European Representations of the New World in Travel Narratives and Literature, Late-Fifteenth to Mid-Seventeenth Centuries Rosamund Elaine Brennan PhD 2006 Cardiff University UMI Number: U584064 All rights reserved INFORMATION TO ALL USERS The quality of this reproduction is dependent upon the quality of the copy submitted. In the unlikely event that the author did not send a complete manuscript and there are missing pages, these will be noted. Also, if material had to be removed, a note will indicate the deletion. Dissertation Publishing UMI U584064 Published by ProQuest LLC 2013. Copyright in the Dissertation held by the Author. Microform Edition © ProQuest LLC. All rights reserved. This work is protected against unauthorized copying under Title 17, United States Code. ProQuest LLC 789 East Eisenhower Parkway P.O. Box 1346 Ann Arbor, Ml 48106-1346 DECLARATION This work has not previously been accepted in substance for any degree and is not being concurrently submitted in candidature for any degree. Signed (candidate) Date Uv.O.lQfc..... STATEMENT 1 This thesis is the result of my own investigations, except where otherwise stated. Other sources are acknowledged by footnotes giving explicit references. A bibliography is appended. Signed (candidate) Date Ufc..Q3...Q&....... STATEMENT 2 I hereby give consent for my thesis, if accepted, to be available for photocopying and for inter-library loan, and for the title and summary to be made available to outside organisations. Signed (candidate) Date Acknowledgements Catherine Belsey, an inspiration since undergraduate days, has been the most wonderful supervisor. Her insight, enthusiasm, understanding and encouragement have been unwavering and invaluable and helped make writing this thesis an immensely enjoyable experience I would also like to thank everyone in the Centre for Critical and Cultural Theory for contributing to the stimulating academic environment. Teaching on the Cultural Criticism course has been enjoyable and illuminating, and, for their help and humour along the way, thanks to Neil Badmington, Ailbhe Thunder, Andy Williams, Anna Haynes, Christine Michaels, Daniel Haynes, Gareth Gordon, Jessica Mordsley, Jodie Poppleton, Mair Rigby, Roberta Magnani and Roger Christophides. Special thanks are due to Faith Kent and Judith Pryor for their friendship and support throughout. Janette Graham deserves many thanks for her patience and for always knowing the right way to do things. Also thanks are due to Helen Dartillac-Brill for finding even the most obscure inter-library loans. For encouraging me to give papers at the conferences and panels they organised I would like to thank Claire Jowitt, Joan Fitzpatrick, Anne McMonagle and Iain Jenkins, and, for supporting my attendance, Chris Weedon and Carl Plasa. Thanks are also due to Nigel Rigby and Janet Norton at the National Maritime Museum, Greenwich; to countless patient staff at the British Library; and to Charles Newton at the Victoria and Albert Museum for making Jan Brueghel’s Garden of Eden accessible both physically and digitally. My parents have been a source of absolute love and belief always, and thanks are not enough. My brother Jim’s early departure prompted me to rethink the future and set off on a path which led to the New World. Summary The thesis proposes that the point of first encounter with the New World constituted an irruption of the real into European cultural reality, and provides an example of the process by which the real (in Lacanian terms, the terrain of unmapped alterity outside the symbolic order with no cultural script) becomes incorporated within cultural reality. Unlike death, another instance of the real, the New World offered travellers the possibility of return and revelation, and, once experienced by explorers, the actuality o f the New World had to be articulated: reality was constructed. The thesis examines a selection o f fifteenth- to seventeenth-century European travel narratives and literary texts within the broadly Lacanian theoretical framework suggested by Catherine Belsey'sCulture and the Real ; the methodological approach follows Belsey's practice o f reading cultural history ‘at the level o f the signifier’. Chapter one examines, in accounts of Columbus, Vespucci and Pigafetta, the inauguration of the New World as a locus of European material and spiritual desire; differential constructions o f the native; and intertextual links with earlier travel literature. Chapter two focuses on the English cultural mapping of the real o f the Americas in accounts of Francis Drake’s circumnavigation, arguing that new types of cultural script are developed, including a model for English colonialism. Chapter three examines textual constructions of domesticated reality on the borders of the real, in accounts o f the first English settlement at Roanoke, and Jean de Lery's account of living in Brazil. Chapter four argues that, while each of the fictions discussed has intertextual links to first-hand travel narratives, the European signifier defers the materiality o f the New World, using the space to explore possibilities for European culture. Texts discussed include Layfield’s account of Puerto Rico, More’s Utopia, Shakespeare’s The Tempest, and Beaumont and Fletcher’s The Sea Voyage. Chapter five comprises a short conclusion. Contents Introduction 1 Chapter One: Rewriting the Edge 38 Chapter Two: A Measure o f Civility: (Re)writing the First English 106 Circumnavigation Chapter Three: A True Relation 181 Chapter Four: No Where and No Body: Fictionalising the New World 261 Chapter Five: Conclusion 362 Bibliography 368 Illustrations The Garden of Eden, Jan Brueghel the Elder (1568 - 1625), c.1600, 1 Victoria and Albert Museum, London. World map with Christ Pantocrator from a Latin Psalter, c. 1250. BL MS '43 Add. 28681, fo. 9, in Peter Whitfield, Mapping the World: A History of Exploration (London: Folio Society, 2000), p. 35. Portolan chart by Petrus Visconte, dated 1318, in Charles Bricker, 44 Landmarks of Mapmaking (Ware: Wordsworth, 1989), p. 54. The world map of Pierre Desceliers, 1550, in Whitfield, Mapping the 45 World, p. 74-5. Dog-headed cannibals from the Desceliers world map (detail), in 46 Whitfield, Mapping the World, p. 72. Magellan entering the Straits o f Magellan. Theodor de Bry, America part 53 IV, Frankfurt, 1594, British Library. Woodcut illustrating a German edition of Vespucci’s voyages. Disz 77 buchlin saget wie die zwe herre Fernandus, J Gruniger: Strassburg, 1509. Cannibals. Sixteenth-century woodcut, Augsburg or Nuremburg c. 1505, 85 Spencer Collection, New York Public Library, Astor, Lenox, and Tilden Foundations. Copy of Francis Fletcher’s illustration of the volcano on Fogo. British 128 Library, Sloane M.S. No 61. Copy of Francis Fletcher’s illustration of a seal. British Library, Sloane 136 M.S. No 61. An engraving o f the battle between Drake's Golden Hind and the 159 Cacafuego, from Levinus Hulsius, 1626. Kurtze, Warhqfftige Relation.. der ... vier Schiffarten... Ferdinandi Magellani ... Francisci Draconis...Thomae Candisch...Olivarii von Noort...So alle vier umb den gantzen Erdtkreiss gesegel, Frankfurt, Hartmann Palthenius and Levinus Hulsius, 1626, from http://www.loc.gov/rr/rarebook/catalog/drake/drake- 4-famousvoy.html (last accessed 05 05 06). The weeping greeting. Jean de Lery,History of a Voyage to the Land of 201 Brazil trans. by Janet Whatley (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1992), p. 165. 13 ‘Their manner of prainge with Rattels abowt te fyer’. Thomas Hariot, A Briefe and True Report of the New Found Land of Virginia published, with engravings, by Theodor de Bry, Frankfurt, 1590, plate XVII. 14 John White’s map of the coast of Virginia. The First Colonists: Hakluyt's Voyages to North America (London: Folio Society, 1986), p. 131. 15 ‘The Creation o f the Animals’. Holkham Bible Picture Book (circa 1320- 1330, produced in England, with French language script, BL MS Add. 47682). 16 ‘Temptation of Adam and Eve’. Holkham Bible Picture Book (circa 1320- 1330, produced in England, with French language script, BL MS Add. 47682). 17 ‘The Fall and the Expulsion’. Holkham Bible Picture Book (circa 1320- 1330, produced in England, with French language script, BL MS Add. 47682). 18 ‘Adam and Eve outside Paradise’. Holkham Bible Picture Book (circa 1320-1330, produced in England, with French language script, BL MS Add. 47682). 19 Cynocephale, Anthropophagus, Himantopode, and Artibatirae. London, Sion College Bestiary, fol. 117, in John Block Friedman,The Monstrous Races in Medieval Art and Thought (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1981), p. 10-15. 20 Aztec human sacrifice. Theodor de Bry, America, Part III (1592). Introduction Figure 1 The Garden of Eden, Jan Brueghel the Elder (1568 - 1625), c. 1600 Jan Brueghel the Elder painted many versions of the Garden of Eden. In this particular example, from around 1600, he depicts a profusion of animals, coexisting in apparent harmony, within a verdant landscape. In the foreground are horses, cattle, a pig, deer, leopards, lions and monkeys, and in flight, or perched in trees, a variety of species of birds, including toucans and macaws. Two dogs appear to be barking at a pair of swans on the river. On the far bank a penguin stretches its wings, while on the near bank a pair of guinea pigs scamper about. In the distance camels, elephants, rheas and turkeys can be seen. Just to the right of the mid-point of the painting, but in the centre of Eden, are two small human figures. Adam and Eve are frozen in the instant before they taste the forbidden fruit and change everything for all of them irrevocably. By 1600 Europe had been aware of the existence of the New World for only just over a hundred years. Its extent and content were still largely unknown. The authors of the Book of Genesis knew nothing o f the New World, yet Brueghel includes various New World species in his depiction of Eden (guinea pigs, macaws, toucans, turkeys, rheas).1 This inclusion could signify the acceptance and embracing of the New World by European culture as an equal part of God’s creation: the Old World and the New World co-exist, like the animals, under the beneficent eye of God.