HORDERN HOUSE RARE BOOKS • MANUSCRIPTS • PAINTINGS • PRINTS “Ross Bank Magnetic Observatory” (detail); see catalogue no. 43 HORDERN HOUSE RARE BOOKS • MANUSCRIPTS • PAINTINGS • PRINTS Three Centuries of Voyages: 1558-1861 77 VICTORIA STREET • POTTS POINT • SYDNEY NSW 2011 • AUSTRALIA TELEPHONE (02) 9356 4411 • FAX (02) 9357 3635 www.hordern.com • [email protected] 1. ALVARES, Francisco. Historiale description de l’Ethiopie, contenant vraye relation des terres, & païs du gran Roy, & Empereur Prete-Ian… Small octavo, italic and roman letter, woodcut of the stars of the Southern Cross and six plans of Ethiopian churches; 18th-century English red morocco. Antwerp, Christopher Plantin, 1558. With Corsali’s depiction of the Southern Cross A delightful copy of the first edition in French, in a most attractive English bind- ing. Alvares’ book includes Corsali’s de- scription of the constellation of the South- ern Cross along with the famous image. First published in Portuguese in 1540, Alvares gave the earliest first-hand de- scription of Ethiopia by a known Europe- an. Ethiopia in the sixteenth century stood for something even more exotic than it actually was, often appearing in early texts as a place as far away geographically and culturally as it was possible to imagine. Importantly the book also includes the de- scription of the first identification of the Southern Cross. Alvares’s narrative is preceded in this edition (though not in the original Portuguese version) by the two letters of An- drea Corsali, included here because this Florentine traveller ended his days in Ethiopia. In 1515 Corsali, an Italian under the patronage of the Medici family, accompanied a Portuguese voyage into the Southern and Indian Oceans, in the course of which he observed the curious behaviour of an unrecorded group of stars, which he described and illustrated in a letter – the first of the two printed here – narrating his voyage that he sent back to his patron Giuliano de Medici in Florence. Corsali’s description and illustration of the constellation was the first to outline its shape in detail as a cross: after the publica- tion of his Lettera the term “cross” or “crosiers” recurs frequently and in 1606, for example, Quiros, on his quest for the Southern Continent, instructed his captains to ascertain their position at night by the “crucero”. The narrative also contains a tantalising reference to a continental land in the vicinity of New Guinea, which alone would make the Lettera an important element in the canon of pre-Cook discovery of Australia and the Pacific. Corsali’s two letters appeared in Italian in 1516 and 1517 respectively and both are of utmost rarity; the important 1516 letter is known in only three copies, one of which at one time belonged, as did this book, to the English collector William Beckford. This copy subsequently belonged to an impressive list of collectors: Joannes Gennadius; Henry J.B. Clements; the explorer Wilfred Thesiger; Henry Winterton; and finally the great collec- tor of Ethiopian material Bent Juel-Jensen, with his distinctive Amharic bookplate. Alden, ‘European Americana’, 558/2; BM STC (Dutch), 5; Borba de Moraes, I, p. 31 (Spanish edition only); Fumagalli, 610; Gay, 2603; Streit, XV, 1589; Voet, Plantin, 53B. 2. LA POPELINIERE, Henri Lancelot-Voisin de. Les Trois Mondes par le Seigneur de la Popelliniere. Small quarto, folding world map, title-page vignette, some toning and browning, the title-page with a neat old repair and an early owner’s signature; an excellent copy in contemporary vel- lum, a few neat repairs & some stains, spine lettered in ink, endpapers renewed; in a modern folding morocco case, gilt. Paris, l’Olivier de Pierre l’Huillier, rue Sainct Jaques, 1582. Colonising the “incogneu” southern land Very rare, first edition, first issue: a serious sixteenth-century proposal detailing the author’s utopian dream of creating French colonies in the Great South Land beyond the Straits of Magellan, which he claims is a habitable land larger than America and richer too. The work is ‘un véritable projet colonialiste en vue de la Terra Australis’ (Anne-Marie Beaulieu, Les Trois Mondes de la Popelinière). The work includes a highly attractive map of the world based on the original of Ortelius in 1570, even down to the detail of the legend from Cicero (here translated into French). Popelinière (1541-1608) was a Protestant speculative geographer known for his inter- est in the “incogneu” world. His utopian project for French expansion in the only vaguely theorised unknown worlds of the southern hemisphere marks him out as one of the foundation writers of the long French interest in the region, interest that would culmi- nate in the voyages of Bougainville and his successors. In this tradition, as Frank Lestrin- gant has noted, Les Trois Mondes was the pioneer work to forsake the northern confines of the New World to the ambitions of the other European powers, preferring to turn to ‘the myth of a southern continent’ for the author’s ‘dreams of empire and revenge’ (Map- ping the Renaissance World, p. 118). Even more extraordinarily, Popelinière is thought to have mounted the first genuine at- tempt to found just such a colony, sailing from La Rochelle in May 1589 with three tiny ships. John Dunmore writes that they ‘got no further than Cap Blanc in West Africa, where dissensions and despondency made him abandon the expedition and return to France. The captains of the two other ships, Richardiere and Trepagne, decided to contin- ue to South America, but only succeeded in reaching the coast of Brazil. A century and a half was to elapse before another attempt was made’ (French Explorers in the Pacific, I, p. 196). Despite its inglorious end, this was the first French expedition to search explicitly for the Southern Land. Les Trois Mondes energetically discusses the so-called three worlds of Renaissance ge- ography, a model which had been developed by Mercator. The three worlds, then, were simply the old (‘vieil’), the new (‘neuf’), and the unknown (‘incogneu’). Basing his work on the writings of Guillaume Postel, André Thevet and Jean de Léry, in Les Trois Mondes Popelinière discussed ancient and modern discoveries, concluding with an open petition to the French government to colonise the australe lands, having shown that the Americas were too politically fraught to allow French expansion there. Colonisation, he argued, would provide an answer to the grave religious, political and economic crisis in France (in 1627, nonetheless, the French embarked on their American colonies). For Popelinière it was Magellan’s voyage around Cape Horn and into the Pacific, not Colombus nor Vespucci, which pointed to the future. His extraordinary thesis was that the French should seek to colonise the “virgin” southern land, where they could be guar- anteed not to be repulsed by the armies of the other European powers, cautioning that they would have to act with speed and determination. Only in so doing, he writes, could they atone for having ignored the example set to them since Columbus. Other travel- lers and geographers of the sixteenth century had discussed and disputed the existence of the hypothetical “South Land”, but Popelinière was the first to cut the Gordian knot and announce that it should be colonised, making this work an important and compel- ling forerunner of the rush to the South Seas. It could be considered the pioneer practical exposition of a search which would last for two more centuries, until the myths of the Great South Land were finally exploded on Cook’s second voyage. Rather than an anthology of voyage narratives (such as those of his near contemporaries Hakluyt or Purchas for example), the book is a synthesis of known reports in the service of a definite plan, and indeed one of its cleverer aspects is that La Popelinière treats much of what he writes as definitively proven, rather than speculative. Also notable is how far he wants to distance himself from the armchair: “I am writing as a sailor” (“Je parle icy en matelot”), he writes at the beginning of his introduction. The first section of the book traces the voyages and explorations of antiquity, and is chiefly an attempt to unravel the early discussion of the new world and the antipodes through authors such as Plato and Saint Augustine. The following two parts are a survey of the New World and its conquest, with particular attention to the European colonies in the Americas, the voyages of Columbus, the circumnavigation of the Magellan expedi- tion, and a fleeting reference to Sir Francis Drake who had returned to England in 1580, two years previously. The whole text builds towards a concluding section which deals with the “unknown” world proper, the rationale behind the entire book; that is, La Popelinière dwells on the known facts of the European colonies in the new world to show the folly of French pretensions in the area. At the same time, so little is known about the worlds beyond the Americas, that there is little point in speculation; action is required, and the political will to explore the Pacific beyond Cape Horn. It is frankly difficult to quantify or explain just how early this work is in terms of the search for the southern continent: it was published in 1582, over a decade before Quiros actually sailed with Mendana, and 26 years before he began issuing his famous memorials calling for his colony in “Austrialia” (see catalogue number 6). Popelinière’s account might also be compared to the famous book by Gonneville, the Mémoires touchant l’établissement d’une Mission Chrestienne dans le Troisième Monde (1663; it is noteworthy that Gonneville used the phrase “troisième monde” in his later title).