DOCTOR of PHILOSOPHY the Old World in the New Theories of Pre-Columbian Contact in Science and Society, 1860–1920 Ward, Willia
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DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY The Old World in the New Theories of Pre-Columbian Contact in Science and Society, 1860–1920 Ward, William Award date: 2020 Awarding institution: Queen's University Belfast Link to publication Terms of use All those accessing thesis content in Queen’s University Belfast Research Portal are subject to the following terms and conditions of use • Copyright is subject to the Copyright, Designs and Patent Act 1988, or as modified by any successor legislation • Copyright and moral rights for thesis content are retained by the author and/or other copyright owners • A copy of a thesis may be downloaded for personal non-commercial research/study without the need for permission or charge • Distribution or reproduction of thesis content in any format is not permitted without the permission of the copyright holder • When citing this work, full bibliographic details should be supplied, including the author, title, awarding institution and date of thesis Take down policy A thesis can be removed from the Research Portal if there has been a breach of copyright, or a similarly robust reason. 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Sep. 2021 The Old World in the New: Theories of Pre-Columbian Contact in Science and Society, 1860– 1920 by William Francis Ward, B.A., M.A. Thesis submitted in partial fulfilment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy at the School of Natural and Built Environment, Queen’s University Belfast in September 2019 i Abstract On the 12th of October 1892 when the quadricentennial of Columbus’s discovery of America was commemorated across the globe, not everyone rejoiced and not everyone cared. It was undoubtedly a great occasion, and the cult of Columbus is difficult to overrate, but there were many for whom the famous Genoese was not America’s discoverer. America had been discovered long before 1492. The Norsemen, the Welsh, the Irish, the Chinese, and the Phoenicians were all held to have beaten Columbus to the punch. Still others believed that America didn’t need to be discovered: intercourse between the two worlds had never from the day the Americas were peopled halted or ceased. The following, therefore, seeks to contextualise and explain various late nineteenth-century conceptions of pre-Columbian contact between the Old World and the New. Such ideas were not particularly aberrant. They grew out of and more often than not reflected the sociointellectual and geographical circumstances in which those who proposed them worked and lived. This project attempts to trace the development and reception of several theories of pre-Columbian contact, and thus aspires to make a useful contribution to the history and historical geography of anthropological, archaeological, and historical ideas. ii Contents Introduction. The Old World in the New, p. 1. Chapter one. The transpacific past of Charles Wolcott Brooks, p. 18. Chapter two. A saint across the sea: Ireland and theories of pre-Columbian contact, p. 75. Chapter three. An American Levant, p. 127. Chapter four. Seeing Egypt in America, p. 174. Chapter five. Viking varieties, p. 213. Concluding remarks, p. 259. Bibliography, p. 263. Visual appendix, p. 317. iii Acknowledgements Thanks, first of all, go to the Northern Bridge Doctoral Training Partnership, without which, and its AHRC funding, I’d be as penurious now as I was prior to pursuing this PhD. C’est la vie. Secondly, I’d like to thank Diarmid Finnegan and David N. Livingstone for their forbearance in dealing with a rather odd and ungregarious fish. I heartily commend their sterling supervision. There are many others without whom I wouldn’t have been able to pursue this, roundly imperfect, work. My parents, Danny and Teresa, have exhibited the patience of saints, as have my siblings and friends. I’d also like to thank various of the institutions that have helped me throughout the years. St Kevin’s Primary School on the Falls Road in Belfast is still perhaps the site of my greatest academic achievements, and the Open Doors Learning Centre, where, if nothing else, I learned to play pool, was a more welcoming and friendly environment than I, at that stage of my life, probably deserved. Though it’s not something that anyone should ever take on my saying so, educational provision for pupils and students who have been excluded from mainstream education is a matter of great importance. Lastly, but not in the least leastly, I’d like to thank all of those upon whose work, whether physical or mental, I depend upon each day. Royal Mail postmen and postwomen, Belfast City Council refuse collectors and road maintenance workers, and the drivers of the West Belfast Taxi Association, to all these I owe an unpayable debt (and £1.50 in the last-named case). Much the same can said of all the world’s librarians, archivists, and academic digitisers, without whom all scholarship would be a nullity and void. i Nonsense is nonsense, but the history of nonsense is scholarship. –Saul Lieberman The American who first discovered Columbus made a bad discovery. –Lichtenberg, The Waste Books It’s mighty hard to write nowadays without getting something or other worth listening to into your essay or volume. The foolishest book is a kind of leaky boat on a sea of wisdom; some of the wisdom will get in anyhow. –Oliver Wendell Holmes, Poet at the Breakfast Table I cannot recommend the experience of abridging one’s own work. An author is forced to re- examine prose with minute care and I, at least, ended up with the bleak conviction that I was once incapable of writing a competent sentence, fashioning an adequate footnote, or making a clear argument. –Michael O’Brien, on abridging Conjectures of Order 1 Introduction. The Old World in the New It was late in the history of the world before Europe and America became known to each other. During the first fifteen centuries of the Christian era Europe was unaware of the vast continent which lay beyond the sea. Asia had ceased to influence her. Africa had not begun. Her history was waiting for the mighty influence which America was to exercise in her affairs through all the future ages.1 These words of the Scottish journalist and historian Robert Mackenzie2 were certainly representative of one particular stream of nineteenth-century opinion, but, though the world is not quite so fructiferous as a plenum, contrary opinions, as the following seeks to make plain, were verily ten a penny. That Asia had never ceased to exercise an influence upon the Americas was a rather respectable position. In the ninth edition of the Encyclopaedia Britannica it is stated that ‘America has of course been known to the barbarous tribes of eastern Asia for thousands of years’,3 and Élisée Reclus, who, next to the renowned non-crackpot Peter Kropotkin, is probably history’s most famous anarchist geographer, similarly noted that ‘[t]he Asiatics had no need to discover America, nor the Americans Asia, seeing that where they approach nearest the continents are visible from shore to shore’.4 Otis Tufton Mason agreed. ‘[C]ontact was a constant condition to-day [sic] in the Behring Sea region’, the anthropological 1 Robert Mackenzie, America: A History (London: T. Nelson and Sons… Edinburgh; and New York, 1882), p. 11. An earlier edition, entitled The United States of America: A History, was published in 1870. 2 Mackenzie (1823–1881), who was educated at a school in St Andrews, was, during the 1840s, a reporter for the Dundonian Northern Warder. Mackenzie’s greatest claim to fame, however, is that he became a target, when several decades dead, of R. G. Collingwood’s invective and scorn. In the Idea of History, Collingwood employs Mackenzie as an example of the baleful influence that the idea of progress — ‘a piece of sheer metaphysics derived from evolutionary naturalism’ — could have upon the writing of history. ‘In order to realize the lengths to which this dogma of progress was pushed, it is necessary to go slumming among the unsavoury relics of third-rate historical work. A certain Robert Mackenzie published in 1880 a book called The Nineteenth-Century—A History, depicting that century as a time of progress from a state of barbarism, ignorance, and bestiality’. See Collingwood, The Idea of History, Revised Edition, with Lectures 1926–1928 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005), pp. 144- 145. 3 ‘America’, The Encyclopaedia Britannica: A Dictionary of Arts, Sciences, and General Literature, Ninth Edition, Volume I (Edinburgh: Adam and Charles Black, 1875), p. 706. 4 Élisée Reclus, The Earth and its Inhabitants: North America, Vol. I., British North America (New York: D. Appleton and Company, 1890), p. 4. Regarding claims of non-Asian, and specifically transatlantic, contacts with the Americas, Reclus, outside of the Viking case, was rather ambivalent: ‘[p]ossibly at some remote epoch vessels from the eastern hemisphere may have reached this western world. Mention has been made of Phoenician navigators, and the Greek legends have been revived touching the mythical land of the Atlantes [sic].