View metadata, citation and similar papers at core.ac.uk brought to you by CORE provided by D-Scholarship@Pitt “THE GEOGRAPHICALL COMPASS”: HISTORY, AUTHORITY AND UTILITY IN THE ENGLISH VOYAGE ACCOUNT, 1660-1730 by Jacob Pollock Bachelor of Arts, University of Auckland, 2002 Master of Arts, University of Auckland, 2005 Submitted to the Graduate Faculty of The Kenneth P. Dietrich School of Arts and Sciences in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy University of Pittsburgh 2012 UNIVERSITY OF PITTSBURGH KENNETH P. DIETRICH SCHOOL OF ARTS AND SCIENCES This dissertation was presented by Jacob Pollock It was defended on February Nine, 2012 and approved by Seymour Drescher, University Professor, History Peter Machamer, Professor, History and Philosophy of Science John Twyning, Associate Professor, English Dissertation Advisors: Jonathan Scott, Professor, History Pinar M. Emiralioglu, Assistant Professor, History ii Copyright © by Jacob Pollock 2012 iii “THE GEOGRAPHICALL COMPASS”: HISTORY, AUTHORITY AND UTILITY IN THE ENGLISH VOYAGE ACCOUNT, 166O-1730 Jacob Pollock, PhD University of Pittsburgh, 2012 The late-seventeenth and early-eighteenth centuries saw a dramatic increase in the publication of accounts of voyages on the London book market. These publications ranged from brief extracts of romantic narratives involving shipwrecks in the East Indies to multi-volume compilations of voyages to all parts of the world, printed in folio and containing numerous maps and engravings. Existing scholarship often views such accounts as entertainment destined for a popular audience. This dissertation shows how the voyage account was used in multiple genres and multiple intellectual contexts, finding its way into debates about natural philosophy, religion, and history, and playing as important a role in the work of the Royal Society as it did in the literary practices of the period. By investigating these books as key texts in a changing intellectual and cultural climate, and understanding their relationships with other genres, “The Geographicall Compass” offers a reader’s view of empire and the world in England between 1660 and 1730. This project analyses the interaction between the narrative and paratextual elements of accounts of long-range voyages of discovery in the early-modern era, in order to investigate how ideas about the New World found their way into political, scientific and cultural spheres in seventeenth-century Europe. I argue that we can understand how the commercial market shaped knowledge of the New World by considering these books as books – written, published, bought and sold for a reading public, subject to commercial pressures and prone to failure. Focussing mainly but not exclusively on iv voyages to the New World, this dissertation uses Samuel Purchas’ metaphor – the voyage account as a compass – to discuss these texts in their scientific, religious, literary and political contexts. As the cartographers of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries used the geometrical compass to shape their maps, and seamen used the magnetic compass to find their direction in the expanse of the sea, so I use the compass as a way of understanding texts that are composite, multi-layered, and were produced in multiple, overlapping contexts. v TABLE OF CONTENTS ACKNOWLEDGMENTS .......................................................................................................... IX INTRODUCTION......................................................................................................................... 1 SAMUEL PURCHAS, THE VOYAGE ACCOUNT, AND “GEOGRAPHICALL COMPASSING” ................................................................................................................... 1 THE VOYAGE NARRATIVE AND THE BOOK IN ENGLAND, 1660-1730 ............ 10 THE GEOGRAPHICALL COMPASS ............................................................................ 20 CHAPTER ONE: TO COMPASS ............................................................................................. 24 TANCRED ROBINSON’S LETTER ............................................................................... 24 THE REPUBLIC OF LETTERS ...................................................................................... 30 THE EMPIRE OF KNOWLEDGE .................................................................................. 35 TANCRED ROBINSON, THE “BEAST L.P.,” AND THE DISSOLUTION OF THE EARTH ................................................................................................................................ 49 ANATOMY OF AN ACCOUNT OF SEVERAL LATE VOYAGES ........................... 58 WILLIAM DAMPIER AND THE ROYAL SOCIETY ................................................. 66 CHAPTER TWO: THE HISTORY OF THE COMPASS ..................................................... 72 THE COMPENDIUMS ...................................................................................................... 74 MARKETING THE COMPENDIUMS ........................................................................... 77 NAVIGANTIUM ATQUE ITINERANTIUM BIBLIOTECA AND AUDIENCE ....... 82 vi NATION, EMPIRE, AND HISTORIES OF NAVIGATION ........................................ 92 THOMAS PHILIPOT, JOHN EVELYN, AND SEVENTEENTH CENTURY HISTORIES OF NAVIGATION ...................................................................................... 95 AYLETT SAMMES AND THE PHOENICIANS IN ANCIENT BRITAIN .............. 102 THE CHURCHILLS AND THE PHOENICIANS ....................................................... 105 JOHN HARRIS AND SACRED GEOGRAPHY .......................................................... 109 THE MERCHANTS AND THE MODERNS IN 1744 .................................................. 115 CHAPTER THREE: THE VARIATION OF THE COMPASS .......................................... 120 THE CHURCHILLS, CRONE AND SKELTON, AND THE UTILITY OF THE VOYAGE ACCOUNT ..................................................................................................... 122 THE VARIATION OF THE COMPASS AND THE CENTER OF THE WORLD . 127 MAGNETIC VARIATION AND AN ACCOUNT OF SEVERAL LATE VOYAGES ............................................................................................................................................ 132 MAGNETIC VARIATION AND THE ROCKS OF REPROACH ............................. 135 CHAPTER FOUR: THE SEAMAN’S COMPASS ................................................................ 141 THE PROBLEM OF CIRCUMNAVIGATION: MAGELLAN AND HIS MEN ...... 144 THE BREED OF SEAMEN: VICTUALS, BODIES, AND LABOR .......................... 150 DIGESTION AND NUTRITION .................................................................................... 155 BREAD, PEAS, AND CIVILIZATION ......................................................................... 159 CAPTAINS AND AUTHORS ......................................................................................... 168 THE SEAMAN’S CHARACTER, THE SAILOR’S TONGUE .................................. 175 CONCLUSION: THE GEOGRAPHICALL COMPASS ..................................................... 185 BIBLIOGRAPHY ..................................................................................................................... 194 vii PRIMARY MATERIAL .................................................................................................. 194 Manuscripts .............................................................................................................. 194 Periodicals and Journals ......................................................................................... 196 Printed Books ........................................................................................................... 197 SECONDARY MATERIAL ............................................................................................ 202 viii ACKNOWLEDGMENTS I would first like to thank my dissertation committee: Jonathan Scott, Pinar Emiralioglu, Seymour Drescher, Johnny Twyning and Peter Machamer, all of whom provided guidance as I ventured into unfamiliar historiographical waters. Particular thanks to Jonathan, who remained committed to the project despite moving halfway across the world just as it began. This dissertation bears his stamp as advisor, mentor and friend. I am grateful to the University of Pittsburgh for its generous financial support, in the form of an Arts and Sciences P&BC Fellowship in my first year, and two Andrew Mellon Predoctoral Fellowships which allowed me to research and write this dissertation. The Department of History at the University of Pittsburgh also provided funding for travel and language study, and the European Studies Center provided generous funding that allowed me to write the second chapter of this dissertation in summer 2010. In July 2011, while in the final stages of revising this dissertation, I attended the National Endowment for the Humanities for the Summer Seminar English Encounters with the Americas, 1550–1610: Sources and Methods, at MIT. I am grateful to the NEH and MIT for their generous support of this event, and especially to Mary Fuller and the other seminar participants, whose wide-ranging interests and perspectives were invaluable in helping me think through the problems of early modern travel writing in an interdisciplinary environment. The Department of History at the University of Auckland provided office space and library access on my occasional visits, and I would like to thank Malcolm Campbell for ix facilitating that.