke in England” deflates his desire. Ralegh is more enamored by the surprising collaborations between nature and culture, not an imitation of his own cultural geography. Nevertheless, in both instances the uncanny nearness of Guiana to England does not shore up their differences. The idea of home is blurred, and not just because he is in someone else’s (like Irraparragota). The riverscape reconfigures the home as something constantly in production: full of “art and labour” done by diverse things.

Similitude would imply that each side of the comparison is stable: that home and foreign,

England and Guiana are discrete terms. Instead, the “park” is really the Common (or,

55 oikos) that human and nonhuman things share. Here place can be bounded and yet remain open to redefinition, at least temporarily.

Ralegh’s first foray into the “beautifull countrie” invokes a desire to dwell. The narrative’s flow appropriately slows down after this moment. He begins to write simply about the beauty around him, beauty that importantly penetrates and moves him even in his most static moments. Thus dwelling for Ralegh is not to idealize irrecoverable, glad- diluvial movements gone by. His desire appears paradoxical: a wish to anchor and dissolve at once in the matter-energy that is water. But desiring to dwell in the riverscape is to exist always in water’s confluence of fluxes. As such, Ralegh’s desire to be moved actually explains his anchoring points in the riverscape. Tellingly, shortly after his bankside vista he moors precisely at a point of turbulence: “the parting of three goodlie riuers” (46). A random decision, perhaps, but mooring at a site of lively matter-flows and intersections that constantly move is exactly what the possibilities of flowing with water afford. The liquid “laborinth” of Guiana therefore transforms – just like the prickly vegetation above – from portentous catastrophe to sheer possibility of transformation.

To dwell, then, is to dwell with speed. Water has speed in the obvious sense of flowing downriver, but also in the nomadic sense Deleuze and Guattari define:

“movement is extensive; speed is intensive” (1997, 381). Movement characterizes Ralegh as “one” stratified and territorialized organism, “speed, on the contrary, constitutes the absolute character of a body whose irreducible parts (atoms) occupy or fill a smooth space” (381). Water as matter-movement importantly deterritorializes Ralegh into smooth spaces of becoming even when he seems to be at his most immobile. The riverscape, and he, will not stay still. Like the shoreline’s hybridity of earth-water, Water

56 and his men slip through the riverscape with speed, simultaneously liquefying and solidifying along with its various actants. The labyrinthine places of ecological multiplicity – streams, branches, “multitudes of Ilands” – are desirable places to cohabit because of their intensive flows. So are his more solid spots of anchoring. He lands upon

a faire sand, where we found thousands of Tortugas egges, which are very wholsome meat, and greatly restoring, so as our men were now well filled and highlie contented both with the fare, and neerenes of the land of Guiana which appeered in sight. (46)

Ralegh feasts on the sight of the riverscape as much as the actual items in it. “Sight” would seem to flow from the active subject to the passive riverscape, but the riverscape also acts back: the “neerenes of the land” energizes the viewer. Seeing Guiana “well filled” and “highly contented” Ralegh as much as the “fare” of eggs. Ralegh beholds

Guiana and, in doing so, feels “greatly “restor[ed].” He is beheld by the “land” and beholden to it. “Sight” here is shared. If “the landscape sees,” as Deleuze and Guattari put it, “[t]he true eye of the earth is water” (1994, 169; Bachelard 1999).

“Everything is vision, becoming” (1994, 169). The mobile riverscape initiates a sea change in Ralegh. Things look different after acting upon him. Egged on by his replenishment of “meat” and “neerenes,” he waits for Putyma, “a follower of Topiawari, chiefe Lord of Arromaia” (48). Although he never arrives, Ralegh’s reaction is vastly different from his pitiful note of famine before:

[S]o as we ankored againe that night neere the banks of another Iland, of bignes much like the other, which they call Putapayma, on the maine lande, ouer against which Iland was a very high mountaine called Oecope: we coueted to ankor rather by these Ilands in the riuer, than by the maine, because of the Tortugas egges, which our people found on them in great abundance, and also because the ground serued better for vs to cast our nets for fish, the maine banks being for the most part stonie and high, and the rocks of a blew metalline color, like vnto the best steele ore, which I

57 assuredly take it to be: of the same blew stone are also diuers great mountaines, which border this riuer in many places. (48)

Like the red waters of Amapaia, consuming the riverscape near Putapayma reveals the agentic process of ingestion: eggs and fish enter Ralegh and create a more-than-human self. Yet the almost indulgent nature with which he anchors and fishes describes a more joyous cohabitation with the endlessly liquid environment than before. The riverscape’s resplendent shoreline of “blue stone” attracts Ralegh and his men. By “couet[ing] to ankor” at these places, he shows how desirable attachments between humans and nonhumans can be both pursued and made. He literally anchors himself in the steely rock that constitutes the shoreline and the “diuers great mountaines, which border” that same river. The “blew metalline” of stone and the blueness of water entwine. Similarly, Ralegh has been in the elemental mixture all along—the Guianan riverscape is a “diuers” place where ore, water, eggs, and human enmesh.

Intriguingly, Ralegh finds watery bodies like himself at these spots of confluence.

Though he may be said to put a face on nature, it is not to grant the supposedly lifeless matter of the riverscape an exclusively human agency. Rather, as he faces the landscape he also sees his coconstitutive relationship reflected back at him as a material image.

When he dwells in the particularly streamy town of Toparimaca, for example, he encounters his watery side face to face: “This seate of this towne…was very pleasant, standing on a little hill, in an excellent prospect, with goodly gardens a mile compasse round about it, and two very faire and large ponds of excellent fish adioyning” (47). The town exists in a similar site of “coueted” nature-culture confluence – ponds, gardens, and fish – that he visits shortly thereafter near Putapayma. It is the people of the town, though, who are the most notable: “In that place I sawe very aged people, that we might

58 perceiue all their sinewes and veines without any flesh, and but euen as a case couered onely with skin” (47). Like Ralegh’s later reference in the History, human and nonhuman veins of water are made real in Toparimaca. These natives beyond conceivable age might represent a temporal disjunction Ralegh laments (an antediluvian Eden), or personify the ageless rivers, or perhaps both.11 More than anthropomorphic marvels, however, the water people embody the hybridity of human veins and nonhuman streams that compose

Water Ralegh as well. His surroundings reflect back at him his desire to touch water, and yet the strangely human face of the riverscape reveals how the human and nonhuman are always-already in assemblage. Thus Ralegh’s “excellent prospect” (or view) of the town and its inhabitants materializes the connections between skin and water. Such a

“prospect” makes transparent the vibrant reality of all things in the riverscape that live, flow, and touch.

***

They Drew Me On: Watery Prospects

Significantly, Ralegh’s use of “prospect” means the common definition of “a view” – such as the view of Toparimaca – but it also attests to the agency of living water.

Etymologically combining both the root pro- (“forward”) and specere (“to look”), there were two basic meanings of the prospect available to early modern writers: (1) a phenomenological concept of facing forward, involving the physical senses; and (2) a temporal term of futurity and anticipation.12 As a noun, the “prospect” simply could be that which faces forward, the relative senses of such, or the view itself. Crucially, by the mid-sixteenth century “prospect” also denoted an action: to face forward, to situate. The act of prospecting thus developed coextensively with the literal exploration of

59 geographical spaces – spaces full, no less, of rich metallic prospects like Guiana. In addition to the sensory and active idea of prospecting, the idea of “looking forward” is a spatial activity (to look into the distance) as well as a temporal one (to look into a distant future). Thus both senses of “prospect” are highly visual. A “prospect” is a look and to

“prospect” is to look forward across space and time—sometimes all at once.

Ralegh’s “excellent prospect” at Toparimaca therefore alludes to the power of water to “prospect” him in new directions: an interaction he anticipates, or “looks forward to” in the indefinite future. What is more, by utilizing the active meaning of the word “prospect,” Ralegh finally unleashes the liveliness of water that runs across all of the senses. In addition to the riverscape’s profound visual affect, it is felt as water on skin and currents under barges; heard in calamitous rainstorms and waterfalls; tasted in heady wine and meridian springs; and even smelled in fresh breezes. Early in the narrative

Ralegh admits that writing about his surroundings is a tedious endeavor, that true pleasure resides in first-hand experience: “[Berreo] passed by the mouths of many great riuers, which fell into Orenoque both from the north and south, which I forbeare to name for tediousness, and bicause they are more pleasing in describing than reading” (29).13

Yet we have seen how the pleasure of becoming washes away Ralegh’s logic the longer he dwells in the riverscape’s flows. These sights are indeed pleasurable to describe and to read, but there is more pleasure in feeling the multisensory waters above all. Water saturates everything. Ralegh cannot stop moving and being moved – in all senses of the word – by fluvial things. “[W]e passed the most beautifull countrie that euer mine eies beheld” and “stil...we rowed” (42). Prospected by native guides and the riverscape itself,

60 the near-end of his journey contains Guiana’s most sensorial places that take the

Discoverie to new horizons.

Notably, water’s most moving moments are at its most forceful locations: waterfalls. These sonorous places are sites of infinite affect where the entire body becomes like a tingling palate of sensation. Always prevented from his goal, shortly after leaving Toparimaca Ralegh reaches a stream so powerful that he is forced to journey by land. One half of his party goes on a political reconnaissance mission to enlist guides and scout the nearby towns. Ralegh meanwhile departs on a sightseeing tour. Distracted from his golden mission, he purposely marches overland to view the Caroli’s waterfalls and the adjoining plains of Canuri. The view of the riverscape is breathtaking:

When we ronne to the tops of the first hils of the plaines adioyning to the riuer, we behelde that wonderfull breach of waters, which ranne downe Caroli: and might from that mountaine see the riuer how it ran in three parts, aboue twentie miles of, and there appeared some ten or twelue ouerfals in sight, euery one as high ouer the other as a Church tower, which fell with that fury, that the rebound of the waters made it seeme, as if it had beene all couered ouer with a great shower of rayne: and in some places we tooke it at the first for a smoke that had risen ouer some great towne. (54)

The sight must have been stupendous: not just one “overfall” but “ten or twelve” in all their “fury” crash together. Water is at its most moving here, and there is no doubt that

Ralegh found the furious confluence of water affective: the “breach” is the telltale sign of water’s torrential force bursting over the brink. Water is clearly the point of fixation; his reference to church towers is devoid of religious significance or metaphysical rumination.

Even here Ralegh distances himself from environmental modes of being based on lack.

The church tower is devoid of practically all “craving to find in nature a consolation for our mortality” (Schama 1995, 15). Even the presumed town is minimized: the water

61 seems to be flowing and falling into the town below, a magnificent image of how water’s energetic flows bridge and enliven nature-cultures.

The Caroli’s “wonderfull” water enacts a somatic effect analogous to Stephen

Greenblatt’s description of wonder: “The expression of wonder stands for all that cannot be understood, that can scarcely be believed. It calls attention to the problem of credibility and at the same time insists upon the undeniability, the exigency of the experience” (1991, 20). Wonder, indeed, makes it difficult for Ralegh to connect heart and mind. Yet if “the experience of wonder continually reminds us that our grasp of the word is incomplete,” as Greenblatt continues (24), how Ralegh understands

“incompletion” is crucial. For Ralegh, the wonders of Caroli do not so much frustrate his attempts at completion – immobilizing his powers of knowledge, or bodily “oneness” – but show his exigent desire for constant becomings with his surroundings. Gaps mark spaces to inhabit, not sites to deplore out of lack. Since a “breach of waters” is also a literal breach, or opening, Ralegh shows his watery self to be an open place of connectivity with water that reciprocally opens him to new possibilities. This “breach” is similar to the “breach” Ralegh experienced earlier in the labyrinth (which we too quickly define as a divide). Like the rushing water at the top of the falls, he is always on the brink of new assemblages. Ralegh enters, like water, new worlds below. The “rebound of waters” catches his attention above all because to rebound is to interact (bounce off of) something else. Rebounding water mirrors his passionate desire for aquatic connections, for water that touches and is touched. Water constantly swerves, hits, and moves again at

Caroli, the exact kind of vibrant ecological activity that defines the Guianan riverscape in general.14

62 The water of the next, and last, waterfall Ralegh sees at Winicapora is even more magnificent. Traveling down the Cararoopana and observing “many goodly Ilandes”

(65), Ralegh once again wanders through the riverscape, this time distracted by rumors of a strange crystal mountain:

[T]o which in trueth for the length of the way, and the euill season of the yeare, I was not able to march, nor abide any longer vpon the iourney: we saw it a farre off and it appeared like a white Church towre of an exceeding height: There falleth ouer it a mightie riuer which toucheth no parte of the side of the mountaine, but rusheth ouer the toppe of it, and falleth to the grounde with a terrible noyse and clamor, as if 1000 great belles were knockt against another. I thinke there is not in the worlde so straunge an ouerfall, nor so wonderfull to beholde. (66)

Here Ralegh uses the familiar tropes of church tower, wonderment, and strangeness he employed at Caroli. Yet his emphasis on sound in his description stands out. Although

“not able to march” directly to the water, Ralegh can still feel water via its “terrible noise and clamor” akin to the sound of “1000 great bells.” His previous river soundings demonstrated water’s illimitable depths: an imperious gaze could not objectify the riverscape. At Winicapora Ralegh discovers how water sounds him. Water touches him as if tasted or dripped onto his skin – its sound waves penetrate his ears and collide with his body. Watery noise acts as a parasitic “third” that instigates “relations with relations” and disrupts the human’s one-way relations to things (Serres 2007, 38). In its noisy interference, then, the sound of falling water opens those new embodied material relations, or desires, with the riverscape. Ralegh can enter watery assemblages and not even get wet. And the water comes to him. The riverscape is infinitely “wonderfull to beholde” through any sense, medium, or vehicle. Even if water cannot be reached by physical proximation, it remains affective and agentic no matter how “farre off.”

63 Ralegh’s aqueous encounters with the Caroli and Winecapora waterfalls are more attuned to desire than ever before. His reaction to the Caroli falls, in particular, notes his sudden change:

For mine owne part I was well perswaded from thence to have returned, being a very ill footeman, but the rest were all so desirous to go neere the said straunge thunder of waters, as they drew mee on by little and little, till we came into the next valley, where we might better discern the same. (54)

Ralegh believes he is unfit to continue – he cannot be both an “ill footeman” and a water- man at once – and it appears that he has seen enough. His company must force their reluctant leader to continue. But what exactly prospects Ralegh to the next valley? What

“drew” him on “little and little”? Ralegh’s indefinite “they” could mean either the clamor of the falls, his men, or both. The “straunge thunder of waters” might just as well draw him due to his ambiguous phrasing. The thunderous waters of Winecapora do just that.

Across impassable distances and impossible hardships, Ralegh is inextricably drawn to and by the wonders of water, just like his younger self seated on Millais’s seascape.

Waters that “drew” Ralegh “on” demonstrate living water in action. Urged ever onward by the vibrancy of waterfalls, the view that appears to Ralegh around the Caroli’s bend is an ecopoetical masterpiece:

I neuer saw a more beawtifull country, nor more liuely prospectes, hils so raised heere and there ouer the vallies, the riuer winding into diuerse braunches, the plaines adioyning without bush or stubble, all faire greene grasse, the ground of hard sand easy to march on, eyther for horse or foote, the deare crossing in euery path, the birds towardes the euening singing on euery tree with a thousand several tunes, cranes and herons of white, crimson, and carnation pearching on the riuers side, the ayre fresh with a gentle easterlie wind, and euery stone that we stooped to take vp, promised eyther golde or siluer by his complexion. (54-5)

64 Water prospects Ralegh toward the best “prospectes” he has seen so far, a “lively” country that trumps his earlier shoreline experience with the deer led by a “keepers call.”

Added to water’s pulsating noise is now other nonhuman vibrations like birdsongs of

“thousand several tunes.” He even smells the “fresh” air mingled with the waterfall’s mist. This “lively” riverside at Caroli is a remarkable example of the living riverscape: all things connect and adjoin in “diverse branches” with the possibility to meet and transform like the deer that intersect “every path.” Notably, if Ralegh describes Arcadia on the Caroli he does not place himself at its center. The plains of Caroli encompass the desirable ecological connections available everywhere in the narrative, connections that flowing nonhuman actants make as well as humans: the “gentle” wind touches Ralegh in its course heading in the rough direction (east to west) upriver to El Dorado; stones

“promise” the way to the golden city if only touched. It is here that Water Ralegh best articulates Guina’s riverscapes of desire: networks of co-implicated things that crash, connect, and create. And we have not ceased to coexist with them. The ways are

“diuerse” and the results unpredictable. Guianan waters are without rest. The Discoverie beckons us, “little and little,” to acknowledge the historical failures that haunt riverscapes. It also asks us to rediscover the desires – even those of nonhuman things – that prolong them, that provide hope, and that may help us imagine future prospects in which non/humans mutually benefit. And still we row.

***

Liquid Narrativity: Watery Writing

Underscoring the ecomaterial connections with the riverscape seems at odds with

Ralegh’s overall mission to acquire El Dorado’s gold. We are back on solid ground. Even

65 if his watery becomings bespeak an immanent relationship with the riverscape, he must ultimately address the Discoverie’s problem of verifiability. The search for gold runs parallel to his liquid excursions: a refiner’s basket suddenly appears after the liquid labyrinth; the “precious stones” of the Caroli and the “Diamondes” of the Winicapora falls catch his eye. Concerning the latter, for instance,

Berreo tolde mee that it hath Diamondes and other precious stones on it, and that they shined very farre off: but what it hath I knowe not, neyther durst he or any of his men ascende to the toppe of the saide mountaine, those people adioyning beeing his enemies (as they were) and the way to it so impassible. (66)

Precious solid objects are close but always just-beyond reach. Indeed, most of Ralegh’s aquatic portraits surround his most passionate promises to achieve the Guianan gold that always seems to shine “very farre off.” Solid objects turn liquid. Minerals have flow, as seen earlier with the “rocks of a blue metalline ore” that bleed into rivers. As Ralegh watches the Epuremei work with gold – “not seuered from the stone” but gathered from

Lake Manoa, mingled with copper, melted, and poured into moulds to make “plates and

Images” (63) – he witnesses gold’s liquidity firsthand. Metallurgy is the nomad’s art.

And if gold has movement, it moves away from him.

Theorize he may about the flow of mineral gold, Ralegh’s investors still demanded fiscal profits. Unlike Berrío, Ralegh only has the words of the Discoverie.

Berrío “dispatched his Campmaster for Spain with all that he had gathered, therewith to leuy soldiers, and by the shew thereof to draw others to the loue of the enterprize” (33).

The previous explorers of Guiana brought back numerous material goods. On his deathbed, Johannes Martines (Juan Martin de Albujar) donated to the Church the beads of gold from El Dorado, the sole pieces of the city’s elusive treasure that he managed to

66 protect from thieves. Domingo de Vera, taking possession of Guiana on Berrío’s behalf, brought back “diuers rarities which he caried to the Spanish king” and which were displayed in Seville to public amazement (24). Yet Ralegh brings hardly anything back.

He sends his benefactors two golden images he obtained after his metallurgical lesson with the Epuremei, “more to shew the manner of them, then for the value” (63). He tested a small quantity of Guianan ore, publicly believed to be fool’s gold, which he assured his readers to be real in the Discoverie’s prefatory materials. Multiple assayers “made manie trialls” that proved auspicious (8). This might be the same “oare” he sent to his patrons

Sir Robert Cecil and Lord Charles Howard, promising that

wee tried them to be no Marquesite, and therefore such as the Spaniards call El Madre del oro, which is an vndoubted assurance of the generall abundance; and my selfe saw the outside of many mines of the white sparre, which I know to be the same that all couet in this world, and of those, more then I will speake of. (63-4)

When the oar is proven priceless, Ralegh pulls out the excuses: primarily that he “had neither tyme, nor men, nor instruments fitte to labour” (7). He dispels rumors that he hid in Cornwall during the voyage, bought the gold ore in Barbary, and even served the

Spanish king. “I hope the better sort will judge me by themselves, & that the way of deceipt, is not the way of honor or good opinion” (27). With only promises of a “general abundance” in such scandalous times, how might Ralegh expect, like Berrío, to “draw others to the loue of the enterprize” (33)?

Ralegh’s solution, in fact, is the solution that is all around him: water. The infinite possibilities of the riverscape he witnesses – its unfathomable depths, wonderful attractiveness, and oozing pathways – affords the Discoverie’s language a liquidity that is useful to a writer like him who needs, first, to explain away his empty-handed expedition

67 and, second, to recruit potential Guianan investors. His language has more than a metaphorical “flow” to it. Riverscape and text intermesh to form “liquid narrativity.”

Watery writing is thus Ralegh’s precise methodology in the Discoverie: a discourse in which the bridge between language and truth, world and writer, is made. His writing shows that the truly “impassible” route to take is the one that tries to sever these terms.

Like the dangerous road to the top of Winicapora falls, the binaries are impossible to maintain. Water saturates both his words and his body. Ralegh seizes upon rivers’ twists and turns in order to maintain the impossible verifiability of his account. Water’s agency

“drew [him] on” before (54). Now, he draws others “on” through his newfound attraction.

To put liquid narrativity in terms of his “Poesy,” watery language keeps desire from

“runn[ing] out of breath.”

Ralegh’s watery language serves an important strategic purpose. Interpellating his readers as fellow questers for El Dorado, Ralegh treats them as potential capital investors who, like him, want to reach, and profit from, the promised golden end of his unfinished story. Ralegh can only imagine the gold as a future rather than present prospect “very far off.” Repeatedly in the Discoverie the natives guarantee Ralegh a larger prize farther ahead: “[I]f wee entred the lande over the mountaines of Curaa, wee should satisfie our selues with golde and all other good things” (53). But this satisfaction remains endlessly deferred to an indefinite future: it is a prospect that can never be realized. The mountains resemble nuggets of golden ore: “[W]e sawe al the hils with stones of the cullor of Gold and siluer” (63), Ralegh observes, but these gold and silver mountains remain on a distant horizon that he never reaches. When a Spaniard convinces him that one such stone

“promising” gold or silver indicates an abundant mine underground, Ralegh moves on.

68 Digging the mine would be the obvious choice in an effort to authenticate his report.

Ralegh, however, speaks “promises” instead: “But it shall bee found a weak pollicie in mee, eyhter to betray my selfe, or my Countrey with imaginations…were I not assured that the sunne couereth not so much riches in any part of the earth” (55). “Imaginations” do not produce riches – but neither does he. Rather than attempting to close the ambiguous gap of language in his narrative between words (his report) and things (the gold), he keeps it open. He always aims for the mother lode, El Dorado, rather than small profit. Indeed, he assures his readers that he could have brought back plentiful, but not extraordinary stores of gold “if I had not shot at another marke, than present profit” (44).

Ralegh inundates his readers with slippery promises from the very first line of the dedicatory epistle. “For your Honors many Honorable and friendlie parts, I have hitherto onely returned promises” (3). Ralegh is acutely aware of the predicament facing him, therefore it is interesting that he concludes the Discoverie by extended his promise once more to his readership: “For the rest, which my selfe haue seen I will promise these things that follow and knowe to be true” (71). Ralegh heaps promises upon more promises. Whoever accepts Ralegh’s offer and then journeys to Guiana will find there

“more rich and bewtifull cities, more temples adorned with golden Images, more sepulchers filled with treasure, then wither Cortez found in Mexico, or Pazzarro in Peru”

(71). In fact, his repetition of “more” bespeaks his supplementary intent. “More” conspicuously rhymes with the absent “ore” of his obsession. Ominously, he offers his own life as collateral in “To the Reader”: “I wilbe contented to lose her highnes fauour and good opinion for euer, and my life withall, if the same be not found rather to exceed, then to equall whatsoeuer is in this discourse promised or declared” (10). Promises have

69 lives at stake, and Ralegh continually upped the ante until breaking his “discourse promised” and dying for it in 1618.

As the (m)ore conflation suggests, Ralegh is able to weave the economic and the linguistic together in order to suspend his deferred promises indefinitely. New economic theorists and critics have explored the homologous relationship between gold and language to point out Ralegh’s liquid linguistic economies.15 William West (1997), for example, describes the credit Ralegh seeks as analogous to the early modern shift from gold as an autonomous signifier of value (a bullionist perspective) to gold as a representation of value, an absent elsewhere (a financial form of credit). Mary Fuller considers El Dorado as the anchoring yet perpetually deferred referent in Ralegh’s economic and linguistic fantasies. His expedition, she argues, is the search for a golden referent of language. When words might be tried against things, he turns away from creating a true report of Guiana and gestures instead towards language itself: “[W]hat appears to be a turn away from language into ‘the concrete and everlasting world’ dissolves into a multiple references back into the order of language” (1993, 223). The liquidity of money conterminous with the liquidity of language these critics suggest significantly points to the Discoverie’s watery language that similarly refuses to close the gap between signs and their referents. Better yet, the movement away from the “‘concrete and everlasting world’” that interests new economic critics can exceed the linguistic and economical. The “turn” also reflects the ways in which the aquatic environment veers

(viro-) the subject. Riverscapes are sites of simultaneous siltation and erosion. True, language dissolves back into the labile structures of language, yet this language is also interconnected with the Guianan rivers that challenge the very idea of concreteness.

70 Far from a “weak pollicie,” liquid narrativity keeps the ambiguous gap open between language and truth and allows Ralegh’s and his readers’ imaginations to profit creatively, and, he hopes, financially. Ralegh’s “Chart of discouerie” models his preference for uncertainty over absolute knowledge. Ralegh promises a map of Guiana, one only to be viewed under strictest secrecy after its completion: “[Y]our Lordship shall receive in a large Chart or Map, which I haue not yet finished, and which I shall most humbly pray your Lordship to secret, and not to suffer it to pass your own hands” (25).

Rivers are important in Guiana, but none so much as the Caroni regarded as the entrance to El Dorado. Significantly, the Caroni is the only river not mentioned on the map. Far from betraying Ralegh’s reconnaissance anxieties, the absence of the Caroni on the map serves yet again to signal the gap between words and things Ralegh exploits – or in this cartological example, lines and things. The Caroni’s absence stands in for something which is supposedly there in the Guianan jungle, but only on the condition that the reader credits Ralegh with its route. The unfinished map must remain just that: “not yet finished.” Water Ralegh has been going along with the matter-flows of water to new horizons; in his hydrographic chart he urges his readers to go along with him.

Although told years after the Guianan expedition, Ralegh’s account of an inventive mapmaker in the History links his desire for island and stream with the

Discoverie’s strategy of liquid narrativity. Ralegh remembers “a pretty jest” told to him by a Spanish gentleman:

The fictions (or let them be called conjectures) painted in maps do serve only to mislead such discoverers as rashly believe them, drawing upon the publishers either some angry curses or well deserved scorn; but to keep their own credit, they cannot serve always. To which purpose I remember a pretty jest of Don Pedro de Sarmiento, a worthy Spanish gentleman, who had been employed by his king in planting a colony upon the straits of

71 Magellan: for when I asked him, being then my prisoner, some questions about an island in those straits, which methought might have done either benefit or displeasure to his enterprise, he told me merrily, that it was to be called the Painter’s Wife’s Island: saying, that whilst the fellow drew that map, his wife sitting by desired him to put in one country for her; that she, in imagination, might have an island of her own. (Greene 1999, 8).

To have an island of one’s own undoubtedly evokes possession. Roland Greene describes the homology of fictions and islands in early accounts of imperial conquest that

“constitute[s] an especially prevalent ideologeme of the intersection between humanism and imperialism” and hence reads the wife’s island as an example of “a marker left by the powerful discourses at work in early modern writing” (8). Although Frederic

Jameson’s ideologeme is suitable for Greene’s larger study of Petrarchan imperialism,

Ralegh’s fictions-islands are markers of a more humanistic fictitiousness, islands that are certainly not unrelated to discourses of imperialization but that also need not be inextricably moored to these historical delineations, either. As Ralegh suggests, to have an island of one’s own is also to paint, to “draw upon,” to create. He uses the anecdote to address the question between fiction and truth that plague his History (and by association, the Discoverie).16 Still, he describes “conjectures” in a tolerant, even amused tone.

The play between fictions and truths conflates the Spanish mapmaker with Ralegh the narrator. Even if islands-fictions “cannot serve always” they may still keep their

“credit” – that telling word that inflects Ralegh’s own search for credibility in his narrative. This is not to say that fictions do not serve at all, but that Ralegh is best at putting questionable fictions into service: his map of Guiana that must remain unfinished and unknown; the unnamed mapmaker and wife; the second-hand report of the painter’s story from a Spanish prisoner. Reading the islands of the Discoverie through the islands of the History demonstrates how Ralegh moves his audience around a Guiana

72 metaphorically populated by islands-fictions, a riverscape carved by liquid language and narratives. Ralegh acts as both the painter and the painter’s wife, proliferating and inhabiting islands in the stream of his own “imagination.”

Returning now to the liquid labyrinth, these intersections become places of narrative possibility rather than helplessness. Ralegh’s streamy recollections, and the

Discoverie in general, orientates the reader in the direction of disorientation—just in time for Ralegh to extend his hand and guide the reader to the destination of his choice, and just short of the riches of Manoa. Ralegh loses his readers in order to bring them back out and follow him on successive enterprises. Failure, deferral, and disorientation may be advantageous directions to take after all. Ralegh employs the liquidity of water to keep his narrative flowing. In fact, he foresees his readers’ responses. He treats his crew essentially like the readers of his narrative. None will continue to El Dorado, physically or in the imagination,

had we not perswaded all the companie that it was but onlie one daies worke more to attaine the lande where we should be releeued of all we wanted, and if we returned that we were sure to starue by the way, and the world would laugh vs to scorne. (40)

Ralegh pushes his crew, and his readers, to persevere with only “one daies” more effort

(albeit repeatedly), against the scorn of the unbelieving “world”. To the crewman who cannot see any farther across the breadth of one river in the “laborinth of rivers”, he offers his leadership. To the reader who cannot breach the similar gulf of skepticism in the narrative, he offers fellowship via his credible report of Guianan gold. Both offers operate on the clause of an indefinitely deferred gold – a contract written in water.

Water rises higher and flows fiercer in the narrative, constantly washing the gold just beyond Ralegh’s reach: “And to say the truth all the branches and small riuers which

73 fell into the Orenoque were raised with such speed, as if wee waded them ouer the shooes in the morning outward, we were couered to the shoulders homewarde the very same daie” (44). Ralegh’s predictable near misses transform his narrative into a kind of textual alchemy. It is crucial to note that immediately after he regains his bearings at the labyrinthine intersections, Ralegh finds the tools of the trade. He espies four canoes coming downriver. Giving chase to them, two run ashore. One of the canoes is loaded with bread, the other contains three Spaniards: “[W]ho hauing heard of the defeat of their gouernour in Trinedado, and that we purposed to enter Guiana, came away in those

Canoas: one of them was a Cauallero, as the Captaine of the Arwacas after told vs, another a soldier, and the third a refiner” (42). Creeping around the bushes by the abandoned canoes, Ralegh makes a fascinating discovery: “I saw an Indian basket hidden, which was the refiners basket, for I found in it, his quicksiluer, saltpeter, and diuerse things for the triall of mettals, and also the dust of such ore as he had refined, but in those Canoas which escaped there was a good quantity of ore and gold” (43).

Ralegh inexplicably knows the contents of the lost canoe but does not pursue.

Fuller notes that the canoe chase “typifies the scene of discovery” in the narrative, an example of the simultaneous search for the referent and the desire for distance between words and things (1995, 66). But the other metals Ralegh discovers should not be overlooked, especially because alchemy was a subject he knew intimately. Elizabeth sponsored alchemical experimentation and mineral works in the latter part of her reign. It was during this time that Ralegh developed a reputation as a “chymist.” His library contained seventeen works on chemistry and medicine. According to the seventeenth- century biographer John Aubrey, he “studied most in his sea voyages, where he carried

74 always a trunk of books along with him” (Nicholl 1995, 278). John Hester dedicated a book of medicines to him under the pseudonym, no less, of the Renaissance polymath

Paracelsus. His close circle included alchemical dabblers: Henry Percy “the wizard Earl,”

Thomas Harriot, and even his faithful Captain Keymis. After his return, Ralegh brewed a

“Balsam of Guiana” with famous powers (he allegedly cured Queen Anne’s fever) and continued to brew alchemical concoctions in the Tower after his imprisonment.17

It is humorous to imagine Ralegh brushing-up on his alchemy during the long voyage of 1595. His chemical background is more significant, however. The refiner’s quicksilver combines his arcane interests with his liquid narrativity, thereby transforming him into a kind of alchemical author. Alchemy depends on obscurity and deferred knowledge passed down from master to apprentice. Lee Patterson’s work on alchemy in

Chaucer’s Canon Yeoman’s Tale defines this knowledge as a “negative knowledge”, or,

“the ‘logic of the supplement” (1993, 35). In short, instead of closing the gap between word and thing, language and truth, alchemy operates on multiplication, substitution, and excess; as a result, meaning is always in motion: “the disclosure of an original meaning becomes the multiplication of meanings; as each signified is revealed to be only another signifier, the act of revelation becomes itself a concealment” (35). To speak the truth of alchemy would deprive it of its efficacy. Hence, the truth becomes unsayable. Moreover, alchemical writers often promise to clarify the obscurities or failures of other alchemists

(40). Lastly, alchemy markedly affects concepts of self-representation since it pushes the practitioner to near-theatrical heights. As a result, the endlessly multiplied revelations

(concealments, really) turn into acts of self-revelation. The Yeoman’s self is left equally in motion, unmoored, “his language multiplying itself—proliferating uncontrollably—yet

75 never finally grasping the essence it seeks. The more he talks about the self that so fascinates him, the more dispersed it becomes, leaving him a cipher, an absence, a desire—a being who seeks rather than an object sought” (39).

The Discoverie is a striking analogue to the Chaucerian example. To reach El

Dorado would effectively immobilize his narrative; hence, the truth of the matter must be unknowable. Ralegh’s pronouncements of superior knowledge and his derision of previous explorers parallel the competitive nature of alchemists. His mention of the “triall of metals” in the riverside brush symbolizes the transmutation of his narrative into the narrative gold of El Dorado and the approval of the reading public (43). Just as the

Yeoman, Ralegh’s trademark performativity and desire for gold certainly categorizes him as a “being who seeks” across the Guianan landscape (39). Perhaps unlike the Yeoman, though, Ralegh revels in this self-mobility, using it to his advantage as he pursues an

“object [infinitely] sought” (39). Understanding Ralegh’s watery language as an alchemical discourse – with its inherent multiplicities, translations, supplements, and ambiguous gaps – reveals Ralegh’s intent to layer language upon language, promise upon promise, in the hope of attracting future investors to his Guianan enterprise. Like the coiling confluences of the riverscape, mercury and its “diuerse things” symbolize the narrative’s boundless diversities and multiplications of meaning (43). Alchemy’s liquid knowledge parallels the narrative’s liquid language – truth keeps on slipping.

***

76

They Drew Me: Water Writes

Make a map, not a tracing.

Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus

Might liquid narrativity center Ralegh in the riverscape, transforming him into an masterful alchemist or a too-human author who writes alone? By equating the multiplicity of language with the Discoverie’s “multitudes of Ilands” and interminable flows of water, Ralegh indeed writes water to his advantage. But even at this point, water’s work is “not yet finished.” Water enables Ralegh’s watery writing. As much as alchemy describes the self and language perpetually in motion, these authorial formulations should be reconceived as fluidic selves within larger non/human networks.

If liquid narrativity instantiates a broad semiotic breakdown of language, it also amplifies

Ralegh’s ecopoetical process with water. We have seen how Water Ralegh resists the metaphorical fluidity of identity (through his material and embodied becomings), and how Ralegh’s composition illustrates more than just the metaphorical fluidity of language that poststructuralism takes for granted (since it draws on the Guianan riverscape in order to draw others on). In its genesis from the riversacpe, the Discoverie exemplifies the eco- compositionist manifesto. Once we consider the author as an aquatic assemblage rather than human authority, we sense how water writes at the same time it is written about.

Ralegh’s narrative proves that the riverscape is an authorial collaborator.

Ralegh’s legacy as “Renaissance man” overshadows the agency of water. As I previously mentioned, critical praise is often reserved for Water’s fluid identity and self- fashioning. As a result, the materiality of water is often missing. Schmidt’s bibliographic

77 work describes Ralegh’s genres as “active,” meaning that they invite different processes of reading: “It is not simply that the Discovery of Guiana streams its words along in a forceful rush of prose – the result, no doubt, of Ralegh’s kinetic literary style and his imperative call (in this case) to colonial action” (2007, 472). Even with the “thrust of

Ralegh’s prose” which “convey[s] the audience headlong” into subsequent passages,

Schmidt focuses on the broader interplay between content and form (473). How all the specific actants involved – human and nonhuman – guide the flow of form remains unexplored. Shannon Miller’s study of Ralegh’s influential circle addresses the

Discoverie’s stream-like composition.18 Miller argues for Ralegh’s patrons as a system of production. Effectively decentering Ralegh, she intriguingly returns to the literal meaning of “influence” (influere: “to flow in”) to show how “[t]he ‘flow-in’ of other streams builds an ever-changing, ever-shifting inundation, allowing for the multiple influxes that necessarily comprise the artistic or intellectual project” (1998, 2). Miller’s study importantly describes a liquid process of narrative influence. Consequently, watery influence not just decenters Ralegh and the typical sites of power relations (like the new historical approaches to which Miller responds) but also applies to any investment in core meaning of the Discoverie. Truth is equally unmoored by “flows-in” and “flows-out” of influence, and Ralegh was highly aware of the liquidity of language in this regard. Both these readings of Ralegh’s compositional process, however, would benefit by including not only Ralegh’s personal circle of human patrons but also water’s influential flows that decenter the subject and “convey” writer and reader “headlong” through the riverscape.

In order to experience writing water we need to get out the “Chart of discouerie” yet again (Fig. 1). Ralegh as humanist explorer cannot fully draw the route to El Dorado

78 for the primary reason that he could not realistically reach the city. Nor could he possibly visit all the innumerable waterways of Guiana during his brief mission. Hence his chart’s

“not yet finished” areas: the terra incognita of the chart is the place for the imagination to inhabit. The chart keeps these imaginative routes flowing by visualizing the living riverscape: “[h]ow all these riuers crosse and encounter, how the countrie lieth and is bordred, the passage of Cemenes, and of Berreo, mine owne discouerie, and the way that

I entred, with all the rest of the nations and riuers” (25). Ralegh’s chart importantly coinvents with the riverscape it attempts to display. The “passages” of explorers intersect as “riuers cross.” Nonhuman and human “encounter” on the chart just as Ralegh does in the riverscape. Like the “deer crossing every path” of Caroli falls, the chart’s hydrographical points, lines, and curves vivify the riverscape’s bustling interweavements and nature-culture crossings. An example of inventiveness shared with the agentic riverscape, the chart breaches the borders of humanism to embrace posthuman possibilities as well.19 Remember, the waters “drew me on” (54). Water writes. If Ralegh had drawn water for his own purposes earlier, here the self of Ralegh is drawn by water.

“Drew” plays with the idea of drawing as both an attraction and an act of composition.

Thus living water draws him on (moves him), allows him to draw others to his enterprise through liquid narrativity (persuades them), and now collaborates with the human to draw a map. The human, just like the chart, is “not yet finished.” They can never be finished.

The map is like a mirror in which Ralegh sees his unfinished watery self.

The chart’s lines and points are seemingly indelible: note the topographical traces of already-imprinted footpaths, connections made, borders sunk in, a country that “lieth” still (25). Yet the map is topological as much as it is topographical. These water lines are

79 really “lines of flight” that encourage new points of “encounter”– things yet to be encountered – that refuse to lie still. The chart constantly flows like water, unpredictably bringing these immobile points together in its folds. He makes maps, not tracings. The gray area is not a gap that seeks human imagination and inventiveness to fill it; rather, it signifies the desirable insolvability of water. Rivers cannot be plumbed or fully known, but they can surely draw and move the watery explorer to new possibilities. The “not yet finished” chart is thus a site of possibility with “not yet finished” material connections.

Water insures that terra incognita will never be wholly territorialized, even on the literal page. Ink spills over the “bordred” segments; it runs everywhere. Ink may dry but it continually has speed of its own. Just as rivers spilled into Ralegh’s language and prospected him to new horizons, writing resists stratification in its very medium. Like the slippery shoreline of water and earth, the chart’s various actors – ink, paper, and hand – forge a co-authorial network. Meaning flows in collaboration with inky non/human hands. If there is room for error in Ralegh’s authoritative chart, then, it is infinite space to be explored, cohabited, desired.

The “not yet finished” chart of the Discoverie thereby exemplifies Ralegh’s necessarily “not yet finished” desire to connect with the living riverscape. Rather than looking at the “Chart of discouerie” for traceable, plottable points, the chart should be read for endless directions instead. My thought experiment reconceives Ralegh’s chart as a “map of relationships,” relations that in their speedy vectors are never fixed but instead precede a position (pre-position) of being in place: “[T]his maritime chart, an ocean of possible routes, fluctuates and does not remain static like a map. Each route invents itself” (Serres 1995b, 105). Reconfiguring water (and its graphic vehicle, ink) as

80 endlessly inventive routes characterizes Ralegh’s own “maritime” chart, his fluctuating narrative of watery words, and finally his desire to cohabit the riverscape’s bottomless

“ocean” of connectivity. Ralegh’s riverscape is a map of vectorial becomings, “a sort of fluctuating picture of relations and rapports—like the percolating basin of a glacial river, unceasingly changing its bed and showing an admirable network of forks, some of which freeze or silt up, while others open up” (105). To “silt” and “open” up, anchor and move, write and be written, this is precisely the Discoverie’s meshwork of matter-flows that

Ralegh charts and desires. “Percolating” networks of unceasing change – the creature in this map of relationships is, and has always been, the living creature of water.

***

The Objections of Ecojustice: Water Rights

A map may also speak of conquest, especially when its lines force non/human bodies into discrete areas. Although Ralegh theorizes the writing of water in the

Discoverie, he is far from an environmental crusader. He is in Guiana to promote English enterprise. The waterscape is an untapped land of abundance: “Brasill woode,” “berries,”

“Cotton,” “sylke,” “Balsamum” (72). Gold is the priority, for “[w]here there is store of gold, it is in effect nedeles to remember other commodities for trade” (72). As we saw earlier, plumbing the waterways for precise measurements is an impossible feat. Mapping the water routes is an easier way for him to orient himself in a slippery riverscape. While his technical work is necessary, charting the “Chart of discouerie” proves tedious work.

As Ralegh and his men travel, they make sure to chart every river: “Euerie daie we passed by goodlie branches of riuers…but those I leaue to the description in the Chart of discouerie, where euerie one shall be named with his rising and descent” (40). If water

81 cannot be made knowable via depth-soundings, another useful technique is to name it.

Coming out of the “laborinth,” for example, demands a colonizing approach: “But this it chanced that entering into a riuer, (which bicause it had no name we called the riuer of the Red crosse, our selues being the first Christians that euer cam therein:)” (36). The choice is highly symbolic, referencing Spenser’s Red Crosse Knight from The Faerie

Queene (1590), the Protestant hero St. George of England, and even the religious sect of

Rosicrucians at once. George Chapman’s poem composed shortly after Ralegh’s voyage,

De Guiana, Carmen Epicum (1596), anticipates England’s grand course: “Riches, and

Conquest, and Renowme I sing” (1941, 353-7).20 Regardless of his relationship with water built upon open-ended processes (and desires) of becoming, Ralegh’s empirical and imperial forays into the riverscape also demonstrate his wish to limn the waters, mark their boundaries, and understand their recalcitrant flows. Encounters like these are acts of territorialization, desires for domination, and attempts to harden Guiana’s matter flows into hierarchies of knowledge. A squiggly line is drawn on the “Chart of discouerie.” An unknowable river gets a name “Red Cross.” The company moves on. This is a colonial methodology so often repeated that it, too, seems “not yet finished.”

Ralegh’s liquid body and narrativity on the River of the Red Cross – coded as male, English, and Protestant – necessarily raise questions of environmental justice. What of Guianan bodies that do not want to go with the flow, or are prevented from doing so?

Becoming water is not a universal desire or ability. The efflorescence seen earlier on the banks of the Caroli where nature and culture intersect – the “beawtifull country, nor more liuely prospectes” (54-5) – resembles a paradise of asymmetrical relations. The

Discoverie’s “conference” between heterogeneous human and nonhuman characters is

82 much more complex, however (29). Not all beings share the same “liuely prospectes.”

Guiana’s living waters are unable to erase all divisions. Actants may use difference to their advantage, even try to shore up indissoluble breaches between the human and the nonhuman (as well as human from human). Ralegh’s colonial injunction is the most obvious example: “it is in effect nedeles to remember” anything other than the gold he promises, even if this means – purposefully or not – neglecting the ethical dilemmas of ecoimperialism. These predicaments require further exploration.

Ralegh’s goal is simple enough: the English acquire riches and the Guianans are freed from Spanish oppression. The contract is supposedly beneficial to both, even if the natives lose one master only to gain another:

I made them vnderstand that I was the seruant of a Queene, who was the great Casique of the north, and a virgin, and had more Casiqui under her than there were trees in their iland: that she was an enemy to the Castellani in respect of their tyrannie and oppression, and that she deliuered all such nations about her, as were by them oppressed; and hauing freed all the coast of the northern world from their seruitude, had sent me to free them also, and withal to defend the countrey of Guiana from their inuasion and conquest. (15)

Always one to offer promises, Ralegh offers the hope of redemption. The irony is obvious: in order to liberate the Guianans, England must invade their territories. Ralegh’s ethnographical reconnaissance is sparse. While he has a general idea of the multiculturalism of Guiana – he is aware of domestic conflicts, for instance – its diverse peoples are assumed to be a willing conglomeration:

The countrey is alreadie discouered, many nations won to her Maiesties loue and obedience, and those Spanyards which haue latest and longest labored about the conquest, beaten out, discouraged and disgraced, which amonge these nations were thought inuincible. (75)

83 Likening himself to an English Columbus – “The west Indies were first offered her

Maiesties Grandfather by Columbus a straunger, in whome there might be doubt of deceipt” (74) – Ralegh picks up where the legendary explorer left off. He is discovering a country already “discouered.” His task, then, is to show others what they have been missing. Everything is ripe for English conquest: the people are pacified, the minerals are ready for removal, the Spanish are retreating. Guiana is rich for the taking. Yet few besides the English would approve of these “prospectes” (54-5).

Once again, “doubt” and “deceit” are meant to encourage colonial investors, though only Elizabeth could give the final go-ahead. The amicable Guianan-English relations he describes must be taken at his word. Ralegh assures his readers that an

English settlement, once attempted, will last. “[K]eeping one good fort, or building one towne of strength, the whole Empyre is guarded” (74). He surveys the waterscape not just to map the way to El Dorado, but also to suggest where a “defensible” fortress might be built in order to prevent any plots against the proposed English colony in the future (73).

Nearby rivers, deltas, and mountains are useful allies in this martial sense. Moreover, he hopes that the amount of geographic detail he provides will amount to a better route for invasion, “an easier way to inuade the best parts therof, then by the common course” (5).

The sea towns and islands are “anatomized” and “by what meanes they may be beste inuaded, as farre as any meane Iudgement can comprehend” (6). This guarantee of

English security dovetails into his earlier promises of gold. Colonial and financial incentives intersect; both results are deferred: dig a mine here and riches will appear, build a colony there and the English will come. But he must explain why he did not invade when he knew the strengths and weaknesses of Guiana. Upon deliberation, he

84 found it “verie euill counsell to haue attempted it at that time” (62). His logic is worth repeating in full for its ethical maneuvering:

But it woulde haue been in mine opinion an vtter ouerthrowe to the enterprize, if the same should be hereafter by her Maiestie attempted: for then (whereas now they haue heard we were enemies to the Spaniards and were sent by her Maiestie to relieue them) they would as good cheape haue ioyned with the Spanyards at our returne, as to haue yeelded vnto vs, when they hadproued that we came both for one errant, and that both sought but to sacke and spoyle them, but as yet our desier of gold, or our purpose of inuasion is not known vnto those of the Empire: and it is likely that if her maiestie vndertake the enterprize, they will rather submit themselues to her obedience then to the Spanyards, of whose cruelty both themselues and the borderers haue alreadie tasted: and therfore til I had known her maiesties pleasure, I woulde rather haue lost the sacke of one or two townes (although they might haue been very profitable) then to haue defaced or endaungered the future hope of so many millions, and the great good, and rich trade which England maie bee possessed off thereby, I am assured nowe that they will all die euen to the last man against the Panyardes, in hope of our succoure and returne: whereas otherwise if I had either laid handes on the borderers, or ransommed the Lordes as Berreo did, or inuaded the subjects of Inga, I knowe all had been lost for hereafter. (62-3)

Ralegh’s general assurance floats on a river of deceit. He lists yet another reason why the

Guianan gold could not be brought back to England: to begin mining or to ransom local chieftains would divulge (“deface”) the secret nature of the enterprise. If the “desire of golde will aunswere many obiections” (62), it is a desire he must bury deep within himself. But how can negotiations take place if only one party is aware of the terms? No matter—gold trumps everything. The “desire of golde” goes hand-in-hand with his assurance of successful colonialization. The choice not to invade, in other words, is done for commercial rather than ethical reasons. Liberation is on the agenda as long as it turns a profit. The “hope of so many millions” is monetary millions; Ralegh does not refer to the riverscape’s non/human populations here (though we are inclined to read it this way at first glance). “They” hope to live. Ralegh hopes for gold. His true motives could not be

85 clearer: the “desier of gold, or our purpose of inuasion.” His desire for gold is invasive because it is inherently a desire to invade. The “or” equates the two clauses. But by couching his desire in terms of rescue – he is an action-hero who prevents a massacre at the hands of the Spanish – Ralegh saves “face” and the “face” of the English enterprise.

Or does he? What of the non/human lives he has “endangered” by his actions?

Can Ralegh’s two desires – becoming watery, accruing gold – answer the “obiections” of environmental justice? Topiawari tells him in confidence that the “Epuremei [a rival tribe] woulde inuade him, and destroye all the remayne of his people and friendes, if hee shoulde any way eyther guide vs or assist vs against them” (61). Likewise, the Spanish

“woulde be nowe more vehement when they shoulde vnderstand of his conference with the English” (61). Ralegh’s promises have dangerous political consequences he does not fully understand. The inhabitants of the riverscape are put at risk. Read this way, the

Discoverie’s memorable line about Guiana’s virginity deflects the riverscape’s present dangers away from his voyage:

To conclude, Guiana is a Country that hath yet her Maydenhead, neuer sackt, turned, nor wrought, the face of the earth hath not beene torne, nor the vertue and salt of the soyle spent by manurance. The graues have not beene opened for gold, the mines not broken with sledges, nor their Images puld down out of their temples. It hath neuer been entred by any armie of strength, and neuer conquered or possesed by any Christian Prince. (73)

More idealistic than realistic, Ralegh’s vision of trouble-free invasion is wishful thinking.

Of course, one could quickly point out Ralegh’s hypocrisy on multiple levels: this is the same author, for instance, who has been testing the land for gold and who has seen native metallurgy in practice. The passage is notable more for its ironies, though; Ralegh is not simply naive here. Instead, he translates the stakes of environmental justice into idyllic

86 terms. He describes a landscape that can be penetrated and still retain its “Maydenhead,” a clean space (without “manurance”) that is also fecund.

“To conclude,” Ralegh slips into reverie. What does he dream? A land of unspoiled essences? If there is anyone who should know that nothing is untouched, it is

Ralegh. He saw parks on the riverbanks, felt sound waves of waterfalls, and drank the red water of Amapaia. Guiana is elemental mixture in extreme, not a taxonomic Eden where every thing has a name and a place. A nostalgic wish to return to the Golden Age?

Invoking the classical trope overlooks the fact that the Golden Age, according to Ovid, was a time in which both gold and travel were unknown rather than in abundance: “The fertile earth as yet was free, untouched of spade or plough; / And yet it yielded of itself of everything enough” (2001, 1.115-16). Ralegh will put an end to this age; he will personally bring the “sledges.” Or, perhaps the gendering of “Country” is an allusion to his patchy relationship with Elizabeth. Joan Pong Linton points out the passage’s

“interplay between...romance and colonial discourse” (1998, 1). Ralegh’s reference to

“Maydenhead” is misogynistic imperialism at work (pitting an active masculine force versus a passive feminine nature). Rather than reading his reverie for its blind spots or for its willful manipulation of his audience, I believe we should take a closer look at how he perceives the environmental effects of his conquest. This is not a prelapsarian paradise he preserves; it is a precarious ecology he violates. In short, his pleasurable experiences come at a cost.

My interrogation is not in Ralegh’s defense, nor is it meant to attribute blame. If he bemoaned his conflicting desires outright, could we exonerate him? Instead, we must take up the ethical issues Ralegh leaves behind. When he confronts the real impact his

87 expedition makes on the riverscape and its peoples, he spins his encroachment in a positive light. He speaks of his own infiltration chastely. The Spanish are the sole

European injurious party. Not only do they buy women and children from the cannibals and sell them for a profit – amongst other horrors – but they also take the natives’

“wiues...and daughters daily, and vs[e] them for the satisfying of their owne lusts” (44).

The English are in direct contrast to the Spanish “who tyrannize ouer them in all things”

(80). Ralegh commands his men never to touch, even “offer to touch” (44), any of the wives and daughters:

I protest before the maiestie of the liuing God, that I neither know nor beleeue, that any of our companie one or other, by violence or otherwise, euer knew any of their women, and yet we saw many hundreds, and had many in our power, and of those very yoong, and excellently fauored, which came among vs without deceit, starke naked. Nothing got vs more loue among them than this vsage. (44)

Chaste conquest is an appropriate strategy to maintain the “Maydenhead” of Guiana. The

English have desires, at least for the “very young and excellently favoured,” but their greater self-control separates them even further from their licentious Spanish rivals.

These women are treated similarly to the land. He prohibits his men to take up a “Pina

[pineapple], or a Potato roote, without giuing them contentment” (44). Women and fruit entwine; he forbids both to be plucked. Ralegh confesses that no one is perfect:

[I]t was a very impatient worke to keep the meaner sort from spoile and stealing, when we came to their houses, which bicause in all I could not preuent ... If ought were stolen or taken by violence, either the same was restored, and the party punished in their sight, or els was paid for to their vttermost demand. (44)

As a result, the English are wondered at for their discipline. Yet English virtue is based upon colonial progress, nonetheless. Ralegh’s environmental ethics serve a strategic purpose. The natives’ fair treatment “drew them to admire hir Maiestie” (80). The

88 English still use the women to gain favor and ultimately use the land. The “vsage” of

Guiana’s “Maydenhead” – and by extension, the maidens’ – is both politically motivated and chastely performed. The Spanish policy depended upon “violence or otherwise.”

Ralegh’s purer motives are “without deceit, starke naked.” Who could object?

His kidnapped native pilots certainly could. After exiting the River of the Red

Cross, Ferdinando, the navigator, enters a village to gather information and victuals for

Ralegh and his men. Taking his brother along with him, the natives “offred to lay hands on them, purposing to haue slaine them both, yeelding for reason that this Indian of ours had brought a strange nation into their territorie to spoyle and destroy them” (37). Ralegh has led these men to their deaths. A chase ensues; in the fracas, Ralegh takes action:

“[W]e set hands on one of them that was next vs, a very old man, and brought him into the barge, assuring him that if we had not our Pilot againe, we would presently cut off his head” (37). His oath fortunately did not need to be put to the test. The two men escape and return to the barge. “[B]ut our good hap was, that we kept the other old Indian, which we handfasted to redeeme our Pilot withall” (37). Because of his old age, the handcuffed captive presumably knows the waterways better than Ferdinando (he does not). Ralegh grows impatient with “[o]ur old Pilot of the Ciawani” (40). Though he leads them to their place of refreshment, and, on the following day, “the most beautifull countrie that euer mine eies beheld” (42), the old “Pilot” is under the gun. “At last we determined to hang the Pilot; and if we had well knowen the way backe againe by night, he had surely gone, but our own necessities pleaded sufficiently for his safetie” (41). At such moments of selfishness – Ralegh’s own “necessities” take priority – interdependence is clearly not the automatic nature of non/human relations. It is a choice. Not all bodies on the river roll on

89 desirably: some are “handfasted.” Ralegh states in the dedication that he “could haue laid hands and ransomed many of the kings and Cassiqui of the Country” (6), but decided against it for fear of jeopardizing English-Guianan relations (and the amount of gold to be exchanged). Yet he does lay “hands.” The “desire of golde” depends on it.

Ralegh’s hands “laid” upon these native bodies are mere footnotes within his greater golden cause. Like the “transparent” residents he meets at Toparimaca, the old

“Pilot” simply disappears back into the riverscape where he belongs. Native bodies are often rendered invisible; the Discoverie is an economical rather than an ethnographical narrative. Although the “Pilot” is lost, there are more enduring intercultural relations, moments with stories “not yet finished.” Topiawari “freely gaue me his onelie sonne to take with me into England” (63). Cayoworaco, given the name Iwiakanarie Gualtero by the Spanish (a term for “Walter Ralegh”), spent time with Ralegh in the Tower before returning to Arromaia to rule again in the early 1600s (Whitehead 1997, 30). Did

Cayoworaco have Ralegh’s desire to travel, not just his name? He is the one who famously tells Ralegh about the Ewaipanoma (Acephali), the headless men “written of by

Maundeuile” who ravage his father’s country: “[B]ut it was not my chaunce to heare of them til I was come away, and if I had but spoken one word of it while I was there, I might haue brought one of them with me to put the matter out of doubt” (56-7). Is

Cayoworaco’s careful silence a strategy to keep himself moving, to become liquid, to chart his own discovery of England? In the same paragraph, we learn of Francis Sparry and Hugh Goodwin, two English boys left behind: the former was meant to “describe

[the] cuntrey with his pen” and the latter “to learne the language” (63). The Spanish capture Sparry; jaguars eat Goodwin. Are these two abandoned in the waterscape or

90 desirous to stay in it? Such cross-cultural exchanges loosen, even if slightly, the handfasted-ness of others. Ralegh is not the only one unleashed. Becoming watery can be a shared process, even if left to the imagination.

There are more “obiections” to come. As Cayoworaco’s comment about the headless men suggests, there are creatures that remain off Ralegh’s map of relationships.

A shipwrecked Dutch sailor in the same area, Lourens Lourenszoon, supposedly witnessed the capture, torture, and execution of an Acephali in 1623 (Whitehead 1997,

92-3). Ralegh is kinder; he “might haue brought one of them” back. Once kidnapped, would these monsters – hybrids like himself? – have had the same urge for flowing like

Ralegh? Also policed at the borders of becoming are the Amazons. Ralegh “was very desirous to vnderstand the truth of those warlike women,” which he gets from a “Casique or Lord of people” (26). He then proceeds to correct the lord (Amazons do not cut off their right “dug” for instance). Although Ralegh never encounters either group, he makes good “vsage” of these imaginary inhabitants. Like the other Guianans, the Amazons will submit to English rule:

And where the south border of Guiana reacheth to the Dominion and Empire of the Amazones, those women shall heereby heare the name of a virgin, which is not onely able to defend her owne territories and her neighbours, but also to inuade and conquere so great Empyres and so farre remoued. (76)

The Amazonian empire translates into an English one; the “warlike women” get a new queen: Elizabeth I.21 The same holds for Mandeville and his headless men. Ralegh becomes the new author of marvels, the new Mandeville—plus, the disunited populations will finally get a new head: the Queen. By pushing the Acephali and Amazons outside the margins, Ralegh silences them and their desires.

91 Even if his colonial motives conflict with his chaste desires for the environment,

Ralegh remains a self-confident invader. True to the riverscape’s living waters, however,

Guiana’s “Maydenhead” is not so easily taken. He might assume he is the one who penetrates – to follow the passage’s sexual metaphor – but he is constantly reminded that he is being penetrated. As I have shown above, the dangers of the waterscape are well understood. The interpenetration of the riverscape is not always safe to experience. But when the riverscape strikes back, Ralegh learns his lesson at the expense of another.

Immediately after his eye-opening experience on the Amana River, Ralegh tells of an unfortunate accident:

Vpon this riuer there were great store of fowle, and of many sorts: we saw in it diuers sorts of strange fishes, and of maruellous bignes, but for Largatos it exceeded, for there were thousands of those vglie serpents, and the people call it for the abundance of them the river of Lagartos, in their language. I had a Negro a very proper yoong fellow, that leaping out of the Galley to swim in the mouth of this riuer, was in all our sights taken and deuoured with one of these Lagartos. (42)

Though a “Negro” is not listed in the ship records, whether or not this incident is

“spurious” is beside the point (Whitehead 1997, 163n71). The one person who succumbs to the environment is the sole racialized body in the company. The river is going to get you: the dangerous incorporation of the human body into the riverscape via the maws of

“Lagartos” (alligators) reminds Ralegh of the nonhuman’s powerful agency. But it also foregrounds the questions of environmental justice Ralegh avoids. Why are specific bodies, and their attendant stories, absent from the narrative? While the Negro’s desire for the waterscape literally consumes him (as it will Ralegh), he is significantly not

Ralegh. This scene raises more questions than it answers: How can we create livable lives for both humans (“a Negro” and Ralegh) as well as nonhumans (the Amana, alligators)?

92 Who encroaches upon whom? Whose desires take priority? Ralegh’s most aesthetic descriptions of the riverscape impinge on his narrative’s most troubling moments: a

Negro’s death, kidnapped pilots, the colonial “way of deceipt” (27). Such discrepancies compel us to think of the Discoverie in ethical terms. Ralegh’s quest leaves us with questions we should not, and cannot, avoid. Above all: if the “desire of golde will aunswere many obiections” (62), when are these objections suppressed, and, at whose expense?

Ultimately, Ralegh knows a chaste penetration of Guiana is untenable. He always leaves a physical mark. At the end of the Discoverie he turns defensive, reiterating a local prophecy in order to justify England’s imperial desires. Ostensibly, a future expedition would free the oppressed Guianans from the Spanish, Ralegh’s ideal situation, since it would return him to the riverscape without having to vindicate his “desire of golde”:

[T]here was found among prophecies in Peru (at such time as the Empyre was reduced to the Spanish obedience) in their chiefest temples, amongst diuers others which foreshewed the losse of the said Empyre, that from Inglatierra those Ingas shoulde be againe in time to come restored, and deliuered from the seruitude of the said Conquerors. (75)

The prophecy not only hands Guiana over to the English, but it conveniently thwarts the

Spanish as well. Their best imperial defense has been waiting for them in their future home all along. Ralegh need not give any more reasons for a chaste conquest. The narrative concludes, finally, with a simple choice: “eyther defend it, and hold it as tributary, or conquere and keepe it as Empresse of the same. For whatsoeuer Prince shall possesse it, shall be greatest” (75). “Inglatierra” (Eng-land) overtakes guiana (“land of water”). Only from a more solid (terrestrial) foundation may a colony be built. The

English are next in line in a trajectory of empires that leads from the Incas, to the

93 Spanish, and finally to themselves. The Incas are “restored” and “deliuered” just in time to be supplanted by their English restorers/deliverers. Conveniently for the English, the ancient prophecy is a self-fulfilling one.

What kind of ecological future is this for Guiana? Mountains removed; rivers choked with commerce; natives displaced; coastlines civilized; “the relief we found by killing some store of [foule and fish] with our fouling peeces” (40). Ralegh does not think on environmental degradation or accountability. He need not: eco-imperialism simply goes on. The inhabitants either assimilate or perish. Ultimately, Ralegh proves that a chaste conquest is impossible not because a “pure” and virginal nature is a fantasy, but because the idea of human separation from any riverscape (any –scape) is a delusion. In the end, Ralegh cannot have his water without making contact; he cannot enter Guiana without creating ripples. As we have seen, colonial contact profoundly altered the riverscape. Environmental justice demands more than the human making a lesser impact on its surroundings, more than smarter “usage” of rivers’ resources, more than becoming stricter “keepers” of them (42).22 A posthumanist ethics requires hearing the call of fluvial things and responding to them. Of living enmeshed with living riverscapes. Of living more-than-human. More.

***

Conclusion: More Nature

In 1844 Henry David Thoreau published his essay “Sir Walter Raleigh” to awaken American heroism: “If an English Plutarch were to be written, Raleigh would be the best Greek or Roman among them all” (2001, 57). What sets Ralegh apart is his nature: “He seems to have had, not a profounder or grander, but, so to speak, more,

94 nature, than other men” (57). What makes Ralegh more natural, so to speak? Thoreau explicitly means Ralegh’s combination of martial rigor and genteel behavior – a mien that somehow came naturally to him – but he also points implicitly to Ralegh’s material connections with the natural world. The blue blood of Ralegh that Thoreau details is the bluest of all – blue by fact of being conjoined with blue waters.

Water Ralegh has “more nature” because he desires more water, more movement, more and more. And his riverscape of desire has not been lost on his readers. Robert

Schomburgk, one of the Discoverie’s first editors, wistfully describes the narrative’s imaginative longevity in his preface to the Hakluyt Society edition: “Every page, nay almost every sentence, awakened past recollections, and I felt in imagination transported once more into the midst of the stupendous scenery of the Tropics ... I explored in 1841 that wondrous delta of the Orinoco” (1848, vii). Visiting Ralegh’s text prompts

Schomburgk’s re-visitation to Guiana in his imagination. And Nicholl literally follows

Ralegh’s footsteps to write his book. As John Muir wrote, “Tracing rivers to their fountains makes the most charming of travels. As the life-blood of the landscapes, the best of the wilderness comes to their banks, and not one dull passage is found in all their eventful histories” (2004, 47). A tribute to Elizabethan heroism or not, the Discoverie assembles “more natural” bodies flowing as the “life-blood of the landscapes”: “walking” waters, potable marshes, translucent skin, animate ink.

“We have not another such head to be cut off!” (Trevelyan, 2002, 552). Ralegh’s blood must run its natural course, alas. Relegated to a haunting narrative of failure, error, and incredible lies, his ecotheorization of living waters culminates at the final scene of execution. In his opening letter to the readers, Ralegh spoke of the voyage dryly: “I am

95 not so much in loue with these long voiages, as to deuise, thereby to cozen my selfe, to lie hard, to fare worse, to be subiected to perils, to diseases, to ill sauours, to be parched and withered, and withall to sustaine the care and labour of such an enterprize” (9). A desiccated Discoverie. But as we have seen, his adventure was sheer liquefaction. Those present at his execution in 1618 discovered the symbiosis of human blood and watery flows firsthand. Far from being “parched and “withered,” one anonymous witness noted that Ralegh’s “large Effusion of Blood, which proceeded from his Veins, Amazd the

Spectators, who Conjectured that he had stock enough of Nature to have survived many

Years” (Schama 1995, 320). “More nature” proves to be not “enough” in the end. And yet, perhaps this person had read the Discoverie, perhaps even associated with Water’s desire for diluvial places. The spectator’s language transforms the scaffold into another riverscape, albeit a grisly one. Effusive like his language, Ralegh’s blood spills over: some jets in rivers around the cobblestones, some meets with dust and coagulates into lakes, some may even join with the Thames (and onto Guiana, eventually) after a heavy rainfall.

The ghastly scene of Ralegh’s supernaturally flowing blood invokes what Gail

Kern Paster describes as the “ecology of the passions” where “[e]motions become a key feature of the body’s internal climate to match key features of the climate in the world outside the body. Emotions were a body’s weather, its winds, and its waves” (2007, 139).

A sanguine, passionate man like Water appropriately makes “waves.” Uncannily, her reading of Amavia’s death in The Faerie Queene could apply to Ralegh’s: “Thus insanguinated, the ground expresses human blood’s analogical relation to rivers and streams; it recalls blood’s place in bodily topography as the body’s liquid source of

96 nourishment as well as its current of feeling and consciousness” (142). Ralegh’s death intensifies Paster’s work on “becoming the landscape” (137). Both “analogical” and geographical, material and metaphorical, becoming the riverscape disrupts inside/outside terms of human and nonhuman embodiment. By his “relation to rivers and streams,”

Ralegh is guiana.

I opened this chapter with the stage of the Gulf, navigated the stage of Guiana in its middle, and left you with the stage of the scaffold at its end. But this last place is not our final destination. Being a strong proponent for the “natural contract,” Serres would probably applaud Ralegh for exploring the fluctuating assemblage of things, “less a juncture under control than an adventure to be had. This is an area strangely void of explorers” (1995b, 70). The Discoverie depicts a riverscape of ecomaterial things in constant, and creative, coconstitutiveness. Exploring Guiana helps us improve our material interactions with the guiana of today. Ralegh demonstrates the pleasures of dis/solution, the joys of cohabiting a river’s unfathomable uncertainties. He also points us to the “breaches” that may harmfully separate non/human things; these watery beings solicit a new ethics from us. A “conference” need not be interrogational (29). A

“conference” is also a parliament, an assembly, a home, a “confluence of streames and branches.”23 Ralegh confers with the natives, but he has been in Guiana’s swirling

“conference” of diverse things all along.

Let us make better contracts, more garrulous conferences, in this way. Ralegh was not just haunted by waters; neither should we. Catastrophes are possible, and do happen.

We may fail. But the shores of any riverscape offer endless departures to new assemblages with the world. This is a capability too often mired in the failures of

97 Deepwater Horizons. What is crucial to remember is that the scaffold can always become the “prospect,” a “paineful pilgrimage” a voyage of “contentment” (121, 80). A point of termination becomes a way of facing the future, a new horizon. Ecology reconceived in our shared deluge unleashes the potential of water’s living matter-flows: a potential that never runs its course, within and without us. Like the “Chart of discouerie,” our fluvial bodies and stories are truly “not yet finished.”

1 The numbers vary depending on the source. Visit the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s “Deepwater Horizon Archive” < http://response. restoration.noaa.gov/deepwaterhorizon>; see also RestoreTheGulf.gov for ongoing projects < http://www.restorethegulf.gov/>. 2 All citations from the Discoverie refer to the page numbers of V.T. Harlow’s edition (1928). 3 For more on the Discoverie’s afterlives, see Benjamin Schmidt (2007). 4 See, respectively, Stephen Greenblatt (1973), Mary B. Campbell (1988), and William West (1997). 5 See entry for catastrophe, n. in the OED. 6 In a letter written from Thomas Naunton, Secretary of State, to Thomas Wilson is an “inventory of such things as were found on the body of Sir Walter Rawleigh, Knight, the 15th day of August, 1618”. The inventory was compiled shortly after Ralegh’s failed escape attempt from the Tower. See Richard Schomburgk’s edition (1848). 7 See Joan Pong Linton (1998). She discusses Ralegh in her second chapter devoted to “sea-knights and royal virgins.” 8 Walter Oakeshott (1968) has catalogued Ralegh’s impressive collection. 9 Elsewhere in the narrative Ralegh considers the agency of things. Armadillo “horne” possess medicinal powers (51). Although the Amazons exchange plates of gold for spleen stones, Ralegh does not automatically condemn them as fetishistic. “[F]or a kinde of greene stones, which the Spaniards call Piedras Hijadas, and we vse for spleene stones, and for the disease of the stone we also esteeme them” (27). 10 Eating is an aesthetic experience, though solid food does not seem to move him as much as imbibing the liquid landscape does: “On the banks of these riuers were diuers sorts of fruits good to eate, flowers and trees of that varietie as were sufficient to make ten volumes of herbals, we releeued our selues manie times with the fruits of the countrey, and sometimes with foule and fish: we sawe birds of all colours, some carnation, some crimson, orenge tawny, purple, greene, watched, and of all other sorts both simple and mixt, as it was vnto vs a great good passing of the time to beholde them” (40).

98

11 For example, see Luiz Vaz de Camões’s Portuguese epic poem The Lusiads (1572). The Indus and Ganges rivers appear in a dream personified as “[t]wo ancients” (1997, 4.72). 12 See prospect n., esp. senses 1 and 6; prospect v.1 sense 1 and 3 in the OED. 13 Occasionally Ralegh will speak of birds and other natural things in a hurried way: “And if to speake of them were not tedious and vulgar, surely we sawe in those passages of very rare colours and forms, not else where to be found, for as much as I haue either seen or read” (39). 14 Atomistic swerving is characteristic of the Roman poet Lucretius, a writer Ralegh might have read. See De Rerum Natura (1975). 15 Jean-Joseph Goux, for instance, views gold-language as the stable economy of signs, where each word is anchored by a real referent just as money’s value is guaranteed by a gold standard. According to Goux, this model is superseded in the modern era by the system of token-language, more aptly described as the endless fungibility of signs: “Gold money becomes a metaphor for the failure of the realist or representational system of language…the linguistic order based on the gold value of language is headed for bankruptcy” (1994, 13). 16 For an introduction to the early modern period’s gradual separation (if we may call it so) between fiction and truth, see William Nelson (1973). 17 See Katherine Eggert (2006) for a notable introduction to alchemy in the period. Ralegh built his own chemical still and left behind a collection of chemical and medical recipes. Nicholl’s chapter on the balsam provides a quick overview, 278-287. Also see Oakeshott, 288. Deborah Harkness’s (2007) work on “Big Science” in Elizabethan England traces the connections between mining, alchemy, and royal patronage, implicating the emergent adventures to the New World and those close to Ralegh: Robert Dudley, Humphrey Gilbert, and William Cecil. 18 Joyce Lorimer’s Hakluyt Society edition allows the reader to compare the discovered manuscript edition to the printed version of 1596. Her conclusion likewise distributes authorial agency: “The [1596] version…was not an unmediated account of his experiences in Guiana but rather a carefully edited version of them. The comparison…demonstrates that the final product was not what Ralegh had wanted, but rather what already engaged investors…felt it was advisable to publish” (2006, xcv). I would consider Ralegh’s questionable collaboration another instance of his narrative’s liquidity. 19 The definition of posthumanism is slippery itself. Cary Wolfe tackles the paradoxical post- of the term: “[B]efore in the sense that it names the embodiment and embeddedness of the human being in not just its biological but also its technical world, the prosthetic coevolution of the human animal with the technicity of tools and external archival mechanisms…[A]fter in the sense that posthumanism names a historical moment in which the decentering of the human…is increasingly impossible to ignore, a historical development that points toward the necessity of new theoretical paradigms (but also thrusts them on us)” (2010, xv-xvi). Ralegh’s chart is both a historical moment of humanism and a posthumanistic example of a shared (non)human “technicity.”

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20 Chapman’s commendatory poem compares Ralegh to Jason. The “Argolian Fleet” should be sent forth by Elizabeth upon the “Guianian Orenoque”: “Then most admired Soueraigne, let your breath / Goe forth vpon the waters, and create / A golden worlde in this our yron age” (lines 159,161, 30-2). Also see IV.xi of Edmund Spenser’s The Faerie Queene in which the noble Thame and his train surpass the rivers of the world. The Amazon River is fit for taking: “And shame on you, o men, which boast your strong / Annd valiant hearts, in thoughts lesse hard and bold, / Yet quaile in conquest of that land of gold” (1978, IV.xi.22.3-5). 21 I gesture in brief to the large body of scholarship on the Amazons in the English imagination. Standard texts are Andrew Hadfield (2001) and Kathryn Schwarz (2000). 22 This is not unlike the arguments of “sustainability” today. See the forthcoming May issue of PMLA for essays on the topic. 23 Alden T. Vaughan (2002) describes Hariot’s and Ralegh’s successful attempts in language education, both in England and in the “language lab” of the New World (375). Vaughan considers Ralegh a figure of transculturation, “the principal link…between native interpreters and English overseas ventures” (375). Intriguingly, several natives stayed with Ralegh in his Thames-side mansion. Here marks another fluvial “conference,” this one done in his domestic ecology.

100 Going Glacial

For some people, what they are is not finished at the skin, but continues with the reach of the senses out into the land.

The land gets inside us; and we must decide one way or another what this means, what we will do about it. Barry Lopez, Arctic Dreams

On August 5 2010, an ice sheet one hundred square miles in size calved from the

Petermann Glacier in Greenland. Heading through Nares Strait, it had the potential to enter the Atlantic Ocean and eventually strike urban areas. It fortunately did not; and almost expectedly, the scare became evidence for global warming. This wandering chunk of matter doomed human civilization to an inevitable collision course with the icescape.

Two years earlier, both the Northwest and the Northeast Passages had opened for the first time. Bill McKibben seizes upon this historic event in Eaarth, arguing that their dissolution forces us to see “how profoundly we’ve altered the place we’ve ever known”

(2010, 5). If the Petermann incident illustrates ice’s transgressive vitality, in McKibben’s view it is the human who terrorizes the ice: “We need now to understand the world we’ve created, and consider—urgently—how to live in it” (xiv). McKibben is absolutely right: human actions have real consequences that must be accounted for. Yet saving ice from an entirely human industry implies a kind of Arctic anthropocentricity. We wish to avoid catastrophes that only our present actions generate and only our future actions will prevent. Unknown causation is too chilling; according to McKibben, there is direct causation for the current crisis: us. Despite the human’s material enmeshment with icescapes that these recent events describe, ice’s agency melts away.

101 When and how did the human become the center of the (Ant)arctic Circle? The

Norse colonized Greenland centuries before Columbus; Iceland was a commercial center for the English beginning in the early fifteenth-century; and starting in the first half of the sixteenth century, the French and Portuguese competed in the fishing industry off

Newfoundland (Seaver 1996). The northwestern Atlantic was hardly an unpopulated region. (Indigenous peoples like the Inuit, of course, had been living in the region before the Europeans arrived.) These histories are devoutly anthropocentric, however; narrating ice the human point of view risks territorializing the living ice all over again.1 If Bruno

Latour’s theories of actor networks help deterritorialize landscapes and disperse its agents, it is fitting that his landmark text, We Have Never Been Modern, opens in

Antarctica. The ozone layer crisis, Latour argues, exemplifies the “proliferation of hybrids” shunned by modernity, which translates agentic ice into an objectified, even if dangerous, substance (1993, 1-3). Humans exist in an icescape that they must master, exploit, or escape. Somehow pristine and pure in its violence, and barely able to sustain life, icescapes are inhospitable places where the only things alive are invasive or on the brink of collapse. And where, consequently, indigenous cultures risk being “frozen” into static histories of survival amidst trackless waste. Ice and humans are not only autonomous things-in-themselves, but indefatigably opposed as well. The poles of Nature and Culture, like the North and South Poles, stand stolidly apart. Polar-ization sets in. We are still fighting a cold war.

But we are also akin to François Rabelais’s character Pantagruel, who, upon hearing unidentifiable voices in the icescape, is informed by the captain of the ship that a battle took place on the edge of the frozen sea. The noises are trapped in ice; when the

102 crystals are brought onboard, their vociferousness is released with the slightest touch:

“When we warmed them a little between our hands, they melted like snow, and we actually heard them, though we did not understand them, for they were in a barbarous language” (1995, 569). For the traveler-poet Gretel Ehrlich, ice is an unsolvable mystery:

“So much in a glacier, like so much in a brain, is hidden, we don’t know what a thought or a mass of ice is saying, or why it moves” (2004, 54). Let us clutch ice in our hands – not in the name of war or of complete understanding – but in an effort to listen, to embrace, and to become more intimate. Still, the “barbarous language” proves to be a chronic impediment. Maybe the question is not how we misinterpret what ice is saying, but why we do not want to hear it at all. If the modernist view of Nature, according to

Latour, demarcates what can and cannot be discussed, what is and what is not allowed to speak, our narratives about the physical world are certainly susceptible to this question.

We choose to listen: here the gap between alienated subject (vocalizing human) and object (mute nonhuman landscape) freezes over. To rob ice of its voice is a violent act of silencing. This is the albatross we must bear. Almost every traveler who passes through the cryosphere is astonished by its sounds. John Muir, for example, called it

“berg-thunder” (2002, 201). The American nature writer Barry Lopez is an attentive listener. In Arctic Dreams, the northern landscape is inseparable from the imagination: “It is easy to underestimate the power of a long-term association with the land...with the span of it in memory and imagination, how it fills...one’s dreams” (1986, 279). We would benefit from a new ecopoesis in which place and psyche are always entwined, a bustling

“country of the mind” (252). Can we extend Lopez’s Arctic dreams, nearly three decades later, into a more melted world? Can we dream better as a result?

103 ***

Back to the Boreal: Ice and the Early Modern English Imagination

Here is cold comfort: Yes. As I have been arguing in this project so far, early modern English travel writing unleashes this ecomaterialist potential. Yet early modern ecocriticism is noticeably silent about ice; Romantic studies (on up) predominate.2 When ice is vocalized, it typically becomes a network of predominantly human commerce and activity. Joseph P. Ward (2008), for instance, examines how the Thames was “tamed” after it froze multiple times in the seventeenth century. In what follows, I reveal a rimy early modern English imagination at work. Travelers seeking the Northwest Passage discovered vociferous stuff: ice acts; carves its own worlds; builds weather systems; emits creaturely noises; defies logic of land and water; mystifies with its multiplicity of bergs; reveals that marvelous state of melting and congealing matter at once. Classical and medieval traditions told of pygmies, unicorns (narwhales), and white bears; endless days and nights; the North Pole, a giant mountain surrounded by a whirlpool that drained into the earth; another mountain made of iron that attracted compass needles. Mapmakers like Mercator and the fabulous tales of the Zeno brothers and Nicholas of Lynn added to this imaginative geography. For these earliest explorers, cartographers, and writers, the icescape possessed an incredible movement, lure, and vibrancy. The Greeks believed that the Arctic was inhabitable: the word “Arctic” comes from Arktikós, the “country of the great bear” (Lopez 1986, 16). The North Star forms Ursula Major, the Great Bear, in the night sky. The early modern English intended the Arctic to be a valuable stopping point en route to Cathay; in their passages north by northwest they discovered a living icescape.

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104 Northward, Ho: Argument

What happens when we do not come in from the cold? This chapter will be slow, but, like a glacier, I hope it slowly works upon us. I propose a frosty thought-experiment: to speak for, with, and through the icy world in order to (1) recognize our complex co- implication with icy stuff and (2) realize the desires in these connections. “It is time to compose—in all meanings of the word, including to compose with, that is to compromise, to care, to move slowly, with caution and precaution” (Latour 2010, 487).

How does ice remind us that we slowly compose with and are composed by the rimy world? And what new futures, collectives, and joys may come of it? To look forward we must paradoxically move backward. Three early modern English travel narrative will be my onto-ecological point of embarkation: George Best’s A True Discourse (1578), John

Davis’s The Worldes Hydrographical Discription (1595), and Thomas Ellis’s A True

Report of the Third and Last Voyage into Meta Incognita (1578). In their persistent attempts to discover the Northwest Passage, the English distinguished themselves as tireless conversationalists with ice. The early modern Arctic redefines the relationship between humans and ice – configuring them not as impervious antagonists, but as co- constitutive, sensual bodies constantly interacting in a process I call “going glacial.” All three thaw our ontological rigidity regarding ice. And all three, Best’s case especially, show what happens when barriers are put between cold things, separating human from nonhuman as well as other humans. My hope is that these early modern experiences will help us reimagine new futures for our warming world right now.

105 ***

Going Glacial

We should be aware of glacial activity. Some glaciers move about a meter a day.

Others sustain worms, plants, and algae. But what exactly is a glacier? Modern science calls glaciers “living” ice for their trademark characteristic of movement:

[A] glacier is a natural body of ice, originating on land, and undergoing movement that transports ice from an area of accumulation to an area of disposal...Glaciers are dynamic entities engaged in accumulating, transporting, and disposing of ice. (Sharp 1988, 2)3

Glacier ice, like all ice, is a type of rock (rock defined as that which is made of one or more crystallized minerals; ice is a mineral). Glaciers are paradoxically flowing rivers of rock: as they accumulate the snowy particles of sediment, they become sedimentary rock in the process of aggregation, and they even become metamorphic rock as heat, stress, and recrystallization occur. The idea of “living” ice comes from this observable process of material transformation and transportation. As glaciers carry a “budget” from an accumulation area to a wastage area, they leave material leftovers called till, glaciofluvial outwash, and loess units. A number of actions have taken place: ablation (melting), calving, erosion, abrasion, and plucking. Not all ice is glacial, however. Glaciers move, and are defined by, these internal adjustments; technically, falling ice is not a glacier, and neither is sea ice. Although the most recognizable type of glacier is the valley variety, coastal glaciers produce icebergs and/or ice shelves. Most glacial activity is unseen because it takes place in Antarctica and Greenland, the only two places where ice sheets, a type of glacier, still exist in Ice-Age dimensions. Alaska, Canada, South America, and the mountain ranges of south central Asia yield the most glacial ice easily visible. They are extremely good timekeepers, recording up to one hundred fifty thousand years’ worth

106 of climate changes. They provide our drinking water. Glaciers covered thirty-two percent of the land in the last Ice Age, and they affect us still.

Even though modern scientific discourse envisions glaciers as sites of transformation, history, and flow, living ice is different from the metaphorical “life” that science grants it. Movement does not always equal liveliness. The etymology of glacier helps us understand ice’s agency. Glacier as a noun for “ice” in early modern English is unrecorded. The glacier we think of now (“a river of ice”) was not coined until the mid- eighteenth century.4 Thus the meanings we most commonly associate with glacial, such as “of a glacial time period” and “of a slow process,” did not appear until the mid- twentieth century. Yet early moderns used glacies in its popular Latin meaning of “ice.”

An entry from 1400-50 in the OED lists “on a glace” as “to be frozen.” Glacis, a gently sloping bank used as a fortification (c.1270), closely resembles a glacier’s appearance.

The earliest use of glacial relative to iciness is from 1656: “Full of, or having the nature of, ice; cold, icy, freezing.” Glaciate, “to freeze,” appeared in 1623. Clearly, the English had glacies on their minds whenever they imagined something cold or formidable. From

1400 onward there was also a verb form available in French. The Old French word glacer, glacier, glacher (“to glide, slip”) came from the popular Latin glaciare (“to slip, slide”). Glacer could be an intransitive verb, “to glance, glide; to move lightly or quickly,” especially regarding weapons: “to glance off, to slip, to fail in giving a direct blow; also, to glide, pass easily through.” Intriguingly, glacer could be a transitive verb as well: “to cause to glide or slip,” as when Cotgrave writes, “Glacer vn mot, to insert, put, thrust or foist a word into a writing.” In time, the French noun glacis (c.) was “a place made slipperie by wet lately fallen and frozen on.” The noun glacies (ice) merged

107 with the verb glaciare (“to slip”) to describe what we would now call a glacier.

Astonishingly, a glacier does what the Old French word glacier denotes – the action of glaciare. To make a long etymological lesson short: ice is slippery and it slips.

The early modern English rarely used glacier instead of ice (and its multiple spellings) when writing about the icescape. George Best, one of the most popular Arctic-ologists, seldom uses “Mare Glaciale” to convey the “Isie Sea” (Best, 1867, 234).5

Nevertheless, the English seized upon glacier’s multivalent meanings when describing ice. It is not anachronistic to speak of early modern “glaciality” since ice and glacier perform the same theoretical work in these narratives. Like the glacies (noun) side of ice, ice in the early modern lexicon indicates cold material; slippery slopes of contact; and places where things glide, glance, and pass through. And like the glaciare

(verb) potential of ice, ice slides and causes things to slide. If modern science and early modernity seem incongruous, then, glacier’s etymology helps us realize the agency of living ice and furthermore shows how modern and early modern icescapes may suffuse one another. The action inherent to glacier shifts the focus away from knowable glacial geography to a more theoretical engagement with geophilosophy. A glacier’s internal dynamism is really an aspect of “vibrant matter” (Bennett 2010). In other words, ice itself is lively: it is alive, creaturely, and desiring; it carries, disperses, and distributes non/human elements in its icy trajectories; it possesses its own causation. Living ice, never figuratively “living” ice, conjoins the separate fields of glacial geology (work being done by glaciers) and glaciology (study of glaciers). To study a glacier is always to study its work. A glacier is always-already acting, and its work is never done.

108 The English were apt pupils. Beginning with John Cabot’s trip to Newfoundland under Henry VII in 1497, by Elizabeth I’s reign the English obsession with the northwest was unmatched. The reasons to reach Cathay were political as well as economical; arriving later than their wealthier European neighbors in the affairs of global trade and overseas settlement, English feelings of inferiority were also responsible. Many English writers pointed out that the most demanding seafaring in the world was through the monstrous icescapes of the north. The Arctic was appropriately reserved for the stalwart

English, as in Best’s opinion: “the adventure the more hard the more honorable... herein, the Englishman deserveth chiefe honour above any other” (20). Englishness itself was oddly bound up with the ice that stupefied everyone. Indeed, these “invincible mindes of our Englishe nation” had never encountered anything like the hazards of the icescape

(19). Then as now, glaciers produce icebergs and ice shelves in the parts of Greenland these authors visited. The East and West Greenland Currents carry icebergs calved from glaciers, floes of shore ice set adrift in summer, and year-round ice torn loose from farther north (McGhee 2001, 42-3). Propelled by unpredictable winds and currents, and shrouded in fog, sea ice was notoriously treacherous. The search for the legendary

Northwest Passage was also a search for the way out of the inimical icescape.

The English appear to circle back to Nares Strait where we began—in antagonism.

In describing ice’s incredible monstrosity, English explorers also noted ice’s potential to create. There is a seduction, they discovered, in glacial alluviation. Authors flowed with and through these icy expressways (Fig. 3), often describing desire and disaster on the same page. Slipping with icy matter-flows is a process I call “going glacial.” Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari were right to call the body without organs

109

Figure 3: Barnard Glacier in Alaska’s St. Elias Mountains

“that glacial reality” (1987, 159).6 Both a solid and a liquid at once, glaciers are interstitial places. What early moderns called “Mare Congelaum” (“frosen Sea”) is really the congealed sea: to congeal literally means “to freeze together.” Though frozen, things paradoxically move: they flow, harden, dissolve, and then congeal with other substances.

Icescapes are mixtures of human and nonhuman things, “feedback” flows of sedimented bodies that fuse with one another as they move through the icescape. Ice is matter-flows.7

Ice is catastrophic at times – a monstrous hull-piercer – but it also slips up bodies and takes them to new desires across its translucent sluices. Before I turn to my first text indelibly shaped by glacial flows, Best’s Discourse, I need to explain why the English traveled to these icescapes in the first place.

***

The Iceman Cometh

The English moved slowly into the Arctic. Pope Alexander VI’s edict of 1493 partitioned the world between Spain and Portugal: Spain had Columbus’s New World and Portugal the southern and eastern parts of the world. An imprecise longitudinal line

110 divided the claims off the Cape Verde islands. Technically, the slivers of the Arctic

Atlantic – Newfoundland, Labrador, and Greenland – were Portuguese since they fell east of this line. Although the French encroached on these rights to North America between

1520-40, the English were hesitant. John Cabot’s 1497 voyage claimed his “Newe Found

Islande” for England. His son Sebastian’s voyage of 1508 might have been imaginary.

Bristol merchants made another attempt in 1527, but they turned south to the Caribbean after encountering icebergs. Mary avoided conflict with Spain during her reign by moving the expeditions from the west to the northeast. The 1553 search for the Northeast

Passage through the north of Norway was calamitous: the leader Hugh Willoughby froze to death and two ships were stranded. Richard Chancellor reached the Russian coast and was able salvage the English efforts by establishing trade relations with Ivan’s court in

Moscow. The Muscovy Company opened a profitable trade. Explorers failed in subsequent years to push farther east, bringing back only tales of defeat.

With Elizabeth’s accession in 1558, foreign policy changed. By allowing negotiations with Spain to dwindle, hopes for the Northeast Passage were gradually abandoned. In the second half of the sixteenth century, the English renewed their search northwest. The route made sense; the eastern route to Cathay navigated by Magellan in

1522 was too long and the Northeast Passage too dangerous. An iceman cometh: Martin

Frobisher, an uneducated pirate-turned-navy officer who sought riches and fame in northern climes. Major players backed Frobisher’s three voyages to modern-day Baffin

Island from 1576-8: Sir Humphrey Gilbert, explorer and author of A Discourse of a

Discoverie for a New Passage to Cataia (1566), promoted the idea in court; John Dee, the mystical polymath, invented nautical instruments and provided the maps and

111 navigation techniques; Michael Lok, the London agent for the Muscovy Company, supplied money and stockholder support. Not much is known about Frobisher. He made a name for himself raiding Portuguese Africa at the age of seventeen. As an occasional privateer, he must have surely been intrigued by the thought of wealth, fame, and adventure in the northwest. As his poem states in support of Gilbert’s voyage to

Newfoundland in 1583:

A pleasant ayre, a sweete and firtell soile, A certain gaine, a never dying praise: An easie passage. voide of loathsome toil. Found out by some, and known to me the waies. All this is there, then who will refraine to trie: That loves to live abroad, or dreades to die. (McGhee 2001, 32)

Frobisher’s vision of “firtell” Arctic lands echoes contemporary claims of a habitable north. His poem captures a desire for the land while recognizing its dangers. Gilbert did not “refraine to trie”, but he did not return either. Without a doubt, voyaging to the northwest was a risky venture with lives at stake.

Frobisher’s three voyages to modern-day Baffin Island were far from “easie.”

Storms and ice harassed his first attempt in the summer of 1576, as they would invariably thereafter. With only apocryphal knowledge of the area, he sighted two forelands north of

Labrador, believing the strait between them to be the Northwest Passage. While surveying this “channel” he aptly named Frobisher’s Straits, several Inuit approached the ships and began to trade. Five English scouts disappeared. Before leaving, Frobisher seized a native man in retaliation and took several tokens of possession, including a black stone that was “proven” to contain gold back in London. Speculation was enough for a second voyage in 1577, but this trip only produced worse relations with the natives, no recognizable passage, and two hundred tons of rock. Although Elizabeth was pleased

112 with her new claims to Meta Incognita, as it was called, the young joint-stock Company of Cathay was in dire straits. And when dubious assayers pronounced conflicting assessments of the ore’s worth, investors’ skepticism grew. Nevertheless, in 1578 a fleet of record size disembarked with orders to colonize the area. A huge storm separated the ships. Frobisher lost valuable time in the Mistaken Strait (Hudson Strait) until he realized his error and eventually regrouped at the Countess of Warwick’s Island. Mining began; unbearable weather, the waning summer, and low morale forced Frobisher’s return. He hurriedly erected an unmanned watchtower (England’s first structure in America) before heading home with one thousand tons of worthless rock. Litigation, scandal, and insolvency plagued the principal venturers over the following years. Frobisher died fighting the Spanish in 1594; he claimed, or at least others claimed for him, that the

Mistaken Strait was the passage to Cathay. The “passages” from 1576-8 had produced only “loathsome toil.”

If anything, Frobisher perpetuated the geographical interest in the region, and later expeditions by Henry Hudson (1607-10) and William Baffin (1616) helped established future profits for the English in the Arctic. By 1635, Luke Foxe was able to publish a massive collection of northwest travel literature, North-west Fox, beginning with King Arthur and ending with his own voyage. The question, then, is not simply why we have historically “forgotten” this region of the world, as Mary Fuller (2008) asks, but what work the icescape did in the early English imagination and continues to do in ours.

Likewise, much has been written about Frobisher’s ersatz gold, both in literary criticism and in archaeology.8 We would do better to reexamine the living and desirable connections with ice. But how can we move beyond the infamy of catastrophe and the

113 monstrous icescape to discover the more gainful connections that going glacial entails?

The key is to remain in the disorienting ice maze, to cohabit a glacier’s flowing dynamics, to turn to Michel Serres’s icy image of reality: “a sort of fluctuating picture of relations and rapports—like the percolating basin of a glacial river” (1995b, 105). To this day, the Arctic Circle is one of the few places in the world we have not fully sounded.

When we rethaw the ice and enter the depths that we can only plumb but never fully understand, we enter into new relationships with the cryosphere.

***

Icescapes of Desire: George Best

Several members of Frobisher’s company produced narratives immediately after the 1576-8 voyages, the first being Dionyse Settle’s A True Reporte (1577) of the second voyage that was quickly translated. The most accessible compendium of all three voyages is George Best’s A True Discourse (1578). Best was lieutenant on the Aid during the second voyage of 1577 and captain of the Anne Frances during the third trip of 1578.

Richard Hakluyt included Best’s narratives in the third volume of the Principall

Navigations (1598-1600). The Discourse includes a lengthy preface that explains the general advantages of English explorers over their Spanish and Portuguese rivals, exalts the gifts of modern navigational methods and instruments, and furthermore proves the existence of the Northeast Passage. As far as the Northwest Passage is concerned, Best encourages his countrymen to go northwest: Frobisher “dissolved the long doubt of the passage which we seeke to find to the ritch Countrey of Cataya” (216). Best objects to those who find Meta Incognita inhospitable; he argues not only for a passage to Cathay but for a place of English habitation as well. Quasi-scientifically confirming “all partes of

114 the worlde to be habitable,” Frobisher’s voyages for Best are indications of a temperate and thereby livable north (43).

Best’s Discourse invokes the argument for English dauntlessness, placing the

English at the center of an adverse environment they must tame. He amplifies the enormity of the icescape; in his account of the first voyage, for example, Best notes the treacherous intermingling of ice and land. Off of Friseland, an imaginary island believed to be east of the Passage and hence a guiding point for many explorers en route, he sees

“high ragged roks all along by the coast, and some of the ilands of ise were nere yt of such heigth as the clowds hanged about the tops of them” (81). The icebergs are so large they resemble landmasses with their own weather systems. Usually, a place of gigantic impediments like these ice-mountains would not ideal for someone navigating uncharted waters. In his preface, however, Best states that the English are better equipped than

Hercules and Alexander. As a result, he transforms Frobisher into an epic figure pushing through the formidable ice: “We were forced manye tymes to stemme and strike great rockes of Ise, and so as it were make way through mightie mountaines” (212). Frobisher almost single-handedly prevents his ship the Gabriel from sinking during a storm.

Likewise, the natives the English encounter become devious cannibals. The icescape’s alleged gold comes with the risk of being devoured, especially by the second voyage:

“For they knew ful wel, that the beste cheare the countrey coulde yeelde them, was golden rockes and stones, a harde foode to live withall, and the people more readie to eate them, than to give them wherewithall to eate” (132). By making statements that pit an antagonistic icescape and its inhabitants against reliable English fortitude, Best’s

115 Discourse makes a grand attempt to sway popular opinion about an ungovernable north and establish Frobisher as an Arctic action hero.

Best only seems to put up boundaries in his icescape: the English versus ice, the cannibals, the storms. The nonhuman ice particularly threatens them since it surrounds them at all times. In his almost obsessive descriptions, Best alludes to ice’s creatureliness: it is not simply a floating, submissive substance, but actively drives:

“fleting and driving with the wyndes and tydes and streams” (82). Frobisher’s only recourse is move on due to “being greatly endangered with the driving ise alongst the coast” (126). The ice, in league with the winds and tides, propels them as much as they drive through it. But Best intimates the harrowing togetherness of the icescape in these moments merely to shut down its possibilities. The English even taste the “sweet and holesome water” of dissolved ice to prove its origins from fresh instead of salt water

(235). He militates against the thought of mingling with the icescape even at his lowest points. The men debate suicide on the third voyage: “And againe some were so fast shut up, and compassed in amongst an infinite number of great Countreys and Ilands of Ise, that they were fayne to submit themselves, & their Ships, to the mercie of the unmercifull

Ise” (213). To submit to ice is a scary prospect for Best, for it means certain death and never the chance of newness. An “unmercifull” foe can know no “mercie.” Members of the company considered jumping ship and taking their chances with “Maneating people” rather than sink (216). One cannot embrace this Arctic monster. According to Best, when faced with binary breakdowns between ice and human, English and native, the only option is to enter an icescape of pure destruction.

116 Even though they must work together in the icescape, when man and ice meet they seldom intertwine. The ice carries the English; oftentimes they fasten onto icebergs with makeshift grappling hooks in order to ride the momentum through the sea ice

(following underwater currents, icebergs are natural icebreakers). Or the men fasten the nose of the ship to icebergs and use the wind to break through. Yet working together seems to put most of the work in human hands; a margin note reads: “Extremitie causeth men to devise new artes and remedies” (223). Ice threatens, man invents. The English cleave their way through the ice. The ice does not open up new perspectives because there is a still an ontological divide. Even when beautiful prospects come into view, the visions are mired in conflict: “And having by this meanes at length put their enimies to flight, occupyed the cleere place for a prettie season, among sundry Mountaynes, and

Alpes of Ise” (254). Ice remains “enimies” the English must battle. When the ice cannot be defeated, Best employs a different strategy to “know” his enemy and thus distance himself from it. One iceberg appears to be “.65. fadome above water, which for a kind of similitude, was called Salomons porch. Some thinke those Ilands eight times so muche under water, as they are above, bycause of their monstrous weight” (223). He was right: icebergs are not mirror images below water. Arctic explorers were just beginning to realize the spatial dimensions of floating ice. “Salomons porch” is a unique likeness.

Perhaps Best suggests the wisdom of Solomon in his approach to towering ice forms. The unknown must be made familiar in order to deactivate its power. In both name and measurement, the “porch” moors the company with a degree of certainty. This knowledge bolsters the separation between the observing human subject and the observable inhuman

117 object, despite their bodies being physically attached to the creature’s “monstrous weight.”

Nose-to-nose with ice, who or what drives whom? “Driving” ice challenges the

Discourse’s built-in subject-object differentiation. Ice acts upon Frobisher’s men as much as they latch onto it. Best cannot ignore the fact that monstrous matter always surrounds them, touches them, and invades their fragile anthropocentricity. “The land gets inside us,” Lopez notes, and Best must decide what he will “do about it” (411). A stirring moment in the third voyage puts pressure on Best’s efforts to evacuate the icescape from his company’s bodies. Every commentator describes the Bear Sound storm in early July that dispersed and nearly destroyed the fleet. He relates the company’s terror:

And albeit, by reason of the fleeting Ise, whych were dispersed heere almost the whole sea over, they were brought manye times to the extreamest poynte of perill, Mountaynes of Ise tenne thousande tymes scaping them scarce one ynch, which to have stricken had bin theyr presente destruction, considering the swifte course and way of the Shippes, and the unwildyness of them to stay and turn as a man would wish. Yet they esteemed it their better safetie with such perill to seeke Searome, than without hope of ever getting libertie to lie striving against the streame, & beating amongst the Isie Mountaines, whose hugenesse and monstrous greatnesse was suche that no man would credite, but such as to their paynes sawe and felte it. (214)

This chilling scene is an example of the company’s physical fragility. Indeed, the English narrowly dodged their demise, and afterward Frobisher led several crews aimlessly for over a week through the channel he called, in retrospect, the Mistaken Straits. But the storm also exposes the weaknesses of Best’s human-icescape division. The word

“scaping” reflects the idea of English escaping their “perill”, certainly, but it also points up the icescape’s ability to -scape (“shape”) things that any -scape in general possesses.

The men, like the boats, are being shaped by their surroundings: ice is “scaping them.”

118 No matter what a man may “wish” the ice has its own wishes. The “unwildyness” of ice

“to stay and turn” considers it a creature with its own unpredictable will. The men furiously beat back the ice with oars, “striving” to detach themselves from their enmeshment with the ice-creature. For Best, the touch of ice is unpleasant and therefore uncomfortably shunned. Do not touch or act upon me: as the men push off the ice, Best struggles to keep the ice from entering the human.

What happens when English skin touches ice? Try as he may to fight it, the contact with ice on Bear Sound is a significant moment of commingling in Best’s narrative that not only accommodates ice’s agency but dissolves the human-nonhuman boundary altogether. As Serres argues in The Five Senses, sense is the mixtures of the body as it commingles with the world. Skin and its ever-deepening topographies are paramount. Sense is typified by variation, flow, skin, and touch: “the skin is a variety of our mingled senses” (2008, 52). What is important to glean from this topology is the knot, or the mingled, that emerges:

The organs of the senses form knots, high-relief sites of singularity in this complex flat drawing, dense specializations, a mountain, valley or well on the plain. They irrigate the whole skin with desire, listening, sight, or smell. Skin flows like water, a variable confluence of the qualities of the senses. (52)

Knots are mingled sense-bodies; thus the body is like a tapestry of senses and bodies that continually knot together.9 When these knots unloosen by analysis (from the Greek word

“untie”), the senses are anesthetized. Yet analysis is, and always enacts, a proliferation:

“Proliferation becomes a condition for analysis or the result of its practice. To untie is to create profusion” (301). Knots significantly have a flow to them. As they flow they mix together and go elsewhere: “There are only varieties tied or bound by soft or hard,

119 cobweb-thin, or thick bonds, knots that analysis undoes with ease or difficulty. This situation is better described as a mixture than as a medium” (79). Serres’s phenomenology advocates mixture over medium that is useful when thinking about how we sense the ecomaterial world. We always take in a myriad of other things when sensing. “Everything meets in contingency, as if everything had a skin” (81). Serres illuminates how sensible non/human bodies mix, flow, knot-up, and infinitely vary.

Ice has a Serresian skin on Bear Sound, and the English feel its touch. Ice touches them and “scapes” them in a hyper-sensual, hyperborean way. In the end, Best’s words cannot convey the attack of the ice, just the palpable sensations they “felte”: [the ice’s] hugenesse and monstrous greatnesse was suche that no man would credite, but such as to their paynes sawe and felte it” (214). The senses make the best witnesses. The ice has gotten under their skin. Serres’s sense-work opens up a new eco-phenomenology that

Best only reluctantly allows for: sensing sense with and through ice. Touching and being touched by ice in Bear Sound is a powerful moment of being knotted in the icescape. The storm illuminates the sentience of non/human skin; fleshy and icy skins flow and braid together. The icescape is a cryospheric tapestry. If going glacial traces glacial alluviations and layered becomings, we may think of ice as the sloughing of and accretion of sense- bodies. These turbulent interstices are what we should visit more often – in glacer’s sense of “insertion” – and let ourselves be glanced. Ecocritics are eager to meditate in the landscape, but to meditate with the feeling landscape is a different sort altogether. When

Lopez writes that for some “what they are is not finished at the skin, but continues with the reach of the senses out into the land” (279), the reverse holds true as well: the land reaches out, sensibly, into the human. Our shared skins are never finished. Analysis is

120 mistaken if it is undertaken to unveil “truth.” Pathways burgeon; analysis unties the knots of sense-bodies only to create new passages. We should inhabit these glacial knots of unknowing and potential and see where they lead, clasp their unraveling threads with cold hands. Accordingly, the insufferable Arctic fog noted by explorers proves helpful.

Its mists re-mystify the ontological relations between things; its thickness fills space with new creations: “Fog betrays, completely fills the environment with potential things...mist disturbs ontology” (Serres 2008, 70). Ariadne’s thread through the ice-labyrinth does not point the way out, only newer ways in.

Meditation with the ice is what Best does best, even if covertly. It is useful to meditate more on Best’s icy encounters and uncover the desires operating within them.

Meanings proliferate when we hook onto – think with and through – ice. Inconceivably, ice drives the company to ways of actually desiring the icescape. The icescape exerts an irrepressible influence despite Best’s intentions. The skin of ice looks appealing; icescapes of desire emerge. Immediately after his meeting with ice at “Salomon’s porch,” the touch of ice ushers in a new world of feeling:

But now I remember I saw very strange wonders, men walking, running, leaping & shoting upon the maine seas .40. miles from any land, without any Shippe or other vessell under them. Also I saw fresh Rivers running amidst the salt Sea a hundred myle from land, which if any man will not beleeve, let him know that many of our company lept out of their Shippe uppon the Ise, and with their Calivers did kill greate Ceales, which use to lye and sleepe upon the Ise, and this Ise melting above at the toppe by reflection of the Sunne, came downe in sundrye streams, whyche uniting togither, made a prettie brooke able to drive a Mill. (223)

This moment is unlike any other in Best’s narrative, for here he pleasurably invokes the

“strange wonders” of the icescape. He realizes his attachment, after all. Still, Best’s snapshot could be construed as a moment of colonization, a precursor of our modern day

121 baby seal clubber. Understandably, Frobisher was instructed on the third voyage to build and provide for a settlement of one hundred men. Any “brooke able to drive a Mill” would have been a welcome sight for these members destined to winter until the next year. The Arctic colony was never built, but Captain Edward Fenton constructed a small structure on Meta Incognita as they prepared to leave. “Toyes”, “pictures”, and even an oven with “breade lefte baked therein” were left inside to “allure those brutish and uncivill [Inuit] to courtesie” (272). Following this narrative of possession and conversion, the English appear insensitive to the “strange wonders” around them. Brooks are “prettie” for future industry, seals “sleepe upon the Ise” for meat and sport.

Best surprises himself. “But I remember” catches him lost in his own Arctic reverie, surprised by his pleasurable memories as he retells his story for publication. The iceberg becomes a wondrous place in Best’s description. The iceberg is an ecosystem explained scientifically: the sun heats by reflection the accrued snow above that melts and flows to the sea. More importantly, the iceberg is an interstitial ecoregion that defies definition. As solid water resembling land, Best cannot comprehend what he feels. His amazement comes from both the land-ness of the water and his men’s behavior when they observe it: “men walking, running, leaping & shoting upon the maine seas.”

Somehow this “strange” ice-land is desirable for these men; when water freezes, the idea of moving with and on water is most manifest since it literally provides the ground to walk on. Like a proto-glaciologist, Best describes the iceberg’s features. More like an ecomaterialist, he demonstrates going glacial: ice attracts his men, slips and glides them across its skin, calves new desires. Ice teaches one how to slip with living matter-flows.

Playing at “Salomons porch” is more than just the “shouts” of colonization, then. It is

122 better to focus on those inexpressibly “strange wonders,” with all their potential, that baffle Best. To read about ice’s “wonders” is to put the reader in that mixture, the glancing insertion of the visit, but not solely to conquer or comprehend. Best is moved in all senses of the word by his remembrance—on the ice and in his mind. The effects are not only palpable but may extend to others as well.

Englishmen on ice: the icy porch of knotty sense-bodies invents new ways for thinking about human and nonhuman alliances. If the battle against ice in the July storm demonstrates ice’s driving agency and its rejected assemblages with the human, the touching event at “Salomons porch” adds the element of desire to temper Best’s antagonistic viewpoint. The ice is not beaten back, but is actually embraced underfoot.

The Discourse suddenly widens. Regardless of Best’s intent to limit and/or master the icescape, we can see where ice unremittingly punches holes in his hull of reason. Ice punches holes in ships, of course; Fenton ingeniously plugged the Judith’s hull with beef during the Bear Sound storm and stayed afloat. But Best proves that ice invents more than a sinking feeling. Although done infrequently, explorers could nonetheless refuse to plug the hole of uncertainty and slip through it to feel the “tacit ascendancy of the tactile”

Serres describes and ice demands (2008, 60). When they did, they found that these openings are focal points of desire, glacial passages that could lead to chilling sensations and “strange wonders” rather than certain peril. It takes one step off ship.

***

Northwest Passages

Instead of discovering the Northwest Passage, explorers like Best stumbled upon these sensorial passages almost by surprise. The gradual arrival of desire in the Discourse

123 is an example of how knots of mingled sense-bodies endlessly proliferate new routes to take. As much as they embody non/human assemblages, knots are also the sites of interchange. According to Serres, knots are passages. At this junction in Best’s narrative, we have witnessed mingled sense-bodies going glacial. Now, place itself becomes a knot that guarantees its own proliferation through analysis. Intriguingly, for Serres the ultimate knot is the Northwest Passage. The Passage is a more epistemological knot of knowledge, for it is his key image for the conjunction between the local and global, the geological and political, the human and exact sciences. Similar to his work on the contract as a connective “cord” (1995a), the Passage makes contacts and contacts between discourses.

Geography is not an inactive set of discrete points but a mode of transportation:

It transports us, in fact, from one major body of knowledge to the opposite one through the North-West passage. In geography, the carillon of the hard sciences finally falls silent, when that of the human sciences is barely beginning. In this almost silent space lies the landscape. (2008, 274)

The Northwest Passage is a circuit negotiated by the geography it spans.

Serres’s image of the Northwest Passage importantly alludes to the ecomaterial as well as epistemological possibilities the Passage has to offer. Its sensory capacity shapes more than knowledge. As that powerful in-between space, landscape’s mediary distinction becomes clear; landscape creates knots as much as it ties knots together. The landscape is “almost” silent. In Serresian geography, ice’s flows powerfully act:

[T]his new map of knowledge reproduces the old world map, or a present- day view of the North-West passage: great oceans invaginated into seas, then straits and gulfs or bays, scattered archipelagos and islands redrawing immensity on a small scale; ice flows, variable through freezing and melting, projecting into time the complexities of space, overlaps and dead- ends, reliable passages and obstacles, a mixed landscape in a fluctuating state, an intermediate and complex state between two plains of water on which constant, methodical routes are ensured. (2008, 274)

124 The Passage conjoins the hard and soft sciences, but also projects “complexities” into time and space: those mingled sense-bodies and their desires that are constantly reproducing beyond the map’s scope. The Northwest Passage is a navigable route and an ecomaterial actant. Like ice, it transports bodies into new becomings infinitely “variable through freezing and melting.” It is a knot that creates new knots the more one tries to untie it; the location of the Passage is impossible to pinpoint in “a mixed landscape in a fluctuating state.” New passages crack into life. Paradoxically, the most methodological route through a mixed landscape, like “two plains of water,” is mixture itself. Thus to seek the Northwest Passage is to go glacial through Northwest Passages always in- between things. Every passage is a knotted meshwork the explorer passes through, as well as the knot that passes through the explorer. The most sensitive Arctic voyagers theoretically discovered the mobile Northwest Passage whenever they went glacial. They might not have known it at the time, but they certainly felt it.

Icescapes of desire involve a voyage out into these meandering glacial passages, a trip inconceivable to an English navigator like Frobisher meant to locate, and profit from, the mappable Northwest Passage. If the idea of inhabiting pluralizing passages seems too abstract, Best includes a fascinating example of an invitation taken. In their first encounter with the Inuit in 1576, the English “had sundry conferences” with them, trading toys for furs “and suche like” (73). Frobisher asked for directions to the Passage, but without a shared language, most conversations were confusing. A native whom

Frobisher enlisted as a guide was set ashore with a small English reconnaissance party.

What happens next is startling. Best narrates: “After great curtesie and many meetings our mariners contrarie theyr captaines dyrection began more easily to trust them and five

125 of oure men going ashoare were by them intercepted with theyr boate and were never since hearde of this daye againe” (73). Two days passed without word. Fearing cannibalism and the onset of snowier weather, Frobisher rashly took an Inuit man – kayak and all – back to England as a hostage. But he never forgot about his stray men.

A bumbled hostage attempt during the second voyage of 1577 escalated the already-tense

English-Inuit relations. Frobisher managed to interrogate one native about the five sailors; when he discovered stray bones, his suspicions of cannibalism were confirmed.

So began the English attack at Bloody Point: five or six Inuit were killed, an English solider seriously wounded, and an Inuit woman along with her infant son were taken prisoner. Frobisher addressed a letter to the marooned five, but it was unanswered.

Dissatisfied, he departed for England with his three captives. A watchtower furnished with English trinkets was built in the hope that these men might return, two years after their disappearance.

The lost men haunt the narrative. Best’s summation of the topography and commodities of Baffin Island at the end of the third account distracts attention from the five Englishmen. “A generall and briefe Description of the Countrey, And condition of the people, which are found in Meta Incognita” enumerates valuable Arctic commodities in an effort to attract, primarily, the company’s disgruntled investors (238). On their way back to England, they discover an island teeming with wildlife in the Mistaken Straits, the most “fruitful” tract they have discovered so far (218). After the voyage they pass by another imaginary island off the map: “a great Ilande in the latitude of (erased) Degrees, which was never yet founde before, and sayled three days along the coast, the land seeming to be fruitful, full of woods, and a champion countrie” (238). This Boreal Bower

126 of Bliss, although “erased,” supports Best’s general conclusion that the Arctic is habitable, fecund, and exploitable:

To conclude, I finde in all the Countrie nothing, that maye be to delite in, either of pleasure or of accompte, only the shewe of Mine, bothe of golde, silver, steele, yron and blacke lead, with divers preaty stones, as blewe Saphyre, very perfect and others, whereof we founde great plentie, maye give encouragement for men to seek thyther. (243-4)

Taking the “delite” of the company to heart, Best supplies his readers and embittered investors with the “shewe” of the region, a strategic move that essentially erases the threat of cannibalism and of a consuming icescape in general.

Returning to Best’s greatest unsolved mystery proves that their absence is not a problem to be solved but rather an avenue to be explored. These men point to desire immanent in the icescape. The real danger for Best is the deterritorialization of going glacial. Like the men sliding on “Salomons porch,” they inhabit the icescape’s smooth spaces—and what is smoother than ice? The lost sailors perform what Serres calls

“rambling,” a paradoxical method with intrinsic variation (2008, 259). The ice-labyrinths that daunted the early explorers are simultaneously the itinerant’s playground: “Let us design a polytropic, polymechanistic ramble with a thousand twists, turns and connections, Ulysses’ bag of tricks” (270). Method and rambling go together; hence the traveler’s journey is unimpeded by telos, hierarchy, or linearity. The traveler “percolates like time,” Serres continues,

He proceeds horizontally. The time of this great work, both unexpected and expected, percolates along the whole length of the navigation route or ramble, as it could be called, up and own, adventurous, but a knot in the volume of space, with repetitions, rediscoveries, novelties, and sudden grandiose visions. (238)

127 To Best’s disbelief, the sailors went for a ramble in the foggy labyrinth. He routinely advises against rambling into the unknown. Leaky vessels require safe harbors, for example, but soundings are impossible: “and before the next cast, ere you shal bee able to have your leade again, you shall be uppon the toppe thereof, and come agrounde, to your utter confusion” (228). The icescape cannot be sounded, and yet the English entered it time and time again in their efforts to understand it. There is little difference between rambling and navigating in an icescape that refuses to stay still.

The five men prove that the “utter confusion” of the icy labyrinth can be its most desirable trait. The most methodological routes are those passages that carve through a mixed icescape. Frobisher knew his men were out there, mixing. Their voices could still be heard. Noisy glaciers and unquiet souls intertwine with the land, and perhaps the company’s greatest fear was to be enveloped and silenced by ice. Admittedly, the five men might have quickly perished. But in this uncertainty there is also room for imagining more tolerant kinds of intercultural relations. When Charles Francis Hall visited the bay in the 1860s, he heard a story about Eloudjuarng, an Inuit leader who had protected several quadlunaat (a local term applied to Norsemen) after they had been left behind.

The following spring the men set off in their makeshift boat, never to be heard from again

(McGhee 2001, 56). It is tempting to think that these quadlunaat were Frobisher’s men, and, furthermore, that they were attracted to an Inuit lifestyle (if only temporarily). What it means to desire the icescape is not that one should continually dance upon its icy porches, but realize the pleasures of drifting with ice, of going glacial, of mixing with the world. Ice takes bodies to new prospects, and there are pleasures in the disorienting flows of skin. In their ramblings they found the Northwest Passage: not the singular passage

128 dismissible as legend, but the Passage as proliferating passages of non/human bodies that pass in and through each other into unpredictable assemblages. The Northwest Passage is a multiplicity of middle passages without endpoint: a great knot of places, sense-bodies, and commingling always passing through something yet never reaching completion.

Have the five lost sailors finished haunting the Discourse? Perhaps. But the “four unfortunates,” the first Inuit in England, do not—at least not for us (McGhee 2001, 88).

Not only did Frobisher jeopardize future relations with the natives of Baffin Bay, he also established an ethnological limitation to going glacial. The kayaker died immediately after arriving in England. The other three did not fare much longer, though they became celebrities around the seaport of Bristol. The man demonstrated his hunting skills on the

Avon River before succumbing to a lung infection brought on by broken ribs sustained during his capture. The child, sent for by the Queen, died en route. The woman caught measles shortly after witnessing the man’s burial—the English wanted to prove to her that they buried rather than ate their dead. The English intended for the man and women to start a family. On board, the crew members eagerly waited for them to copulate:

“Having now got a woman captive for the comfort of our man, we brought them both togither, and every man with silence desired to beholde the manner of their meeting and entertainment” (144). “[T]he one would hardly have lived,” Best says, “without the comfort of the other” (144). Yet he clearly dehumanizes them, thereby disallowing any

English desire. He speaks of their barbarity at length: “They live in caves of the earth and hunte for their dinners or praye, even as the beare or other wilde beastes do” (283). The woman was supposedly found licking her infant’s wounds like a dog; an older woman’s feet next to her were checked for hooves. As eaters of raw flesh, cannibals, and

129 sometimes animals, Frobisher could kidnap with a clear conscience. Luckily, a threat he made in his letter to the lost men was not carried out; known for his violent temper, the captain’s brutality borders on genocide: “Moreover, you may declare unto them, that if they deliver you not, I wyll not leave a manne alive in their countrey” (147). Here the mining of the land and the lives of its people intersect. For how could the English ravage the “Caves of the Earth” if not those of it as well? Disturbingly, these four Inuit bodies go glacial – but they do so by a foreign captain’s orders, without their consent, and with no desire for where they are going. The temperate English climate stops their flow; its warmth is their death sentence.

We should focus on these knots of problematic entanglements: native bodies hoisted on deck, the meeting of bullets with flesh at Bloody Point. The Discourse is important, even useful, for the discourse it avoids: environmental ethics. We cannot know what the five men felt, what exactly drew them on, what “grandiose visions” they had.

Likewise, we can only imagine what the four Inuit captives felt, what “mournefull song...and Dirges” the woman sang and what story the man told in unfamiliar tongues onboard the Aid bound for England (284). And here are better dreams: glaciality keeps going. Best’s descriptions of the “strange wonders” on the iceberg and the skin-on-skin contact in Bear Sound demonstrate the icescape’s potential to challenge damaging human and nonhuman divisions while acknowledging the fragility of our coexistence, while remembering the histories of violence that have broken the ice. Even for a stalwart captain like Best, by the third voyage his rigid methods begin to thaw a little. He begins to get lost; he senses the marvelous in the ice around him. The first and second accounts of Frobisher’s ventures are rather straightforward in their documentary tone. Over the

130 years Best feels the ice’s pull. His account of the third voyage, touched by the disorienting experience of the Bear Sound storm, subsequently embraces the pleasures of glacial ramblings. Stuck at an icy intersection of fluxes, the crew mistakes their position:

[T]he expertest Mariners began to marvell, thinking it a thing impossible, that they coulde be so farre overtaken in their accomptes, or that any Currant coulde so deceyve them heere, whiche they had not by former experience proved and found out. Howbeit, many confessed that they founde a swifter course of floud than before time they had observed. And truly it was wonderfull to heare and see the rushling and noyse that the tydes do make in thys place with so violente a force, that oure Shippes lying ahull were turned sometimes rounde aboute even in a momente, after the manner of a whirlpoole, and the noyse of the streme no less to be hearde a farre off, than the waterfall of London Bridge. (215)

Best relates the wonders of disorientation. The noisy icescape transports them into a wondrous stupor: “truly it was wonderfull to hear and see” the violent force of the storm, ice, and men. It was noise surely felt as well: ice produces sounds that both glance off

(glacer) and pass easily through the body. Ice slips in, penetrates the body by means of the sound-storm. As Best’s ship is “turned...round aboute” the bodies onboard also turn.

Previously, Frobisher had lamented the thought of voices trapped in ice. Here, the sound and bodies come together in a “wonderfull” conjunction. Once “turned” by the ice, these ice-bodies go glacial, extend out into the sound (and the Sound). To be caught in “the manner of a whirlpoole” causes men to “marvell” as well as despair. Thus the reference to London Bridge, perhaps cited by Best as a mooring gesture of reference, ultimately fails. Escaping mere metaphor, the sound of icy waters enters the men even if “hearde a far off.” The whirlpool disperses ontological categories by its dizzying power to disorient. Ice, men, and sound knot together. The Arctic maelstrom is a dangerous place, but also a place of vertiginous bodies with potential. Finally, the whirlpool stands-in for what the icescape has been all along: non/human bodies in swirling mixture.

131 For its sheer sensual power, Best’s ramble in the whirlpool is his most promising moment of ecomaterialism. Best did not realize that he had felt something extraordinary pass through him, unfortunately; his narrative might have been vastly different. He was not

“overtaken” enough by ice. Nevertheless, Best narrates the marvels to be found when rambling. The geographic Northwest Passage kept changing, of course: from Frobisher’s

Straits, to the Mistaken Straits, to Hudson Strait. The original name given to the icescape is telling: Elizabeth chose Meta Incognita (“Unknown Limits”). Arctic topography can never be fully mapped or known, only felt and passed through, its layers observed and inhabited like skin. Best describes Frobisher’s amazement at this fact. After various cases are presented for returning home, Frobisher pushes north and finds that “the land was not firme, as it was first supposed, but all broken Ilandes in manner of an Archipelagus, and so with other secret intelligence to himselfe, he returned to the Fleete” (235). The archipelago presents a topography of multiplicity unknown to Frobisher. The islands are both familiar and unfamiliar at once: “These broken landes and Ilandes, being very many in number, do seeme to make there an Archipelagus, which as they all differ in greatnesse, forme, and fashion one from another, so are they in goodnesse, couloure, and soyle muche unlike” (239). These lands may be “broken,” but they are somehow also connected in a network of bridges and pathways. Ice is constantly moving, forming, dissolving, and connecting. Ice-land is endless archipelago, segments, and things set adrift. Contemporary maps could not encompass it (Figs. 4-6). But ice is constantly reforming the explorer as well. As Best shows only infrequently, these layered becomings

– what we might call glacial alluvions – can be felt and desired. If Meta Incognita was

132

Figure 4: Michael Lok’s chart of the North Atlantic, commissioned by Richard Hakluyt for his Divers Voyages (1582)

Figure 5: World map from Best’s True Discourse, attributed to James Beare, master of the Anne Frances during the 1578 voyage

133

Figure 6: Meta Incognita from Best’s True Discourse, author unknown originally the “Unknown Limits,” there truly are no known limits to glaciality—just potential.

Illimitable islands of multiplicity finally bring us back to the meshwork of dissolving and forming connections that the shifting archipelago of ice represents: the slips and slides into “unknown” mixtures, the act of going glacial. To think back, then, on Best’s finest summation of his dauntless leader:

And as some of the company reported, he hath since confessed, that if it had not bin for the charge and care he had of the Fleete, and fraughted Shippes, he both would and could have gone through the South Sea, called Mare del Sur, and dissolved the long doubt of the passage which we seeke to find to the ritch Countrey of Cataya. (216)

The “reality” of the Northwest Passage is the joys of dissolution one finds by passing through glacial passages. Frobisher does not dissolve the “doubt” of the Passage; the

Passage dissolves him. Did he sense his own iciness or realize that the Passage is a

134 problem never “solved,” only a knot cohabited? It is hard to tell. But Best holds up the possibility in this moment of deferral that we, too, can be better explorers. We are marooned only from the perspective of the human onlooker stuck in ice. Once we ramble from our anthropocentric vessel, we discover the pleasures of living ice: touching its skin, it touches ours. Where boreal voices are not hijacked or muted. This is a different

“conference” between humans and nonhumans, a glacial assembly of non/human things speaking together, dreaming up “sundry” assemblages yet to come. The Northwest

Passage reminds us that passages still open, that non/human mixtures are always flowing down glacial expressways – somewhere, everywhere.

***

Analyzing Ice: John Davis

Like Frobisher, John Davis was obsessed with the Northwest Passage. And like many of these early Arctic voyagers, not much is known about him. As a skilled navigator, his legacy includes the Davis Strait to the west of Greenland (a land he named

“Desolation”), his praised Seaman’s Secrets (1599), and the Davis quadrant. His three northwest missions between 1585-7 were mainly exploratory. In comparison, Frobisher’s later voyages were primarily for “gold”; the discovery of the Passage was secondary.

Convinced that the Passage lay farther north and west than Frobisher’s findings, Davis pushed up the coast of Greenland until ice forced his retreat south. On his first two missions, he plotted regions far north and caught cod that provided the expedition with a meager profit; on the third, he reached northeastern Baffin Island and explored the

Hudson Strait. Without backers like Walsingham after the third voyage, Davis joined a team in 1591 to find a route from the west (via Alaska). Although the expedition was

135 unsuccessful, he is credited with the discovery of the Falklands. In 1595, Davis published

The Worldes Hydrographical Discription detailing his 1585-7 Arctic voyages. His hydrography is a series of quasi-scientific “objections” he sets out to disprove across his three narrative accounts, similar to Best’s climactic theories in the Discourse’s preface.

His goals are both spiritual and worldly; in addition to establishing trade with India, the

English are to become proselytizers through Greenland’s perpetual and heavenly daylight. After serving successfully with the Dutch in the East Indies, Davis became the chief pilot of the first East India Company, killed in a skirmish with pirates in 1605.

At first glance, Davis’s hydrography seems unremarkable. His response to the first objection, that the Northwest Passage is nonexistent, resembles Best’s strategy of deferral in the Discourse. The unfathomable passage that cannot be sounded “proves” its existence by its very uncertainty. On his third voyage, Davis describes the natives in detail. As they row out to trade, Davis interprets their signs to mean that a larger sea lies farther off:

[T]hen I departed from that coast thinking to discouer the North parts of America, and after I had sayled towardes the west neere fortie leages I fell vpon a great bancke of yse, the wind being North and blewe much, I was constrained to coast the same towardes the South, not seeing any shore West from me, neither was there any yse towards the North, but a great sea, free, large, very salt and blue and of an vnsearcheable depth. (1595)10

The “vnsearchable” blue water – almost certainly of the Hudson Strait – evokes the

Northwest Passage as a searchable passage that is always elusive. Limitable in scope and hopefully limned by maps for future reference, the Passage is limitless at the same time.

The Arctic is abysmal, bottomless, and forever uncertain. Davis finds this “depth” advantageous. Like Best’s exoneration of Frobisher, Davis is candid about his retreat. He could have gone farther and dissolved the doubt once and for all: “by this last discouerie

136 it seemed most manifest that the passage was free and without impediment towards the

North” (1595). But a series of events forced him to return to England: his secretary died; the fleet he had ordered to wait for his return abandoned him; and it was rumored that the

Spanish were preparing an invasion. Davis seems to be yet one more explorer who adds ambiguous knowledge onto an already-ambiguous geography. His account of all three voyages simply widens the gap of uncertainty via deferral. His words, wrought from personal experience, are enough. He even produced a globe.11 There is not much to be desired in his hydrography: the icescape is a cold, mute, and impersonal place that impedes his progress. What else has ice left to say?

Davis’s true uniqueness is his second “objection.” Arguing against the hypothesis that the seas may freeze, his hydrography engages in a scientific exploration as much as a geographical one. In these pseudo-scientific moments, Davis objectifies the living ice.

Seawater, he declares, is impossible to freeze. Ice is congealed fresh water once separated from saltwater by cold temperatures near rivers and shorelines:

And as the nature of heate with apt vessels deuideth the pure spirit from his grosse partes by the coning practise of distillation: so doth the colde in these regions deuide and congeale the fresh water from the salt, nere such shores where by the aboundance of freshe riuers, the saltnes of the sea is mittigated, and not else where, for all yse in generall being dissolued is very fresh water, so that by the experience of all that haue euer trauelled towardes the North it is well knowne, that the sea neuer fryseth. (1595)

Playing upon the “coning practise” of distillation and congealment, Davis’s understanding of the icescape’s dynamics is alchemical. The frozen sea was called “Mare

Congelatum” for its uncanny ability to congeal. As such, Davis’s explanation

“dissolue[s]” the scientific matter of ice. In other words, he offers a solution to the question of ice’s solubility. Davis’s argument is essentially the unmixing of mixture; he

137 “deuideth” the fresh water from the salt water in the same way that bodies in the icescape would divide by the “untying” of scientific analysis – an untying, that is, which depends upon a veiled truth rather than proliferations of meanings. Analysis, in Davis’s case, freezes the possibility of understanding non/human mixture. Regarding his hydrography’s readership, he does not try to conceal the idea of ice’s distillation, but instead uses this scientific knowledge as a way to simultaneously reveal and conceal the existence of the

Northwest Passage he promises to have found but cannot prove. Like a true alchemist, he is loosening language and inhabiting deferral – but not cohabiting glacial becomings.

Expectedly, Davis notices the strange creatureliness of the ice around him. The same ice that grounds his theory against frozen seawater possesses its own vitality. As he analyzes the ice, it begins to swerve:

[B]ut wee know that the sea dissolueth this yse with great speede, for in twentie foure houres I haue seene an ylande of yse turne vp and downe, as the common phrase is, because it hath melted so fast vnder water that the heauior parte hath beene vpwarde, which hath beene the cause of his so turning, for the heuiest part of all things swiming is by nature downwards, and therfore sith the sea is by his heate of power to dissolue yse, it is greatly against reason that the same should be frozen, so that the congealation of the seas can bée no hinderance to the execution of this passage. (1595)

Flipping icebergs that “turne vp and downe”: this is ice in motion, independent of the onlooker’s gaze. Davis automatically turns to the scientific discourse he knows so well.

Salt heats the heaviest, and thus the bottom-most, part of the ice, causing it to flip.

Performing a kind of cryospheric dance, the agents of the icescape – salt, water, ice – present a mystery to the explorer; their desires might have little (or nothing) to do with human involvement. “[W]e don’t know what a thought or a mass of ice is saying, or why it moves” (Ehrlich 2004, 54). Yet Davis quickly halts the flipping ice by translating the

138 nonhuman event into an authorial performance of knowledge. Preferring explication over speculation, the ice becomes a scientific “passage” upon the page. His scientific mind has no interest in rambling out into the swerving world so close to him.

Similar to Best’s earlier attempts to unravel and/or divide human and nonhuman elements, Davis’s erudition alienates him from his objectified matter of study. Arguing against his opponents’ third objection that the Pole is uninhabitable, Davis demonstrates how the icescape breathes. Metals are “con[...]oct and molten in veines” in the mountains of Norway and Sweden. Arctic exhalations, by “pearcing the earth and the waters and through both those natures breathing forth into the ayre, tempereth the quantitie thereof making it tollerable” (1595). If the earth breathes a hot metallic air, Davis has effectively proven Greenland’s temperate climate since “the extremities of ellements consent with their next” (1595). He launches into an intricate series of deductions: salt, as the heating ingredient in water, produces coldness; the cold water interacts with the hot and thin vapors; finally, a temperate climate is the result. Davis’s theories admit inanimate vitality

– breathing, heating – but not quite agency. Moreover, these ecomaterial substances exist in contradistinction and contradiction to one another. His vitalism is comprehensible and replicable. For Davis, then, the expedition creates an identifiable, and observable, icescape that can be understood scientifically and plotted geographically. Any question left unanswered is directed upward to God: “diuine prouidence hath made nothing vncommunicabl” (1595). His trim epistemological lines leave little room for ontological exploration. Teleological truth, divine or worldly, is hierarchically organized just as the human scientist is superior to, and separate from, the icy matter at hand.

139 ***

Experimenting with Ice

Before proving his pseudo-scientific theory about freshwater distillation derived from alchemical “practise,” Davis must put real ice in his hand. He decides to conduct an onboard science experiment. In order to test the hypothesis that a seventh of an iceberg is visible above water, ice comes on ship. Fascinatingly, Davis creates his own little cryosphere:

[A]nd therefore what neede the repetition of authoritics from writers, or wrested Philosophical reasons, when playne experience maketh the matter so manifest, and yet I deny not but that I haue seene in some part of those seas, tow sortes of yse, in very great quantity, as a kind of yse by seamen named yla[...]s of yse, being very high aboue the water, forty and fiftie fadomes by estimation and higher, and [...]uery of those haue beene seuen times as much vnder the water, which I haue proued by taking a [...]eece of yse, and haue put the fame in a vessell of salt water, and still haue found the seuenth part thereof to bee aboue the water, into what [...]orme soeuer I haue reduced the same, and this kind of yse is nothing but snow, which falleth in th[...]se great peeces, from the high mountains bordering close vpon the shore depe seas. (1595)

Davis’s experiment shores up the anthropocentricity of analysis. Once again, he demonstrates his reliance upon subject-centered modes of observation. In his “vessell” he mixes one piece of ice with one part seawater, and the result is the universal scale of these great “ylands of yse.” If Davis observes the activity within the vessel, he also creates it: he makes his own little iceberg.12 Similar to Best’s analysis of “Salomons porch,” measuring the frozen creature outside the ship evacuates ice’s monstrosity. His

“playne experience” assuages the fears of him and his men. Look, here: this chunk of ice is “nothing but snow.” Davis effectively creates a little ecosystem that he can monitor, manipulate, and disseminate to his readers and those more familiar with “wrested

140 Philosophical reasons” and “the repetition of authoritics.” He has a whole ice world in his hands.

Yet how easily this egocentric world falls apart. Suddenly Davis complains of “an horible noyse as if their were one hundreth canons shot of at one instant” (1595). Ice tumbles to the sea, barely missing his ship. The nonhuman noise physically disturbs his subjective analysis. The “horible noyse” is the “slight surprise of action” in full effect

(Latour 2005, 45).13 As mediary actants, the ice boulders penetrate Davis’s seemingly inviolable subject-object border that his scientific know-how sustains. Glacial activity takes place unobserved and in spite of him; the rocks move on their own accord. Davis’s ship and his “vessell” are made miniature within the larger vessel of the cryosphere. Even if the creaturely icebergs flip outside his ship, even if the iceberg in his hand is grasped tightly, the noisy ice breaks the easy distinctions between inside and outside, human and nonhuman. To put it differently, the noise flips the one-way agency the “vessell” is supposed to represent: the active experimenter and the lifeless experimentee. Ice acts upon him. Davis is startled because he senses that his scientific “passages” are written by swerving with the ice rather than against it. The glacial sounds glance off him (glacer).

Ice’s reverberations insert themselves into the passages of his hydrography by passing through his physical body. Davis, in a phrase, goes glacial. If he had previously spoken of the contradiction between elements – the versus – he additionally sketches conjunctions with living ice. Thus the “passages” have no conceivable end; they are “executed” in perpetuity. Like Best’s experience in the whirlpool, Davis feels the knot of the Northwest

Passage via the noise of mingling sense-bodies as they pass through the icescape. And the

141 noise rattles him in a way that guides him to new prospects. The touch of ice in his hand was not enough. It took more than a small “peece” to move him.

Ice enters Davis by surprise, and a sensational new natural contract is forged. He slowly begins to see ice differently than any other early modern Arctic explorer before him (and few after). Whereas his experiments had once proven his hypothesis of elemental contradiction, what follows in the Discription, while lengthy, reads like a peace treaty. Davis drafts a manifesto of our enmeshment with the physical world:

[I]n ordinary reason men should not suppose nature to bee monstrous, for if all such yse and snowe as congealeth and descendeth in the winter, did not by natures benefit dissolue in the sommer, but that the cold were more actual the~ the heate, that difference of inequallitie bee it neuer so little would by time bread natures ouerthrowe, for if the one thousand parte of the yse which in winter is congealed, did the next Sommer remayne vndissolued, that continual diffrence sithins the worldes creation would not onely haue conuerted all those North seas into yse, but would also by continuall accesse of snow haue extended himselfe aboue all the ayers regions, by which reason all such exalations as should be drawn from the earth and seas within the temperate zones and by windes driuen into these sti[...]fe regions, that moysture was no more to bee hoped for that by dissolution it should haue any returne, so that by time the world should be left waterlesse. And therefore how ridiculus this imagination of the seas frysing is. I refer to the worlds generall opinion. (1595)

Davis advances the idea of non/human lives in the balance. Nature and its icy agents could not possibly “bee monstrous,” for without the natural cycle of freezing and dissolving the whole world would be rendered “waterlesse.” All water would freeze. One might argue that Davis invokes the language of catastrophe here, but unlike modern visions of the Arctic ice, there is no pre-destined collapse unless. For Davis, the only danger is in meddling with a process outside of human knowledge and furthermore mistaking “natures benefit” as “monstrous.” Ice is not a cause for trepidation; rather,

Davis becomes an advocate for ice’s flow. He illuminates for his readers the far-away

142 dissolutions that they can never fully observe but must nevertheless appreciate. Let the earth breathe its hot vapors. In fact, Davis’s rebuke offers his own Arctic dream: to embrace the misconstrued monstrosity of nature and its elements and, in doing so, inhabit the world’s flows. A planet bereft of water is a dry planet, indeed – but so is a planet bereft of ice. The most “ridiculus...imagination” here is not just the sea freezing, then, but freezing the icescape’s living ice – to deny ice’s ability to flip and sound, distill and congeal, mix and transport. To make this announcement, Davis needs the ice to flip him.

Davis’s attempts to analyze the ice of the Northwest Passage teach him about his desire for the icescape. He is in the grips of something even as he grips the ice world in his hand. Peering into the “vessell,” Davis sees a reflection of his own knottedness. He recognizes what he looks like through ice’s eyes. Importantly, the “turning” and resounding icescape instigates his own turning, his own transformation. Davis embraces his creature by surprisingly arguing against the monstrous “nature” of the north. Yet what about the clamoring ice? What desires might ice have? Since the ice inserts itself (glacer) into the “passages” of his hydrography, ice collaborates in his experiments. In this sense, the Discription challenges the idea of composition as exclusively human. Davis begs a new way of thinking about how we compose ourselves with the ice world and how the ice world composes us. Davis’s experiment is really a thought-experiment, and one not beyond us. Once we visit and dwell in similar knotted places, we can compose our own experiments too. Our experiments must forgo analyzable truth, however, in favor of a new kind of analysis: the proliferation of knots, passages, and sensual bodies. Desires.

Living peacefully with the cryosphere is an urging seldom unheard. I have been arguing up to this point that we need to revisit early modern Arctic narratives in order to discover

143 the delights and dangers of going glacial—and also to acknowledge the divisions imposed onto this process, whether between captain and kidnapped (Best), or scientific subject and senseless object (Davis). To help us see how even the most gelid non/human restrictions may eventually dissolve, I now turn to a “report” that rethinks the nature of visiting and composing altogether.

***

Composing Ice: Thomas Ellis

Serres writes in the “Visit” segment of The Five Senses, “Do not seek to know how to look at a landscape – compose a garden instead. Go visiting” (239). Composition is not patient observation of a visible landscape but a place of creativity. For Serres, to visit is to compose. He makes this connection via personal experience; his own countryside ramblings prove that the page of the book is inextricable from the pagi of the land: “Pages do not sleep in language, they draw their life from the pagi: from the countryside, the flesh and the world” (238). In their shared “life”, pages, flesh, and landscape compose together in a writerly coexistence. Thus the geographer is one who both writes about the landscape and is part of a “fleshy” conjunction with a sensual world. The earth is always writing about itself:

Carried away by torrents and their own weight, halted by obstacles or their own shape, stones descend and break, carve into the talweg the long path of their fall or movement. Masses of sand, driven by the wind, file away at the mountain. Ice cracks and breaks stones and trees, cliffs and the earth on the plain, as does drought. Who is writing? Water, snow, the return to gentler weather, ophite, granite, equilibrium, density, energy, sun, flora and fauna. This covers, that stains. On what do they write? On snow and water, on fauna or flora, on marble or ice. What the earth displays results from the wrinkles it gives itself. A page. (275)

144 “Who is writing?” Composition, that common task of human writing – indeed of my very own essay here – suddenly is no longer precisely human. Serres’s idea of visiting proves that composition is an ecomaterial exercise; like the carved pathways or “talwegs” a glacier makes in the icescape, our bodies too are carved in a process of co-composition.

As the earth writes, we contain its traces on our skin, as do the skins (pages) of the subsequent narratives we write in order to describe our experience. The ink of a tattoo and a page are identical. Thus the travel narratives of the Northwest Passage are themselves instantiations of glacial composition in as much as they illustrate examples of glaciality on their pagi(e)s. Ice -graphs (or writes) just as it -scapes (or creates). Once we understand ice as a lively composer, and not just some passive pagi waiting to be written about, the icescape cracks open, and more irenic ways of composure with and within a cold world emerge.

Allow me my own ramble: What is the pagos (a Greek word meaning “ice”) if not also a page? Arguably, all visits to the Northwest Passage are pagographies. The resounding ice in Davis’s Discription is a significant example of how page and pagos enfold. But one of the best examples belongs to a minor figure in the history of Arctic exploration. Thomas Ellis was onboard Frobisher’s flagship the Aid during the third voyage of 1578. Hakluyt included Ellis’s account of the voyage, A True Report (1578), in

The Principall Navigations (1589) and its three-volume edition (1598-1600). Ellis’s report is noteworthy mainly for its ostentatious dedicatory poems. He even wrote one of the five poems himself, “In praise of Maister Martine Frobisher,” in which he compares the captain to Jason:

The glittering fleece that he doth bring, in value sure is more,

145 Than Iasons was, or Alcides fruite, whereof was made suche store. (1578)14

As Ellis continues, Frobisher matches and then surpasses the Grecian examples by bringing home the “glittering fleece” (the ersatz gold), taming “cruell monsters” (the ice), and conquering “men of sauage kinde” and “countries straunge” (the Inuit). Following

Best’s example, Ellis lauds Frobisher as the dauntless hero. Perhaps not as rambling as

Ulysses, Jason was supposedly the first adventurer outside the ancient world. Despite the

“glittering fleece” turning up as coarse cloth, or worthless rock, Frobisher at least had

Jason’s courage to his credit.

To read Ellis’s narrative is to question the sincerity of his introductory praise.

Like other contemporary accounts of the third voyage, Ellis describes the monstrous icescape in terrifying detail. The legendary place known as Friseland, for instance, is especially intimidating: “There we might also perceive the great Isles of yce lying on the seas, like mountaines, some small, some bigge, of sundrie kindes shapes, and such a number of them, that we coulde not come neere the shoare for them” (1578).

Approaching his destination, Ellis feels fenced in: “the yce being round about vs, and inclosing vs, as it were within the pales of a Parke” (1578). This “Parke” is not a bucolic place. The company is enlimned, enclosed, and hopelessly claustrophobic:

Thus the yce comming on vs so fast, we were in great danger, looking euerie houre for death. And thus passed we on in that great danger, seeing both our selves, and the rest of our ships so troubled and tossed amongst the yce, that it woulde make the strongest heart to relent. (1578)

Ellis narrowly escapes the hoartempest on Bear Sound. Irretrievably “plunged in...perplexitie” of icy flux, he and his weary companions are forced to fend off the ice:

146 “the yce had so enuironed vs, that we could see neither land, nor Sea, as farre as we could kenne” (1578).

Eventually, the Bear Sound storm abates and Ellis “prais[es] God for [their] deliuerance” (1578). At his moment of salvation, Ellis composes several sketches of a tabular iceberg as seen from all sides (Fig. 7). The storm literally delivers him to new

Figure 7: Captions to Ellis’s sketches

1. At the first sight of this great and monstrous peece of yce, it appeared in this waye. 2. In coming near unto it, it shewed after this shape. 3. I approaching right against it, it opened in shape like unto this, shewing hollow within. 4. In departing from it, it appeared in this shape.

147 ways of perceiving ice. As if strangely attracted to his vanquished enemy, he renders the iceberg for us in both word and picture:

And as we thus lay off an on, we came by a maruellous huge mountaine of yce, which surpassed all the rest that euer we sawe: for we iudged him to be neere a foure score fadams aboue water, and we thought him to be a ground for any thing that we could perceue, being there nine score fadams deepe, and of compasse about halfe a mile, of which Island I haue, as neere as I coulde, drawne and here set downe the true proportion, as he appeared in diuerse shapes passing alongest by him. (1578)

The attraction is a nervous one. Even as he draws close, the ice remains harmful like a wounded beast. The caption to the first drawing calls it a “great and monstruous peece of yce.” But as Ellis draws nearer to it, the ice loses its bite. His second, third, and fourth sketches involve careful attention to detail instead of quick judgment. As he nears the iceberg, he discovers a hollow cavity shown in sketch three – or rather, an entryway.

Neglecting its ice-mazes, Ellis moves on. Significantly, he is the only one moving,

“passing alongest by him.” The monolithic form of the fourth sketch clearly illustrates

Ellis’s rejection. He might have noticed the iceberg’s hollow cavity as a way to assert his own strength. Eviscerating the ice’s body is a way to gauge and control the icescape by avoiding the complexities of the human-nonhuman relationship. The “true proportion”

Ellis describes does just that: he undercuts the immensity of the iceberg by transferring it to a small page in a book he carries. He condenses ice’s monstrous size into something manageable. The sketchbook becomes a method of escape. Ellis’s act of composition, the drawing of ice on the page, is a means to compose his frightened senses in a harsh icescape. Moreover, his composition is avowedly human. He is writing about ice, not letting it glance, pass through, or slip him.

148 Because Ellis dwells on the “maruellous” aspect of the “huge mountaine of yce”, however, his report displays the briefest desire for the icescape. There can be no “true proportion” of the iceberg, of course, since ice endlessly changes shapes. Ice itself is diversity in “diuerse shapes.” And the “maruellous” shapeshifting power of icebergs powerfully amazes the viewer as well. The mutability of the ice island is part of its splendor, and its mystery demands a type of love – possibly a religious love, but also a profoundly secular love for and with the physical world. Ellis’s sketches are acts of shared life overtly denied. Yet he must go to the iceberg to know his opponent. Ellis performs an icy ingesis; his artistic interpretation of the iceberg leads him into, not out of, its cavernous domain. It is in the third sketch – when “approaching right against it” – that the iceberg opens to him. The caption describes a moment of proximity, perhaps even of touch: to feel right against something and not simply against it antagonistically.

Crucially, Ellis “against” the iceberg narrates the physical mingling of human and nonhuman. Perhaps he felt something shockingly familiar when “against” the ice. Or maybe, like a lonely creature, the ice yearned for his embrace. Ellis anthropomorphizes the iceberg as if making its acquaintance: the ice is not always a creature, an “it,” but is gendered as a male “him” as well. But by “passing alongest by him”, Ellis also passes on a chance to fully go glacial, to realize the pleasurable potential of two beings in mixture rather than ontological players on polarized sides. The opportunity dissolves. The ice closes in the fourth sketch. His report is finished. Ellis leaves, “departing from it” forever.

Do we? Returning to Ellis’s opening poem, he surely doubted the “value” of the

English enterprise at these unbelievably cold moments. But the crew’s icy errancy holds much more “value” in “store” for us than we first imagined. If we revisit “Iasons” path, a

149 newer mode of non/human composition appears. Ellis takes the invitation to visit- compose into new territory. Although at times he desires distance from ice, both spatially and ontologically, his “maruellous” illustrations in fact illustrate the compositional abilities of living ice. His narrative of the Northwest Passage is a product of glacial composition since the marks of glaciality are the pages themselves. Ice -graphs (or

“writes”) just as it -scapes (or “creates”). A True Report is a true pagographical text. Ellis is not escaping ice through his art as much as he is -scaped by ice. The ice inserts itself,

“gets inside us” (Lopez 1986, 411), and collaborates. Ice creates new openings and desires by composing with the human. Ellis’s multivalent “against” models the pre- positions any writer may take with ecomaterial. There cannot be “true proportion,” just endless perspectives, horizons, and positions. Composition’s greatest contribution is the promise of the com-: the ability to truly “live with” things. Have we forgotten our true sense of composure? What positions may we take with things in composition? Visiting ice islands – composing with them, through them – is the lesson lost on Ellis but not on us. We can revisit the desires in and of the icescape. Pagophilia can be a peacemaker, an act of love. We can trace how the (ice) world composes us. What other permutations and shapes await us for the love of ice?

***

Processing Ice: The Ice Age is Never Over

Ellis’s island returns us to the meshwork of connections that icescapes form – of shifting archipelagos, of slips and slides into unknown mixtures, of going glacial. Once we understand ice as a lively composer, and not just some passive pagi waiting to be written about, the icescape cracks open, and more irenic ways of composure with and

150 within a cold world emerge. How can we recompose ourselves in this way? The Ice Age is over—or is it? Slow down. Critical responses to England’s Little Ice Age, a long duration of cold weather spanning roughly 1300-1850, highlight the socio-economic effects of this dramatically cooler period in history, including its influence upon literature

(Fagan 2000). Robert Markley describes this little cold front as a geoclimatic shift that necessitates a “rethinking [of] the complex relationships between climate and culture”

(2008, 132). In doing so, we discover how “‘[e]cology and ‘culture’ ultimately are never distinct entities” and thereby approach a “broadly Latourian understanding of the natural world” that he defines as “eco-cultural materialism” (137). Markley’s understanding of a climate-culture constituency is remarkable for its Latourian emphasis (even if broad) and the continuum it establishes between a preindustrial era and our era of global warming.

His “rethinking” invokes the recurrent question I have been asking in this chapter: Do composition and climate compose in a climate-culture alliance and hence always write collaboratively, or is their union merely an after-effect of constitutive, yet ontologically distinct, elements coming together in the service of a “progressive” cultural materialism?

The latter instance would privilege the centrality of a writing human subject (or composer) divided from an outside (even if influential) nonhuman material world.

Ice in the early modern English imagination is eco-compositionism at work. In its very existence, Ellis’s Report – all three narratives, really – demonstrate how ice composes. As it visits (it need not be us), and as we visit the icescape, arctic actants shape and are shaped, decompose and recompose. These bodies are never at rest, never wholly finished. In a culture in which glacial “retreat” has become a byword, what if we thought of glacial process instead? To go glacial is to be both solid and fluid at once, to pass

151 through ice as it passes through you, to process to new prospects and becomings with the world. Like Ellis’s multifaceted iceberg, ice produces only more shapes, only more prospects. And we need to remain composed in the face of this polar plentitude.

Apocalyptic meltdowns and ice monsters are possible, but so is the potential for peaceful compromise. Similarly, frosty mines, Inuit abduction, and territorializing Jasons are only several prospects within a multitude of trajectories; we can reconceive the icescape just like any other. The key is to keep moving, however slowly, forward. In fact, this is what the daunted English did: those sailors, who, intimidated by the onslaught of icebergs around them, inconceivably latched on to see where the ice would take them. But how can we? The Ice Age is over—is it not?

Even now, glaciologists question whether or not we have passed the end of the last Ice Age. The accepted view is that the most recent Ice Age, the Pleistocene Epoch, began 1.0-1.5 million years ago and ended 10-11 thousand years ago, giving way to the

Holocene Epoch we live in today. Another opinion is that we may be in what is called an

“interglacial interval” instead – the warmth between glacial phases. The inter- of the interglacial is significant; the ambiguity of our place in the linear chronology of glacial time is relative to being in the middle, or going glacial, with the flows and assemblages of the ecomaterial world. Enter-, glacial. The interglacial is as much an untimely as a timely place to be in. Glaciers are natural storehouses of history; yet as time congeals into discrete chronological units it also slips away from us. Almost every Arctic explorer notes the intolerable elongation of day and night in the Arctic. Time always moves, of course, just not in typical chronological progressions. Midnight suns. Polar nights. Arctic temporalities bend normative lines of time. Being disoriented by time in the icescape

152 reveals glacial layers of times as well as geographies. Arctic time queers that grand march of progress towards a pronounceable end via its end-less days and nights.

Although eco-compositionism entails a process forward into the future, the icescape’s temporal slipperiness means that we may reach new prospects in the past.

Arctic time moves forward, backward, and sideways as well. Like a modified version of

Walter Benjamin’s “Angel of History,” we have somehow processed forward (as a movement) and yet gone back (as a direction) in time (Latour 2010, 485-6). The past, never frozen in time, confronts us. We look at it, but we also feel it, and we need to compose with it. Hence if we truly are interglacial, and I believe that we are, we can already relate to the early modern English Arctic imagination. An ice bridge between the early moderns and us has always existed. We slip back and forth in time, just as in memory. Like those knotted becomings in the Northwest Passages – of nature and culture, subject and object, human and nonhuman – past, present, and future are all knotted by glaciality as well. The Northwest Passage is a knot of temporalities that slowly carves new prospects. New prospects back in time: to Best, Davis, Ellis, and elsewhere. New prospects forward in time: our mutual “thirst for mixed connections”— that is, a desire for the material processes of connection with living ice (Latour 2010,

481). We thirst for the glacial rivers of Serres’s percolating basin. Like the desires immanent to mingling sense-bodies, the cryosphere is a pleasurable place for us. “Once again, our age has become the age of wonders at the disorders of nature” (Latour 2010,

481). And we stoop to drink from this disordered kakasmos once more.

Going glacial means to process back and forth in time while always moving forward into the future. Sensing the world’s living ice could not be timelier for us in a

153 world of glacial “retreat” (there it is again!), global warming, and drifitng icebergs. The coldest war imaginable threatens to annihilate our warm(ing) world. Ice forces us to confront the “after” but also the “before” of this cataclysmic event. What do we do?

Without an organizing, holistic concept – nature, culture, time, the human – what are our options? Let us recompose. Let us redefine ice as action with agency, with its own desires. Hear it speak. Listen! To be with ice is to go glacial, go somewhere, visit elsewhere, but always compose together; it is a process that brings chilling catastrophes alongside Arctic dreams. There is much to be desired. Early modern travel writers prove that both fears and joys may be found on the white horizon. And that was is supposedly the most barren landscape can be the most prolific, teeming, enticing. We are back in the

Arktikós that opened this chapter: the vibrant, living world of the bear; of Bear Sound’s stormy sense-bodies knotted in sound; of old and new voices that draw us on; of pellucid northwest passages. Ice says what we have known all along but have recently forgotten.

The Ice Age is never over: glaciality is our reality, and one full of potential.

***

Coda: Ice Dreams

In addition to stopping the Judith’s leak with a side of beef, Edward Fenton is known for a log he kept of Frobisher’s third voyage. The typical torments of ice are here:

All the night there was but smale stoore of ize about us, but Middaie we were so daungerfullie environed therwith, that there appeared no waie for us to gett owt of theim...The ize were so monstrous that some of theim were by estimacion an acour broode and verie deepe in the water, so that we laie in verie greate daunger. (2001, 35)

It is hard to imagine the English finding composure in the environing icescape. What is atypical, however, is Fenton’s description of a frigid English dreamscape. Captain

154 Courtney dreams of his own drowning, “and so troubled therewith in his sleepe, that he cried with such lowdnes, Iesus have mercie upon me (46). Similarly, Best narrates a vision that eerily comes true. On the return journey of the second voyage, the boatswain and master of the Gabriell are swept overboard:

Thys mayster...William Smyth...who beeing all the morning before exceeding pleasaunte, tolde hys captayne hee dreamed that he was cast overboorde, and that the boateson hadde hym by the hande, and could not save hym, and so immediately uppon the ende of hys tale, hys dreame came right evelly to passe. (35)

Both of these dreams reinforce the dangers of the “evell” icescape. Ice penetrates the

English mind in disastrous ways. Courtney fortunately survives; Smith’s country of the mind in fact swallows him. The sinking feeling imagined here is not a desirable place of transformation, but a chilling ice tomb. Their Arctic dreams are really Arctic nightmares...

Who is writing?

Who is dreaming?

I refer to the world’s general opinion.

1 For examples, see McGhee (2005) and Schultz (1974). Both are engaging studies of the Arctic and the imagination, but, as McGhee’s title suggests, tend to privilege the human as the end point of becomings. Schultz, for instance, argues for a “friendly Ice Age” since “[t]he human race thrived and progressed in spite of the Ice Age. Or did it do so because of it?” (303). Even while working together as friends, the human is on top. In contrast, see Julie Cruikshank (2005). 2 Francis Spufford (1997) traverses only the tip of the iceberg: the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. For the Romantic phenomenon, see Eric G. Wilson (2003). For the Victorian period, see Jen Hill (2008). 3 My few scientific notes come from Sharp’s accessible volume. A more detailed introduction is Michael Hambrey and Jürg Alean (2004). 4 All references are from the OED; see the entry for glace, v. especially. 5 All citations from the Discourse refer to Richard Collinson’s editon (1867). Page numbers are Collinson’s.

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6 In full: “the BwO is that glacial reality where the alluvions, sedimentations, coagulations, foldings, and recoilings that compose an organism—and also a signification and a subject—occur.” 7 My use of “feedback” and “matter-flow” derives from Manuel De Landa (1997). 8 See, respectively, William West (1997) and D.D. Hogarth, P.W. Boreham, and J.G. Mitchell (1994). 9 Serres’s key metaphor is the medieval tapestry The Lady and the Unicorn. On the surface, the tapestry seems seamless. Flip it over and you are exposed to a jungle of connections and knots like the nerve endings of a flayed man. Likewise, “The chaotic whirlpools of the senses never achieve singularity, conservation, or identity. Hence these tapestries, studded and spangled with every thing in the world” (57). “The organism forms a gigantic knot with as many dimensions as one could wish. It begins, in an embryonic state, with one or more sheets, folded, pleated, rolled, invaginated. Embryology has the appearance of applied topology, looks like an infinitely wrinkled skin. The organism fills with local interchangers that finally form a global interchange system, a giant knot made from small differential knots” (80). I view the icescape like Serres’s tapestry: a meshwork of sensible things stitched and stitching together. 10 All citations are from Davis’s original (unpaginated) document. 11 “[H]ow far I proceeded and in what fourme this discouery lyeth, doth appeare vpon the Globe which master Sanderson to his verye great charge hath published whose labouring indeuour for the good of his countrie, deserueth great fauour and commendations. Made by master Emery Mullineux a man wel qualited of a good iudgement and verye expert in many excellent practises, in my selfe being the onely meane with master Sanderson to imploy master Mulineux therein, whereby he is nowe growne to a most exquisite perfection.” 12 An interesting analogy to Davis’s experiment is the discovery made by the mid- sixteenth-century English translator Richard Eden. From a letter sent to William Cecil in 1562, Eden describes how he alchemically engendered silver islands: “I dissolved two substances in two waters. Then I put the waters togyther in a glasse, suffering them so to remayne for a tyme. Then I stilled of[f] the water frome the masse or Chaos lefte of them bothe. And put it on ageyn. And so dyd dyvers times. In fine, the masse being dissolved in the water, I lett it rest all night in a coulde place. In the morning, I found swymming on the water and in the myddest thereof, a little round Iland as brode as [a] riall or sumwhat more, with at the least a hundredth sylver trees abowt an ynche high, so perfectly formed with trunkes, stalkes, and leaves all most pure and glystering sylver, that I suppose no limne[r] or painter is able to conterfect the like.” See Edmund Valentine Campos (2007). 13 “Action should remain a surprise, a mediation, an event” (45). 14 All citations are from Ellis’s original (unpaginated) document.

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When It Rains

Does life only make sense as one side of a life-matter binary, or is there such a thing as...a life of the it in “it rains”? Jane Bennett, Vibrant Matter

The English chronicler John Stow reported that on Whitsunday in the spring of

1599, “great rain, and high waters, the like of long time had not been seen” inundated

London (Shapiro 2005, 111). As the Thames overflowed, it surged toward a construction site in Southwark: the future home of the Globe Theatre. The building materials, the company, yea, the foundations of the great Globe itself, almost dissolved in the deluge.

The theatre survived, fortunately, and opened later that year. Approximately two years after the “great rain,” Feste, the fool of Shakespeare’s play Twelfth Night (1601), stood on the open-air stage of the young Globe and sang a song:

When that I was and a little tiny boy, With hey, ho, the wind and the rain, A foolish thing was but a toy, For the rain it raineth every day.

But when I came to man’s estate, With hey, ho, the wind and the rain, ‘Gainst knaves and thieves men shut their gate, For the rain it raineth every day.

But when I came, alas, to wive, With hey, ho, the wind and the rain, By swaggering could I never thrive, For the rain it raineth every day.

But when I came unto my beds, With hey, ho, the wind and the rain, With tosspots still had drunken heads, For the rain it raineth every day.

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A great while ago the world begun, With hey, ho, the wind and the rain, But that’s all one, our play is done, And we’ll strive to please you every day. (5.1.376-395)

Melancholic, yes. This song must have registered with Londoners who experienced periodic floods. Over the next thirty years, almost the entire lifespan of the Globe, dams and drainages along the Thames routinely failed. It is not far-fetched to imagine Feste singing about rain while in it as it falls upon a wet stage. Twelfth Night is January 6, the culminating night of Christmas revels (surely a damp day in London). And Shakespeare lived during the Little Ice Age (1300-1850), one of the wettest periods in English history.

Like John Heywood’s The Play of the Weather (1533), written during a flood year,

Shakespeare surely felt some of the prodigious rain of 1599 as he composed his play.

Thus Feste’s song reflects Twelfth Night’s environmental embeddedness. But it also invites us to see how rain allows Shakespeare to explore the complex relationships between climate and culture, human and nonhuman, water and imagination.

We tend to hear the universal pangs of maturation in Feste’s melancholic song that closes the play. Rain not only represents the intransigencies of life, but also the inhospitalities of the world that push against us. Wind and rain incessantly batter the “I.”

It is fitting that rain is the most repetitive part of the song, then: “With hey, ho, the wind and the rain” appears four times in almost twenty short lines. To make this pitter-patter worse, Feste usually sings alone in performance. The rain falls only to promote the alienation he laments. It’s special ability to touch him only makes him feel isolated in its showers, like a soggy individual “I” singled-out for assault. He must suffer the sleets of outrageous fortune. Thus rain amplifies Feste’s role as an outsider in the play, a carnivalesque energy that is “shut” from the “gate” and pushed to the margins.

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Shakespearean characters who stay in the rain are typically fools. The Fool in King Lear reiterates Feste’s speech to Lear who becomes a fool in a rainstorm. Just as his more tragic counterpart, however, Feste clarifies something we fail to recognize or, rather, choose not to see.

“I am for all waters,” Feste freely admits (4.2.56). His rain song is definitely in step with the juxtaposition of romance and mortality in the play. This is the same fool, after all, who sings earlier, “Present mirth hath present laughter. / What’s to come is still unsure. / In delay there lies no plenty” (2.3.46-8). In a play that leaves little we can be

“sure” of at its end – Malvolio’s vengeful vow, for one – Feste chooses the “plenty” of the present moment for us. But by his closing tune, “[w]hat’s to come” is surely rain – and “plenty” of it. Rain keeps spilling over. And so does his body. Feste’s “drunken head” in the fourth stanza describes him becoming liquid: in his drunkenness, he resembles a human “tosspot” or brimming vessel. Like his song, Feste’s body is attuned to the effects of rain. “I am for all waters.” Go to,” Olivia chides, “you’re a dry fool”

(1.5.35). How fleeting is Feste’s “laughter”? “With the hey and the ho” insinuates that things happen with weather, not despite or without it. Similarly, Feste’s “for” in the phrase “[f]or the rain it raineth” expresses both support and affect: things happen or they do not “for” (or, because) the rain rains. Rain allows him to “thrive” just as it thrives. The use of prepositions here is telling; rain is the ultimate catalyst, propelling Feste to endless pre-positions and moments “when I came.” Although stymied in spots, he still comes and goes, again and again, through the world and with the rain.

The clearest example of thriving with the rain is the song itself, borne from

Feste’s embodied experiences of being touched by it since he “was and a little tiny boy.”

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Just as rain drives him from station to station in life, the song moves from stage to stage.

As he enters and exits singing his rainy song, he makes connections between actor and audience that bring them into his rainy world. We can think of Feste’s song as a rainy composition: a kind of positive feedback loop that builds profits exponentially as it falls upon the audience’s ears (“when I came” to the theater). Feste’s song assembles the stage of culture and the matter of nature, poetry and rain. The result is a lucrative actors’ network that will be performed “every day.” Or so the company hopes. Feste’s song therefore reveals an ecopoetical relationship between culture and climate, human and nonhuman that avoids – in fact resists – seeing these elements in isolation, or even as a monistic “all one.” In this light, the song should not be read solely as a critique of the individual’s separation from society and the woes of maturity – although it may certainly be perceived in this way. Being turned from “man’s estate” and/or tackling the complications the “estate” of adulthood incur are definite matters of concern. The feelings of loss and nostalgia that permeate his song point to the problem of not being able to feel the rain at all. Feste grieves the thought of the body cut-off from the “heys” and “hos” of the rainy natural world.

For Feste, being caught in this “thriving” daily rain is a pleasurable thing.

Interestingly, the word we most expect to rhyme with rain, pain, is never mentioned. And although weather is notoriously unpredictable, rain is paradoxically the most stable part of the song. The second and fourth lines of each stanza repeat until the final stanza.

Crucially, “For the rain it raineth every day” – considerably the most melancholic line of the song – disappears in the last stanza when it is replaced by “And we’ll strive to please you every day.” This surprising substitution of “rain” with “please” performs a

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metonymical exchange rather than a literal erasure. Feste suggests to the audience, and to us, that rain and pleasure are physically connected. His song truly is soaked in pleasure.

The “thriving” of sexual pleasure he mentions in the third stanza resembles the procreative type of “thriving” sanctioned by matrimony. Too frivolous to “wive”, and

“bedding” only when drunk, he does not bear children but performances of Twelfth Night instead. The pleasure really is in the performance. Because “we’ll strive to please,” the players bring forth a play every day. Feste stays in his rainy role, birthing a play while simultaneously inseminating future performances. “[B]edding” and the “world begun” are possible allusions to the classical analogy between rain and fertility, a metaphor that stretches as far back to the meeting of Heaven (male Uranus) and Earth (female Gaia) in

Hesiod’s Theogeny. But his inability to dry off is an important point I think we miss. Rain prevents Feste and the play from ever finishing since it prevents the consummation of his

“thriving.” In other words, if rain keeps driving Feste onward and elsewhere, he will never really be “done.” His song swaggers on, the play continues to “thrive,” and the pleasure behind one of the play’s most famous lines is preserved: “For the rain it raineth every day.”

While certainly nostalgic, Feste’s song is also a meditation on how to “thrive” with the rain and what pleasures may come of it. In this sense, Shakespeare theorizes what happens when “it raineth.” The song performs like a cloudburst, dropping upon us multiple questions about the nature of our showering world: the possible material agency and (a) life belonging to “foolish toys” like rain; the creation of a “thriving” composition with rainy matter; and the slipperiness of when’s temporalities. How did early modern rain enable writers like Shakespeare to rethink ecology in newer, ontological ways? How

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might it for us? Stow’s reference to the “great rain” embodies what Andrew Pickering calls the “decentered and open-ended becoming of he human and the nonhuman, a ‘dance of agency’” (Pickering 2008, 7). So are we fools to dance in the rain? Maybe. Or are we foolish to believe that we are “dry”? (1.5.35). Shakespeare reminds us that we are always-already environmentally enmeshed with ecomatter like rain. That there are both catastrophes and joys to be had with a showering world. This chapter takes the open- ended rain dance seriously, examining how rain challenges the (non-) divide between climate and culture. Highlighting its destructive and delightful effects, I attempt a thought experiment that imagines humans and nonhumans in more peaceful cascades. By paying attention to rainy texts, we can develop an onto-ecological approach that builds on prevailing studies that track the conditions for how/why our knowledge of climate change is produced (Middleton 1965). We have always been told to come in when it rains. But what if we desire to get caught in it? My hope is that “when” thinking about early modern rain, we reconceive ecologies in which humans and nonhumans intersaturate, where the

“mangle” may mean a dance of vibrancy, not just one of melancholia or death. We are for all waters.

***

Weather with You

Given Feste’s song, it is no coincidence that pre- and early modern critics have lately faced the weather. Rather than finding a theoretical mode that bridges the human and nonhuman, several critics usefully employ more eco-ontological approaches. Gail

Kern Paster (2007) and Mary Floyd-Wilson (2003) argue that the dynamic processes of

“geohumoralism” and the “ecology of the passions” (respectively) produce forms of

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human embodiment. “[R]ethinking the complex relationships between climate and culture” (2008, 132), Robert Markley suggests that “climate and culture are mutually constitutive entities” (137). Taking a cue from early modern monsoons, Markley formulates an “eco-cultural materialism”:

[H]eterarchical networks of mutually constitutive identities and relations...Such relational models locate agency neither in human subjects nor in nonhuman objects, but in heterogeneous constellations of actants organized into multiple, intersecting, and irreducibly complex networks. (2007, 530)

Markley’s “biocultural” approach, then, describes the “interanimating processes” of acculturation and acclimatization that resists a totalizing system, deterministic model, or single theory of causation. Imagining “monsoon-cultures” as Latourian actor-networks

“opens up possibilities for multidisciplinary investigations” and furthermore challenges the separation between climate, ecology, and culture (530). In general, an eco-cultural materialist examines “the ways in which Shakespeare and his contemporaries and near- contemporaries register their culturally specific, intuitive perceptions of the natural world” (2008, 132). Yet ecology is not subservient to, or apart from, culture. There is no overriding idea of a “familiar” or Eurocentric nature that serves as a point of comparison, just complex interactions between humans and the environment that vary across time: contingent meetings between various actors like wind, rain, and travelers (or singers) that always act in alliance rather than in occasional collaboration or contestation. “With hey, ho, the wind and the rain” (5.1.377). This is weather with you, not about you.

Markley’s eco-cultural materialism extends to our current moment in which the

“idea of Nature distinct from and largely unaffected by human intervention persists”

(Egan). What will it take? In response to this “idea,” Steve Mentz follows the “strange

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weather” that “threatens ‘to the skin’” in King Lear (1603). “[N]either receptive to nor reflective of human desires, this version of the elements re-draws the boundaries between self and world and puts the body-nature relationship in crisis” (2010, 140). For Mentz,

Shakespeare’s tragedy anticipates the modern “new ecology” or the “post-equilibrium shift” that “see[s] constant change and instability as fundamental to natural systems”

(139). Two early modern methods commonly used to comprehend and control this mutability – Divine Providentialism and proto-scientific discourse – are insufficient in the play. Lear “presents the human consequences of living in this incessantly mutable world” (139). The drama’s focus on the “opacity and the unnarratability of the eco- sphere” extends to our present-day meteorological fascination with strange weather and

“emphasizes the incompatibility of human senses (physical and moral) in relation to the natural world” (146). Ultimately, Mentz claims that weather’s unknowability necessitates a modern-day “retelling of the story of ecocriticism”:

Post-modern understandings of cognition and selfhood as ‘distributed’ phenomena, located less within individual subjects than across a network of agents, living and not, resonate with early modern representations of a porous self, vulnerable to and constituted by interactions with its environment. Juxtaposing early modern multiplicity with post-modern de- centering can help us restructure the body-in-nature relationship. (142)

Mentz importantly regards weather as one “agent” across a distributed “network,” yet it remains strangely incompatible with the senses. The body is porous, but this penetration only goes so far: although weather’s violence may “restructure” the body-nature relationship, it also redraws the body-nature boundary. Just as nature is finally illegible, so is the narrative of bodily permeability. To the point: a hard rain is going to fall. If

Markley explains the ecological crisis in Latourian terms – as a recognition of, and an invitation to, ecological assemblages – Mentz’s crisis announces a disequilibrium that

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checks our “hopes of sustainability or interdependence” (147). The question is what rain does, and, just as importantly, how we describe its interactions.

***

Blame it on the Rain

If we are for all waters, the waters will rise and fall. Responding to Britain’s record rainfalls in the first years of the twenty-first century, Brian Cathcart’s Rain seems to bring more of it: “It is only when things go wrong that our dim consciousness of scientific meteorology rises to the surface” (2002, 66). Bruno Latour (1999) would diagnose this tendency as “blackboxing.” Focusing only on the success of a scientific or technological apparatus paradoxically renders it invisible. When the meteorology machine runs smoothly, we might say, it produces factual climates that we can reasonably predict and accurately monitor. But an error (like an overflowing levee) exposes the box’s inner complexities. For Cathcart, scientific analysis provides a false sense of security. We are to make a “managed retreat from the assumptions that science has the answers, that even if the price is high we can always buy protection, that we can cope with downpours and their consequences” (95). What are our options, then? If we cannot build better shelters, we cannot put off contemporary matters of concern like drought or acid rain, either. Arguing against inevitable catastrophe, Cathcart believes that only a “new humility” can shake our egocentric delusions of domination (89). Simply put, “there is no such thing as getting above the rain” (95).

I fear that Rain opens one black box known as “scientific meteorology” only to box up another substance: its subject matter, the rain. The agency of rain is typically hidden until it falls irregularly or causes something to fail. The timeliness of Rain is a

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case in point. I want to rephrase Cathcart’s warning against climate control as a way to open this box of rain: what if we stayed in the rain rather than held our egos and our knowledge systems below it? The preposition is crucial, as Michel Serres reminds Latour during one of their Conversations: “Pre-positions—what better name for those relations that precede any position?” (1995b, 105). Pre-positions are directions to things as well as ways of plotting our relationships with them. Whither rain? The influx of rain in contemporary ecocritical discourse corresponds with the alarming rise (and falls) of water levels throughout the world. Rain’s un/predictability is a constant source of frustration.

So are its effects: one ecosystem’s flood may very well be another’s source of life.

Rather than blaming rain for the problems it causes, I suggest that we listen to the rain, when “it raineth,” more closely. Manuel De Landa argues that human history is shaped by the flows of nonhuman matter-energy, which results in “phase transitions” in our social organization. “[I]norganic matter is much more variable and creative than we ever imagined” (1997, 16). Our narratives are likewise shaped by their material interactions. What stories has rain told? What stories can it tell, what “positions” can it still create? Invoking the tired metaphor for procreation is something altogether different from recognizing rain’s agency, even (a) life. A living rain propels non/human things into new relationships and new material embodiments; it showers becomings. Although rain is known to flood in a “flash” or take part in “the perfect storm,” what follows is a longer, slower journey, one full of accidents and deviations. Like its French namesake, le temps, rain moves us in space as well as time: back to sixteenth- and seventeenth-century

England, over to Mughal India, up into the atmosphere, and straight into monsoonal

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middles. When “it” rains, we sense our coimplication with wet weather “every day”—and may, in turn, recompose our shared selves for another “day.”

***

When It Rains: Argument

If you have ever been “caught” in the rain, you have made such an alliance. Or perhaps you gained a new position by running “out of” it. Yes, rain catches us. Consider

Jane Bennett’s meditation on inorganic life: “[I]s there such a thing as...a life of the it in

‘it rains’?” (2010, 53). Here rain is not merely a metaphor for life; it is lively and a life, life defined in her own words as “a restless activeness, a destructive-creative force- presence that does not coincide fully with any specific body” (54). To recall Bennett’s vital materialist philosophy, rain is “vibrant” matter since “matter itself is lively” (13).

More importantly, rain materially represents it—pure immanence, affect, (a) life.

Bennett’s question identifies rain as wet matter-movement that ceaselessly catalyzes new bodily forms. Rain participates in her thought-experiment, as it did in Shakespeare’s. In a single line – “for the rain it raineth” – Feste recognizes both the subject, the “rain,” and the impersonal affect, the “it.” The impersonal is essential; in her study of medieval rain and identity, Gillian Rudd (inadvertently or not) personifies, that is, anthropomorphizes the rain by making it “personal”:

I am struck by the way that we imbue rain with something approaching intent while yet, apparently, denying it even the potential to be a self- realising system...Rain, it emerges, is personal, it has agency which may even suggest a personality, as it seems to delight in making us wet when we’d rather be dry and with our fellows, but it does not have selfhood. (2009, 71)

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Her insinuation that rain has “intent” and “delights” of its own nevertheless leads to more speculative ways of thinking about rain as a living element that is both impersonal and intimate at the same time. Is there such a thing?

“It rains” resists the binaries between in/human, in/organic, life/matter, and climate/culture. Elsewhere in ecocriticism, however, the “it” is more problematic.

Timothy Morton, for one, reads impersonal rain differently. According to him, the “it” or

“there is” ironically upholds the subject/object distance it supposedly collapses; the binary between in- and outside remains (2007, 77). This “outside” vibe is not the same impersonal affect that Bennett discusses. The “intoxicating atmosphere of aura” is a

“vibe” that shakes the “I” (166-9). Writing about atmosphere still involves what he calls a

“re-mark”: that which indicates mimesis and thus maintains the inside/outside boundary

(47). “As I am writing this” and “it is raining”, in fact, are his examples (60). Each side of the binary is needed to define the other. There is nothing we can do about it—and this is precisely his point. Morton argues that we should stay in the illusion of the in-between, something that “feels like dualism” (205). Rain’s atmospheric affect falls under his “dark ecology”: loving the thing as a nonidentical thing to us. The darkness of rain certainly supports his “melancholic ethics.” But to return to Bennett, the vibrating “I” is also a

“vibrant” one that neither occludes its fragility nor marks its egocentricity. The “I” expresses its interdependence with in/organic stuff like atmospheric rain. Feste’s “I” is shaken but nevertheless stirred into a vibrant climate-culture system. Apparently, when it rains it storms ecotheoretically. When we make it rain in a more vital materialist way, we glimpse brighter ecological collectives alongside their “dark” counterparts.

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Drip for drip, this chapter is drizzly. It falls something like this: (1) early modern drama, meteorological texts, and travel literature cohabit the “it” of living rain, exploring the strife and pleasures of intersaturation. (2) Rain precipitates non/human things in the literal sense: it actively “throws” them “headlong” and “causes” events “to happen.” Its interruptions are acts of creation. Rainscapes are energetic networks, systems in

“cascade” (Serres 2007, 5). Whenever it rained, early moderns could theorize how ecologies are re/assembled: how things cascade to create random, wet alliances like

Feste’s song. In their unpredictable swerves and collisions, these assemblages disrupt ontological binaries, disturb neat linearities of causation and chronology, and emphasize the aleatory nature of scientific methodology. (3) Geographic location plays a critical role in the process. India’s monsoons are prodigious events, spectacular deluges considered both catastrophic and life giving. Hindi and Urdu in fact erase the “it” of English and

French entirely. Baarish hai (“rain is”) and barsaat hai (“monsoon is”) signal (a) life of rain in its very syntax.1 India is thus a contact zone on multiple levels – of east and west, human and nonhuman – that challenges our onto-epistemological conventions about how we know and interact with rainscapes. François Bernier’s mid-seventeenth-century journey through the Mughal Empire exposes the limitations of Eurocentric rainscapes; the profundity of the monsoons requires a new eco-genre of travel writing. In order to narrate his physical experiences in the rain, he must co-invent with it: eco- compositionism. His narrative puts Indian rain to the test. Although Bernier retreats to the drier ground of reason and scientific calculation at times – as we will see in his second and third answers devoted to the monsoons – his fourth reply places him in direct contact with the living rain of Bengal. The rainscape soaks his skin and text to points of pleasure

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as well as fear. Like him, we may reexamine our shared and soaky materiality with rain.

And we may celebrate, not just deplore, getting caught in and by it.

***

Who Will Stop the Rain? : Precipitation in Action

The etymology of “precipitation” helps illustrate the life of rain in the early modern period. What we call “precipitation” today during our weather reports – “the condensation of moisture from water vapour and its fall or deposition as rain ... an instance of this, a shower of rain” – was first set down during the days of the Royal

Society in 1692.2 Its meaning of “senses relating to descent” was first recorded in English in 1475: “The action or an act of casting down or falling from a height; the fact of being cast down; vertical fall or descent.” The word “precipice,” from classical Latin praecipit-, is related (“headlong, sheer). Thus in its earliest meanings, “precipitation” merely fell; rain was a passive fluid that had been hurled from above. Precipitation is such because it has been precipitated. But “precipitation” comes from the Latin stem praecipitāt- (“to throw or cause to fall headlong, to ruin, destroy, to fall headlong, to suffer ruin, come to grief, to hasten, to rush”). Appropriately, a transitive verb form appeared in 1528: “To throw (a person) suddenly or violently into a particular state or condition, esp. an undesirable one.” “To cast down ... to throw over a precipice” followed shortly thereafter in 1541. By 1557, to “precipitate” could denote bringing about or hastening: “To cause

(an event or series of events) to happen quickly, suddenly, or unexpectedly; to hasten the occurrence of ... to bring about, cause to happen.”

To sum up, although the idea of “precipitation” as an atmospheric process that condensed water and precipitated it to the earth was not thought of until the end of the

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seventeenth century – and specifically as condensed, measurable water until the beginning of the nineteenth – early moderns could think of rain as an agentic precipitator that could (1) throw things “headlong” and (2) catalyze events and/or “hasten” preexisting ones. Aided by the Royal Society’s definition, modern meteorology has come a long way from living rainfall. In contrast, early modern precipitation was felt in fell swoops. And to qualify the OED’s hasty conclusions, “precipitate” did not always involve “a person” in an “undesirable” situation. Rainscapes housed non/human things desirous of cascade. I now turn to how early modern meteorologists theorized the thing- power of “precipitation” in one or both of these ways.

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In the Early Modern Rain

Meteorology was slowly gaining scientific momentum in early modern England.

Derived from the Greek meaning “something raised up,” meteors included all atmospheric phenomena. Popular resources included the Bible, Seneca’s Quaestiones naturales, Bartholomaeus’ De proprietatibus rerum, and Du Bartas’ La Sepmaine. By

1625, many classical and medieval authorities had been translated into English. Most studies borrowed heavily from Aristotle’s Meteorologica, which emphasized constant interactions between the four elements, their qualities (hot, cold, warm, and moist), and the two types of evaporations drawn up by the sun (exhalations and vapors). Writers often adapted and interpreted Aristotelian philosophy – supplementing it with the Roman encyclopedic tradition of Pliny’s Historia naturalis, for example – rather than accepting or rejecting his views outright. What is more, English authors started to develop their own theories. Their ideas sold:

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The press provided texts to suit all intellectual needs and tastes, and thereby assured the greatest diffusion of recognized theories. Meteorological notions of all sorts, regardless of their wide variety, were easily accessible to everyone; and even those conceived in scientific spirit had readily passed into the commonplace of everyday life. (Heninger 1960, 33)

Envision the early modern meteorological book market as a kind of celestial mixture.

Here we find technical works like William Fulke’s A Goodly Gallery (1563) and Thomas

Hill’s A Contemplation of Mysteries (1571); topical writings such as Arthur Golding’s A

Discourse upon the Earthquake of April 6 1580 and Abraham Fleming’s A Treatise of

Blazing Starres in Generall of November 10 1577; and wonder books like The Doome

Warning All Men to Judgemente (1581) by Stephen Batman.

In general, rain was considered to be an atmospheric phenomenon of “vapor” with

“cold” and “moist” attributes. It took the “new scientists,” aided with modern inventions like the thermometer and barometer, to ultimately triumph over the irrational discourses of astronomy, astrology, and sublunar influence in the late seventeenth century. But it was a hard battle until then: both the Meteorologica and superstitious types of

“forecasting” were current through the late-seventeenth century. Fulke introduces us to this intellectual climate any meteorological writer would have faced. A Goodly Gallerye is perhaps the most significant early modern English meteorological text: not only was he the first to use the word “meteorology,” he theorized the wonders of the heavens in great detail. Referencing Aristotle, Fulke divides meteors three ways: bodies “perfectly” and

“imperfectly mixed”; “moist impressions and drie”; “fiery, aery, watery, and earthly”

(1979, 26). Rain results from clouds thickened by cold, tempered by hot winds, and melted into drops:

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For after the matter of the cloud being drawen vp, and by cold made thick, (as is sayde before) heate followynge, which is moste commenlye of the Southerne wynde, or any other wynde of hotte temper, doth resolue it againe into water, so it falleth in droppes, to geue encrease of fruict to the earth, and moue men to geue thankes to God. (90)

Rain has a power in this process, a fructifying force that “doubtles...doth more encrease and cherishe thinges growyng on the earth, then any other water wher with they may be watered” (90). Still, this idea of rain as the great fertilizer is fairly commonplace. Where rain power really pours is his section on “monstruous or prodigious rayne.” Clouds mold worms and toads, form flesh, and even forge iron (93). Rain clouds are weird wombs of spontaneous generation:

Wormes and frogges may thus be generated, when fat Exhalations ar drawen vp into the ayre by a temperature of whott and moist, such vermyn may be generated in the ayr, as they are on earth, without copulation of male and female. Or els that with the Exhalations and vapors, their seede and egges are drawen vp, which being in the clouds brought to form, fal down among the rain. (93)

As a Protestant clergyman, Fulke assigns these anomalies to God’s ordered plan, “the vniuersall chiefe and last end of all thinges” (30). Despite declaring meteors as “body compounde with out lyfe naturalle (25), Fulke’s clouds suggest living precipitation indifferent to a divine plan or creator. His attempts to straighten out climatic irregularities through theological explanation betray an anxiety of uncertainty. In his study of early modern to

Enlightenment weather, Vladimir Jankovic argues that Fulke’s dilemma was endemic from early modernity to the Enlightenment: “[T]he history of meteorology may...be conceived as an effort to resolve...uncertainty, or, better yet, as a series of recurring failures to do so” (2000, 16). Fulke cannot explain wonders; he can only describe them.

Through these cracks in his Gallerye, we can steal glimpses of climatic actor-networks.

These are spaces others would inherit—others like the French travel writer François

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Bernier. But first we must visit the galleries of another Frenchman’s house, Michel

Serres, who invites us to see houses differently.

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This Mold House

In The Parasite, Serres points out that “parasite” signifies three things at once in

French: a biological eater, a human (social) parasite, and noise (static). But what Serres sees (as only he can) is relationality in action. The parasite is absolutely relational, para-, next-to, “[having] a relation only with the relation itself” (2007, 39). Each parasite tries to outdo its predecessor, spurred into parasitism by the sudden eruption of a third, noise: “A parasite, physical, acoustic, informational, belonging to order and disorder, a new voice, an important one, in the contrapuntal matrix” (6). The system “is parasitic in a cascade”

(5). To inhabit this cascade is to enter collectives. Subjects and objects persistently switch positions, scrambling the ontological chain of command between host and interrupter.

The system incorporates rather than paints over the “chance, risk, anxiety, and even disorder” that constitute it (14). Thus, fluctuation is no longer an affront to the house of reason: it is the very foundation upon which reason is built. For Serres, there can be no system without parasites. The cascade is far from a closed system; it invents new systems because of its (dis)equilibrium. Rather than “restoring” harmony to ecosystems then, we are better off allowing for disputability, error, and disruptions: “[O]ne must write...of the interceptions of the accidents in the flow along the way between stations—of changes and metamorphoses” (11).

Serres can be a deeply ecocritical thinker, of course (1995a). But a cascading thing like rain plays a little-acknowledged role in his parasitical model. Just as rain falls

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in a cascading form, rain’s noise crucially reveals how the cascade works: it brings collectives “into order and disorder.” In other words, the noise of the Serresian cascade is the same as the noise of rain as it cascades upon our bodies, our architecture, our constructed houses of life and knowledge. Let us briefly visit the house into which

Serres’s opening characters chase one another. La Fontaine’s fable is The Parasite’s prime scene of parasitism. The country rat is chased into the house; the rat chases the farmer, the farmer chases the city rat, and so on. What is the noise in the first position?

But the excluded one, just while ago, was making his way through the countryside; the passer-by goes out again in the rain that, as far as we know, never stops, beating incessantly on the roof of the host and guest. That noise too interrupted a process: a trip. And from this noise comes the story. Hosts and parasites are always in the process of passing by, being sent away, touring around, walking alone. They exchange places in a space soon to be defined. (16)

Rain. Noise generates the stories like Serres’s “story” he examines and the overall story of The Parasite he produces. Recall that the Latin root of rain, imber- (“shower of rain”) comes from imbrex (“roof tile”). In this passage, the literal meeting of rain and roof creates a type of rainy ecopoesis. Wet writer and world overlap, they imbricate, like drizzly rooftiles. Rain makes a lot of noise in Serres’s household. Rain materializes a system in cascade: the non/human characters in constant pursuit of one another across haphazardous lines of poetic invention. These ramblings and errors are part of the process: “Mistakes, wavy lines, confusion, obscurity, are part of knowledge; noise is part of communication, part of the house. But is it the house itself?” (12).

Yes, and we must not mistake Serres’s concern for the house as an act of redemption. He is showing us its mold. Although he is addressing the house of reason (or science) in particular, we can extend his argument further to the house (eco-) of ecology.

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In this dank house buffeted by the rain, we hear alternate voices—be it rain, farmer, or rat. The parasite offers an erring and errant kind of ecocriticism that denounces the human’s position as prime parasite. He does not put it mildly:

[H]istory hides the fact that man is the universal parasite, that everything and everyone around him is a hospitable space. Plants and animals are always his hosts; man is always necessarily their guest. Always taking, never giving. (24)

Rain reminds us that there are only things in relations and as relations, beings in cascade with everywhere to fall: “[T]he thing is nothing else but a center of relations, crossroads or passages” (39). We leave one house only to find new relations in another(s). We are drawn in and out by the noise of rain as it swerves us in a cascade that “as far as we know, never stops.” It is our “trip.” And it was Bernier’s.

***

Rain Man

François Bernier (c.1625-88) lived during the reign of Louis XIV (1661-1715), a

“new stage in the evolution of the institutions of learning” (Dew 2009, 16). By the start of the 1660s, “Orientalist” scholarship in Paris needed reinvigoration. Through the efforts of

Jean-Baptiste Colbert, Louis’s minister and cultural patron, a more thorough reorganization of the Republic of Letters took place. Situated “between the cultures of curiosity and erudition,” according to historian Nicholas Dew, baroque Orientalism would not have its heyday until the eighteenth century (40). Early Enlightenment publications had a marginal presence for several reasons: not only was it difficult for those interested in Asia to get access to sources, expertise, and printing facilities, but the necessary linguistic skills were hard to learn. Plus, travel writing was in high demand:

“Only in the case of travel accounts (written by Europeans) can it be said that literature

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on Asia occupied a significant place in the seventeenth-century market for books” (39).

This insatiable appetite for travel writing coexisted with an increasing taste for climatic literature as well.

Enter what came to be known as Voyages de François Bernier: a personal account of his stay in India from 1658-69. Despite Bernier’s identifiable views on materiality – he promoted the skeptical-empirical philosophy of his teacher, Pierre Gassendi, and was a staunch supporter of Descartes – it is crucial to place Bernier within this period of

European intellectual history that had not quite reached its Enlightenment pinnacle and inside a book market that could demand a multiplicity of perspectives over scientific precision and authenticity. In a letter to Jean Chapelian, Bernier belittles the

“[s]uperstitions, strange customs, and Doctrines of the Indous or Gentiles of Hindoustan”

(Bernier 1968, 300).3 The letter is typically noted for its attack on astrology, amongst other spiritual traditions. Rain, we will see, challenges his Enlightenment logic. Like

Fulke, his scientific foundation is inherently unstable. First serving the court of

Danishmand Khan, a Persian merchant and eventual governor of Delhi, Bernier later became physician to the Mughal Emperor, Aurangzeb. Traveling extensively throughout

India with the imperial retinue, he amassed an encyclopedic amount of knowledge.

Published in French in four tomes (1670-1), and quickly translated into multiple languages, Bernier’s text is actually a collation of multiple texts: political history, mostly a record of the recent civil war and Aurangzeb’s accession; personal letters, including a famous one to Colbert on the issue of private property; and scientific responses to the

French polymath and explorer Melchisédech Thévenot. Members in Thévenot’s circle aimed “to advance the natural-historical cause by making use of travellers” (Dew 2009,

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131). Not only are the answers to Thévenot’s inquiries the most vivid descriptions of the natural environment found in all of Bernier’s correspondence, but they also detail his affective bodily encounters with the Indian rainscape. These short replies will be my focus. Here Bernier fully feels it, soaking up the connections and desires shared between non/human things, and narrating the open-ended becomings that result.

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Spaces Soon to Be Defined: Monsoons

I have argued that rain’s powers of precipitation, its endless possibility to link and disrupt things in cascade, helps us imagine new ways of being in the world. Not just any drizzle will do, however. Travel through India is essential to this process. His travels through “space soon to be defined” depend on some of the world’s wettest phenomena.

Europeans were enthralled by extraordinary climatic events like unusual downpours. But most had never experienced the rain of South Asian monsoons. Monsoons are seasonal prevailing winds that typically blow from the southwest during May to September and from the northeast during April to October. Known primarily for the heavy rains of summer, monsoons last long enough to constitute a season: the “rainy season” known as barsaat in Hindi and Urdu. For the first European explorers to India, monsoons required acclimation, creating climate-culture hybrids, or “monsoon-cultures,” in their wake

(Markley 2007, 527). Such collectives promote a deeper understanding of rain’s role within political ecologies and other material networks. There were certainly economic reasons to understand the rain: transportation was dangerous during these tempestuous months. And the embodied effects of rain were especially noted. Edward Terry complained of the painful monsoon climate during his brief stay in the Mughal Empire as

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chaplain to the English ambassador, Sir Thomas Roe. In short, monsoons are turbulent networks of wind, rain, and traveler. Even their etymology bespeaks a swirling nature.

The OED definition of “monsoon” is a composite of merchant-travelers’ tongues:

Portuguese (monção), Arabic (mawsim), and Dutch (monson).4

Bernier’s interest in the Indian monsoons reflects the era’s fascination with extraordinary weather. Pietro Della Valle, for instance, an Italian traveler to India in the first half of the seventeenth century, spoke of salubrious monsoons near Goa in his

Travels (1665):

Tis observ’d by long experience that this Rain in India, after having lasted some days at first, ceases, and there return I know not how many days of fair weather; but those being pass’d, it begins again more violent than ever, and continues for a long time together. By this Rain, as I observ’d, the heat diminisheth, and the Earth which before was very dry and all naked, becomes cloth’d with new verdure, and various colours of pleasant flowers, and especially the Air becomes more healthful, sweet, and more benigne both to sound and infirm. The arm of the Sea, or River, which encompasses the Island of Goa, and is ordinarily salt, notwithstanding the falling of the other little fresh Rivers into it, with the inundation of great streams which through the great Rain flow from the circumjacent Land, is made likewise wholly fresh; whence the Country-people who wait for the time, derive water out of it for their Fields of Rice in the Island of Goa and the neighbouring parts, which being temper’d with this sweet moisture, on a suddain become all green. (1665, 86-7)

Believed to contain “seeds and eggs,” rainwater was often thought to breed poisonous vermin, especially in hot weather—Fulke’s worst nightmare (93). In Della Valle’s view, however, the rain purifies the air, invigorates the land, and lays down “new verdure...and various colours of pleasant flowers.” Rain might be an extraordinary fertilizer with the ability to turn anything “all green,” but Della Valle also points out how monsoons assemble cultures; these rains significantly precipitate. People “wait for time” to water their fields and, once inundated, disperse into “neighbouring parts.” While monsoons can

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be “marvellous rains, which render [India] not onely habitable, but also fertile and most delitious,” as seen here, Della Valle admits the unpleasant surprises rain always has in store. He describes one unwelcome accident in particular: “At night we were troubled with rain, which passing through all covers, wetted us sufficiently, and kept us from sleeping. The next day we hoi’sd sail, and had scarce dry’d our Clothes, but more rain surpriz’d us.” Constantly “surpriz’d,” permanently saturated, and sent on the move, rain permeates everything. The taste of Indian rain is bittersweet.

At first, Bernier does not allow for any similar surprises in the Travels. In his second reply to Thévenot – “concerning the Periodical Rains in the Indies” (431) – we catch him at his most analytical. Like Fulke, Bernier does not just describe the weather; he tries to explain it. The subcontinent is so hot that it would be completely “sterile and uninhabitable...if Providence did not kindly provide a remedy” (431). The remedy comes in July, when the rains begin their three-month-long duration. “The temperature of the air becomes supportable, and the earth is rendered fruitful” (432). Rain is the great fertilizer, understandably, and Bernier is careful to note that it merely brings life. The effect of rain is something easily noted. His more difficult task here is to accurately pinpoint the monsoons’ “periodical” nature. The rains are only predictable to a limited extent: “they are never the same two years together” and they do not “descend undeviantingly” (432).

The rains’ beginning, end, and quantity depend upon location and vary from year to year.

The rains come from different directions – usually determined by the proximity to the sea

– and even if they originate in one location they may not follow a direct course. In Delhi, for example, rain clouds form in the south but first appear in the east. These clouds “burst and descend in rain” by finding “some impediment” like landmasses or types of air which

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offer differing degrees of “resistance” (434).

It seems that the only thing predictable about monsoons is their propensity to deviate. What is more, since monsoons can commence in different regions and at different times they challenge European notions of temporality. Time itself is upset. If the monsoon’s arrival marks the onset of summer, for example, “summer is sooner” on the rainy coast of Coromandel than on the parched coast of Malabar (433). Bernier essentially discovers the combined flux of weather and time. Serres playfully notes how the French language, in its “wisdom,” uses the same word for weather and time, le temps.

Like time, “[m]eteorological weather, predictable and unpredictable, will no doubt some day be explainable by complicated notions of fluctuations, strange attractors” (Serres

1995b, 58). Bernier’s rainy “day” has come. European seasons certainly fluctuated in time and experienced drastic changes. Yet the idea of an un/predictable season that encroaches on temporal borders is uniquely complex. Monsoons are periods of rain that resist “periodical” stability. They reveal time’s messiness. Thus any knowledge of rain always arrives soon: maybe after this point, sometime indefinitely in the future, but not now. Like the rain, time is ever fluctuating, never complete, a substance always “soon to be defined” and yet escaping definition.

The “strange attractor” of rain will not let up, compelling Bernier to define his subject matter—and soon. What is rain? Adding a scientific “dissertation” about its materiality, he conjectures that

the heat of the earth and the rarefaction of the air are the principal causes of these rains which they attract. The atmosphere of the circumjacent seas being colder, more condensed, and thicker, is filled with clouds drawn from the water by the great heat of the summer, and which, driven and agitated by the winds, discharge themselves naturally upon land, where the atmosphere is hotter, more rarefied, lighter, and less resisting than on the

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sea; and thus this discharge is more or less tardy and plentiful, according as the heat comes early or late, and is more or less intense. (433)

Bernier description resembles our modern rain cycle. In the simplest terms possible, the sun evaporates seawater to make vapor; vapor rises and condenses into clouds; water falls upon mountains as rain; and rain makes rivers that flow back to the sea. According to him, the sun’s heat draws moisture from the water into the colder air above (evaporation), thereby making clouds (condensation) that later “discharge” upon the land (precipitation).

True to the times, he explains these reactions in Aristotelian terms of attraction and opposites: the “heat of the earth” and the “rarefaction of the air” are opposed to the

“colder, more condensed” watery vapors. But there is little room for living rain in his estimation: being “agitated” and “driven” to “discharge” robs rain of its vibrant materiality by rendering it passive or acted upon. Bernier resists the possibility. Even if rain causes life, the question of whether or not the monsoon’s rain has a life is set aside

(for now). Uncertainty simply requires more analysis. Therefore the quandary over summer commencing sooner in some regions than it does in others “may be owing to particular causes which it would not perhaps be difficult to ascertain if the country were properly examined” (433). His second inquiry ends with this hint of eventual certainty.

The “periodical rains” in the Indies organize into elements to be defined later – or so he hopes – despite their ability to disrupt Eurocentric notions of time and expose the limits of scientific analysis. Bernier’s imaginary survey is a piece of a climatic puzzle he believes he can complete but can never truly finish.

In his third inquiry, “concerning the Regularity of the Currents of the Sea, and the

Winds in the Indies” (434), Bernier tries to attach some sort of “regularity” onto the deviating Indian climate. Point by point, he describes when and in which direction the sea

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courses and the wind blows, which season has “doubtful and variable winds” perilous for travelers (434), and the difference between the Europeans’ and the Indians’ navigational skills (although the former is “greatly superior,” he admits, sea wrecks are common for both) (435). Monsoons allow him to explain the entire globe’s regulative movements.

Going from micro (India) to macro (world) in scale, he proposes three conditions: (1) the earth is composed of three bodies: air, water, and earth; (2) it is suspended in a “free and unresisting space” where it would be “easily displaced if it came in contact with any unknown body”; (3) as the sun moves toward the poles it “depresses” them and creates tilt. In doing so “conducts and draws along with it both the sea and the wind” (436). As one pole is elevated, “the sea and the air, which are two fluid and heavy bodies, run in this declension” and thus “constitut[e] the Monsoon-wind” (436). In this extraordinary schema lies Bernier’s hope. If only the earth’s surface were unanimously free of intercepting landmasses, he believes, “regularity would reign generally” (437). Bernier’s hypotheses indicate a desire to order the disorders of le temps. He seeks a kind of cosmic smoothing. Yet trying to disentangle the monsoons’ mysteries through scientific practice leads him to more entanglement. His monsoonal analyses are “mangled,” to quote

Pickering, “an evolving field of human and material agencies reciprocally engaged in a play of resistance and accommodation in which the former seeks to capture the latter”

(1995, 23). The monsoon is material agency that resists “capture” as well as captures the observer.

Incredibly, Bernier’s desire for regularity’s “reign” becomes an acceptance of the irregularity intrinsic to systems. He makes an unprecedented confession in the middle of his third response: “I wish it were in my power to trace every effect to its true cause; but

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how is it possible to unravel these profound secrets of Nature!” (435). Capitalized

“Nature” is not a vault of natural laws waiting to be cracked. In this case, Bernier realizes that these “secrets” truly are “profound” because they “unravel” without end. Analysis is meant to unravel the knot at hand in the hope of reaching the “true cause” or direct route into an object’s nature. Remember that analysis, which comes from the Greek “untie,” always enacts a proliferation: “Proliferation becomes a condition for analysis or the result of its practice. To untie is to create profusion” (Serres 2008, 301). The inexplicable nature of the monsoon makes it a knot that leads to new knots in various directions.

Bernier jettisons the “providential” concept that tethered weather-writers like Fulke to a totalizing, even if unknowable, center. Instead, he supplicates himself before “Nature” in order to explore those shifty spaces “soon to be defined.” Monsoons usher in the reign of irregularity that is always coming at you, and soon, over and over again. And if one body may knock the earth out of place, it does so, importantly, into another body. The fourth inquiry brings all of Bernier’s data under (low) pressure. Rain washes away the illusions of human centrality and analytical enclosure. In Bengal he discovers an incredible desire to be knocked loose by rain-bodies and have them penetrate the all-too permeable barriers of human skin and knowledge.

***

Rainscapes of Desire

Like the rest of Thévenot’s inquiries, Bernier’s description of Bengal comes at the end of the Travels. The significance of this little appendix for a rainier ecomateriality cannot be overestimated. Bernier’s interactions with the “fertility, wealth and beauty of the Kingdom of Bengale” are his closest encounters with the Indian rainscape (437).

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Bernier can think only of inferior comparisons in order to describe the country: “[T]he pre-eminence ascribed to Egypt is rather due to Bengale” (437). It is a lively place, one that attracts foreign merchants along with asylum-seekers like Christians, Portuguese, and half-castes fleeing Dutch persecution. With its free and unmolested exercise of religion,

Bengal models a vibrant cosmopolitanism. Above all, Bengal offers pure “abundance”: rice, sugar, animals, and fruits; drugs and butter of the best quality; beautiful and amiable native women; and an illimitable variety of precious commodities like silk (439). “In a word, Bengale abounds with every necessary of life” (438-9). Noting his own attraction, he reiterates a well-known proverb: “[T]he Kingdom of Bengale has a hundred gates open for entrance, but not one for departure” (439). The country absolutely swells with diverse agents in mixture and exchange, all moving across energetic networks. Bengal is a place of utterly expansive heterogeneity.

While the weather is noticeably absent from his introductory descriptions, the general atmosphere is a force to be reckoned with. Just as the Bengali kingdom is open to foreign visitors, so, too, are its inhabitants’ bodies. Bernier displays the people and its sicknesses more impartially than other travel writers: “It is fair to acknowledge...that strangers seldom find the air salubrious, particularly near the sea” (441). The earliest

Dutch and English strangers faced decimation. Now Europeans exercise more caution, meaning that they drink “less punch” and the masters of ships do not allow their crews

“so frequently to visit the Indian women, or the dealers in arac and tobacco” (441).

Bengal is full of biological parasites that find a way to enter the human via its air or commodities. Bernier remains reassuring: “I maintain that those who live carefully need not be sick, nor will the mortality be greater among them than with the rest of the world”

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(441). He diminishes the dangers of Bengal by leveling its air with the “rest of the world.” By this logic, insalubrious air is not exclusively Bengali because unwholesome air (like venereal disease) is pandemic. Thus Bernier’s cultural descriptions cannot be fixed to simple dichotomies of them and us. Expanding this point demonstrates that the human body cannot be divided from its material (Indian) enmeshment, either. “It is fair” to resist placeholders like this healthy air and that sickening air when comparing climes, but it is even “fair[er]” to challenge the ontological division between climate and corporeality, nonhuman landscape and human body, altogether.

The Bengali waterscape is one “fair[er]” way to theorize Bernier’s non/human coconstitutiveness. Bengal gets its beauty from the “endless number of channels” cut from the Ganges that transports merchandise and provides water “reputed by the Indians to be superior to any in the world” (442). Towns and bountiful fields dot the channels nearly a hundred leagues in length. Bernier’s interest in the unending quality of these waterways shows an interest in a more circuitous method of description, one in stark contrast to his monsoonal analyses. At one point, he enters what must be the Sundarbans region in the Bay of Bengal: “But the most striking and peculiar beauty of Bengale is the innumerable islands filling the vast space between the two banks of the Ganges” (442).

His experience with the infinite islands around him encourages an archipelagic imagination.5 A new kind of analysis built upon multiplicity and fluidity emerges.

Thinking like a river – in terms of identifiable sources or “causes” we saw earlier – meets the effusiveness of the delta. Since the “extremely fertile” islands have “a thousand water-channels run through them, stretching beyond the sight” (442), Bernier inhabits a true place of pre-position. The water has no perceivable terminus—only embarkations

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that open up new horizons. The delta houses flowing things and relations, that, traveling through their “passages” and across their “channels,” also pass through things. When

Bernier dwells in the delta, he gains a different perspective on the “secrets” of scientific experimentation: meaning becomes a series of interconnected islands that lead to other

“innumerable” islands. Linear models of travel and knowledge are useless in such an environment. And with this change in analysis importantly comes a change in embodiment. Bernier’s body becomes deltaic, a channel within channels of non/human things.

There are dangers on the delta, of course. Pirates and swimming tigers snatch victims alike. But if both sorts of kidnapping expose his fears of entanglement, the

“striking...beauty” of Bengal significantly relates its pleasures (442). Bernier’s realization in the Bengali delta sets him up for his rainiest encounter. Perhaps he finally overcomes his penchant for linear and closed systems of analysis because he does not have an ostensible destination while in Bengal. In his discourses with Thévenot he had the explicit natural-historical charge to “communicate whatever observations” he had regarding the monsoons (428). When he recalls his nine-day journey “from Pipli to

Ogouli, among these islands and channels,” then, his newfound sense of fluidity is put to the test (443). Ogouli is an endpoint, arguably, but it is a point amongst a host of other points that distract him, intervene, and re-route his movement. And what emerges along the way. For nearly a week and a half, “no day passed without some extraordinary accident or adventure” (443). Moreover, the “extraordinary” accidents that befall him – those interceptions “one must write” about, says Serres – are meteorological (2007, 11).

Bernier’s narrative trip to Ogouli is actually a series of trips.

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On the second night, Bernier and his men bed down in a “snug creek” beyond the main channel (444). With the boat tied to a tree and at a safe distance from tigers, he keeps watch. What he watches exhilarates him:

While keeping watch, I witnessed a Phenomenon of Nature such as I had twice observed at Dehli. I beheld a lunar rainbow, and awoke the whole of my company, who all expressed much surprise, especially two Portuguese pilots, whom I had received into the boat at the request of a friend. They declared that they had neither seen nor heard of such a rainbow. (444)

Aristotle considered rainbows to be a phenomena of reflection caused by clouds opposite the sun or moon (Heninger 240). Like the descriptively ambiguous nature of rainbows

(something in-between water and light), Bernier is on the brink of consciousness as well.

The rainbow seems like a hallucination (somewhere in-between material and immaterial).

According to biblical tradition, the rainbow represented God’s promise to Noah (and mankind) after the Flood. Never again would rain destroy the earth. Life in postdiluvian times therefore meant a life of peace and futurity. But the rainbow is not just a sign or comprehensible wonder Bernier wants to narrate to others. Enacting what Latour has called the slight “surprise” of action, the rainbow surprises him, and his companions, with its agency (2005, 45). The lunar rainbow is an actant that makes a “Phenomenon of

Nature” (444). The rain infiltrates Bernier on the river and catalyzes a series of events: it moves him emotionally and holds his gaze (“I beheld”), and then it transports him physically as he scrambles to notify the others (“I...awoke”). His decision to awaken the company and share his experience with the rain is a powerful moment of collaboration made between rain, light, and human (to name just a few participants). Though “twice observed” at Delhi, it is when Bernier inhabits the vibrant Bengali waterscape that the rainbow’s true colors – as a cascading collective – become clear. The biblical covenant

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had forestalled destruction. What Bernier witnesses on the bank is a non/human contract that promotes creative connections instead.

The rainbow proves to be a catching thing, initiating a cascade of activity and setting actants adrift. On the third day Bernier and his men are literally drifting,

“lost...among the channels” (444), when Portuguese salt-makers put Bernier’s party back on track. That night the watch changes: “my Portuguese, who were full of the strange appearance on the preceding night, and kept their eyes constantly fixed toward the heavens, roused me from my sleep and pointed out another rainbow as beautiful and as well defined as the last” (445). Who is watching whom? For the Portuguese, the rainbow is that object at the center of relations, the atmospheric thing upon which their attention is

“fixed.” The “heavens” interact as well, “filling” the men with its “strange appearance.”

Being suddenly “roused” expectedly discomforts Bernier, who quickly grounds himself in his scholarship: “You are not to imagine that I mistake a halo for an iris” (445). Yet he quickly abandons his treatise to focus on his arousal: something “beautiful” and “well defined.” Although “well-defined” in his estimation, the rain once again crosses temporal definitions. Rain takes you somewhere other than authoritative realms – it takes you to new places in space and time. “Thus you see that I am more happy than the ancients, who, according to Aristotle, had observed no lunar rainbows before his time” (445). Once an “ancient” before the dawn of lunar rainbows, Bernier is suddenly rushed into

Aristotle’s time of first light, and finally into a modernity in which these rainbows may be more than “twice observed.” Ultimately, Bernier’s nighttime encounters are pleasurable ways to compose with the rain. The rainbow invents collectives and the routes for them to travel. Was not Iris both the Greek goddess of the rainbow and the

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gods’ messenger? Bernier’s eye is the meeting point of iris and Iris, a lively conversation between human and sky, eye and rainbow. It is a “beautiful” thing.

Bernier’s ecological equanimity abruptly ends. On the fourth night, the air is “so hot and suffocating that we could scarcely breathe” (445). Glowworms seemingly ignite in the air, and Bernier fears the same incendiary relationship between his body and the landscape. But the unbearable heat proves to be the least of his worries; the worst is when it rains. A torrential storm catches him unawares on the fifth night. The company attaches the boat to nearby trees for safety. When the cable breaks, Bernier is forced to hug trees for several hours: “Our situation while clinging for our lives to the trees was indeed most painful; the rain fell as if poured into the boat from buckets, and the lightning and thunder were so vivid and loud, and so near our heads, that we despaired of surviving this horrible night” (445). The elements viciously attack the men. Far from the rainbow’s surprise, the rain’s “painful” affect produces pure terror. Raindrops harass human skin; the noise of rain rattles their senses. One could argue that Bernier’s entwinement celebrates rain’s ability to connect – as in, the more mediators the better – or that it even discloses a strange love for trees. But the relationships he makes are clearly meant for human life- preservation. To do anything else would be “inevitably to perish” (446). There is no way to get “above the rain” (Cathcart 2002, 95). Bernier inhabits the cascade, and his body nearly unravels in the rain’s “profound secrets” he had tried to trace.

Once beautiful, now catastrophic, rain precipitates Bernier into near-destruction on the fifth night. Rain is utter turbulence. Still, it is rain’s un/predictable nature that swerves him into uncertain collectives—and thus into sites of potential. Indeed, his trip is

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not yet over; rain continues to create new passages and pushes his Travels onward.

Arriving at Ogouly four days after the storm, Bernier arrives in a rainscape of desire:

Nothing, however, could be more pleasant than the remainder of the voyage. We arrived at Ogouly on the ninth day, and my eyes seemed never sated with gazing on the delightful country through which we passed. My trunk, however, and all my wearing-apparel were wet, the poultry dead, the fish spoilt, and the whole of my biscuits soaked with rain. (446)

The same cruel rainscape transforms into “delightful country.” And as the rain passes through his body, Bernier becomes rain-man. His eyes are washed-over, and, never

“sated,” they are incapable of being filled. His relationship with the rainscape at Ogouly is entirely based on desire rather than lack: non/human desires to touch and be touched, to cohabit, and to interconnect. Rain fills without a point of fulfillment. “Nothing...could be more pleasant” than being caught in and by the rain. His eyes, like his body, remain open-ended and ready for “more.” Bernier is constantly gazing, always absorbing, and energetically on the move. The same year the Travels were translated into English, Ralph

Bohun wrote A Discourse Concerning the Origine and Properties of Wind (1671).

Monsoons are his centerpiece, and the Discourse’s illustration is now famous (Fig. 8).

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Figure 8: From Ralph Bohun, A Discourse Concerning the Origine and Properties of Wind (1671)

Bohun sees the atmosphere as a vibrant place:

So that there can scarce be a moments rest in the Universe, the Atmosphere being as one continued scene of Action and Passion, that I believe the Air even in the calmest days is almost every where Agitated, at least by some insensible Wind. But thus farre of their distinct Species, and particularly of the Monsoons. (1671, 130)

“Action” and agitation without “rest,” “Passion” that is “insensible” and yet palpable— monsoons as the desiring-spaces Bohun leaves us in (and with) “thus farre.” Similarly,

Bernier ends his inquiry (and shortly thereafter, his Travels) with this Bengali rainscape

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of desire. In a wet way, he brings us back to where we have always been: a cascade of non/human things that takes us on “painful” and “pleasant” trips (446). Right into the heart of elemental mixture, that vertiginous middle of Bohun’s monsoon.

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Conclusion: Have You Ever Seen the Rain?

Despite the material insulation in which we wrap ourselves, these tousled forests and ocean currents pushing through inland passages still determine how we live; the landscape overwhelms. We are not removed—yet—from the arms of the land. Timothy Egan, The Good Rain

Whenever it rained, Bernier reacted widely: exhibiting scientific control (the discourses on monsoons), composing a beautiful contract (the lunar rainbows), braving turbulent contact zones (the storm en route to Ogouli), and desiring intersaturated becomings (to be soaked without satiation). Whether or not it is embraced, whether drizzly or diluvial, living rain resists any solid position. Rain dis/joins actants, simultaneously interrupting and inventing collectives. Drip by drip, we have seen where rain took Bernier. Rain is a trip to both pleasure and catastrophe. In his masterful reading of Serres’s parasite, Julian Yates describes “agentic drift”: “[A] way of representing agency as a dispersed or distributed process in which we participate rather than as a property which we are said to own” (2002, 48). Agentive drift epitomizes the distributed agency of rainscapes. Rain is “ecological” drift. So how might we drift into newer ecological assemblages? Whither rain? Our precipitation-participation begins by hearing the rain on our rooftops, feeling it on our bodies, and listening to the stories it tells. At the same time, we need to re-examine the kinds of stories we are told and the types of embodied experience we narrate. Bernier’s Travels might be pre-imperialist, yet it does

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not take an avowedly postcolonial ecocritical reading to connect his narrative to the eventual colonization of India and the harmful extraction of its resources. The ethics of the cascade need to be explored as well. Within Bernier’s rainscape of desire, after all,

“the poultry [is] dead” (446). And what might rain desire? These are important starting points for our own inquiries. A theorist of living rain like Bernier shows us to be always- already with/in rainy weather. Once we realize that a house (oikos) “out of” the rain is illusory, once we stop tiling our houses of reason in vain efforts to protect them, we begin to build new houses altogether. Together. Let it rain.

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Coda: Come Again Another Day

Feste touched by a living rain “every day” should not sound so foolish by now. It is an everyday dance of agency we overlook. The trick is on us. From Feste’s first days, he realizes that rain does not stop at the skin, does not halt at the supposed limits of the human. His song celebrates and demonstrates the individual indivisible from the physical environment. At the same time, he forces us to recognize rain’s real violence. He gestures to matters of concern, both then and now: floods, droughts, acid rain, “ecological refugees” who are forced out of their own “gates,” out of their own homes, and barred from others.’ Feste’s rain song of connection emphasizes the necessary “cares” we must have in a diluvial world. But it also highlights the pleasures, the festiveness, of an eco- ontological approach over the tired, and damaging, duality of climate and culture. The

“estates” of nature and culture were and have never been severed ever “since the world begun.” Shakespeare realized this on a rainy day in 1599. The “great rain” did dissolve the Globe, at least the idea of a globe made out of discrete human and nonhuman realms.

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When it rained, it ushered in a new world, the play of Twelfth Night, which sings about our interdependence with things, the cares we must take, and the promises of newer worlds.

For the rain it

raineth

every

day

1 Shukriya to Jonathan Gil Harris for bringing this to my attention. 2 See precipitation, n. and precipitate v. in the OED 3 Henry Oldenburg of the Royal Society published an English translation in 1671. I will use a different English translation, Travels in the Mogul Empire, translated by Archibald Constable. For consistency, I will refer to Bernier’s text henceforth as the Travels. Page numbers are Constable’s. 4 See monsoon, n. in the OED 5 Amitav Ghosh (2004) is a gorgeous modern example. Characters reference Bernier, travel in the same general area, and replay certain key scenes from the Travels.

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Swamp Things

Doesn’t intimacy always reveal the pores, the loosely woven, the invitation to go below, the way the bog invites, gurgling and swaying and rearranging itself around your by-now-somersaulted plane, its tousled layers of sphagnum and cranberry rising over your upside-down windshield?

A swamp is a poor place to go for a steady reflection.

Barbara Hurd, Stirring the Mud

Despite the island’s geographical mystery, it is fairly commonplace by now for critics of Shakespeare’s The Tempest (1611) to see Caliban as a New World native. What is less noticed, perhaps, is Caliban’s relation to a material place on the island, the marsh:

“As wicked dew as e’er my mother brushed / With raven’s feather from unwholesome fen / Drop on you both! A southwest blow on ye, / And blister you all o’er!” (1.2.324-7).

Caliban’s curse is from a “fen,” producing swampy “dew” meant to infect his persecutor,

Prospero, and it comes, tellingly, from the hot southern regions. He is called “thou earth”

(1.2.317), and, because the text does not specify where his dwelling is located, he usually enters from below the stage as if from the ground. He embodies both water and earth.

Caliban is an example of swampy bodies forced onto dry land: “you sty me,” he says to

Prospero, “[i]n this hard rock” (1.2.345-6). But he also underscores Prospero’s way of conflating toxic bodies with a toxic swampscape. When Prospero calls him a “poisonous slave” (1.2.322), he could just as easily be talking to the swamp as well as those who dwell in it.

Through Caliban’s aspersions (and his body), Shakespeare voices early modern fears of swamps: full of disease (dew) and coded as foreign (southwest) and feminine

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(mother), swamps demand territorialization, a straightening-out into “segmentarity” and

“strata” (Deleuze and Guattari 1987, 3). At the same time, Shakespeare gives us the fantasy of human separation from these swamp-worlds: or to put it in Stacy Alaimo’s terms, he envisions swamps as “trans-corporeal landscapes” (2010, 2). Although

Prospero lives in a dry cavernous “cell” (4.1.195), he and his company are there only infrequently. When some would-be assassins approach Prospero’s home, we discover that it is surrounded by the sphagnous stuff he abhors: “At last I left them,” Ariel says,

“I’th’filthy-mantled pool beyond your cell, / There dancing up to th’ chins, that the foul lake / O’er-stunk their feet” (4.1.181-4). Prospero believes himself to be beyond the swamp. In a play notable for its “ooze” – a magical bed of transformation mentioned twice – the swampscape is ultimately abandoned for “fair” Milan. But not so fast: “This thing of darkness I / Acknowledge mine” (5.1.279-80). If Caliban is a “thing of darkness” according to Prospero, so too, is the environment. In his material entanglements with one swamp “thing,” Prospero must necessarily recognize his relationship with the other: both dark “things” are “mine.” His puzzling phrase that “every third thought shall be my grave” begins to sound less like a relinquishment of authority and more like an acknowledgment of his material enmeshment with the ooze. If “[w]e split, we split” in a storm at the beginning of the play (1.1.55), Prospero “drowns” his book and “buries” his staff at its end. In other words, we sink, we sink, into more and more embeddedness. If

Prospero ever leaves – does he? – it is a moist farewell.

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Learning to Swampspeak: Towards a Wetland Ethic

To love a swamp...is to love what is muted and marginal, what exists in the shadows, what shoulders its way out of mud and scurries along the damp edges of what is most commonly praised.

Barbara Hurd

The Tempest stages the troubling presence of swamps in the early modern English imagination. Travel outside the British archipelago was definitely responsible for this; the

Everglades and the Sundarbans expanded the bogs of Spenser’s Ireland and the fens of

Beowulf. Early moderns like Shakespeare could theorize how swamps infiltrate the human body because explorers had trudged through the massive swamps of the New

World a century before and then wrote about their laborious experiences. Some of the first landscapes sighted in North America were swampscapes. When the Spanish conquistador Hernando de Soto landed in Florida in 1539, he was plagued by sticky swamps, treacherous natives, and monstrous alligators. The New World was really a new swamp world. These geographical swampscapes enfolded into the art of writers like

Shakespeare, thereby generating newer, and even more pernicious, images of toxic muck.

Caliban curses on the early modern stage and in the Floridian swamps. When Othello thinks on the green-eyed monster of jealousy, for instance, he thinks on a “toad” and

“vapour” of a green-brown “dungeon”: swamps (3.3.275-6). As Othello (1602-3) suggests, swamps harbored inner fears as well as external creatures. The swamp is the sick mind of jealousy, a psychoanalytical dumping ground for repressed desires (the muddy Freudian id). Mind and body collapsed into each other. Just as the inner thoughts of the mind were to be cleansed from exterior pollutants, the swamps outside the

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European body required control, and, ultimately, purification. The swampscape was not always a welcome site: calling for a light to illuminate his slimy dungeon, Othello quickly “put[s] out the light” (5.2.7).

Rodney Giblett sums up Seamus Heaney’s fascination with Irish bogs and bog- men this way: “Yeats was looking for some fixed reference point in the flux of modernity whereas for Heaney the only centre which holds in the swamp of postmodernity is one that changes like the bog” (1996, 246). The Tempest makes clear that early moderns knew about this decentering center, too. But what can early modern swamps tell us about our own fears—and our desires? When Michel Serres famously opens The Natural Contract with a section titled “War, Peace,” we see a Francisco Goya painting of two men, knee- dip in sludge, dueling to the death:

Who will die? we ask. Who will win? they are wondering—and that’s the usual question. Let’s make a wager. You put your stakes on the right; we’ve bet on the left. The fight’s outcome is in doubt simply because there are two combatants, and once one of them wins there will be no more uncertainty. But we can identify a third position, outside their squabble: the marsh into which the struggle is sinking. (1995a, 1)

As Serres points out, swamps typically serve as battlegrounds for the human struggle. We are still fighting in the swamp just as Prospero and Caliban. In fact, we are still fighting the swamp. “Fen” is one of the oldest words in the English language (from the Old

English fęn). We do not like to be “swamped,” “mired,” or “bogged.” Black water conjures up the usual stereotypes: darkness, disease, disorientation, death. Their interstitial nature terrifies us. In African American histories of runaway slaves, they promote “ecomelancholia” (James 2011). As spaces in which where fear is easily met with domination, they epitomize “ecophobia” (Estok 2011). Neither beautiful nor useful, and mysteriously withdrawing from us into the dark, swamps mark the danger zone, the

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spatial borders of civilized development. Enter at your own risk. Or are sticks in the mud better left there? Aldo Leopold, the famous founder of the “land ethic,” took an apathetic approach in “Marshland Elegy”: “What good is an undrained marsh anyhow?” (1949,

100). Although Leopold was being sarcastic, it is a good question to ask. First war, then peace—or is it first war, then war?

There are two prominent ways in which contemporary society tries to redress the historical denigrations of swamps. The first is spiritualized reclamation, stemming in part from the Transcendentalist and proto-environmentalist nature writing traditions. Henry

David Thoreau is usually considered to be a pond-dweller, although he felt most at home in swamps:

When I would recreate myself, I seek the darkest wood, the thickest and most interminable and, to the citizen, most dismal, swamp. I enter a swamp as a sacred place, a sanctum sanctorum. There is the strength, the marrow, of Nature. (1947, 613)

Thoreau reverses the miasmic tradition by claiming that cities, not swamps, are the epicenters of sickness. Yet his statement not only severs the “civilized” city from the swampy “wilderness,” it also performs a colonialist conversion of space through its theological metaphor. Despite the rich confluences Thoreau identifies – he sees them as rejuvenating middles caught between life and death – the swamps are still divided: the country and the city, the pure and impure. John Muir also observed the swamps’

“beautiful blendings and communions of death and life, their joyous inseparable unity”

(1916, 70). The danger of the sanctifying nature (still prevalent today) is that doing so overlooks past acts of violence and/or the displacements of indigenous peoples. If

Thoreau’s sanctification of the swamp codes it as a place of rebirth, it also neglects to mention the removal of the Native American populations necessary for his solitary

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experience. “Unity,” in other words, is never a given. And swamps are never empty spaces. Thoreau’s desire for spiritual truth within decaying middle-grounds could characterize our desire for security in times of ecological disequilibrium: a strategy for dealing with the vagaries of environmental change or the horrors of the past. Muir’s conversion in a Canadian swamp took place during the American Civil War, for example.

By reclaiming the swamp as a meditative site, spiritualized forms of nature writing risk silencing their non/human voices by occluding acts of environmental destruction like these.

Second, preservationist movements may in fact endanger the same voices they seek to protect. If we think all we have to lose is a measurable area on a map, we delude ourselves. To be clear: swamps are receding, and they need human help. In her book

Swamplife, Laura A. Ogden argues for a “landscape ethnography”: “a practice of reintroducing and reinscribing the human back into the multispecies collective while at the same time being attuned to the politics of asymmetrical relations” (2011, 29). But her

“reintroduction” is not anthropocentric: it is a way to understand “how what it means to be ‘human’ is constituted through changing relations with other animals, plants, material objects, and the like” (2). Thus if we are to ask how we are geographically losing wetland in the present – to industry, to private ownership – we must additionally inquire into how we have historically rendered swamps and their inhabitants mute through longer traditions of violence. It is a question of agency, really: if the danger is now what humans do to swamps, it is harder for swamps to answer back (through sickness, disorientation, and even desire). We need to be more articulate when articulating our rhizomatic relations with swamp worlds.1 Malarial mosquitoes cause us to keep our bodies protected

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even as we penetrate ecosystems. Yet mud baths therapeutically exfoliate our skin. Here is where the nature writing tradition can be useful. “[W]hen I die you will find swamp oak written on my heart,” Thoreau said, reconfiguring the boundaries of the human skin

(1993, 17). Both he and Muir call attention to a swamp’s ability to defy linear models, especially for imperial purposes. Thoreau held that “[n]ature abhors a straight line” while

Muir mused that “land and water, life and death, beauty and deformity, seemed here to have disputed empire and all shared equally at last” (1962, 9: 281; Badè 1924, 1:118).

Swamps writing on hearts and scrambling lines of demarcation are promising acts of agency to reconsider, especially in post/colonialist contexts.

I mention these two efforts at reviving the role of swamps in the modern environmental imagination because they are helpful to a certain extent. Yet the idea of

“rescue” that both sanctification and preservation promote effectively robs the swamps of their sphagnous agency and thus jeopardizes any attempt at a more beneficial politics of nature. How can human and nonhuman things in the swamp achieve livable lives while, nevertheless, voicing their past and present grievances? Can the two camps of environmentalism (dedicated to ecocentric measures) and environmental justice

(dedicated to human health) ever get along? Even while recognizing the “third position...the marsh into which the struggle is sinking” we still pit ourselves on opposing sides, just as the characters in Goya’s paining (Serres 1995a, 1). Either the human or the nonhuman takes priority. Place your bets. Stuck in this ethical quagmire, the more we struggle with one side of the question, the more we exhaust ourselves. But what if we stopped fighting in the swamp? What if we stopped fighting the swamp? As any survivalist would recommend, we should stop struggling and re-examine our

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surroundings instead. At the bottom of the mud is only more mud. True; but by concluding that there is no way out of the marsh – that we are always-already in it – we actually gain a critical point of entry.

Rather than simply recuperate swamps from early modern environmental imaginations, I am going to take us deeper into them. I suggest that early modern swampscapes show us what is at stake when the human attempts to sever itself from the environment. More promisingly, they point us in the direction of a posthumanist ethics.

Andrew Pickering (1995) persuasively argues that humans are constantly in medias res,

“in the thick of things.” And so does Shakespeare: we are “dancing up to th’ chins.” It is precisely because of the kind of “mangling” witnessed here – “a dance of agency” – that our relationships are so precarious (Pickering 2008, vii). We are chin-deep in sites of potential: of desires for isolation and connectivity, of moments that bring pleasure and poison. As Caliban’s word “stymie” suggests, it is clear that swamp becomes a “sty” whenever it and its multiple meanings are locked into thick definitions. Remember: swamps “abhor a straight line.” But if we hope to make any ecocritical headway with them, we must figure out how to cohabit the fluidity as well as stagnation of swampscapes; to dwell with the “ooze”; to proliferate new meanings rather than stick to the old, mired stereotypes.

According to Giblett, “swampspeak” is the language we use to speak about swamps (229). He calls for a “counter-tradition” to oppose the more derogatory terms

(like “miasmic”) we have inherited (228). I wish to rephrase his swampspeak in more ethical terms by proposing a wetland ethic. When we put the wetland outside of our interpretations (and our bodies), what non/human voices are lost? To a degree, popular

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culture trains us to speak a certain dialect of swampspeak – be it the exaggerated masculinity of the television show Swamp Loggers; the classism of another, Swamp

People; the monstrous Creature from the Black Lagoon (1954); or the radioactive toxicity of Swamp Thing (1982), a complex environmental sickness narrative in its own right.

These examples prove that we need to focus on what kind of “swampspeak” is spoken at any historical moment as well as who is and who is not allowed to speak. Caliban relates his autobiographical tale. The native tribes of seventeenth-century New England, as we will see, were not so fortunate. Out of my four waterscapes, swamps are the ultimate sites of enmeshment: here are sticky collaborations tightly packed together, places full of creatures that drag you down. When things stick together they may desire extraction—but they may also wish for (more) connection. As some of the world’s densest ecosystems, swamps illustrate the richness of non/human assemblages. It is precisely for this reason of proximity that swampy relationships are the most precarious. If I end purposefully in the swamps, it is because swamp things tell the stakes of our mucky enmeshment in the world today. Their simultaneous infinitude and disappearance demand critical attention.

Early modern swamps stymie the dead-straight line of empire and the fantasies of the hermetically sealed human. They encourage us not to “sty” ourselves on drier land until the swamps – and their stories – are truly lost.

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Swamp Things: Argument

This notion of our concrete selves—I, you, they—as beings within our rigid armor, it’s all clumsy, brittle scaffolding. Dunk it in the mud here and see what sloughs off.

Barbara Hurd

This chapter argues for living swamps in an unlikely way: by entering one of the most violent, and deadliest, conflicts in North American history. King Philip’s War

(1675-6) pitted the New England Confederation – Massachusetts, Plymouth, Connecticut, and New Haven colonies – against Metacom (Philip) of the Wampanoags and his Indian allies. Frustrated by the Indians’ guerilla-tactics, historians conflated the Indian body with the toxic landscape that surrounded and threatened them; these dark bodies pop out as if generated from the swamp itself. I argue that swamps muddy the social-political divide between English and native and, more importantly, the greater ontological divide between human and nonhuman. Contrary to Puritan attempts, there is no escape from the entangling swampscape and the things it harbors. Swamps as non/human networks are ethical spaces of conflict, “trans-corporeal landscapes” that interrogate the ideologies behind toxicity. Early modern New England swamp fights offer a compelling stage for inquiring about how environmental and human rights are always-already conjoined.

Defining an Indian (or a swamp) as “toxic,” we will see, is harmful to both. The Great

Swamp Fight of December 19, 1675 – which left hundreds of native men, women, and children dead and the swamp ravaged – tragically proves it.

My chapter leaves two slurpy footprints. (1) Seventeenth-century narrators of native conflict thought of swamps as living things, full of nonhuman actants in a sticky

(and often dangerous) network. The etymology of “swamp” itself (as rhizomatic

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“mushroom”) illustrates this liveliness, as does their obsession with swamp things that could suck in or invade the human body. Narrators try in vain to stick to their dichotomous terms: the Puritan is pure, enclosed, and firm, while the Indian is toxic, porous, and fluid. (2) These narratives of conflict show the violent consequences of a

Puritan belief system that insisted upon nonhuman and human divisibility. Often combined with religious rhetoric, certain bodies are rendered invisible or “toxic” in these instances; tracking them exposes their stories and also allows us to mourn for those lives that are lost. William Hubbard’s A Narrative of the Troubles with the Indians in New-

England (1677) will be my main focus for both points. To be clear: reading the swamp as a defenseless victim would only make its non/human inhabitants stagnate. But there is accountability, nonetheless: early modern swamps show us how some actors distribute

(or manipulate) agency to the detriment of others. My hope is that by following swamp things, we realize how “matter is not a thing but a doing,” an action that urges us to act so that things change (Barad 2007, 129). If “the world is ever-emergent” (Alaimo 2010,

143), the early modern swamp generates potential for action. By apprehending these

(unheard) voices and (unmarked) bodies hidden in the mud, we envision new ways to improve the lives of both nonhumans and humans alike. We glimpse a way to flow with the swamp things of the world, even with its poisons. Swampscapes of desire show us how we are “interconnected in potent potential” (Alaimo 2010, 44). We have to keep mucking up.

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Nonmodern Wetlands: Living Black Waters

I have suggested that we “sty” whenever we ask how to connect physical swamps

(nature) to culture (texts, politics), as if we must address either the human or the nonhuman, focus on either the past or the present. Leaving this either/or dilemma means letting swamps get back to work. Like good trackers, we should be ready to follow the actions of swamp things. We must be able to plumb the depths to retrieve what has been left behind or purposefully forgotten. And we must also expect the unexpected (a translation or dead-end) along the way. The question I pose is not how to “save” the wetlands – and hence, in a salvific gesture, repeat the colonial move of making wetlands livable or knowable. This solution entails a similar form of “cultivation” that reinforces human superiority and perpetuates violence. Neither do I convert swamps into objects

“worthy” of critical attention – this only repeats the Puritan policy of purification I refuse. One of the most common misconceptions about swamps is that they are immobile.

Roll black water: supposedly the most stagnant bodies of water, swamps flow. They are

“living black waters” (Giblett 1996, xii). Even if stuck with and to its things, we are never immobile. What is supposedly the most stagnant matter turns out to be the most vibrant. Indeed, the word “quagmire” comes from the “quaking zones” we call swamps.2

We are all shook up: not only do we relinquish our mastery to go with the flux of swamp things, we begin to see how swamps shake up our traditional knowledge practices and modes of understanding.

Giblett’s study of “postmodern” wetlands is useful to envision history, nature, and culture in a newer onto-ecological paradigm. Still, the nominal “postmodern” might be

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too dependent on what Latour calls the modern condition (as if we have moved past or post- the modernists’ divide between nature and culture). Though I prefer the term

“nonmodern” instead, I use “early modern” solely as a chronological placeholder. Early modern swamps do not just predate the modernist bifurcation: they have always been nonmodern places, uniquely interstitial actor-networks. The meeting of land and water resembles the Amazonian forest-savanna entanglement by which Latour develops his idea of “circulating reference.” Shadowing scientists and their soil samples outside Boa

Vista, dispute the gap between world and language that “reference” supposedly bridges.

Yet “how do we pack the world into words?” (1999, 24). Scientific practice is a chain of transformations that the scientists, their instruments, the soil (and more) undergo:

It seems that reference is not simply the act of pointing or a way of keeping, on the outside, some material guarantee for the truth of a statement; rather it is our way of keeping something constant through a series of transformations (58).

There is no transport without transformation, and any relation is really an act of mediation. Phenomena that circulate, that are free from the ties of representation and mimesis are a cause for celebration: “[L]et us rejoice in this long chain of transformations, this potentially endless sequence of mediators” (79). By amplifying the role of the interstitial Amazonian landscape in science studies, we may glimpse how ecocriticism and actor-network theory interrelate. Swamps are networks of living actants that constantly transform; its black water is a circulating space of bodies endlessly on the move. Early modern texts are not only links in the “long chain of transformations”—they emerge from it. The “endless sequence” continues through them.

One quick caveat before we enter the early modern mud. Swamps appear to be prime examples of “melancholic ethics” or “dark ecology” (Morton 2007, 78). I want to

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stake my position. Alaimo notes how the “human is always the very stuff of the messy, contingent, emergent mix of the material world” (11). She is realistic about what this means for the risk society we live in today:

Trans-corporeality is a site not for affirmation, but rather for epistemological reflection and precautionary principles ... It not only traces how various substances travel across and within the human body but how they do things—often unwelcome or unexpected things. (144, 146)

Thus we live in spaces of unpredictable material enmeshments that do away with the ontological divide but never with material repercussions. True to Alaimo’s subject matter

– toxic and invisible bodies that plague coal miners and sufferers of multiple chemical sensitivity, for example – interconnectedness is not always a place of “affirmation.” But neither is it the place of alienation in which “dark ecology” leaves us. The world is a vast swamp of connections – some toxic, some supposed to be – and better understanding their effects upon non/human bodies and our participation with them is our task ahead.

While allowing for X-rays, Alaimo wants to “prevent silica dust...and other forms of pollution to permeate all sorts of bodies” (59). We should not exclude the harmful aspects of “trans-corporeality” from our critical interpretations, to be sure, but neither should they limit our purview. Going into the darkness can also be an effort “to raise the status of the materiality of which we are composed” (Bennett 2010, 12). A swamp is a zone of possibility. With a little reflection, steady or not, we learn that a descent into the mud affords us a chance to recompose our shared and sphagnous, more-than-human selves in potentially healthier ways.

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Generating Swamps: Living Mud

Swamps are murky examples of how to generate a new kind of posthuman ethics in a quaking society. Far from transposing this nonmodern wetland onto the early modern period, however, early moderns knew firsthand the agency of swamps. Moreover, they tackled swamps’ sticky predicaments in ethically problematic terms. Living swamps are revealed in two ways: (1) through the theory of spontaneous generation and (2) via the newly coined word “swamp” itself. For the first, early writers of swampscapes could refer to Aristotle’s History of Animals. Edward Geisweidt’s reading of “excremental life” in Shakespeare’s Antony and Cleopatra (1606-7) “questions humans’ ability to rise out of the dung heap and attain a nobleness of life that sets them above the animals”

(2011, 90). Antony’s attestation of the “nobleness of life” (1.1.35-9) “demands a broader understanding of life, that is, as a phenomenon that animates various forms of being”

(89). He follows the struggle, but ultimate leveling, of non/humans in the play alongside contemporary theories of spontaneous generation (hair and earth), citing Arthur

Golding’s (1585) and Raphael Holinshed’s (1586) experiments with English and

Egyptian soil. Given his focus on the play’s locale, the Nile is emphasized as a muddy place of generation as well as putrefaction. The wider earth was thought to produce its own waste, these “repositories of the planet’s own excreted waste” or “[e]xcremental topography usually features moist, fenny land, or pools of stagnant water” (92).

Geisweidt offerss an alternative to the Great Chain of Being: “for although ‘forms of life’ can be said to substantiate the categories of Being on the Chain, life for the early modern

English also involved a shared experience of the world, a mode of relations between

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humans and other species that did not prioritize one over the other” (102). Dung, or excrement in general, is the great leveler. Significantly, composition and decomposition creatively coexist; here is “stinking evidence of life and death dancing ... Being in excrement means being with both life and death” (103). Spontaneous generation is a rotten dance in which all beings are invited—no questions asked at the door, all partners on the same floor.

Geisweidt’s excremental emphasis is useful for recognizing another example of early modern “excremental topography”: swamps. North American mud could just as well generate creatures – perhaps not beetles, crocodiles, and toads of Cleopatra’s Egypt

– but its own creatures and even, in the Puritan imagination, human-like forms in its

“repositories.” But if spontaneously generating excrement is the great leveler, not everything is always on the same level. Focusing on level “nobleness” would mean that even the slots between non-animal forms are bridged as well. This is not always the case in Geisweidt’s article that tends to privilege relations between humans and animals. I extend his definition of “life” beyond his vitalist terms to a more vital materialist philosophy. Swamp matter itself is “lively,” not dead sphagnum infused with an animating force (Bennett 2010, 13). The dance is the quaking zone known as the quagmire. Swamp matter dances. The forms might be different, of course, but the matter is shared. To be in excrement is really to become. Geisweidt’s blind spot about the exclusivity of “life” has us reconsider what forms are allowed to bridge the gaps, both in ecologies and in ecocriticism. We need to expand the terms in order to truly move towards, in his remarkable phrase, a “shared experience of the world” (102). We can start

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by revisiting early modern texts that interpret swamps as places of generative non/human collectives, the “long chain of transformations.”

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Swamm-: The Mushroom Effect

This is how everything really is, quivering, all the time.

Barbara Hurd

Early modern ideas of generative mud envision (a) wetland life. In addition, travelers and writers imagined the swamp as a living network in the etymology of the word. They grasped spongy connections whenever they deemed something a “swamp.”

The most common meaning of the noun “swamp” – “a tract of low-lying ground in which water collects; a piece of wet spongy ground; a marsh or bog” – is of dubious origin.3

“Swamp” was possibly taken from Low German, where swampen denoted quaking or boggy land. Interestingly, it is related to multiple Germanic prefixes with the meaning of

“sponge” or “fungus”: swamp-, swamb-, and swamm-. These root-words are more fungal than arboreal; they make up a network of Germanic languages: Low German and Middle

High German, Old Norse, Middle Swedish and Swedish, Danish, and early modern

Dutch. “Swamp” fascinatingly enacts a linguistic stickiness by combining Germanic languages. Language becomes spongy. More importantly, “swamp” is exclusive to the

North American landscape. Although probably in local use before in England, it was first recorded as a term in the North American colony of Virginia from John Smith’s General

History of Virginia (1624). “In this tract of Iames Towne Riuer I know very few; some small Marshes and Swamps there are, but more profitable then hurtfull” (162-3). In its earliest recorded uses, “swamp” pertained only in the North American colonies, where it

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denoted a tract of soil with trees and other vegetation too moist for cultivation. Overall,

“swamp” is a spongy word that grew out of marshy ground. The swampscape self- reflexively generates new language, its own “swampspeak.”

The second meaning in English, “mushroom,” comes from the Old English swamm, possibly a borrowing from a foreign source. This rarely observed second meaning is most significant for my purposes here, for it details what I call the “mushroom effect.” “Swamp” meaning “mushroom” appears in a 1631 English translation of

Wilhelm Adolf Scribonius’s Natural Philosophy that describes the larch tree: “In the bodie of the tree groweth Fungus Agaricus, a swamp or mush-rome. The best is white, thin, full of pores, light, and easie to breake: it purgeth fleame” (38). Scribonius renders the swamp not just as an organic and vegetal place, but as a fungal organism. (Modern science classifies fungi separately from animals, vegetables, and bacteria.) Swamp-as- mushroom emphasizes the swamp’s rhizomic characteristics. As a network it possesses a shared agency between its actors. And these actors act: incidentally, the verb form of

“swamp” with which we are most familiar – “to plunge or sink as if in a swamp or in water; to overwhelm with difficulties, or esp. by superior numbers, so as to render inefficient” – first appeared in 1818. However, we can see the swamp’s agency in action centuries earlier. Medieval authors (c. 1480) had already gestured to its embodied effects.

There is a remarkable parallel between a swank (“depression in the ground, deep hollow, bog”) and being swank (“thin in the belly”). “Swank” referred to “a body that may be or is normally distended: That has sunk and become flat; thin from emptiness, as the breasts, the belly, etc.” This is why we feel so depressed in swamps – they literally depress, or, press down upon us. In short, a swamp is a rhizomatic network that impresses bodies, and

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we feel swamped because of swamps’ mushrooming connections. No wonder early modern swamps left such a sizeable mark—the very word quakes. It took material interactions with swampscapes to generate these meanings. Historically, “swamp” became a vibrant activity, a process, and a “mushroom effect” once it met the geographic swamps of North America. For Smith, Hubbard, and many others, the swampscape participated in the compositional process, giving new significance to the “feedback” of non/human dynamics (De Landa 1997).

Swamps proved to be so mobile that when the Puritan Roger Williams put them in

A Key into the Language of America (1643) he listed them in his eleventh chapter titled

“Of Travell.” Cuppi-machàug translates into “Thick wood: a Swamp” (72). He provides an annotation for this “Obs.” word: “These thick Woods and Swamps (like the Boggs to the Irish) are the Refuges for Women and children in Warre, whil'st the men fight” (72-

3). As a simultaneous pushing away (obsolescence) and bringing closer (the Irish), swamp’s persistent links to violence and gender means that it is not so obsolete after all.

“Swamp” is a traveling word of Germanic root and yet it travels with mobile roots

(rhizomes) that refuse to stay still. These two meanings of “swamp” (as “boggy land” and “mushroom”) were not always met approvingly, of course. Williams’s dictionary – inexplicably combining multiple languages into one – minimizes his multilingual region.

Words like Cuppi-machàug are not for acculturation but for conversion into English.

Though there were several exceptions (more later), many like Williams tried to reestablish the levels of the divine hierarchy. Writers repudiated the wider “nobleness of life” within the quaking zone: either by reasserting human sovereignty over the environment or by sealing off the human body from noisome swamp matter. These latter,

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“toxic” bodies had little protection against the Puritans’ disdain that defined most swamp things as abhorrent.

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Moist Crudities: Sick Swamps

The early modern aversion to swamps as agentic things – as generative mud and fungal networks – is most apparent in the swamp’s conflation with miasma and sickness.

Swamps harbored poisonous things, and seventeenth-century depictions leaned heavily towards toxicity. George Gardyner’s A Description of the New World (1651) differentiates the land-winds (cold from the east-northeast) and sea winds (warm from the west-northwest) of England. “New England,” however, is slightly different. Though lower in latitude, their winters are colder than northernmost England,

caused certainly by the land-wind, which that heigh for the most part bloweth west, and northwardly, which is so much more colder, in regard it cometh srom those vast Regions that are far thicker and untill'd, & uninhabited with wood swamps, and such moist crudities, as are not in Europe. (88-9)

Gardyner places “moist crudities” or swamps firmly in the newer England, not in the old.

These “crudities” are beyond the pale. In doing so, he also establishes moist swamps as sources of hot air. Swamps effectively create moist climates: though thick and untilled, their moistness sets them apart from the dryer regions that produce the cold land-winds. It is hard not see Gardyner’s partiality here; “crudities” make a difference. Still, the moisture seems rather innocuous. In his chapter on Virginia, however, the swamps get sick. He paints a ghastly picture of degenerating crops grown by worn-out men lacking for fresh meat – fresh anything – quoting a proverb that “hogs and women thrive well amongst them” (99). This messy non/human confluence is inherently insalubrious, and

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only worsened by the swampscape:

But the later (I think) are indifferently subject to the fate of those men that go there which is much sicknesse or death. For the air is exceeding unwholsome, insomuch as one of three scarcely liveth the first year at this time; though formerly they report, the mortality hath stretcht to the taking away of eleven of twelve. The reason of this is not the latitude, for that is 37 degrees, and a half. In which lyeth many excellent wholsome Countreys, but I conceive it to be the changeablenesse of the weather, which is mighty extream in heat and cold, and as various as the wind both Winter and Summer. The next cause is the Swamps, standing-waters and Marishes, and mighty store of Rivers, and low lying of the land. (99-100)

Though he attributes the colonists’ sickness to the fickleness of the weather, the

“unwholsome” air and the “standing-waters” work in tandem. The weather is extremely changeable and therefore deleterious, but these swamps are the most stable in their bad effects, exuding an “unwholsome” atmosphere that “stands” the test of time. Swamps are not going anywhere, and neither are you—that is exactly the problem. Gardyner’s swamps are defined as “moist crudities” that haunt their would-be gardeners.

The fear of “standing water” reached epidemic proportions on a global scale.

Swamps could plague bodies as well as any attempt to create a healthy plantation.

William Dampier – English buccaneer, navigator and explorer who became somewhat of an celebrity by circumnavigating the world three times – wrote of “bad water” in

Bencouli or present-day Sumatra in his A New Voyage Round the World (1697). Finding freshwater during his first circumnavigation (1679-91) was never an easy task.

Approaching the Cape of Africa, Dampier and his men grow ill. Up to thirty are killed.

Corpses are thrown overboard each morning. Dampier attributes their sickness to their drinking water:

This distemper might probably arise from the badness of the Water, which we took in at Bencouli: for I did observe while I was there, that the River- water, wherewith our Ships were watered, a ws very unwholesom, it being

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mixt with the Water of many small Creeks, that proceeded from low Land, and whose streams were always very black, they being nourished by the Water that drained out of the low swampy unwholesom ground. (524)

He hypothesizes a trickle-down effect: the men drink river water, which is fed by small creeks from “low” (marshy) land, which are nourished from water that drains out of swampy ground. Following the source of the parasite only leads him farther under the muck. Swamp water in general is “unwholesome” because it attacks the body and also disrupts the human body’s putative integrity as a bounded organism. Acting like a keen naturalist, Dampier makes a scientific, proto-etiological observation that sets him apart from the geographic Gardyner:

I have observed not only there, but in other hot Countries also both in the East and West Indies, that the Land-floods which pour into the Channels of the Rivers, about the season of the Rains, are very unwholesom. For when I lived in the Bay of Campeachy, the Fish were found dead in heaps on the shores of the Rivers, and Creeks, at such a season; and many we took up half dead: of which sudden mortality, there appeared no cause but only the malignity of the Waters draining off the Land. This happens chiefly, as I take it, where the water drains through thick Woods, and Savannahs of long Grass, and swampy Grounds, with which some hot Countries abound: and I believe it receives a strong Tincture from the Roots of several kind of Trees, Herbs, &c. and especially where there is any stagnancy of the Water, it soon corrupts; and possibly the Serpents and other poisonous Vermin and Infects may not a little contribure to its bad qualities: at such times it will look very deep coloured, yellow, red, or black, &c. (524-5)

Swamp water is against all life forms. For sponsoring this mushrooming of pernicious life, they are the worst kind of mixture imaginable. Yet like a budding rhizome, the cause of malignancy is ambiguous and unknowable: it is both immobility (stasis “soon corrupts”) and the “tinctures” derived from other organisms. Hence mud generates poisonous things, the poisonous things make the mud poisonous. It is an ultimate infectious ecosystem, tellingly spelled-out by Dampier’s writing of “insect” as “Infects.”

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A swamp “infects” like an insect. Indeed, the men drink water black as “Ink” and

Dampier in hindsight notes that a basic system of pipes supplying fresh water from a nearby spring could have prevented the dilemma. Once more, the goal is to circumvent the swamp entirely and avoid the danger zone. Prevention seems impossible. Although rain would seem to encourage mobility and sanitation by washing everything clean, it only rekindles the verminous land-floods that drink up water like a thristy sponge. In fact, the sailors had taken up the water after the rains finished and the “Land floods were abating.”

Ultimately, Dampier’s swamp story means that its water is never “wholesome.”

Stasis corrupts, flow corrupts, vermin corrupt. Humans cannot live in these environments.

Thus Dampier returns us to the tiered “nobleness of life.” Despite the possibility that he

(and his stomach) opens up, the idea of working with the swamps was infrequent at best.

There are a few notable examples: John Josselyn’s An Account of Two Voyages to New-

England (1674) and William Wood’s New Englands Prospect (1634). Both create how-to guides for the ambitious settler on go “for furnishing a planter and his family at his first coming” (1674) and both resemble naturalist accounts in their sheer amount of detail.

Josselyn’s list of “plants of the Countrie” includes the alder,

of which wood there is abundance in the wet swamps: the bark thereof with the yolke of an Egg is good for a strain; an Indian bruising of his knee, chew'd the bark of Alder fasting and laid it to, which quickly helped him. The wives of our West-Countrey English make a drink with the seeds of Alder, giving it to their Children troubled with the Alloes. I have talk'd with many of them, but could never apprehend what disease it should be they so name, these Trees are called by some Sullinges. (70)

Facing an unknown disease, Josselyn shows little reluctance to imbibe a swamp thing— how it produces its salubrious effects remains unknown. Suddenly, swamps can heal;

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they house remedies, not just causes, for sickness. The process involves chewing and swallowing, willful incorporation of the dangerous mud into the human body. Not only is the swamp eaten, but it is grafted onto the skin: the Indian fastening the bark to his joints creates a swampy assemblage, a more healthy network of circulation that then helps the body regain momentum rather than lay it up.

Wood’s Prospect similarly presents a better view of New England through a more direct relationship with the wetland. Swamps are fertile ground for livestock’s primary fodder, hay: “The Soyle is for the generall a warme kinde of earth, there being little cold- spewing and, no Morish Fennes, no Quagmires, the lowest grounds be the Marshes, over which every full and change the Sea flowes: these Marshes be rich ground” (10).

Breaking down his prospect into categories – beasts that live in land and water, fruits, minerals, native populations, and so on – New England appears to be a lively ecosystem.

A “musketor” (mosquito) is nevertheless listed in the plantations’ “evills”, but this inclusion leads-up to his publication’s main argument for the necessity of labor and right- planning, a dual combination meant to ward off the evil of idleness (46, 44). Mosquitoes are bad and deprivations exist, but what is worse is that

all this argues nothing against the countrey in it selfe, but condemnes the folly and improvidence of such as would venture into so rude and unmanaged a countrey, without so much provisions as should have comfortably maintained them in health and strength till by their labours they had brought the land to yeeld his fruite. (47)

Josselyn’s healthful alder and Wood’s virile ecosystem illustrate more intimate accounts with swamp matter. These authors provide counterpoints to Gardyner’s and Dampier’s discourse of the irrevocably “toxic” swamp. Swamps “be rich ground” as well as “moist crudities.” Swamps become; they mushroom.

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***

Plumbing the Dead-Straight Line

To the Puritans, a swamp had nothing going for itself.

Barbara Hurd

To paraphrase Wood, the swampscape is not hard—people are just not hardened enough to live there. “[A]ll new England must be workers in some kinde” (48). If

Josselyn and Wood (and to a lesser extent, Dampier) could at least check the levels of toxicity in popular discourse, elsewhere the task of territorializing the swamps raged on.

North America was no swamp-topia. Smith believed, after all, that swamps will aid rather than hinder a colony: “And for the building of Cities, Townes, and Wharfage, if they will vse the meanes, where there is no more ebbe nor floud, Nature in few places affoords any so conuenient, for salt Marshes or Quagmires” (162-3). At first rejecting the rumors of the colony’s deficiencies whole-out, chronic troubles forced him to advertise the swamps to his benefactors candidly, and in terms of land reformation:

[T]he fault of all now by the vulgar rumour, must be attributed to the vnwholesomnesse of the ayre, and barrennesse of the Countrey, as though all England were naught, because the Fens and Marshes are vnhealthy; or barren, because some will lie vnder windowes and starue in Cheap-side, rot in Goales, die in the street, high-waies, or any where, and vse a thousand deuices to maintaine themselues in those miseries, rather then take any paines, to liue as they may by honest labour, and a great part of such like are the Planters of Virginia, and partly the occasion of those defailements. (161)

“Some” ills cannot represent the whole; neither can vulgar opinion. Surely those in

England, Smith claims, can relate to the “uwholesomnesse of the ayre, and barrennesse of the Countrey” (106). One might as well take pains to live by “honest labour” in a new swamp world farther away from home.

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Hard work has dramatic ecological effects, of course, for both the native populations and the swampscape. Wood spoke of human and swamp relationships in terms that we would now call conservation. For instance, the swamps provided the

English with much-needed wood. The Indians burn the swampy underbrush for hunting and transportation, also allowing the land to replenish:

Of these swamps, some be ten, some twenty, some thirty miles long, being preserved by the wetnesse of the soile wherein they grow; for it being the custome of the Indians [...]o burne the wood in November, when the grasse is withered, and leaves dryed, it consumes all the underwood, and rubbish, which otherwise would over grow the Country, making it unpassable, and spoyling their much affected hunting. (15)

Citing this practice is not meant to present a picture of universal harmony and tolerance, and certainly not to glorify the Indians’ balanced lives “closer” to nature. Instead,

Wood’s anthropological research proves that the English had entered a mysterious ecosystem different than any other, one that they saw not as cycles (cycles of burning) but of lines (commercial consumption and colonial progress). They laid the dead-straight line of empire as a result.

Ferdinando Gorges, the so-called “Father of English Colonization in North

America,” paints this line the broadest. In America Painted to the Life (1658), written for the “advancement of plantations into those parts,” he sketches the noxious swamps of

Ipswich to prove his point:

This Towne is scituated on a faire and delightfull River, whose first rise or spring begins about five and twenty Miles farther up in the Countrey, issuing forth a very pleasant pond. But soone after it betakes its course through a most hideous swamp of large extent, even for many Miles, being a great Harbour for Beares. (66)

English settlements are “planted” around these “most hideous swamps.” Choosing a site was risky; fresh marsh (as in Concord and Sudbury) was better since it yielded fish and

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hay, but the land often flooded. Settlers built the town of Hampton around a large marsh in 1639. Later inundated with cattle, they realized their agricultural blunder:

[T]he great store of salt marsh did intice this people to set downe their habitations there, for as yet Cowes and Cattell of that kinde were not come to the great downfall in their price, of which they have about 450. head; and for the form of this Towne, it is like a Flower-de-luce, two streets of houses wheeling off from the maine body thereof, the land is fertile, but filled with swamps, and some store of rocks. (134)

Yet Gorges makes clear that even “a most hideous” swamp could be made fertile. With plenty of effort, once-useless marshes grew hay for livestock. Gorges’s “picture” of life in Roxbury circa 1631 shows them to be industrious gardeners,

a very laborious people, whose labours the Lord hath so blest, that in the roome of dismall Swampes and tearing Bushes, they have very goodly Fruit-trees, fruitfull Fields and Gardens, their Heard of Cowes, Oxen and other young Cattell of that kind about 350. and dwelling-houses neere upon 120. (44)

In Gorges’s America we can see how the conversion of swampland by certain New

England residents went hand-in-hand with the greater Puritan work ethic. As the English mushroom at an accelerated rate, there is little “roome” for “dismall Swampes.” “Fruit- trees” and “dwelling houses” alike must be planted. Both require the “tearing” of “Bush,” a rending wetland ethic that will eventually leave these exact same garden states of

Hampton and Roxbury war-torn.

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Things of Blackness: A Prelude with the Pequods

Gorges argued that swamps are “hideous” places that could be made beneficial to larger purposes like European agriculture. We could call this agricultural imperialism. As several of Gorges’s comments (and Wood’s observation) suggest, however, authors could associate swamps with specific bodies in toxic, negative ways. Written three years before

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“hideous” Gorges, Samuel Hartlib’s Legacy of Husbandry (1655) conflates the swamps with the poor, rendering both of them harmful to society:

I know, that in Virginia and New-England, that Pines, and Firs and Cedars, do grow wonderfully thick in such Moors or Swamps, and being light wood, and easily wrought, they are continually used, while they last, for buildings. Further, I suppose these Moors are Commons, to the which the poor have used to resort for siring, and how soon great woods will be consumed by them, every one making what havock he pleaseth, all men know. (19)

The “them” is the poor; Hartlib’s fear is not only that humans will chop down the woods, but that the forests will be metaphorically “consumed” by the poor instead, those who can make as much “havock” as they want. It is unclear whether he is arguing for sustainability or for social divisions, whether he is sympathetic or fearful. He saves his ears, not the environment. What is clear is that the poor can afford to live in moors and swamps only. Swamp-bodies are the least desirable in society, the worst-off, the

“consuming” poor who infect the land. Notably, other forms of habitation (like Hartlib’s own) escape these terms.

These “poor” bodies consume, but they also spread, generate, and mushroom. In other words, these bodies become the swamps they flee into. In the same passage, Hartlib turns to the color and depth of the trees and accounts for the swamps’ vegetative powers:

As concerning their being so deep in the ground, and their blackness; I suppose that when wood was abundant in those places, every one did cut what they pleased, and left what was not for their turns, which being in moist places, was soon glutted with moisture, and made ponderous; by which means it soon buried it self, as Ships do, on Quicksand, or perhaps the Turf (which hath a peculiar faculty vegetative, for where it is exhausted, it soon groweth again) in time hath grown over them. (19)

The swampy “Turf,” as we’ve seen, houses vegetation like trees but it also generates vegetively. It possesses the power to bring forth (“groweth”) things. In Hartlib’s mind,

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this agency or “faculty” is undesirable; he implies the fear of being “made ponderous” by the swamp. Once “glutted with moisture” of the swamp, bodies are bogged down. In time, the vegetal landscape will overcome you. Hartlib uses this image as a stand-in for the undesirable bodies of New England, things of “blackness” that he does not want to husband. And like wet wood, once sodden they are discarded: “the people permitting it, because that wood, once sobbed in wet, is of little use, as we see by Piles on the

Marshes-side, scarce any man vouchsafing to carry them home” (19). Give swamps to the poor. Black wood is only permitted when it is useful, not by it own existence. Left to its devices, the swamps would try to take over:

The blackness of this wood proceedeth, as I suppose, from the sooty fume, or evaporation of the black turf, (which endeavoreth, as all earths do) to reduce all things into its own nature; which though it be not able fully to accomplish; yet it introduceth divers dispositions, and qualities, as blackness in the Wood. Some suppose, that these Moor-logs have lain there ever since the flood, with whom I will not contend; seeing that any wood, if it be kept from the Aire continually moist or dry, will endure even thousands of years without putrefaction. (19)

Hartlib grants the swamp (a) life in his theory of the earth’s evaporation, just as he did in its vegetative powers. But again, this life is rendered dangerous by its ability “to reduce all things into its own nature” (even if “not able fully to accomplish” it). The earth imparts “qualities” (like blackness) into the bodies with which it comes into contact. The swamp gets in. Hartlib’s Legacy imagines a materiality of race in the swamps of New

England. Poor bodies become black in the contact zone. Hartlib is on the verge of a swampy ecomaterialism that accounts for difference without granting certain swamp things (i.e., the human) automatic superiority. The “black turf” has its own desires; it wishes to draw things, and transform things, “into” it. Despite this ability to assemble

“diverse dispositions” across all non/human bodies, blackness is firmly associated with

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the poor, the sodden undesirables, the loud consumers. Hartlib tries to hide the fact that toxic blackness can transform you anytime, including the present. He betrays himself in his temporal comment: these black logs are not from a by-gone antediluvian age he

“contends,” but from multiple times. Thus the potential of the swamp’s “black turf” is ushered in only to show the dangers of relation. No body is safe at any moment of time.

Though not exonerated from their depictions, Gorges and Hartlib had historical reasons to view the swampscape and its “black” things as unsafe. They lived during the

Pequod War (1637-8), a bloody predecessor to King Philip’s War that resulted in the killing, enslavement, and near-elimination of the Pequod tribe in present-day

Connecticut. Hartlib’s toxic blackness encompasses the “poor” while carefully sidestepping the other human presence in the swamps: the Indians. Gorges, on the other hand, could not be more specific when incorporating the natives into his colonial project.

His sixth chapter devoted to the Pequod War is titled “the gratious goodnesse of the Lord

Christ, in saving his New-England people, from the hand of the barbarous Indians” (108).

Cannonicus (chief of the Ganset) knows not to aggravate the English; the Indians know the land, but the English have the firepower and technology:

But at this time his answer was, that he did willingly embrace peace with the English, considering right well, that although their number was but small in comparison of his people, and that they were but strangers to the Woods, Swamps, and advantagious places of this Wildernesse. (110)

The English are estranged from the swampscape—and they desire to be. Cannonicus speaks of the swampy “Wildernesse” as a home that the English policy of wetland- development was threatening. Thus when the Reverend John Wilson spurs the English army into battle, he instructs the soldiers to combat the enemy at their strongest and most

“advantageous” point, the swamps: “[T]here is nothing wanting on your enemies part,

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that may deprive you of a compleat victory, onely their nimbleness of foot, and the unaccessible swamps and nut-tree woods, forth of which your small numbers may intice, and industry compell them” (112-13). In one of the fiercest exchanges, the English are amazed by the supernatural resilience of the Indians and nearly defeated when their enemies retreat into the swamps. Yet God miraculously

gave them a second victory, wherein they sl[...]ew many more of their enemies, the residue flying into a very thick swamp, being unaccessible, by reason of the boggy holes of water, and thick bushes; the English drawing up their company beleagered the swamp, and the Indians in the mean time skulking up and down, and as they saw opportunity they made shot with their Arrowes at the English, and then suddainly they would fall flat along in the water to defend themselves from the retalliation of the Souldiers Muskets. (115)

A favorite term for many Puritan narrators, the “skulking” way the Indians fight is at once dishonorable and inhuman. This dehumanized “skulking” is worsened by the fact that the Indians become the bog: as they delve into the muck to avoid the English, falling

“flat along” the water, Gorges represents them as toxic bodies whose arrows (like airborne sickness from the swamps) penetrate English bodies. The toxic discourse manifests itself in the English battle strategy as well. The English will not follow the

Indians inside the swamp, choosing instead to “beleaguer” the swamp things from the outside. Indeed, their victory comes only when they follow an Indian with a kettle to solid ground, by “which they perceived there was some place of firm land in the midst thereof.” The English despise the wetland and the Indian bodies that lie waiting for them in the black water. They choose – they need – the miracle of dry land to survive.

Gorges’s narrative establishes the messy equation we will see time and again within Puritan tales of Indian conflict: the toxic swamp as the native body, the ultimate swamp thing of blackness. For the English, swamps are not just passive backdrops for

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this association. Swamp matter plays an active role. Whenever Indians retreat into the swamp, they are never known to leave. Once dehumanized and collapsed into the swamp, the mud begins to spontaneously generate native bodies. As the soldiers depart the battleground,

two Indians watching their opportunity, much like a hungry hauke, when they supposed the last man was come up, who kept a double double double distance in his march, they sudden and swiftly snatched him up in their tallens, hoising him upon their shoulders, ran into the swamp with him. (116)

Resembling “hauke[s]” and bearing “tallens,” the Indian body is animalistic, monstrous, and murky. Gorges makes light of the situation at first – “the Souldier unwilling to be made a Pope” tries mightily to free himself, forcing Captain Davenport to enter the swamp. But there is nothing jovial about this kind of kidnapping. Their worst fear is not for a Puritan to resemble the Pope but to be dragged into the spongy Hell known as the swamp. Davenport deserves the highest commendation in this regard. The Indians use the man as a human shield against Davenport’s sword, until, “at last, dying their tawny skin into a crimson colour, they cast downe their prey, and hasted thorow the thickets for their lives” (116). The soldier resists being reduced to black earth by its “tawny” inhabitants.

Gorges, more so than Hartlib, folds native bodies into the pernicious mud and extends the swamps’ material associations beyond the poor to the “consuming” Indians who will, like

“hungry haukes,” drag you into their fenny dens. In doing so, Gorges establishes the

Puritans’ crucial notion of the “return.” It is impossible for the English to live in the swamps: you either return home like the lucky Englishman or you die. This is far from

Wood’s more curious approach. We do not know if Wood’s observations would have changed if he had written after the Pequod War (he published the year it began, 1634). It

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was a war that witnessed too much fire and destruction out of control, one that consumed more than just underbrush. But it was only a prelude to King Philip’s War, a conflict that shook the quaking zone to its unspeakable depths.

***

Toxic Avengers: Cleaning Up the Slough

The struggle with toxicity combated by “honest labor” reached its violent apex once it combined with Puritan religious ideology, which involved, in most general terms, an injunction to work and improve a fallen nature. The Puritans’ work ethic was not just tilling fields but of doing God’s work on earth. Conversion of land dovetailed with conversion of souls. Thomas Hooker’s Application of Redemption (1656) claims that purifying the (putrid) heart takes labor, just like turning a swamp into arable land does. In a series of published arguments and counterarguments with Roger Williams, A New-

England-Fire-Brand (1678), George Fox wrote of swamps in a typical fashion: “So we are not in a Bog and Swamp...between Christ within and Christ without; our

Understanding is clear, it’s his own State” (36). Fox’s metaphor for a hard place – theologically stuck between inner and outer Christ, no less – is the swamp. Swamps represented the negative aspects of doubt and uncertainty. John Bunyan’s Slough of

Despond in The Pilgrim’s Progress (1678) is the paradigmatic example (and the basis for my conclusion). Over in New England, the ubiquitous wetlands fed the populace’s fervent religiosity. Even if they wished to denigrate the swampscape as sites of extreme sloth or moral lassitude, swamps were essential players; they necessarily inspired Puritan philippic. Reading religious texts ecopoetically proves that the Puritans could do not deny the swamps’ power – in fact, their language only enhanced it.

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Despite the metonymic ties between wetland and language, swamps were the depths of darkness, a veritable Hell on earth whose inhabitants resisted the seeds of

Christianity. Satan lived there and could snatch tempted believers. To make matters worse, the Indians were believed to worship him. Richard Gilpin’s Demonologia Sacra

(1677) cites the Indians’ fear of (and service to) the Devil. William Gurnall’s The

Christian in Compleat Armour (1655) compares the Devil’s strategy of concealment to a body lurking in a swamp. Gorges’s disdain for the Indians’ way of combat – and fear of their spontaneous generation from the black muck – now meets religious intolerance. The

Indians are not just toxic bodies but devilish minions as well. The puritanical Christian- warrior therefore did double-duty: cleaning up the slough meant that one could purify the messy swamp while simultaneously converting (or killing) the heathen hordes. Religious darkness coded racial difference. Swamps are places of “darkness” because they resemble

Hell, but also because their “dark” residents have darker skins. Hubbard admits taking prisoners out of “those habitations of darkness” meaning Philip’s “black Regiment of

Wempanoags” (1677, 97).4 The darkness of skin, place, and religion are uneasily conflated in one phrase.

If the swampscape’s occasionally “remedial” qualities rendered it, in Smith’s words, “more profitable then hurtfull,” these profits were short-lived. My brief survey of swamps within the discourses of colonial planting and religious conversion makes it nearly impossible to see why anyone would inhabit them. When religious beliefs of sin and death intersected with physiological discourses of toxicity, the native populations often exclusively felt the repercussions. According to Geisweidt, if being in the swamp is evidence of “life and death dancing,” Puritan responses to the murky non/human bodies

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of New England are the clearest examples of how the dance can be deadly. I now turn to

Hubbard’s narrative of King Philip’s War, a lengthy account of the Puritans’ struggle with the excremental Indian out of fear, malice, and obedience to the will of God.

Swamps generated toxic things out of their control, including the Indians’ bodies that in their very agency threatened Christian identity and the dead-straight line of nascent

English empire. Swamps did as they are meant to do: they mushroomed and created networks of sticky assemblages. Hubbard’s repudiation of these physical connections produces drastic results upon non/human bodies. Nearly thirty years after the war in

1690, the most polemical Puritan ideologue, Cotton Mather, wrote about the altered landscape: “there are scarce any of them [the Narragansett] that we know of, to be now seen upon the face of the Earth” (). Conversion becomes the extermination of the earth’s

“face” and its faces, of wetlands and wet people, what Mather calls the “the tawny

Infidels” (). Dismal, indeed—Hubbard’s narrative compels us to think of better futures than this, ethical ecologies that benefit humans and nonhumans in tandem rather than divide them. And if we are always sharing matter of the world with others (just like the

Puritans discovered), we may prove, unlike them, that to be stuck in the stuff of the swamp is not really to be stuck at all.

***

King Philip’s War: A Dis/united Front

The four English colonies at the time of King Philip’s War – Plymouth,

Massachusetts, Connecticut, and Rhode Island – were a barely-united band of disparate

Puritan sects that had been stitched together as the United Colonies in 1643. When the colonies first started out, note historians Richard Slotkin and James K. Folsom, “they

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were convinced that they had a mission, a divinely appointed ‘Errand into the

Wilderness,’ and that in going to the New World they were fulfilling an evident purpose of God” (1978, 11). The history of New England was a sequel to biblical history that began with Genesis and ended in Revelation. With religion came their identity. But this mission could be interpreted secularly. Living in fertile land, the desire for economic independence could jar with the communitarian principles of the congregation-colony.

When borderers pursued prosperity in the wilderness, their non-religious spirit left a class struggle for future generations in terms of church membership and ministerial authority.

Because of strains like these, the relative prosperity they had achieved after decades of initial hardship with little outside support (1620-40) – Indian land treaties, peace with the

Dutch and French, and victory over the Pequots – was now under threat. Writers viewed this past as a kind of Golden Age, an Exodus-like narrative of puritanical heroism. What is more, the restoration of the Stuart monarchy and its efforts to reassert the primacy of royal government in the colonies added extra pressure. The settlements prospered during the Interregnum. Charles II tried to revoke the charters that had allowed them virtual self- governance for nearly forty years. It was in the midst of these inner and outer crises that

King Philip’s war broke out: “The war exploded in a society that was already riven by an internal crisis: at war with itself over Indian policy and over economic, social, political, and religious issues, and divided along lines of class, race, interest, and generation” (8). It is crucial to understand the New England colonies not as a molecular unit bound by common faith, enjoying the relative ease of security and religious identity, fractured by an invasive force (whether royal or Indian). Instead, the war highlighted and exacerbated the internal crisis that had already begun: “Thus the Indian war precipitated conflicts

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inherent in the structure of colonial society and offered the model of a conflict of races as an analogy for the internal and external conflicts of that society” (18). Puritan writers forecast an unraveling unity; they are able to anticipate the end of one conflict only to visualize new ones ahead within themselves and with their neighbors.

In general, the Puritan-Indian relationship was characterized by “clientage politics,” a struggle over land with political-economic significance (29). The English proved to be coercive and exploitative in their dealings: “the clientage struggles sponsored by the English showed them to be unscrupulous in their pursuit of realpolitik”

(29). Philip (Metacom) was chief of the Wampanoags who inhabited the islands of

Narragansett Bay and the Mount Hope Peninsula. The Wampanoags had a long history of friendship with the English: Philip’s father, Massasoit, dealt with the Pilgrims. Along with his brother Alexander (Wamsutta), they remained “free sachems” who swore obedience to the King rather than colonial jurisdiction (30). Their principal dealings were with the Plymouth and Rhode Island colonies. Each had questionable charters and needed land in order to possess primitive land tenure and validate their claims. Plymouth had settled in the wrong location granted them and Rhode Island had controversially split from Massachusetts. The war was an example of business-as-usual clientage politics gone wrong: Major Winslow of Plymouth seized Wamsutta in 1644 and forced him to sell land to Plymouth rather than Rhode Island. Wamsutta grew ill and died in captivity. Philip succeeded him. Accused of rebellion, Philip swore his innocence and promised not to sell lands without Plymouth’s consent. Plymouth used this agreement to expand its territories from 1665-71. Indians objected and menaced settlers; Philip was called to Taunton, fined, and made to swear his allegiance again, this time to Charles II as well. When he appealed

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to Massachusetts – hoping to flame intercolonial rivalry – the colony surprisingly supported its neighbor, forcing him to sign a revised version of the Taunton agreement.

Here he began to foment discontent while outwardly placating the English. Such dealings with Indian “clientage” helps explain the large numbers Philip was able to amass: “the alacrity with which outlying bands joined the war is testimony more to the ubiquitous effects of English encroachment than to the power of Philip as a conspirator” (31).

Philip’s first attack was on Swansea, Massachusetts in June 1675. By August hostilities moved north and the English were routinely beaten due to their inept organization and general ignorance of Indian warfare. In the middle of the month the

Indians launched raids on the most exposed parts of Massachusetts; the English confederation declared war on September 9. The war spread north and east over the next two months: the English suffered ambushes, abandoned their towns, and broke an important peace treaty with the Narragansetts. In November the commissioners sent a force of one thousand under the command of Plymouth’s General Winslow to destroy the

Narragansetts in their winter stronghold in the swamps of Rhode Island. They marched on December 18 and attacked the next day. The Great Swamp Fight left approximately eighty English and six hundred Indians dead. 1676 began with a massive Indian offensive. Philip stormed the Massachusetts border and penetrated deep into Plymouth territory. The Indians pushed to within ten miles of Boston, attacked the capital Plymouth

Town, and invaded Connecticut. Following a major epidemic in April, the Indians prepared for their biggest assault yet on Sudbury seventeen miles from Boston. They were repelled, and while both sides suffered major losses, the Indians could not fight a long war of attrition like their enemies. They suffered a similar defeat at the Falls of the

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Connecticut in May. In June and July the English swept through Narragansett country.

The loss of leading chiefs and the defection of allied tribes depleted an already-weakened

Indian morale. His allies surrendering, Philip retreated to his home at Mount Hope Neck where he was betrayed and killed in August 1676. Philip’s widow and young son were sent to slavery in the West Indies. By late August the last war band had surrendered, spelling the end of native resistance in southern New England. Many were sent as slaves to plantations or remained at home as laborers. If there were, in Mather’s words, “scarce any of them” left shortly after the war, by 1830 disease and cultural dissolution had made them even scarcer.

***

Hubbard’s Narrative: Troubled History

Little is known of the Rev. William Hubbard (1621/2-1704). Born in Essex,

England, he arrived in New England in 1635 and graduated from Harvard in 1642. He entered the ministry at Ipswich, Massachusetts where he distinguished himself through his sermons and histories: A History of New England (1680) and A Narrative of the

Troubles. Hubbard’s prefatory material in the Narrative proves that he did not sit easy on his laurels as the great Puritan chronicler. The war and its muckiness were still too close to home in 1677. So, Hubbard starts making lines. Appropriately, he translates the events of the previous years into safer metaphors while assigning it a place in providence. His dedication opens the narrative organically, configuring the New England colonies as an ecosystem under duress, one that necessarily must be so: “It is with young Colonies, as it is with trees newly planted, which those winds, as one saith, that are not so boisterous as to blow down, doe so far advantage as to shake them to a greater fastness at the root”

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(1677). Tribulations strengthen roots. The arboreal metaphor is telling for its linearity; the

Puritans have progressed to the present moment. He can only write this in hindsight, of course. Likewise, the narrative is a thing newly planted, an embryo or seed that will grow to help those in the future:

It was intended at the first only as a private essay, wherein to bind up together the most memorable passages of divine providence, during our late, or former troubles with the Indians; it might have remained in the place where it was first conceived & formed, or been smoothered as an imperfect Embrio, not worthy to see the light, if some such as your selves had not both quickned the being, and hastned the birth thereof. Something of this nature may be of use to post[...]rity. (1677)

The past troubles have importantly been superseded on a straight line of history. The

Indian troubles, he hopes, are things of the past.

Yet by looking back to more recent times – not just Old Testament history –

Hubbard cannot avoid the past. He is troubled by the fact that he has to write the narrative. He says as much in his “Advertisement”:

[T]he matters of fact therein related (being rather Massacres, barbarous inhumane outrages, then acts of Hostility, or valiant atchievements) no more deserve the name of a Warre, then the report of them the title of an History, therefore I contented my self with a Narrative. (1677)

Moreover, he has to return to the inhospitable places in which the events transpired:

For our Souldiers in the pursuit of their enemies being drawn into many desert places, inaccessible Woods, and unknown Paths, which no Geographers hand ever measured, scarce any vultures eye had ever seen, there was a necessity to take up many things in reference thereunto upon no better credit sometimes then common Report. (1677)

He is drawn into the swampy unknown: since the land is not – and cannot be – properly mapped, he must go to the “Actors, or Spectators” who were there (1677). His narrative stages the colonial encounter and its hopes of making the unknowable knowable in both historical and theological terms, so that “post[...]rity, as well as to those of the present

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Generation” can remember the “special preservations granted by divine favour to the people here.” As a historian, Hubbard’s view of history follows a straight line. He straightens out the murky (yet recent) past to make a troubled history untroubled, thereby ushering in an arboreal (never swampy or rhizomic) futurity.

***

Causation with Cause: English Origins of War

True to his embryonic metaphor, Hubbard begins in the beginning, with the inchoate continent of America. Once patents are granted, the English swarm like bees,

who did in a short space of time by the accession of many hundreds, who every year flocked after them, make such increase, that in the space of five or six years, there were twenty considerable Towns built and peopled, and many of the Towns first planted, became so filled with Inhabitants, that like Swarms of Bees they were ready to swarm[...], not only into new Plantations, but into new Colonies. (4)

It is hard not to see the English as an invasive species. In contrast, Hubbard speaks of the numerous tribes who had been living in the area already:

The Sea coast from the pitch of Cape Cod to the mouth of Connecticot River [is] inhabited by several nations of Indians, Wompanoogs (the first Authors of the present Rebellion) Narhagansits, Pequods, Mohegins, as the more inland part of the Country by the Nipnets (a general name for all inland Indians betwixt the Massachusets and Connecticut River). (5)

When speaking of the origins of Indian conflicts, Hubbard notes that squabbles within these tribes “compelled” the English to enter the Pequod War and suppress their enemies.

English-Indian leagues unravel because the English were provoked into entering native politics. The English always back up their words; Hubbard often reproduces treaties word-by-word for added exoneration, binding the Indians to the Puritans’ idea that oaths are inalterable truths. The English have the benefit of hindsight; repeating broken agreements proves that the Indians got what they deserved. Hubbard includes Massasoit’s

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advice to his people because it should have been heeded: “I will now leave this word of

Counsel with you, that you take heed how you quarrel with the English, for though you may do them much mischief; yet assuredly you will all be destroyed, and rooted off the

Earth if you do” (9). Now that the Indians have been righteously deracinated, the English are able to put down firmer roots.

Philip’s brother Alexander dies of a fever that Hubbard insists the English did not cause. Instead, his pride raised his choler and indignation. Hubbard paints his successor

Philip as a haughty spirit motivated by the Devil. By situating him on the side of Satan, he portrays the English as victims of devilish “instigation”:

what can be imagined therefore, besides the instigation of Satan, that either envied at the prosperity of the Church of God here seated, or else fearing lest the power of the Lord Jesus, that had overthrown his Kingdome in other parts of the World, should do the like here, and so the stone taken out of the Mountain without hands, should become a great Mountain it self, and fill the whole earth, no cause of provocation being given by the English; For once before this in the year 1671 the Devill, who was a Murderer from the beginning, had so filled the heart of this salvage Miscreant with envy and malice against the English, that he was ready to break out into open war against the Inhabitants of Plimouth, pretending some petite injuryes done him in his planting land. (11)

Their fight is really a holy one against the “salvage Miscreant” and his forces of evil, thereby exculpating the English from accusations of causing an unjust war. Philip, with

“naughtiness” in his heart, renews the treaty in 1671 and damns himself in the readers’ eyes. Hubbard inserts a trial scene: in 1675 the United Colonies vote that “the said War doth appear to be both just and necessary, and its first Rise only a defensive Warre” (12).

When Winslow is called in the case is closed: “I think I can clearly say, that before these present troubles broke out, the English did not possess one foot of Land in this Colony,

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but what was fairly obtained by honest purchase of the Indian Proprietors” (13). The

English are fair dealers, Hubbard continues, always favoring the Indians’ friendship:

[T]he English never imagining that after so many obliging kindnesses received from them by the Indians, besides their many engagements and protestatitions of friendship, as formerly, they would have been so ungratefull, perfideously false and cruel as they have since proved. (14)

Thus the English are targets of Indian cruelty, rendering themselves as passive prey.

Although we can never justify the violence done to either side in the conflict – can we ever? – we can put pressure on “cause” as a means of exoneration. If the Indians caused the war, the English could claim they were unjustly provoked. Hubbard tells how the

English constructed a “very substantial Fence” to differentiate the “fairly” from the falsely “obtained” land and keep away unwelcome swamp things (13). But the fence is for their protection as well as for curbing their “covetous disposition” (13). The barrier substantiates the English desire for differentiation (from both the Indians and the nonhuman surroundings), their beliefs in a divisible landscape, and their damaging eco- epistemologies that uphold these differences. The wall models the Narrative’s hope in, and for, dead-straight lines.

***

The Nature of Hubbard’s War: Clean Breaks

Similarly, the war’s first foray in the swamp – its opening skirmish, in fact – offers an overarching way to grasp Hubbard’s complex relationship with the swampscape. The war officially begins with the death of a mediator, the Indian translator

John Sausaman, a close associate to Philip and a Christian Indian. Fearing that he might backslide, he divulges Philip’s intentions to the English and is subsequently murdered for it. The English agree that the storm might blow over if they do not arraign Philip. He has

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gathered too much force, however, and families flock to the nearby Narragansetts for security. So in “Swanzy ... on the 24th. of June 1675. was the Alarm of War first sounded in Plimouth Colony” (16). The English quickly discover that this war will be fought differently. Major Savage, in charge of the Massachusetts company, forces the natives off of Mount Hope and into the swamps. Due to foul weather, Savage must delay his advance. The next day at noon they come upon a dismal scene:

They passed by some Houses newly burned: not far of one of them they found a Bible newly torn, and the leaves scattered about by the Enemy, in hatred of our Religion therein revealed; two or three miles further they came up with some Heads, Scalps, and Hands cut off from the bodys of some of the English, and stuck upon Poles near the Highway, in that barbarous and inhumane manner bidding us Defyance, the Commander in chief giving Order that those monuments of the Enemies cruelty should be taken down, and buried. (19)

Hubbard will frequently repeat this scene for its shock value and the vilification of the

Indians. But he continues: the English “espyed a company of Indians burning an house; but could not pursue them by reason of several Fences, that they could not goe over till the Indians had escaped into a Swampe” (20). The English are always one step behind the retreating natives who use the swamps for refuge and for flight: swampscapes are smooth planes, after all. They only reluctantly enter the swamps, as these orders relate: “it was resolved that a more narrow search should be made after them, both upon Mount-Hope, and upon the ground between Swanzy and Rehoboth to scoure the Swamps, and assault them if they could find where they were entrenched” (20). Swamps terrify the English; they buy their time on the fences they have constructed to keep the swamps out. This opening scene lays out the principal components of Hubbard’s battle scenes we see enacted time and again: the barbarous Indians always in flight; the English following their tracks, fearful of anything spontaneous, incomplete, or transformative: “bodys” in

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pieces, apostasy, the swamp. And even though they will make peace treaties with the natives and fight alongside them, these agreements will be done with a “Sword in their hands” (20-1). The idea of cultural exchange is still a dangerous one, and the swamps are the most dangerous sites of mixture.

Swamps consistently in the Narrative sites of disorientation and ontological scrambling: places with things “in a continual motion” (86). King Philip’s War is named for its rebellious protagonist, but it is really a war against the swamps that harbor him and where he lays in wait “like a wild Boar kept at a Bay” (25). After the first swamp skirmish the English retreat, reluctant to enter the boar’s den. But Captain Church rallies the English forces, pressing Philip further into the swamp: “which struck such a terror into Philip, that he be [...]ook himself to the Swamps about Pocasset, by this small party till more hands came up” (25). Circling the swamps around Pocasset, the English begin to

“scoure the Swamps.” The first large-scale swamp fight begins:

as soon as ever they came to the place, Plimouth Forces being now joyned with them, our Souldiers resolutely entred in amongst the Enemies, who took the advantage of the thick under-wood, to make a shot at them that first entred whereby five were killed outright, seven more wounded, some of whose wounds proved mortal: Af[...]er the first shot, the Enemy presently retired deeper into the Swamp, deserting their Wagwams (about an hundred in all) newly made of green Barks, so as they would not burn: in one of them they found an old man, who confessed that Philip had been lately there: having spent some time in searching the Swamp, and tired themselves to no purpose, yet it was said one half hour more would have at that time utterly subdued Philip and all his power. The Commander in chief, (night drawing on apace) not thinking it safe to tarry longer in so dangerous a place, (where every one was in as much danger of his fellows as of his foes, being ready to fire upon every Bush they see move (supposing Indians were there) ordered a Retreat to be sounded. (26)

The swamp is the ultimate place of disorientation on multiple levels. In terms of space, bodies have simultaneously nowhere and everywhere to retreat. One can always go

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“deeper.” Distinctions between Indian and English are murky. Allegiances dissolve as comrades attack one another in desperation. Even the boundaries between human and nonhuman are blurred; the Indians become-trees by taking “advantage of the thick under- wood.” The non/human “Bush” proves the most dangerous, because unidentifiable, opponent. Although the English characterize the Indians as deserters, they are actually the most mired. Swamps are places of immobility for the English, but for the Indians they are places of mobility—stuff with which to blend their bodies and build their homes. When the English try to sieve the swamps’ components into discrete entities they truly tire “to no purpose” and to no end.

As the dreaded “Bush” relates, Hubbard describes the swamp as a live creature.

The usual English reaction to the great disorienting swamp is domination – through knowledge and force – which consequently debases the natives within it as well. Within this space of confusion, the English desperately try to separate themselves from the muck and build solid ground.

But to return to king Philip, who was now lodged in the great swampe upon Pocass[...] N[...]ck, of seven miles long: Capt. Henchman and the Plimouth Forces k[...]p a diligent eye upon the enemy, but were not willing to run into the mi[...]e and dirt after them in a dark Swamp being taught by late experience how dangerous it is to fight in such dismal Woods, when their eyes were muffled with the leaves, and their heads pinnioned with the thick boughs of the trees, as their feet were continually shackled with the roots spreading every way in those boggy Woods. It is ill fighting with a wilde Beast in his own den. They resolved therefore to starve them out of the Swamp, where they knew full well they could not long subsist: To that end they began to build a Fort, as it were to beleaguer the enemy, and prevent his escape out of the place, where they thought they had him fast enough. (27)

The English refuse to get dirty, at least willingly, and this symbolizes their attempts to purify the landscape and strain the mixture of swamp things into “swamp,” “English,”

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and “Indian.” For the English, swamps agentically imprison the body: they are constantly

“muffled” and “pinnioned” and “shackled” by “those boggy Woods.” There is no thought of going in and staying there: the fort they construct does not betray a desire to stay and inhabit the swampscape, but rather to control and temporarily inhabit it. The entrance into the swamp is a roundtrip ticket for the English. The necessary “return” means that they can muck up only so far. What infuriates them is the speed of the Indian war-machine;

Philip flees, leaving women and children behind as prisoners. The English forces see this as an act of desperation: “the case being therefore desperate, he resolved with an hundred or two of his best fighting men to make an escape by the Water, all passages by the land being sufficiently guarded by the E[...]glish Forces” (27). More importantly, his escape shows how wetlands defy capture as well as empire. The Puritans’ only explanation is to cite God’s will. The swamps’ living materiality is thereby disavowed. Hubbard supplies a quick sermon: all “means are often frustrated of their desired end” (28). In other words, the English convert the nonlinear, disorienting swampscape into a linear system of solid forts and pinpointable entries and exits. And all teleological lines point to God above, not the muck below.

Despite Hubbard’s attempts to hold things firmly, the Indians start to slip away in the Narrative and stand-in for the dissoluble. Treaties will not work. His repeated attempts at unification reveal an English anxiety about keeping the body, like the narrative together. “But to return and pursue the Rebelious Indians, and keep pace with them in our History, though our Forces as yet could never overtake them in the Woods”

(31). Hubbard is led down diversions and asides, biographies and histories of numerous characters. This fluidity seems to always reach its destination, however: the horrible

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treacheries enacted upon the English by specific tribes. The inhabitants of Brookfield, for instance, are led into a false treaty and ambushed in the swamps (30). Yet the swamps not only harbor the English fears of smooth Indians that constantly escape, but also the dissolution of the English body. The Indians are driven into the woods between Hadly and Squakheag. Captain Beers is sent to re-supply the garrison at the latter place:

but before they came very near to the Town, they were set upon by many hundreds of the Indians out of the Bushes by a Swamp side, of whom Capt. Beers (who was known to fight valiantly to the very last) with about twenty of his men, were by this sudden surprifal there slain, the rest flying back to Hadly. Here the Barbarous Villains shewed their insolent rage and cruelty, more then ever before, cutting off the heads of some of the slain, and fixing them upon Poles near the Highway, and not only so, but one (if not more) was found with a Chain hooked into his under jaw, and so hung up on the Bow of a Tree, (tis feared he was hung up alive) by which means they thought to daunt and discourage any that might come to their relief, and also to terrifie those that should be Spectators with the beholding so sad an object. (37)

Here again, the Indians seemingly emerge out of the mud. The theme of dismemberment first witnessed at Mount Hope is intensified. English bodies are not just wounded or shot through but literally torn apart. These “objects” are astonishing because they show, according to the English onlookers, the despicable translation of “alive” subject into dead object. Ironically, the English had been undertaking the same “sad” translation with the swampscape already – turning quaking matter into static lines of differentiation. By placing these human pieces into high-traffic areas (themselves lines of English travel), the Indians strategically hit on the worst fears of the English. Left in the swampscape without proper (Christian) burial, the human deteriorates into the mud, losing its subjectivity. What in fact dissolves is the idea of solid subjectivity itself. Hanging alive is horrific, to be sure, but the Englishman-tree image demonstrates the body’s abhorred interconnectedness with the swampscape. The English are not just ambushed—they are

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the “Bush.”

The natives play up their powers of deterritorialization. By parodying English domestication, they threaten the English sense of futurity along with their claims to the land that can be segmented and owned (or taken). Captain Parker’s garrison, for example, encounters “wonted subtlety and “barbarous cruelty”:

[F]or they stript the body of him whom they had slain in the first onset, and then cutting off his head, fixed it upon a pole looking towards his own land. The corpse of the man slain the week before, they dug up out of his grave, they cut off his head and one leg, and set them upon poles, and stript off his winding sheet. An Infant which they found dead in the house first surprised, they cut in pieces, which afterward they cast to the swine. (75)

Mocking the English process of colonization, the natives point the head in the direction of the land that cost him his life because he falsely claimed it as his: the “head” of government that is rendered powerless. The bodily resurrection here is at the hands of the heathen who literally unearth the body and do unspeakable cruelties. Hubbard adds another inversion: the natives become perverse caretakers in this moment by feeding the animals baby flesh. The English body is never at rest but unwound, “stript off his winding sheet,” hewn apart, and distributed. There can be no peace with the body whirling and strewn about. There can be no future, except one of consumption: a nonhuman recycling process – pig intestines – that symbolizes the gorging swampscape.

The European introduction of swine to New England only adds to their consternation.

Here is a non-native species eating another invasive species. Metaphorically, the unified colonies unwind at this moment. Like a decapitated head, they can only watch what they have made be destroyed. And what if this swine was eaten? The Indian attack is provocative. The worst is not to be attacked by a foreign enemy, but to be undone from

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within. The inner crises of the colonies play out in the cannibalistic stomachs of the colonists.

Such encounters with unraveling and dismembered bodies encourage English attempts at stable identity. When faced with disunity and questionable futurity, the

English surprisingly seem to solidify. Hubbard cautions against “turning Indian” several times. One example is particularly forceful: on September 18, “the saddest day that ever befell New England” (38) Captain Lothrop and his company are decimated in an ambush.

Less than ten men survive. There is a particular reason why Lothrop fails, and it serves as an admonition to others:

[His] great defeat came to pass by the unadvised proceeding of the Captain (who was himself slain in the first assault) although he wanted neither courage nor skill, to lead his Souldiers; but having taken up a wrong notion about the best way and manner of fighting with the Indians (which he was always wont to argue for) viz. that it were best to deal with the Indians in their own way, sc. by skulking behind Trees, and taking their aim at single persons, which is the usual manner of the Indians fighting one with another, but herein was his great mistake, in not considering the great disadvantage a smaller Company would have in dealing that way with a greater multitude. (38)

Lothrop chooses to fight “like an Indian” and pays the price. Hubbard now shores up

English and Indian difference according to military strategy. Others added the extra qualification of gender: Edward Winslow (1624) commented that “skulking” is not a manly way to fight: “[O]ur Captaine dared the Sachim to come out and fight like a man, shewing how base and woman like hee was in tonguing it as hee did: but hee refused and fled” (44). For Hubbard, the key is not to assimilate, but to uphold this difference of identity at all costs. Military rhetoric conceals his philosophy. The results are accordingly attributed to God’s inscrutable determination. But it is also clear that Hubbard desires the military body to be, like the English body in general, a whole unit impervious until death:

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“yet if they had k[...]pt together in a Body, and fought Marching, they might have escaped the numbers of the Enemy, with little loss in comparison of what they sustained”

(39). Keeping the “Body” in the swamp “together” is an endless battle the English can never win.

For Hubbard, the real danger of swamp things is the possibility of becoming swamp-Indian. Captain Pierce is shot in the leg. Maimed, an Indian named Amos refuses to leave his side. The latter repels the enemy for a short time. Fearing the end is near he ingeniously uses his surroundings:

[T]herefore he used this policy, perceiving the Enemy had all blacked their faces, he also stooping down, pulled out some blacking out of a pouch he carried with him, discoloured his face therewith, and so making himself look as like Hobamacko as any of his Enemies: he ran amongst them a little while and was taken for one of themselves, as if he had been searching for the English, until he had an opportunity to escape away among the Bushes: therein imitating the Cuttle Fish, which when it is pursued, or in danger, casteth out of its body a thick humor, as black as Ink, through which it passes away unseen by the pursuer. (65)

Amos blackens face and becomes Indian – though he is an Indian already. Hubbard assumes that Amos’s Christian identity prevents him from backsliding into a heathen, evidenced by his loyalty to the English captain. Yet the dutiful Indian also becomes a cuttlefish, thereby taking at least three trajectories of becomings – Indian, Christian, and fish: a startling non/human assemblage. Humans can shift between Christian and heathen,

English and Indian. No body is immutable. Odd at first, the cuttlefish is an apt animal to choose. The toxic Indian shoots out black ink (like the swamp) in order to evade his enemies. The mud of the swamp blacks faces, just as it blackens bodies. Smearing the swamp is another example of the materiality getting in the body. Even if Hubbard shows the body to be in transformation, these changes still shore up his “policy” of difference.

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Thus those who are allowed to “turn” are the Indians, never the English: the former are ever-inking, moving, shifty shapes. They can never be trusted even in staunch acts of devotion. (We are not told what happens to the wounded Pierce, for example.) Hubbard cannot sanction transformation, only project it onto a foreign other.

But the swamp smears all. Hubbard’s clean and holistic fantasy takes a miracle to happen. Being relieved by English forces and their allies, Captain Mosely is afforded the opportunity to retrieve the dead the following day:

As Capt. Mosely came upon the Indians in the morning he found them stripping of the slain, amongst whom was one Robert Dutch of Ipswich, having been sorely wounded by a bullet that rased to his skull, and then mauled by the Indian hatchets, left for dead by the Salvages, and stript by them of all but his skin, yet when Capt, Mosely came near, he almost miraculously as one raised from the dead came towards the English, to their no small amazement, by whom being received and cloathed, he was carryed off to the next garison, and is living & in perfect health at this day May he be to the friend & relations of the rest of the slain, an emblem of their more perfect resurrection at the last day to receive their crowns among the rest of the Martyres that have laid down or ventured their lives as a testimony to the truth of their Religion, as well as love to their Country. (39-40)

The bodily resurrection is the Puritans’ faith in a trans-corporal movement in one direction: Christian perfection. Dutch becomes a living martyr, a walking emblem, a promise of the ultimate and perfect form awaiting Christian believers. As such, he provides an antidote to the destructive swamp. Dismemberment and dissolution will only affect their already-flawed forms. Love for God and country (never dissoluble) offer the salvation of solidification. His disability cannot truly be configured as one if his future form is predetermined. As an emblem, of course, Dutch can be misread. But here

Hubbard defines the Puritan life as a movement in one direction towards heavenly perfection. A true trans-corporeal swamp, in comparison, privileges multiplicity and

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unpredictable directionality. As I have suggested, the United Colonies historically were not so united to begin with: there was no pure, original, or political body the English could aspire to, even in the newly-restored Stuart monarchy.

Nevertheless, the Indians are pushed farther into the swamp and its animalistic imagery, the Narrative’s notorious ethical dilemma. The Great Swamp Fight is near.

Their courage emboldened, and now on the counteroffensive, Moseley’s men force the natives into a swamp, the captain dependant upon his lieutenants to pursue the enemy

“through and through” so that he “took a little breath, who was almost melted with labouring, commanding, and leading his mean through the midest of the enemy” (40).

Significantly, Moseley almost melts. Hubbard prepares us for the Great Swamp Fight in the winter. After a victory at Hatfield, the English remain solid enough that the Indians, with God’s will, will fall into the swamp-pit (Hell) that they have dug for others. His language is disturbing: “but the greatest number of them to be sure were found in the winter at the Narrhaganset Fort, where we shall leave them for the present till the Forces of the United Colonies shall fire them out of their nests” (47). This is not the only duhumanizing reference in the narrative, but it is one of the worst since this “nest” – like a troublesome insect’s – will be burned.5

Hubbard makes it hard for his readers to sympathize with the natives after such bestial rhetoric. He tries to ensure that the English never remain on the nonhuman end, even in death. The Indians are

seldome or never da[...]ing to meet our Souldiers in the open Field, unless when they have very great advantage as to their numbers, or covert of the woods and bushes: although like some ranging Beasts they have done much mischief several times since, when they were ready to expire or when the pangs of death were coming upon them. (47)

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Withdrawing for the winter into their “nests,” the English sense an opportunity. Hubbard explains the reason for the great fight; by attacking the hive, they can be exterminated at once: “that there were before this time so many hundreds gathered together into one

Body, and that there was great reason to fear, if they were let alone till the next spring they might all rise together as one man round about us” (47). The other, and far more dangerous reason, is the fear of Indian infestation. This is toxic discourse in full effect. In the spring these bodies will hatch and “could on a sudden on any occasion spread themselves like grashoppers all over the Country” (47). The fear of the multiple and multiplying Indian is couched in biblical typology. Indians behave like the Egyptian plague of locusts in Exodus. And following Hubbard’s disturbing logic, they must be exterminated.

***

The Great Swamp Fight

Perhaps the ultimate mystery is not that there are no clear, impenetrable boundaries in the universe but that we can live as if there are.

Barbara Hurd

On December 19 the English and their allies marched through the snow until they reached the swamp in which their Indian guide-hostage said they would find “Indians enough” (51). Arriving around one o’clock, they are so surprised by their good fortune that they lose control, exchanging fire with the enemy and rapidly assaulting the Indian fort in the middle. “[R]aised upon a kind of Island of five or six acres of rising land in the midst of a Swamp” with impenetrable “palizadoes,” the English are unable to gain entry until God reveals a small entrance only one man can enter at a time (52). The English lose hope until Major Treat mistakenly reports that the Indians “run” (52) – doubling the

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English courage. Once in, and seeing their officers die, the English redouble their courage, gain the advantage, and drive the Indians out:

So as after much blood and many wounds dealt on both sides; the English seeing their advantage, began to fire the Wigwams, where was supposed to be many of the Enemies Women and Children destroyed, by the firing of at least five or six hundred of those smoaky Cells. (53)

With its “smoaky cells,” the fort becomes a hive of insects. When Hubbard likens the

English to insects – bees, for example – it is to applaud their industry: “that little

Regimental Army, as busie as Bees in a Hive” (53). Here the likeness serves to denigrate the Indians as pests. The English wait to make sure no one is left:

[T]hose that were left alive forced to hide themselves in a Cedar Swamp, not far off, where they had nothing to defend them from the cold but Boughs of Spruce and Pine Trees: for after two or three hours fight, the English became Masters of the place, but not judging it tenable, after they had burned all they could set fire upon, they were forced to retreat. (53)

The English burn policy differs, horrifically, from the native kind described by Woods.

The Indians either burn alive or are smoked out. The Great Swamp Fight is over.

Hubbard’s reaction is disturbing for its matter-of-fact narration. After commending the valor of the men and the power of the Lord, he describes the aftermath.

Here the English prove to be just as adept at manipulating bodies. English bodies must be buried while their enemies’ bodies are left in the open. The earth does not just swallow the dead indiscriminately. Difference is upheld for strategic reasons:

[F]or by that means the Fort being clear of the Dead bodies, it struck a greater terrour into the Enemy, to see but eight or ten dead bodies of the English left, then to meet with so many hundreds of their own slain and wounded Carkasses. The number of the slain was not then known on the Enemies side, because our Men were forced to leave them on the ground. (54)

English bodies commemorate an uneven massacre. For both sides, the fight tries to leave

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bodies uncovered, not hide them.6 Yet the English bodies must be “carried off” and out of the swamp while the Indian bodes are left to fester in the sphagnous material from which they sprung. The Indians will be discouraged, Hubbard hopes, and they are. Though the

English lose wounded men to the snow, the Indians lose their crops, habitation, and many men so “that it was the occasion of their total ruine afterward” (54). Hubbard cannot calculate the number of native dead: “the number of old men, women and children, that perished either by fire, or that were starved with hunger and cold, none of them could tell” (54). He later estimates between three hundred and seven hundred. He makes no mention of clemency. All this is reprehensible, but to make matters worse, Hubbard creates a chart. The cold, neat lines of arithmetic are unsettling. As he tallies the numbers of English and Indian dead, the lines literally become dead-straight. For him, the war cannot end so long as swamp-bodies are on the loose. Swamp fights will continue, and the English are not to blame:

But as was said of old, God hardned their hearts to their own ruine and destruction afterwards. For as soon as our Souldiers were able to March, finding that all the Enemies overtures of peace, and prolonging of treaties, was only to gain time that they might get away into the Woods. They pursued after them, and sometimes came upon their Rear, but then they would immediately fly an hundred wayes at once into Swamps, so as our men could not follow them... (55)

The Great Swamp Fight is nothing entirely new, just “great” in its viciousness and in its numbers. It is the “great” culmination of the Puritan environmental ethic: swamp things revealed to prove a theological point, but ultimately left buried in the mud.

An anonymous account of the fight written in December 1675 and published in

London in 1676, A Farther Brief and True Narration of the Late Wars Risen in New-

England, raises the stakes. The narrator enumerates several instances that provoked the

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English mission. One is particularly notable for its inversion of the colonial agenda. The

Indians ironically “plant” the English, mocking and blaspheming the name of God, asking when he will come to save them, cruelly torturing them to death:

[S]ome they took alive and sat them upright in the Ground, using this Sarchasm; You English since you came into this Countrey have grown exceedingly above Ground, let us now see how you will grow when Planted into the Ground. (4)

Hubbard had tried mightily to ground the Indians. In the winter of 1676, English troops are hard pressed by a snowstorm; reconnoitering with some scouts, they

fell amongst the Indians Barns, in one of which, as he was groping to find corn for the relief of his horse, he catched hold of an Indians hair under the leaves, who presently held up his hands, when the souldier was drawing his sword, to spare his life, which was granted; but after he was brought to the Head-quarters, he would owne nothing but what was forced out of his mouth, by the woolding of his head with a cord, wherefore he was presently judged to dye as a Wompanoog. (58-9)

Indians can grow right around the English, like the swamp, and can be anywhere at once; indeed, they are everywhere. Hubbard’s history is about “woolding” (or winding) around this monstrous mushroom and plucking it out. The mockery, or more accurately, self- reflection described in the anonymous report is likewise horrifying. The English are human, not plants; they are planters of plantations. Like the tortuous swampscape they have dominated and actually tortured, they too, are being tortured. Of course, the English reader knows that the Great Swamp Fight avenged this “Sarchasm.” They know their enemies were uprooted in Hubbard’s fashion: “But our Affiance is in the God that made

Heaven and Earth, who when he Arises will Scatter our Enemies” (1676, 4). It is a promise the English cling to while ignoring its repercussions. Both perverse instances of planting attend to the anxieties (and violence) surrounding the separation of the human from the swampscape.

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The anonymous writer’s description of the fight matches Hubbard’s closely, including the casual numbering of men, women, and children killed. It also includes a pleasure felt by the English that resembles the barbarous sarcasm of their tormenters.

Dispersing their enemies within the fort,

every one had their fill of Blood: It did greatly rejoice our Men to see their Enemies, who had formerly sculked behind Shrubs and Trees, now to be engaged in a fair Field, where they had no defence but in their Arms, or rather their Heels; But our chiefest Joy was to see they were mortal, as hoping their Death will revive our Tranquillity, and once more restore us to a setled Peace which (through the Blessing of God) we have long enjoy'd. (10)

The Great Swamp Fight is meant to be the fight that ends all fights. This is a common justification for the atrocities of war: getting one’s “fill” of blood prevents the spilling of more blood and leads to “our Tranquility.” Besides this meager attempt at exonerating the

English thirst for destruction – and cannibalistic imagery at that – we sense the deep- rooted desire for the English to uproot the Indians from the swamp. They wish to disentangle the natives in order to destroy them once and for all. The unruly and endlessly generating native body, the beastly and swampy nonhuman, can actually be slashed, burned, and proven “mortal.”

The “fair Field” is perfect for the English appetite for destruction. A “fair” field is one lacking in tangles and roots, one free from non/human complexities and ethical implications. It is a combative space Hubbard recurrently dreams of, mired as he is in the swamp: “[we] never could come to charge them, for they would presently betake themselves into Swamps, and not two of them run together, so as they saw it was an endless work to proceed further in the chase of such an enemy” (60). The “endless work” ends here with the Great Swamp Fight, at least in the anonymous narrator’s imagination

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(the war would last another six months). The account creates a new difficulty that

Hubbard must confront head-on, the issue of discrimination: “It hath been the great care of our Council to distinguish between Friends and Enemies” (4). For here we are still stuck in the December swamp, even if we acknowledge the unspeakable damage done.

The “great care” to distinguish is, and has been, the great care taken by the English to separate English from Indian, human body from nonhuman swampscape. The “planted”

English is one example of going vegetal. But it is a trans-corporal mixture that cannot be separated even in the greatest fight. We have seen the results; now we should investigate the possibilities that were avoided and what we might learn from the trajectories left alone. Hubbard’s Narrative is like a swirling centrifuge in which commingled materiality is separated into clearly identifiable parts. As we have seen, the truly “endless work” is on Hubbard’s part as he tries, like an accurate historian, to get the facts and his bodies straight.

***

Toxic Whiteness: Cleaning up after the War

Philip is finally driven into the swamp where he belonged all along. The common story is that Philip was betrayed by one of his men, “shot through the Heart by an Indian of his own Nation as is said” (103). Yet Hubbard wants to make clear that it was the swampscape that also proved his undoing:

Philip, like a Salvage and wild Beast, having been hunted by the English Forces through the Woods, above an hundred miles backward and forward, at last was driven to his own Den, upon Mount-hope, where retiring himself, with a few of his best Friends into a Swamp, which proved but a Prison to keep him fast, till the Messengers of death, came by Divine permission to execute vengeance upon him, which was thus accomplished. (103)

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The soldiers encircle the swamp early and, once surrounded, Philip tries to make his escape before the English rush in. He conveniently dies in the swamp without the need of

English entrance. Following Hubbard's metaphor of the entangled prison, his imprisonment is both the swampscape and his own treachery. Hubbard reiterates an apocryphal story about Philip’s last days: “[W]hether the Devil appeared to him in a

Dream that night, as he did unto Saul, foreboding his Tragical end (it matters not)” (103).

He then supports the war’s eye-for-an-eye justice via the book of Isaiah: “when thou shalt cease to spoil thou shalt be spoiled” (104). “Spoiled” is a curious word to use in this situation – the spoils of war, and Philip’s sin that spoiled him – but it additionally refers to the spoiling landscape that dirties and decomposes the body. The king conveniently dies in the swamp, back at his place of origin: the circuit has been completed. War is over.

What of Philip’s dream? When speaking about native religions, Hubbard broadly characterizes them as a singular practice full of conjurations (9). But Christian spirits also roam about, including the Devil and an “evill spirit sent from God upon them” that disperses the Indians and brings about the end of the war (87). Hubbard is by no means unique. In a telling substitution, Gorges troubles the Puritans’ easy combination of the black devil and (and Devil) with the swampy Indian. To the natives, the English are the devils who come out of the swamp to infect the home and the body:

It hath been a thing very frequent, before the English came, for the Divell to appear unto them in a bodily shape, sometimes very ugly and terrible, and sometimes like a white boy, and chiefly in the most hideous woods and swamps: they report that sometimes he hath come into their wigwams, and carryed away divers of them alive... (226)

Gorges likens the “boy” to English (imperial) infancy gaining strength. He arrives

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“before the English came,” and disappears once the English arrive, since the white men are now mature enough to subjugate the Indians. Whiteness, not blackness, is under pressure here. These “white” devils threaten the Indians’ ecology (the “wigwam”) and cast Christian conversion as a kind of kidnapping (“carryed away” while still alive). Mary

Rowlandson, kidnapped at Lancaster in February 1676, published a well-known captivity narrative—these native perspectives are less common. Gorges’s note meant to condemn the natives’ beliefs significantly backfires. By illustrating thep toxicity of whiteness, he encourages sympathy with the natives. Moreover, the “white boy” of the swamps challenges the color distinction of the swamp (as essentially black) and unsettles the

Puritans’ categories of white and black, English and other that Hubbard relies on. Did

Philip dream about toxic whiteness?

Cleaning up the aftermath is harder work than Hubbard expected. All hearts are in the hands of God who can turn them as he pleases, and Captain Church (aptly-named) is able to convince the Indians that the devastation was their own doing, that “they first began the warr” (105). English politics with the French and Christian traders’ desire for land are mentioned in passing.7 Hubbard ends the Narrative with Philip’s peace treaty with the English from 1671, driving home the point that justice (and divine Justice) has been served. As for Philip and his forces,

But it is certain that there are scarce any that are now left that belonged to either of them: so as although the Almighty hath made use of them to be a scourge to his People, he hath now turned his hand against them, to their utter destruction, and extirpation from off the face of the earth, peradventure to make room for others of his People to come in their room, and in their stead. (109)

God clears the area. As a bonus, he makes additional room for the English rather than re- establish pre-war borders. The worst purification of the swamp is in “his hand.” What of

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the tribes that escape Hubbard’s memory? In their silence, it is certain what has become of them. Stragglers are “destroyed one parcel after another” until the area is clear; those who are never heard from again preferably remain that way; those who do speak out are either convicted of crimes or interrogated for information. Hubbard cares only about ensuring a domestic English ecology. It is a precarious one. Major Symon, part Pequod and part Narragansett, was believed to have dispatched with his own hands approximately sixty men, “either out of hatred to the enemy, or love to the English, is this last week [has] gone with the Souldiers to the eastward, in pursuit of our quarrel against them in those parts” (111). The English seem more interested in justice than in assimilation. Besides, the Indians are “wild creatures” that

having had an hand in the bloud of the English, they feared vengeance hung over their heads: or whither they liked not the English manners so well, as to be confined thereunto: wild creatures ordinarily love the liberty of the woods, better than the restraint of a cage. (113)

The battle against the swampscape is never finished. Only a divine fire may rescue them:

“God grant that by the Fire of all these Judgments, we may be purged from our Dross, and become a more refined people, as Vessels fitted for our Masters use” (115). Hubbard closes his Narrative with more purgation and purification, leaving us with his own dream of bodies washed clean of the mud.

***

Slaughter at the Swamp: Hubbard’s Supplements

I have been arguing that the Puritans’ attempts to exonerate themselves from

Philip’s War, done in the name of divine justice, are in tandem with their endeavors to separate themselves from the New England swamps. All swamp things suffer terribly, but unequally, within an overarching discourse of purification. I have also argued that the

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swamp is a trans-corporeal space that refuses straight lines, pure forms, and binary logics.

The swamp’s materiality is always more than an anxiety over exogenous miasma or a secret desire for what one overtly repudiates. The possible reactions to this enmeshment are apparent: for Hubbard, it culminates in the Great Swamp Fight. But the fight is neither singular nor unique. Hubbard’s “supplement” (117) concerning the previous war with the Pequods is an unfortunate example. True to the nature of the supplement, another layer of violence is added to the chronicle after the chronological conclusion of

King Philip’s War. Hubbard and his readers keep fighting. This addition demonstrates the un/easy repetition of non/human violence that remains possible, even as it looks in the past to do so. Although marketed as history, the Narrative’s relationships with the swamp are closer to the present than his readers might want them to be.

Round two. During the Pequod War on July 13 1637, English soldiers pursue the tribe into a village “seated by the side of an hideous Swamp...into which they all slipt as well Pequods as natives of the place” (130). The English foolishly rush “into the Swamp, where they were very rudely entertained by those evening wolves that were then kennelled therein” (130). Arrows and disorientation in the swampscape are the least of their worries:

[O]thers were in as much hazzard of being swallowed by the miery boggs of the Swamp wherein they stuck so fast, that if Serjeant Riggs of Roxbury had not rescued two or three of them they had fallen into the hands of the enemy; but such was the strength and courage of those that came to the rescue, that some of the Indians being slain with their Swords, their friends were quickly relieved, and drawn out of the mire and danger. (130)

The standard English procedure is to encircle swamps and flush out inhabitants. To enter, as we have often seen, equals certain death. Not surprisingly, the men are “swallowed” by the monstrous and consuming swampscape that is the Indian dwelling place. The

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swamp is “hideous” and yet the English must “slip” into it “as well” as the Pequods. Now the English face that chronic swamp problem: once they slip in, how will they slip out?

Certain Indians ask for mercy rather than retreat into the swamp. An interpreter, Thomas

Stanton, is summoned: “upon which the Sachem of the place with several others their wives and children, that liked better to live quietly in their wigwams then be buried in the

Swampe, came forth and had their lives granted them” (130). This conversation is more like Hubbard’s ideal: like the English, the natives do not want to be in the swamp because they, like their enemies, share a mutual repulsion. Swamps are places of stasis for both parties.

Some Pequods, however, decide to fight. Thus begins the “slaughter at the Swamp” near the future site of Fairfield/Stratford (132). Once more, slaughter in the swamps hinges upon slaughter of the swamps. Like the Great Swamp Fight in the winter of 1675, the English resort to a similar strategy against the Pequods. By attacking the landscape they also attack its peoples; as they literally hew and limn the environment, the English cut off the natives’ chances for proliferation by destroying their kennel:

By this time night drawing on, our Commanders perceiving on which side of the Swampe the enemies were lodged, gave order to cut through the Swamp with their swords, that they might the better hemme them round in one corner, which was presently done, and so they were begirt in all night, the English in the circumference plying them with shot all the time, by which meanes many of them were killed and buried in the mire, as they found the next day. (131)

A late-night fog allows several to escape. Many are pursued and killed. Others, even with the offer of mercy, choose death. Although the English would prefer the same over captivity, their refusal of clemency baffles Hubbard: “many were killed in the swamp like sullen doggs, that would rather in their self-willedness and madness sit still to be shot

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through or cut in pieces” (131). Is this justice? Definitely not when the conquered are considered “dogs” to begin with. In the morning, the situation only worsens. Some courageous soldiers re-enter the scene of devastation, only to find more work to do:

they saw several heaps of them [the Pequods] sitting close together, upon whom they discharged their pieces laden with ten or twelve pistol bullets at a time, putting the muzzles of their pieces under the boughs within a few yards of them; so as besides those that were found dead (near twenty) it was judged that many more were killed and sunk into the mire and never were minded more by friend or foe: of those who were not so desperate or sullen to sell their lives for nothing, but yielded in time, the male Children were sent to the Bermudas, of the females some were distributed to the English towns, some were disposed of among the other Indians to whom they were deadly enemies as well as to ourselves. (131)

The Indians prefer dismemberment and miry engulfment above slavery. To be clear, this choice of death is not to be embraced – though their defiance is courageous – but to be exposed, challenged, and prevented from ever appearing again. The “cohesive” English do not understand the natives’ preference for dissolution. The mobility the trans- corporeal swampscape affords ultimately stems from violence. The surviving bodies are immediately “hidden” from sight. Bodies move in one of two ways: either forced down into the mud by the English where they supposedly belong (just like the Great Swamp

Fight) or away from the scene altogether and into slavery. They become objectified

“heaps,” “never minded more.” Of course, Hubbard “minds” them. Yet his history prevents only particular things from being lost: namely, his narrative of divine justice and redemption that begins with the arrival of the English in New England. Shaken by the

Pequod War, their story reaches its bloodiest test of faith in King Philip’s War. In this sense, swamps are useful to the English because they allow only certain things to be covered by the wading historian: “the more pains hath been taken to search out the broken pieces of that Story and thus put them together before the memory thereof was

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buried in the ruines of time” (132). Hubbard will not let his history be ruined – or to use a better word, spoiled, by its subject matter.

Round three. In a postscript attached to the “supplement,” Hubbard describes a ritualized murder of a captured Indian. Almost unreadable, he saves the bloody spectacle for the very end of his publication, where it serves as a dire warning to others.

Connecticut forces under Major Talcot dealt the “greatest Blow” of the war on July 2

1676 (9). As Philip fled, numerous tribes disbanded, recanted their allegiance to

Metacom, and joined the English side. But an anonymous Indian, “a young sprightly

Fellow, seized by the Mohegins” wishes to be put to death rather than flatter his English conquerors:

[He] desired of the English Commanders that he might be delivered into their hands, that they might put him to death, more majorum; sacrifice him to their Cruel Genius of Revenge, in which bruitish and div[...]lish passion they are most of all delighted: The English though not delighted in blood, yet at this time were not unwilling to gratifie their humour, lest by a denyal, they might disoblige their Indian friends, of whom they lately made so much use: Partly also that they might have an ocular demonstration of the Salvage, barbarous Cruelty of these Heathen: And indeed, of all the Enimies that have been the Subjects of the precedent discourse; This Villain did most deserve to become an Object of Justice and Severity... (9)

He then boasts that he has killed nearly twenty men. The English “Cruel Genius” devises an ingenious method of punishment that Hubbard depicts in gruesome detail. Gifting him to their native allies, these “friends” make a great circle, placing the “cruel Monster” in the middle, so that all might observe vengeance in full. They cut each finger one by one, and then break it from the hand “as men use to do with a slaughtered Beast, before they uncase him” (10). The Indians execute this “barbarous” sentence with enthusiasm, of course, while the English appear squeamish. When they had “dismembred one hand of all

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its digits, the blood sometimes spirting out in streams a yard from his hand, which barbarous and unheard of Cruelty, the English were not able to bear, it forcing Tears from their Eyes” (10). Yet the sufferer never relents or shows signs of anguish; when asked how he liked his torture, he admits “he liked it very well, and found it as sweet, as

English men did their Sugar” (10). Then go the toes. Afterwards he is forced to sing and dance round the circle until he tires himself and bores his onlookers. His legs are broken.

Silently sitting down, his brains are finally knocked out. All Hubbard can do is give thanks that the English are delivered from these cruelties: “Instances of this nature should be Incentive unto us, to bless the Father of Lights, who hath called us out from the dark places of the Earth, full of the Habitations of Cruelty” (10). It is not hard to see the hypocrisy here: Hubbard’s countrymen circled, and burned, Indian villages because of their own “Cruel Genius of Revenge.” Crucially, there is no note of any English bystanders leaving or remonstrating despite their tears. This scene demonstrates the diplomacy necessary for future peace and the appeasement of native savagery—a neat lesson Hubbard supplies at the very end.

Although the punishment is not geographically located in the swamp, I have been arguing throughout this chapter that all actors, whether or not they chose to be, are always-already enmeshed in the swampscape. The sacrifice to the “Cruel Genius” illustrates the Latourian (1999) idea of “action at a distance” in significantly ethical ways.

There is no action without doing something; thus an action is inseparable from its effects.

Yet this is exactly what the English onlookers do: they step outside the circle of (solely)

Indian justice. The circle emblematizes what Hubbard’s narrative has been doing all along: creating a network in which the English do not wish to belong (the Indians cause

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the war) but which they participate in, and profit from, nevertheless. Certain actions at a distance. This paradoxical desire is suggested by a hero of the Pequod War, Captain John

Underhill, in his short account of the war published in 1638. A “figure of the Indian fort, or palizado” (Fig. 9) is quite possibly the one described in Hubbard’s “supplement.” The

Figure 9: From John Underhill, Nevves from America (1638)

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English strategy of encircling the swamp is apparent as the English and their native allies, depicted as series of concentric circles, surround the inner circle of the Indian village. But just above and below the fortifications, we see the passages of entry the English detected

(“Heare enttere”). The captains exploited these weaknesses in order to penetrate the fort, and a few skirmishes in the “streets” as well as some burning houses are visible.

Underhill presents a series of surrounding circles that do not touch and yet interact.

This grisly image typifies the English desire for separation from swamp things in the Narrative. As they absolve themselves of the war’s messiness – whether by blaming the Indians for its beginning or projecting its cruelties onto their “friends” – the circle closes in on the English. They are forced to see themselves as active agents inside of the circle, not as passive spectators looking in. The gapped circle, in other words, is a distributed network of agency that demands a shared responsibility of justice (English-

Mohegin). In this sense, Underhill’s illustration models both an open-ended ecosystem and a harmful fantasy of enclosure. For Hubbard, the latter is true; but ecologies are never fully closed, never truly harmonious. Their members precariously re/assemble—in the swampscape, in any -scape. It is important that the native body remains anonymous in this regard, for this body stands for the unnamed native bodies that are equated with the dark wetland to be surrounded, destroyed, and their loss justified. It is a spectacle for

English and Indian alike. The parties cannot avoid it even if they look away; they would still be auditors. Hubbard’s narration of capital punishment and Underhill’s drawing support the argument I have been making throughout this chapter. We must regard swamps as ethical spaces where all actions have material effects. The swampscape’s thick and bottomless embeddedness refuses any attempt at self-distance. All waterscapes

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are like this, arguably, but few can be rendered as well – and as drastically – as the early modern swampscape. Just as the English struggled in the bogs of connections, we are in the great swamp of ecomateriality as well. And in this mushrooming swamp we will remain. But we are not stuck like our Puritanical forebears. Swamps have flow; swamps do. They shake things up, create, and connect. By rediscovering the “quaking” zones in early modern literature we can hopefully prevent future swamp fights, both great and small.

***

Conclusion: The Slough of Respond

It is inevitable: any work on swamps in the early modern period has to address

John Bunyan at some point. A Puritan contemporary of Hubbard’s, Bunyan published

The Pilgrim’s Progress only one year after Hubbard’s history. More so than Hubbard’s swamps, Bunyan’s “Slough of Despond” has pervaded English literature and even popular culture, becoming a catchphrase for depression, low spirits, and a general lack of confidence. The poem begins in a Dantean fashion: “As I walk’d through the wilderness of this world,” Bunyan falls asleep in a “Denn” (2009, 11). In his dream he sees a man,

Christian, who is seeking the path away from death’s condemnation but “could not tell which way to go” (12). The conveniently named Evangelist instructs Christian to journey outside the wicket-gate that marks the border of him home. Christian runs out onto the plain. Only Pliable comes along; almost as soon as he gains his companion, Christian loses him in one of the story’s most famous places:

Now I saw in my Dream, that just as they had ended this talk, they drew near to a very Miry Slough, that was in the midst of the Plain, and they being heedless, did both fall suddenly into the bogg. The name of the Slow was Dispond. Here therefore they wallowed for a time, being grieviously

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bedaubed with the dirt; And Christian, because of the burden that was on his back, began to sink in the Mire. (15)

Pliable chastises Christian for leading him into this mess, and with a great heaving, lifts himself out of the swamp that “was next to his own House,” leaving Christian to “tumble in the Slough of Dispondency alone” (Bunyan, 2009, 16). It takes the hand of Help to pull him out. Help explains to him why the way is miry: it is “such a place as cannot be mended: It is the descent whither the scum and filth that attends conviction for sin, continually run, and therefore it is called the Slough of Dispond” (16). The soul’s fears, doubts, and apprehensions run into this place and come together, explaining the

“badness” of this ground (16).

Bunyan’s swamp encroaches upon Hubbard’s: swamps are “bad” ground that must be rendered good. Thus the solution, Help says, is to cultivate the land. The king’s

“Labourers...have by the direction of His Majesties Surveyors, been for above the sixteen hundred years, imploy’d about this patch of ground, if perhaps it might have been mended” (16). They labor in vain; the slough has “swallowed up...Twenty thousand Cart

Loads; Yea Millions of wholsom Instructions, that have at all seasons been brought from all places of the Kings Dominions” (16). This “king” is the pinnacle of ecoimperialism.

With the necessary surveying and draining the human will “mend” the land. It is wishful anthropocentric thinking. Just as the first visitors to New England discovered, swamps are monstrous things that defy human control; mud keeps guzzling the best-laid plans. “If so be it might have been mended, but it is the Slough of Dispond still; and so will be; when they have done what they can” (16). Help helps Christian discover the futility of human toil, surely, but also the intransigence of the swamp: it is here to stay whether he likes it or not. It is not hard to see the theological side of “badness” permeate the

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geographical and historical specificity of Hubbard’s swamps. As we saw earlier, the purification of wetlands runs two ways: the cultivation of the physical land and the spiritual (human) soul. Non/human swamp bodies, those dangerous and hybrid middles, must be purified. Purified with fire. No wonder Latour (1993) calls the modernists’ split between nature and culture “purification.”

To de-center the human in the agentic swampscape is not necessarily to redefine it, however, and as much as Bunyan’s slough reasserts its powers (endlessly) over civilization, this only seems to bolster an antagonistic (rather than co-constitutive) view of the swampy environment. Like Prospero’s cell, the swamp is right outside your door, and yet, somehow, it is permanently cordoned off. The two houses of nature and culture remain separated as if by their own “Wicket-gate” (12). Although man’s sin replenishes the filth, this influx is a spiritual rather than a material commingling. The sins of man saturate the ground and maintain its unhealthy levels. If Christian cannot be wholly cleansed of his embeddedness, he can at least be shown the way out. Help lends another hand:

True, there are by the direction of the Law-giver, certain good and substantiall Steps, placed even through the very midst of this Slough; but at such time as this place doth much spue out its filth, as it doth against charge of weather, these steps are hardly seen; or if they be, Men through the dizziness of their heads, step besides; and then they are bemired to purpose, notwithstanding the steps be there; but the ground is good when they are once got in at the Gate. (17)

Because there are laws within this system (faith in Christ, according to Bunyan), it is the errant who “bemires” himself by straying from the “good” path that is always there, right at the gate. The progress of the Progress is a linear one, a one-way trajectory that opposes open-ended becomings.. Despondence is merely a stop to spiritual transcendence. Let the

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swamp swallow what it will, let it “spue its filth,” the steps will always be there. The path of righteousness will wash Christian clean. There is method in this Puritanical mire, and these laws are without disputability. In this sense, Bunyan seems to anticipate the modernist view of science even in his affirmations of faith and belief. Laws render the swamps manageable, and these laws distanced the observant subject from the observed object: this is how “facts” are made. Converted into gospel truth, they resist critique.

What of the swamp? What of the “world of fleshy beings with their own needs, claims, and actions” (Alaimo 2010, 2)? Try as he may to circumvent the “slough,”

Christian still has to be “bemired” in order to reach his final destination. Regarding

Hubbard, both the Narrative and the English confederation are built with spongy matter; they are borne out of their material interactions with the swampscape, its “long chain of transformations,” an “endless sequence” of sphagnum. In order for the settlers of New

England to develop a theological discourse of “wallowing” through a fallen world, they must be “bedaubed” by its agentic swamps. Each writer argues that co-extensiveness with

“filth” is something to avoid. Because evangelicalism breaks the human free from the

“Denn” (prison) that swamps represent, Bunyan’s “slough” is a metaphor rather than a material, geographical meshwork. In comparison, Hubbard reads swampscapes materially as well as metaphorically. Hubbard’s Christians are simultaneously firm and infirm. For him, the metaphors of sin, death, and imprisonment collapse into the mud. “Nonhumans are born free,” Latour proclaims, “and everywhere they are in chains” (1999, 172).

Hubbard’s tactic demonstrates how metaphor and material interpenetrate, chaining not just nonhumans but humans as well. Yet these are the pernicious chains of slavery, not the “long chain of transformations.” Some swamp things truly are stuck—that is,

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forcefully set in place by another. By confronting the chains of human and nonhuman bondage Hubbard employs, we may learn how to temper a swampscape’s (or any – scape’s) chains into chains of potentiality, that “endless sequence.” This is the “Object of” environmental “Justice.” There are more lessons to be learned from Hubbard’s history.

On July 1, 1676 Mr. Hezekiah Willet of Swanzy, believing his sentinel duty to be no longer necessary so late in the war, neglects his post. Indians shoot him three times, decapitate him, and then steal his head. Hubbard reacts to the murder in an expected manner – disgustedly – but then briefly hints at another story, that of Willet’s dutiful

Negro:

[T]he same Indians, not being above thirty in number, took away a Negro belonging to the same Family, who being faithful to his Masters, and the Countries interest, ventured his life to make his escape, which was the preservation of many others; for the said Negro being a little acquainted with their Language, discovered to the English after his escape, Philips purpose to seize such and such places: in the first place to assault Taunton, which in all probability had been in great danger, if their treacherous plots and purposes had not so wonderfully been made known before hand. (92)

The slave's escape is considered dutiful because he sticks to his English masters and thus upholds yet another swamp hierarchy. Indians usually killed the men—perhaps this is a moment of resemblance or sympathy shared between slave and Indian. That the “said

Negro” is “a little acquainted” with the language suggests previous (even pre-war) moments of commingling that Hubbard leaves absent. We will never know. The story abruptly ends, taking the man’s tale along with it. He escapes the Narrative as well. Here the imprisonment metaphor of Bunyan’s swamp meets fleshy, captive bodies. The

English shackled black bodies in the same way the swampscape “pinnioned” its earliest

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combatants (27). Hubbard’s Narrative is the ultimate captivity narrative; the swamp imprisons and is imprisoned, the English pinion and are “pinnioned.”

Where is Help to lead us to a “nobleness of life” for all swamp things? Early modern swampscapes reveal how we are “up to th’ chins” in things, always-already enmeshed with the world despite the clean narratives of Hubbard and the Bunyans that followed him. Thus the question becomes not how to free things but how to better understand the co-implication of human and nonhuman, to dwell deeper in our sticky attachments. “As to emancipation, it does not mean ‘freed from bonds’ but well-attached”

(Latour 1999, 218). Departing from Bunyan, I call this ethical as well as spatial place the

Slough of Respond. Early modern swampscapes help us become more responsible by becoming more responsive. We should attend to how swamps have been silenced instead of learning how to make them speak. Unfortunately, the benefits of this new ecological thought will not spontaneously generate. We must pay attention to the human and nonhuman bodies divided by dead-straight lines, hold those divisions (and their implementers) accountable, and try to remedy their wrongs. Prospero exclaims: “Thou poisonous slave, got by the devil himself” (1.2.322). Hubbard whispers more majorum outside the executioners’ circle. In the manner of our ancestors. Let us drown the book and bury the staff of human mastery. Let us have garrulous conversations in swampspeak and compose a different more majorum for the future. We quake in the Slough of

Respond, and “[w]e are not done yet; none of this world is” (Hurd 2001, 27).

1 See Latour on “articulation” in Pandora’s Hope: “Propositions do not have the fixed boundaries of objects. They are surprising events in the histories or other entities. The more articulation there is, the better” (1999, 143). For an intriguing experiment on eco- articulation, see Walls (2011).

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2 See quagmire, n. in the OED. 3 See entries for swamp, n. and swamp, adj. in the OED. 4 All citations of Hubbard’s Narrative refer to the 1677 edition. Page numbers (when provided) follow the original. 5 Elsewhere, the Indians are boars (25), serpents (41), monsters (41), wolves (33), cannibals (63), and flushed-out foxes (101). 6 The English are adept at manipulating bodies and for inspiring fear. They make spectacles: “Matoonas, an old malicious Villain, who was the first that did any mischief within the Massachusets Colony, July. 14. 1675. baring an old grudge against them as is thought, for justice that was done upon one of his Sons, 1671. whose Head ever since stands upon a Pole near the Gibbet where he was hanged up: the bringing in of this malicious Caitife, was an hopeful presage, that it would not be long before Philip himself, the grand Villain, would in like manner receive a just reward of his Wickedness and Murders” (7). And Philip’s “Squaw Sachem” likewise proves a “spectacle of divine vengeance”: she was found stark naked in “Metapoiset, not far from the water-side, which made some think, that she was first half drowned, and so ended her wretched life, just in that place where the year before she had helped Philip to make his escape: her head being cut off and set upon a Pole in Taunton, was known by some Indians then Prisoners, which set them into an horrid Lamentation; but such was the righteous hand of God, in bringing at the last that mischief upon themselves, which they had without cause thus long acted against others” (103). 7 “It is Reported by some of the Inhabitants of Kennebeck, lately fled, or rather driven from thence, that about five years since, four English men were slain by the Amoroscoggin Indians, up Pegypscot River, that runs into Kennebeck; but it was concealed by the wicked Traders of those parts, for fear of discovering their wicked manner of trading with the Heathen; which if it had been duly enquired into, when it was first done, much of what followed might have been prevented;

—Quid non mortalia pectora cogis Auri sacra Fames?

But such Gains have proved like Aurum Tholousanum to some of the Inhabitants of those parts” (1677)

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Exit, Wet

[W]hat time mixes up in the future even more than in the past are not objects and subjects at all, but humans and nonhumans, and that makes a world of difference. Bruno Latour, Pandora’s Hope (200)

Sebastian: I am standing water.

The Tempest (2.1.217)

With the “factish,” Latour overcame the split between matters of fact and matters of concern. As long as the former is kept in the domain of science and the latter in the humanities, critique runs out of steam. Matters of concern, of course, are ecological, and

Latour has recently turned to a similar distinction moderns make between facts and values in ecological philosophy. Along with Émilie Hache, he makes a strong case for how science delegates morality exclusively to the human dimension. Science demands that we leave the facts of ecological crisis alone. But how can this divorce from ethics take place, the authors ask, in our polyvocal pluriverse? Humans are not the only beings whose calls we must answer, and science studies can help redress this disparity. Their essay is “an experiment or exercise in sensitization and desensitization...the reader must agree to suspend belief in any a priori division between beings capable and beings incapable of obliging us to respond to their call” (2010, 312). Hence the etymology of respond, respondeo: “I become responsible by responding, in word or deed, to the call of someone or something” (312). A response, then, is more than a mere speech act: it is a reply to “something,” meaning that we must identify and heed the call. Hache and

Latour’s significant contribution is that they trace this calling capacity to the nonhuman, even inorganic, world: “One may become sensitive or increasingly insensitive to the call

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of certain beings, whether human or nonhuman: that is indeed an everyday experience”

(312).

The authors urge us to (1) “lengthen the list of beings to whose call we should respond scrupulously” and (2) “find amazing...the strange operations whereby we have constantly restricted the list of beings to whose appeal we should have been able to respond” (325). Similar to Latour’s trademark argument that we have never been modern, the point here is that we have always had extension: “[E]cological morality is always approached as if it were a matter of authorizing or prohibiting an extension of the moral category to new beings (animals, rivers, glaciers, oceans), whereas exactly opposite is the case” (325). We do not require extension, just better attention, for there is “a proliferation of moral subjects calling out for scrupulous treatment” at this moment (325). In a strange twist, we must attend to how we have silenced nature, not how to hear it speak.

“[C]hanges are underway that will bring humans to hear the silence of nonhumans once more” (326). The sound of silence is deafening to the ears of the trained respondents

Hache and Latour would have us become.

“Waterscapes of Desire” is an ongoing experiment in sensitization and desensitization. In each chapter, I have portrayed the early modern waterscape as a laboratory in which early travel writers tested agentic waters and listened – some better than others – to the calls of human and nonhuman things. My experiment with posthuman actor-networks has been an experiment in posthumanist ethics along. Like the deer hearing the “keepers call” on the Guianan riverbank, I have tried to: respond to the calls of silent and silenced things; extend my capacity to respond; and lengthen the list of vociferous beings to rivers, ice, rain, and swamps. I have celebrated the instances when

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nonhuman and human desires enter into dialogue; I have confronted the moments when a voice is silenced. Moral reflection should be a key component of ecological justice, to be sure; most environmentalists would claim that it is the obligation, the moral responsibility, of the human to be responsible to the world. But I have considered what would happen if the human was not “to” the world but “with” its things. “[T]hey are us,” after all (Latour 1999, 214). The Puritans of King Philip’s War heard the call of the swamps and its indigenous human inhabitants, but they responded with flame, bullets, and plow. Bunyan, too, desensitizes the swamp, channeling them into one voice (of danger and despondence) that consequently desensitizes us. Despite their wide range of effects, I believe that early modern water-writers participated in this responsibility to be responsive; that their responses can re-sensitize our approaches to the deltas, glaciers, monsoons, and marshes of the present; and that revisiting their narratives can expand our own, so that we may more peacefully compose our co-implicated, shared, and wet selves.

You have been part of my experiment, and you are part of the ecological experiment that happens, in Feste’s and Hache’s and Latour’s words, “every day.” I am sure you will respond. How is up to you.

To conclude, if we are “for all waters” we are also “standing water” (2.1.217).

Placid water belies Sebastian’s oceanic name. Here are the noxious “standing-waters” and “moist crudities” that plague our thirst for mixed connections. There are long histories of harmful flux: “hanged” native pilots, warming Inuit, a wetland burning. Can we stand any more injustice? Can we withstand another ecodisaster, accidental or foreseeable? Recall that the red water of Amapaia changed at midday. “Standing” red water is also that which is able to move in either direction, water with infinite potential.

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And there is another “standing” water: the aquatic bodies of the explorers themselves, those “walking” pots. But interdependence did not come naturally. It involved a choice:

Will Ralegh make a map or a tracing? Will Davis return his laboratory to its anthropocentric moorings? Will Bernier define monsoonal spaces or will he cohabit spaces always in redefinition? Will Hubbard paint a dead-straight line? Through their actions, we have the opportunity to act. Just as early modern travel writers discovered new worlds, we are still discovering them. I waited until the very end to surprise you with this: a wet exit is always an entrance into, enter- something else. So I leave you with yet another exercise, a sequence of plashy places. What interactions will occur? What stories will be told? What desires will be shared? Exit, wet.

***

In April 2012, the Australian company Nautilus Minerals proposes an environmental experiment: deep-sea mining off the coast of Papua New Guinea. “[T]he desire of golde will aunswere many obiections.”

February 2012: Russian scientists reach Lake Vostok, Antarctica’s largest subglacial lake. After drilling two-and-a-half miles down, they enter an alien world.

In September 2011, astronomers discover Gliese 581g, nicknamed the “Goldilocks” planet. Due to its trace amounts of liquid, it might be “just right” for habitation.

...the said strange thunder of waters, as they drew me on by little and little...

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