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Home , 1010s, 1080s, 11th century, 1210s, 1240s, 12th century

SETTING THE SCENE FOR THOREAU’S POEM:

YET AGAIN WE ATTEMPT TO LIVE AS ADAM

11th 1310s 1320s 1330s 1340s 1350s 1360s 1370s 1380s 1410s 1440s 1450s 1460s 1470s 1480s 1490s 1510s 1520s 1530s 1540s 1550s 1560s 1570s 1580s 1590s 1610s 1620s 1630s 1640s 1650s 1660s 1670s 1680s 1690s 1710s 1720s 1730s 1740s 1750s 1760s 1770s 1780s 1790s 1810s

Alas! how little does the memory of these human inhabitants enhance the beauty of the landscape! Again, perhaps, Nature will try, with me for a first settler, and my house raised last spring to be the oldest in the hamlet.

To be a Christian is to be Christ- like.

VAUDÈS OF LYON

1600

William Gilbert, court physician to Queen Elizabeth, described the earth’s in DE MAGNETE.

Robert Cawdrey’s A TREASURIE OR STORE-HOUSE OF SIMILES.

Lord Mountjoy assumed control of Crown forces, garrisoned , and destroyed food stocks. O’Neill asked for help from . HDT WHAT? INDEX

1600 1600

In about this Robert Dudley, being interested in stories he had heard about the bottomlessness of Eldon Hole in Derbyshire, thought to test the matter. George Bradley, a serf, was lowered on the end of a lengthy rope. Dudley’s little experiment with another man’s existence did not result in the establishment of the fact that holes in the ground indeed did have bottoms; instead it became itself a source of legend as spinners would elaborate a just-so story according to which serf George was raving mad when hauled back to the surface, with hair turned white, and a few days later would succumb to the shock of it all. CREDULITY

WALDEN: As I was desirous to recover the long lost bottom of Walden Pond, I surveyed it carefully, before the ice broke up, early in ’46, with compass and chain and sounding line. There have been many stories told about the bottom, or rather no bottom, of this pond, which certainly had no foundation for themselves. It is remarkable how long men will believe in the bottomlessness of a pond without taking the trouble to sound it. I have visited two such Bottomless Ponds in one walk in this neighborhood. Many have believed that Walden reached quite through to the other side of the globe. Some who have lain flat on the ice for a long time, looking down through the illusive medium, perchance with watery eyes into the bargain, and driven to hasty conclusions by the fear of catching cold in their breasts, have seen vast holes “into which a load of hay might be driven,” if there were any body to drive it, the undoubted source of the Styx and entrance to the Infernal Regions from these parts. Others have gone down from the village with a “fifty-six” and a wagon load of inch rope, but yet have failed to find any bottom; for while the “fifty-six” was resting by the way, they we paying out the rope in the vain attempt to fathom their truly immeasurable capacity for marvellousness. But I can assure my readers that Walden has a reasonably tight bottom at a not unreasonable, though at an unusual, depth. I fathomed it easily with a cod-line and a stone weighing about a pound and a half, and could tell accurately when the stone left the bottom, by having to pull so much harder before the water got underneath to help me. The greatest depth was exactly one hundred and two feet; to which be added the five feet which it has risen since, making one hundred and seven. This is a remarkable depth for so small an area; yet not an inch of it can be spared by the imagination. What if all ponds were shallow? Would it not react on the minds of men? I am thankful that this pond was made deep and pure for a symbol. While men believe in the infinite some ponds will be thought to be bottomless.

Thomas Dekker’s plays The Shoemaker’s Holiday and Old Fortunatus.

At about this point Thomas Heywood’s 1st play, THE FOUR PRENTISES OF , began to be acted (it would not be printed until 1615). He also created a 2-part history play about Edward IV. His THE ROYALL KING AND THE LOYALL SUBJECT (acted circa 1600, printed 1637). HDT WHAT? INDEX

1600 1600 Phineas Fletcher, a scholar from the Westminster School of Eton in Buckinghamshire, matriculated at King’s College of Cambridge University.

KING’S COLLEGE

ST JOHN’S HDT WHAT? INDEX

1600 1600 Samuel Purchas graduated at St John’s College of Cambridge University (later he would become a B.D.).

Charles I was born, the 2d son of King James VI of (who would become King James I of ) and Anne of .

Ben Jonson’s play CYNTHIA’S REVELS.

At about this point the commoner poet Samuel Daniel became tutor to Lady Anne Clifford, daughter of the Countess of Cumberland. On the death of Edmund Spenser he was benefited with the somewhat vague office of Poet Laureate, which it seems however he would relinquish in favor of Jonson. Whether it was on this occasion is not known, but about this time, and at the recommendation of his brother-in-law, Giovanni Florio, he was taken into favor at court and wrote A PANEGYRICKE CONGRATULATORIE in ottava rima, which was offered to King James at Burleigh Harrington in Rutland.

The Poets Laureate of England

1591-1599 Edmund Spenser 1599-1619 Samuel Daniel 1619-1637 Ben Jonson 1638-1668 William Davenant 1670-1689 John Dryden 1689-1692 Thomas Shadwell 1692-1715 Nahum Tate 1715-1718 Nicholas Rowe 1718-1730 Laurence Eusden 1730-1757 Colley Cibber 1758-1785 William Whitehead HDT WHAT? INDEX

1600 1600 The Poets Laureate of England

1785-1790 Thomas Warton 1790-1813 Henry James Pye 1813-1843 Robert Southey 1843-1850 William Wordsworth 1850-1892 Alfred Lord Tennyson 1896-1913 Alfred Austin 1913-1930 Robert Bridges 1930-1967 John Masefield 1967-1972 Cecil Day-Lewis 1972-1984 Sir John Betjeman 1984-1998 Ted Hughes 1999- Andrew Motion

John Beaumont and Francis Beaumont transited from Broadgates Hall at University to the Inner Temple in London, for the study of law.

Publication of THE RUTTER OF JEAN ALPHONSE.

This was the approximate florut of the English poet John Chalkhill, about whose life precious little is known. Izaak Walton (1593-1683) would in 1653 include two songs by him in THE COMPLEAT ANGLER. His volume THEALMA AND CLEARCHUS. A PASTORAL ROMANCE. IN SMOOTH AND EASIE VERSE. WRITTEN LONG SINCE BY JOHN CHALKHILL, ESQ., AN ACQUAINTANT AND FRIEND OF EDMUND SPENSER would appear belatedly in 1683, and would be studied by Henry Thoreau in 1842. THEALMA AND CLEARCHUS

At about this point coffee was being introduced into , where it was considered a sort of medication. Throughout the century, however, special shops called caffes would be opening to grant patrons their frequent draught of this distillation of a scorched bean from an Arabian tree. Some smugglers were able to get seven (7) coffee seeds out of the Arabian port of Mocha in an unroasted condition, so they could be planted, and the Arabian monopoly on coffee had been broken.

By this point at least, Passaconaway (“Child of the Bear”) had become headman of the Penacook. He lived at the top of the Pawtucket Falls in what would become Lowell in what would become Massachusetts.

At this point, upstream at what would become Concord in what would become New Hampshire, there were about 2,000 English settlers. HDT WHAT? INDEX

1600 1600

Samuel Rowland’s THE LETTING OF HUMOURS BLOOD IN THE HEAD-VAINE included a remark “We gaue the Brewers Diet-drinke a wipe.” Many such natural health concoctions, at least in Henry Thoreau’s day, would contain sarsaparilla and thus would be what we would today classify as root beers. Cf. WALDEN’s comment about the ruffed grouse:

WALDEN: When the ground was not yet quite covered, and again near the end of winter, when the snow was melted on my south hill-side and about my woodpile, the partridges came out of the woods morning and evening to feed there. Whichever side you walk in the woods the partridge bursts away on whirring wings, jarring the snow from the dry leaves and twigs on high, which comes sifting down in the sunbeams like golden dust; for this brave bird is not to be scared by winter. It is frequently covered up by drifts, and, it is said, “sometimes plunges from on wing into the soft snow, where it remains concealed for a day or two.” I used to start them in the open land also, where they had come out of the woods at sunset to “bud” the wild apple-trees. They will come regularly every evening to particular trees, where the distant orchards next the woods suffer thus not a little. I am glad that the partridge gets fed, at any rate. It is Nature’s own bird which lives on buds and diet-drink.

RUFFED GROUSE

At about this point the members of a Hindu religious cult known as the thugi (pronounced tug-ee, and meaning “sly deceivers”) were becoming notorious throughout for strangling unsuspecting merchants, then dancing around their bodies. While loot was motivating the cult, cult leaders claimed that the Indian death- goddess Kali provided occult powers when offered human sacrifices. The goddess did not like bloodshed, however, as this only strengthened her enemy Raktavira. Therefore strangulation was the preferred method of disposition. [Strangulation offered the spiritual advantage of making its victims look like Kali, whom artists depicted with a black face, bulging eyes, and a protruding tongue, plus it had the practical advantage of negating the defensive value of chain mail shirts. Without a list of robbers and their victims, it is not possible to determine whether the prime motivation for Thugi violence was robbery or sectarianism (e.g., Minas youths attacking their Gujas rivals). Doubtless both motivations played some role, especially as peddlers and circus performers, the people most likely to be traveling through the region, were usually Muslim.] According to 19th-Century trial records, thugi attacks generally used multiple assailants. The initial attacker distracted the victim while the 2d attacker threw a noose around his neck, and then, ideally, a 3d attacker kicked him in the scrotum while he was being strangled. If they had time they would also bury the victim in a shallow grave. HDT WHAT? INDEX

1600 1600 This had a ritual: the grave was dug with a special pickax called a mahi and the victim’s belly was slit with a snake-handled knife called a cathini. In theory, this let his spirit escape, but really caused his body to decompose faster, making discovery harder. The most notorious Thug was a man named Bahram who claimed to have strangled more than 900 between 1790 and 1840. While such outrages caused the British to suppress the cult, it continues to be commemorated by the English word “thug,” and, as recently as 1977, Indian police advised travelers not to travel unarmed at night through rural Rajasthan.

Imbangala bands begin emerging throughout West Central Africa. While the name imbangala is an Angolan title of indeterminate meaning, the imbangala bands themselves were little more than gangs of heavily armed teenagers who fought hand-to-hand using lances and lived by slave-raiding and looting. Imbangala warriors worshipped evil rather than good. They were routinely drunk, used women as cup-bearers, and to prevent the formation of binding ties often killed their children. They practiced ritual cannibalism and used traditional Central African talismans that subsequent oral traditions have linked with American and Caribbean voodoo dolls.

The smoking of tobacco was introduced and to Russia by travelers from Central and by Western European and Turkish sailors. A controversy broke out over whether use of such substances was implicitly forbidden by the Koran. Although Sultan Ahmed I prohibited tobacco, the poet Pecevi would describe it, coffee, opium, and as the four “cushions on the sofa of pleasure.”

There were probably fewer than 20,000 individuals in the five tribes of the Iroquois at this time. The Iroquois were sedentary rather than nomadic, living in clans in longhouses in fortified agricultural villages. These longhouses were covered with elm bark and might well be over 200 feet in length.

Their history begins with the twin brothers, Enigorio and Enigonhahetgea (good spirit and evil spirit), their creatures the Eagwehoewe (people), and their enemies the Ronnongwetowanca (giants). The earliest people were championed by the hero Donhtonha and the less heroic Yatatonwatea and plagued by the mischievous Shotyeronsgwea. These early people were also threatened by, but survived, the Big Quisquiss or mammoth, the Big Elk, the great Emperor who resided at the Golden City to the south, the great horned serpent of Lake Ontario, and the blazing star that fell. Their monstrous enemies included the Konearaunehneh (Flying Heads), the Lake Serpent, the Otneyarheh (Stonish Giants), the snake with the human head, the Oyalkquoher or Oyalquarkeror (the Big Bear), the great musqueto, Kaistowanea (the serpent with two heads), the great Lizard, and the witches introduced by the Skaunyatohatihawk or Nanticokes. When the creation was renewed and restored, the Five Nations/Six Nations tribal alliance was formed and would intermittently be rescued by the intervention of Tarenyawagon, the Holder of the Heavens. The Five Nations was a tribal alliance, or Ggoneaseabneh (Long House), formed in order to effectively oppose the power of the Sohnourewah (Shawnees), Twakanhahors (Mississaugers), Ottauwahs, Squawkihows, Kanneastokaroneah (Eries), Ranatshaganha (Mohegans), Nay-Waunaukauraunah, and Keatahkiehroneah. Important figures in the history include headmen Atotarho I, Atotarho II, Atotarho III, Atotarho IV, Atotarho V, Atotarho VI, Atotarho VII, Atotarho VIII, Atotarho IX, Atotarho X, Atotarho XI, Atotarho XII, Atotarho XIII, the war headmen Shorihowane and Thoyenogea, Sauwanoo, Queen Yagowanea, and the allied or friendly Dog Tail Nation and the Kauwetseka. These were the original Five Nations in this tribal alliance: • The Teakawrehhogeh or Tehawrehogeh (Mohawks) HDT WHAT? INDEX

1600 1600 • The Newhawtehtahgo or Nehawretahgo (Oneidas) • The Seuhnaukata or Seuhnowkahtah (Onondagas) • The Shoneanawetowah (Cayugas) • The Tehooneanyohent or Tehowneanyohent (Senecas)

This tribal alliance was later joined by the Kautanohakau (Tuscaroras), to make up a Six Nations tribal alliance.

The league’s primary law was the Kainerekowa, which simply stated that Iroquois should not kill one another. The Iroquois League’s organization was prescribed by a written constitution based on 114 wampums and reinforced by a funeral rite known as the “Condolence” — shared mourning at the passing of sachems from the member tribes. The council was composed of 50 male sachems known variously as lords, or peace chiefs. Each tribe’s representation was set: Onondaga 14, Cayuga 10, Oneida 9, Mohawk 9, and Seneca 8. This League was formed prior to any contact with white people and thus owed nothing to European influence. The Iroquois considered themselves Ongwi Honwi, superior people. Their isolation inland would protect them to some degree during the initial European epidemics along the continental coast, so that later on they would begin to wield a great deal of influence in the native American world. HDT WHAT? INDEX

1600 1600 HDT WHAT? INDEX

1600 1600

John Bartram’s 1751 diagram of an Iroquois longhouse and the town of Oswego. HDT WHAT? INDEX

1600 1600 Previously, italic font had been available only for the lowercase alphabetic letters, in about the manner in which our current computer font “ITC Novarese” still lacks uppercase italics and lacks italic numerals. During this century it would become for the first time possible to set uppercase letters in an italic font, and numerals as well. HISTORY OF THE PRESS

The Dutch entered the international slave trade. The trade was so rampant that elephant numbers begin to decline in . INTERNATIONAL SLAVE TRADE

After looking at the year 2000 as a possible end-time date, Martin Luther had settled on the idea that the End would come no later than 1600 (Weber, Eugen. APOCALYPSES. Cambridge MA: Harvard UP, 1999, page 66; Kyle, Richard. THE LAST DAYS ARE HERE AGAIN. Grand Rapids MI: Baker Books, 1998, page 192). Even if I knew that tomorrow the world would go to pieces, I would still plant my apple tree.1

MILLENNIALISM

Shortly after meeting Matteo Ricci, Xu Guangqi (1562-1633), who had failed in his 1st try at the doctoral level of examination in the mandarin system of promotion in , the jinshi exam, and had accepted instruction by the Jesuit fathers in the Christian faith, had a dream in which there were three temples. The first of these temples was a shrine to God and the second to God’s son, while the third was empty. After his training in , Xu would come to realize that the Sacred Trinity of Father, Son, and Holy Spirit had visited him in this vision. CHINESE CHRISTIANITY

Onate organized the colonization of New under the encomienda system. Spaniards “protected” the Indians in exchange for a tribute that was to be paid in labor or products. The Spaniards kidnapped Apaches, Navajos, and Utes who lived near colonies to use as slave labor or household servants.

1. Henry Thoreau would say in “LIFE WITHOUT PRINCIPLE” that “I would not run round a corner to see the world blow up.” HDT WHAT? INDEX

1600 1600 The Enlightenment was not innocent in founding itself on man’s ability to reason. Instead, this had a very great deal to do with racial politics. Already, at this point, enlightened (lactified?) Europeans were wondering whether or not the “species of men” which they were encountering in their forays into Africa would prove capable of mastering the arts and sciences of life. The of René Descartes is a fine example of how reason could be valorized, and thus privileged, above any other characteristic of humanity. Were the Afrik variety of humankind to prove themselves capable of reason, of course, then that variety and the European variety would be seen to be fundamentally related, and consequently it would be unseemly for one variety to be treating the other variety, merely because they had the power to do so, as one of their market commodities — . Writing, with the spread of the printing press, had come to be taken as the preclusive evidence of rationality, so, were the dusky Afriks to prove to be incapable of creating any formalized literature on the civilized model, then clearly they were of an appropriate nature to be appropriated as the real world’s niggers of all work, and nobody need to go on any guilt trip about that traffic. For what other function could such beings have been placed here?

?

“The grandeur of a country is to assume all its history. With its glorious pages but also its more shady parts.” — President Jacques Chirac of

SLAVEHOLDING

Between this year and 1614, first the British East India Company was chartered by Queen Elizabeth, and then the Dutch, Danish, and French East India Companies were being founded: In the first voyage made to the East Indies on account of the English East India Company [1600] there were employed four ships commanded by Captain James Lancaster, their General, viz. the Dragon, having the General and 202 men, the Hector 108 men, the Susan 82 and the Ascension 32. They left England about 18 ; in the people were taken ill on their passage with the scurvy; by the first of all the ships except the General’s were so thin of men that they had scarce enough to hand the sails; and upon a contrary wind for fifteen or sixteen days the few who were well before began also to fall sick. Whence the want of hands was so great in these ships that the merchants who were sent to dispose of their cargoes in the East Indies were obliged to take their turn at the helm and do the sailors duty till they arrived at Saldanha [near the Cape of Good Hope]; where the General sent his boats and went on board himself to assist HDT WHAT? INDEX

1600 1600 the other three ships, who were in so weakly a condition that they were hardly able to let fall an anchor without his assistance. All this time the General’s ship continued pretty healthy. The reason why his crew was in better health than the rest of the ships was owing to the juice of lemons of which the General having brought some bottles to sea, he gave to each, as long as it lasted, three spoonfuls every morning fasting. By this he cured many of his men and preserved the rest; so that although his ship contained double the number of any of the others yet (through the mersey of God and to the preservation of the other three ships) he neither had so many men sick, nor lost so many as they did.2

Freed of the Spanish yoke and the intermediary for a vast store of riches from the , Amsterdam suddenly became the most prosperous city of Europe. “They never complain of the pains they take, and go as merrily to the Indies, as if they were going to their Countrey Houses.” Holland’s population would be doubling every . Brownists and were welcomed, if not exactly with open arms. SPICE

Sir Walter Raleigh was appointed the governor of the Isle of Jersey in the . This may have something to do with Henry Thoreau’s becoming intrigued by the man, and it is therefore offered that some scholar might fruitfully dig in Raleigh’s administration of Jersey or his involvement with the port of St. Hélier to find out more in this regard. (If this has ever been researched, I haven’t found out about it.)

At about this point in Persia, Abbas I (would reign from 1587 to 1629) introduced reforms and expanded his territory.

2. Reverend Samuel Purchas. HAKLYUYTUS POSTHUMUS OR PURCHAS HIS PILGRIMES, OR AS A RELATION OR IOURNALL OF THE BEGINNING AND PROCEEDINGS OF THE ENGLIFH PLANTATION FETTLED AT PLIMOTH, IN NEW-ENGLAND, BY CERTAINE … HDT WHAT? INDEX

1600 1600 In Tonga, dominant political leadership was passing from the Tu’i Tonga dynasty to the Tu’i Konokupolu dynasty.

On Easter Island, the beginning of the building of “tupa,” stone towers with inner chambers.

The Kalonga kingdom, north of Zambezi river, was becoming rich through trade in ivory.

The Hausaland dominated trade routes to the Sahara.

Great Zimbabwe was replaced by several regional capitals in Transvaal, Botswana, and Zimbabwe.

Jakob Böhme was newly married and just established with a shoemaker’s bench of his own. In this year, prompted presumably by the Reverend Martin Möller, the Lutheran pastor at Görlitz, he had his 15 minutes of religious experience. The shoemaker who would refuse to stick to his last and insist instead upon mending his soul would say that what he had begun to discover, or rediscover, was the principle that in empirical reality all things are polarized: “in Yes and No all things consist.” HDT WHAT? INDEX

1600 1600 During the 17th century Dunbar, on the east coast of Scotland where the Firth of Forth verges into the , would be a significant fishing port.

John Smith joined Austrian forces to fight the Turks in what would become known as the “Long War.” He would achieve a battlefield promotion to Captain while fighting in .

Queen Elizabeth of England granted a charter to the “Company and Merchants of London trading with the East Indies.” Better known as the Honourable East India Company, this company would be the sole British agent in India until 1858.

In , the 1st import monopolies over tobacco were established. In France, despite high prices, smoking was spreading among the lower classes; snuffing would be more prevalent among the , who consider this a more dignified and aristocratic mode of use. In the Italian and French courts and clergy, the use of tobacco was spreading, and from there throughout the populace (the habit was being spread also by sailors returning from the New World). Tobacco was selling in London for its weight in silver shillings. Cultivation for Europe began in Brazil, while in England, Sir Walter Raleigh persuaded Queen Elizabeth to try some. The 17th Century would be the great age of the pipe. would need to ban smoking or even the taking of snuff in holy places, under threat of . Tobacco would come into use as “Country Money” or “Country Pay,” and would continue to be used as a monetary standard —literally a “cash crop”— throughout the 18th HDT WHAT? INDEX

1600 1600 Century, lasting as a standard of exchange twice as long as would the metal .

Increasingly, medicinal use in England would decline and smoking would become primarily a pleasurable pastime. The government eventually would come to rely on tobacco duties as a main source of revenue. By the 1630s, smoking would have overcome most opposition in England, and use would continue to spread as tobacco prices declined markedly.

In England, coffee was introduced as a luxury, medicament, and panacea; its use was encouraged as a cure for widespread drunkenness. In Arabia and Turkey, another brief attempt to shut down coffee houses as centers of sedition failed.

From the founding of the English colonies in America, drunkenness was so prevalent that it simply was not a stigmatized behavior. As in England the consumption of beers and , particularly home-brews, was integrated into every aspect of colonial family life. Abuse was condemned and temperance advocated, but alcohol itself is highly esteemed as in England as the Good Creature of God, a beneficial gift to man. England. During the reign of James I, numerous writers describe widespread drunkenness from beer and wine among all classes. Alcohol use was tied to every endeavor and phase of life, a condition that would continue well into the 18th Century. HDT WHAT? INDEX

1600 1600 John Bodenham edited ENGLAND’S HELICON, which contained two poems by William Hunnis that Henry Thoreau would copy into his Commonplace Book in about 1841.

ENGLAND’S HELICON

Wodenfrides Song in Praise of Amargana. The sunne the season in each thing Revives new pleasures, the sweet Spring Hath put to flight the Winter keene, To glad our Lovely Sommer Queene. The pathes where Amargana treads With flowrie tap’stries Flora spreads, And Nature clothes the ground in greene, To glad our lovely Sommer Queene. The groaves put on their rich aray, With Hawthorne bloomes imbroydered gay, And sweet perfum’d with Eglantine, To glad our lovely Sommer Queene. The silent River stayes his course Whilst playing on the christall sourse The silver scaled fish are seene, To glad our lovely Sommer Queene. The Woode at her faire sight reioyces The little birds with their lowd voyces In consort on the bryers beene, To glad our lovely Sommer Queene. The fleecie Flockes doo scud and skip The Wood-Nimphs, fawnes and Satires trip, And daunce the Mirtle trees betweene, To glad our lovely Sommer Queene. Great Pan (our God), for her deere sake This feast and meeting bids us make Of Sheepheards, Lads, and Lasses sheene, To glad our lovely Sheepheards Queene. And every Swaine his chaunce doth proue To winne faire Amargana’s love, In sporting strifes quite voide of spleene, To glad our lovely Sommer Queene. All happines let Heaven her lend. And all the Graces her attend Thus bid we pray the muses nine. Long live our lovely Sommer Queene. Finis. W.H. HDT WHAT? INDEX

1600 1600

Another of the same. Happy sheepheards sit and see, with joy The peerelesse wight; For whose sake Pan keepes from ye annoy And gives delight. Blessing this pleasant spring Her praises must I sing. List you Swaines, list to me; The whiles your Flocks feeding be. First her brow a beauteous globe I deeme And golden haire; And her cheeke Auroraes roabe dooth seeme But farre more faire, Her eyes like starres are bright And dazle with their light. Rubies her lips to see, But to tast, nectar they be. Orient pearles her teeth, her smile dooth linke the graces three; Her white necke dooth eyes beguile to thinke it Iuorie. Alas, her Lilly hand How it dooth me commaund? Softer silke none can be And whiter milk none can see. Circe’s wand is not so straite as is Her body small; But two pillers beare the waight of this Maiestick Hall. Those be I you assure Of Alabaster pure Polish’d fine in each part Ne’re Nature yet shewed like Art. How shall I her pretty tread expresse when she dooth walke? Scarse she dooth the Primerose head depresse or tender stalke Of blew-veined Violets Whereon her foote she sets. Vertuous she is, for we find In bodye faire, beauteous minde. Live faire Amargana still extold In all my rime; Hand want Art when I want will, t’unfold her worth divine. But now my Muse dooth rest, Dispaire clos’d in my brest, Of the valour I sing; Weake faith that no hope dooth bring. Finis. W.H.

During this century: the first pockets in trousers. HDT WHAT? INDEX

1600 1600 What would Emerson and Thoreau be reading that had been attributed to the ancient Zoroaster? –Perhaps it would be Otto Heurnius’s BARBARICÆ PHILOSOPHIÆ ANTIQUITATUM (in two volumes) of this year.

CHALDÆAN ORACLES

“WALKING”: My desire for knowledge is intermittent; but my desire to bathe my head in atmospheres unknown to my feet is perennial and constant. The highest that we can attain to is not Knowledge, but Sympathy with Intelligence. I do not know that this higher knowledge amounts to anything more definite than a novel and grand surprise on a sudden revelation of the insufficiency of all that we called Knowledge before — a discovery that there are more things in heaven and earth than are dreamed of in our philosophy. It is the lighting up of the mist by the sun. Man cannot know in any higher sense than this, any more than he can look serenely and with impunity in the face of the sun: , — “You will not perceive that as perceiving a particular thing,” say the Chaldean Oracles.

CHALDÆAN ORACLES

New York: Population of Algonkin (Algonquin) tribes was about 6,000.

The approximate total population of Paumanok Long Island’s Metoac tribes was 10,000. A total of 13 tribes lived on the island.

The population of the five nations of the Iroquois was somewhere under 20,000. HDT WHAT? INDEX

1600 1600

At about this point in Persia, Abbas I (would reign from 1587 to 1629) introduced reforms and expanded his territory.

In Tonga, dominant political leadership was passing from the Tu’i Tonga dynasty to the Tu’i Konokupolu dynasty.

On Easter Island, the beginning of the building of “tupa,” stone towers with inner chambers.

The Kalonga kingdom, north of Zambezi river, was becoming rich through trade in ivory.

The Hausaland dominated trade routes to the Sahara.

Great Zimbabwe was replaced by several regional capitals in Transvaal, Botswana, and Zimbabwe. HDT WHAT? INDEX

1600 1600 Jakob Böhme was newly married and just established with a shoemaker’s bench of his own. In this year, prompted presumably by the Reverend Martin Möller, the Lutheran pastor at Görlitz, he had his 15 minutes of religious experience. The shoemaker who would refuse to stick to his last and insist instead upon mending his soul would say that what he had begun to discover, or rediscover, was the principle that in empirical reality all things are polarized: “in Yes and No all things consist.”

King Henry IV of France withdrew a portion of the grant he had in 1598 made to the Marquis de la Roche, in order to send a wealthy Huguenot merchant of , M. Pierre Chauvin, to establish a colony up the St. Lawrence River. Chauvin’s fur-trading post would be at the mouth of the Saguenay River, at Tadoussac. He would sail off with a valuable cargo of furs, visiting Three Rivers along the way, but when he would return in 1602, he would find that his 16 men had been doing poorly. Chauvin himself would die early in 1603.

During the 17th century Dunbar, on the east coast of Scotland where the Firth of Forth verges into the North Sea, would be a significant fishing port. HDT WHAT? INDEX

1600 1600 Intrusive Spaniards in Mexico had by this point pretty much destroyed the ecology of the Valle del Mezquital above Mexico City. In the 1540s they had characterized this valley as fit for wheat, with stands of oak and pine forest, but by this point their overstocking and overgrazing of sheep and their to acquire mining beams and , combined with the epidemic of 1576-81 which had destroyed the farm labor population, had transformed the irrigated Otomi farmland into hacienda-land fit only for wide-range grazing of rapidly decreasing numbers of European sheep. Mexico’s permanent poverty for virtually all outside the walls of its upscale hacienda homes had begun. See Elinor G.K. Melville’s A PLAGUE OF SHEEP: ENVIRONMENTAL CONSEQUENCES OF THE CONQUEST OF MEXICO (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1994).

JANUARY

FEBRUARY

February 16, Wednesday: Giordano Bruno was burned at the stake.

INSCRIPTION FOR A LITTLE BOOK ON GIORDANO BRUNO3 As America’s mental courage (the thought comes to me to-day) is so indebted, above all current lands and peoples, to the noble army of Old-World martyrs past, how incumbent on us that we clear those martyrs’ lives and names, and hold them up for reverent admiration, as well as beacons. And typical of

3. Walt Whitman, February 24th, 1890, Camden NJ. HDT WHAT? INDEX

1600 1600 this, and standing for it and all perhaps, Giordano Bruno may well be put, to-day and to come, in our New World’s thankfulest heart and memory. W. W.

MARCH

SPRING 1600

APRIL

MAY

JUNE

SUMMER 1600

Summer: Isaac Norris, Sr. recorded in Philadelphia that “About the time of the harvest proved the hottest summer he had ever before experienced. Several persons died in the field with the violence of the heat.” HDT WHAT? INDEX

1600 1600

JULY

AUGUST

SEPTEMBER

FALL 1600

Fall: Isaac Norris, Sr. recorded that there had been in Philadelphia a great yellow fever epidemic in which five members of his own family had died: “This is quite the Barbadoes distemper: they void and vomit blood. There is not a day nor night has passed for several weeks, but we have the account of the death or sickness of some friend or neighbour. It hath been sometimes very sickly, but I never before knew it so mortal as now; nine persons lay dead in one day at the same time; very few recover. All business and trade down. The fall itself was extremely moderate and open.” HDT WHAT? INDEX

1600 1600

OCTOBER

October 20, Monday (Old Style): At the battle of Sekigahara, Tokugawa Ieyasu, a friend of Hideyoshi and Nobunaga, defeated all rivals to his leadership of , thereby establishing the Tokugawa clan in a hegemony they would maintain until 1865. What is known as the Edo period began. What goes around keeps coming around and around and around...

During this century in Japan the smoking of tobacco would begin to take place in polite society. HDT WHAT? INDEX

1600 1600

NOVEMBER

WINTER 1600/1601

DECEMBER