>> From the Library of
Congress in Washington, D.C.
[ Silence ]
>> Well, good afternoon.
My name is Jason Steinhauer.
I'm a Program Specialist at
the John W. Kluge Center,
Library of Congress.
Before I begin today's
program please take a moment
to check your cell phones
and other electronic devices
and ensure they are set to silent.
Thank you.
I'll also make you aware that this
afternoon's program is being filmed
for placement on the
Kluge Center website
and on our iTunes and
YouTube channels.
I encourage you to visit our
website, loc.gov/kluge, K-L-U-G-E,
to view other lectures
delivered by current
and former Kluge scholars including
several on the history of science,
map making and cartography.
Today's lecture is presented by the
John W. Kluge Center at the Library
of Congress and co-sponsored
by the Library's Geography
and Map Division.
The Kluge Center is a vibrant
scholar center on Capitol Hill
that brings together scholars and
researchers from around the world
to stimulate and energize one
another, to distill wisdom
from the Library's rich
resources and to interact
with policy makers and the public.
The center offers opportunities
for senior scholars as well
as post doctoral fellows and
Ph.D. candidates to do research
in the Library's collections and
we also offer free public lectures,
conferences, symposia, book talks,
panel discussions, conversations
and many other public
events such as this one
and we administer the Kluge Prize,
which we will be awarding in 2015,
which recognizes lifetime
achievement
in the study of humanity.
For more information about the Kluge
Center, please visit our website
and I invite you to sign up for our
RSS feed, which is right over there,
to learn about future programs
and opportunities for you
to conduct your own research here in
the Library of Congress collections.
Today's lecture is titled,
Mapping New World Peoples
in Renaissance Europe, and our
speaker is Dr. Surekha Davies,
now concluding her tenure
as Kislak Fellow here
at the John W. Kluge Center.
The Kislak Fellowship is
endowed by the Kislak Fund,
which supports scholarly
research in the Kislak Collection
and the collection is an
extraordinary assemblage
of 4,000 rare books, maps,
documents, paintings,
prints and artifacts that
document the history and cultures
of the early Americas as
well as early encounters
of European explorers
and indigenous peoples.
Among its treasures is
Christopher Columbus's account
of his 1492 voyage to the
Americas, the first map of the world
to identify America as a
distinct and separate continent,
and carved vessels and vases from
the early modern period and earlier
from Aztec and Mixtec cultures.
That's just a sampling of the
holdings in that collection.
The curator of the
collection is John Hessler,
who is also a former
fellow at the Kluge Center,
and to him we are grateful for his
collaboration on the fellowship
and this event as well
as holding the event
in this beautifully redesigned
geography and map reading room.
I'd also like to recognize
Ralph Ehrenberg,
the Chief of the Geography
and Map Division.
The Library's Geography and
Map Division holds the largest
and most comprehensive cartographic
collection in the world.
It has more than 5.5 million maps
as well as atlases, reference works,
over 500 globes, which
is interesting,
a multitude of rich resources online
and many, many other treasures.
I encourage you to visit their
website loc.gov/rr/geomap
to learn more.
Today's speaker is Dr. Surekha
Davies, an Assistant Professor
of European History at Western
Connecticut State University.
Surekha was educated at
the University of Cambridge
and gained her doctorate
from the Warburg Institute
at University of London.
A cultural historian her research
interests include cultural
encounters, travel writing,
histories of knowledge
and science and cartography.
Formally a curator at the
British Library, map library,
she is a founding editor of the
new book series, Maps, Spaces,
Cultures to be published by Brill.
Her first book, Of Monsters and Men:
Maps, Ethnography and the Americas
in Renaissance Europe,
is under contract
with Cambridge University Press
and is the subject of her research
and writing here at the Kluge
Center as Kislak Fellow.
Her articles have appeared in such
journals as the historical journal,
History and Anthropology
and Renaissance Studies.
She edited a special double issue of
the Journal of Early Modern History,
which came out earlier this year,
and she organized an
international conference called,
The Global Dimensions of
European Knowledge, 1450 to 1700s.
She's a very active scholar
with very impressive resume.
These are just some of
her many accomplishments.
So please join me in
welcoming Dr. Surekha Davies.
[ Applause ]
>> Thank you, Jason,
and let me start
by thinking the Kislak Foundation,
the Library of Congress
and the Kluge Center.
The people and the
materials here at the Library
of Congress make this
an extremely productive
and wonderful place
in which to work.
So let's begin.
In 1594, the English mathematician
Thomas Blundeville published
and essay and in it
he described a map
by the Flemish mapmaker
Petrus Plancius,
a map on which cannibalism
giants appear in the Americas.
Blundeville says they are mere
lies that are told of the pygmies
that they should be better a
foot and a half high and likewise
which had been spoken of the people
that should have their heads, noses,
mouths and eyes in their breasts or
of those that are headed like a dogs
or those that have but one eye and
that in their forehead or those
that have but one foot
and that so great
that it covers their whole body.
All these are mere lies invented
by vain men to bring fools
into admiration for most are as
well born in Europe as they are
in other parts of the world.
Blundeville's list of unlikely
beings echoes the monstrous peoples
and classical medieval
traditions for distant places.
You can see an example of
that in a detail of a map
from the late 13th Century
at the top left there.
For Blundeville if monster beings
do exist in distant places,
they are not a nation of
people with a monstrous trait
but rather monstrous individuals
of the sort encountered in Europe.
You can see an example at
the bottom right there.
The explanations traditionally
offered for domestic monsters,
that is monsters as
errors, as natures jokes
or as divined importance were also
sufficient in Blundeville's eyes
to explain instances
of monsters abroad.
Blundeville's reservations point to
the uneasy boundary between monsters
at home in Europe and
monsters far away.
Yet, it is precisely this
ontological slippage that from one
of monsters to monsters in distant
places that the visual language
of Renaissance maps facilitated.
Map viewers examined the details
on maps carefully reading the
distinctive characteristics
of individual figures as a summary
of what people in that region had
in common and of how they
differed from other peoples
and this is the subject
of the rest of my book.
In this talk, I shall focus
on the wondrous ethnography
of one region, Guiana [phonetic].
Problems of credibility were
acute for Renaissance travelers
and for the editors, printers,
cosmographers and map makers
who repackaged travel
information in new formats.
These cultural arbiters [phonetic]
as Christine Johnson
has termed them,
deployed distinctive
rhetorical strategies
to endow their works with authority.
They needed to convince
their readers of their powers
of analysis and synthesis.
We must, therefore, beware of
assuming that context that appears
to 21st Century eyes
to be inaccurate
or frivolous was viewed
in these ways.
In today's paper by analyzing
European ethnographic writing
and mapping of Guiana, I shall
have simplistic binaries of real
and imaginary based on modern
categories do not illuminate
earlier mentalities.
Renaissance readers did
not have the same emotional
and intellectual responses to
diagrams of a distant monster
as a 21st Century observer.
Most of the existing
literature on Renaissance ideas
about distant monsters is of the
coffee table book variety and assume
that there's little we can learn by
looking at images of people on maps
because they are just decorations
that reveal ignorance
and nothing more.
Before people knew what there was
in faraway places they
supposedly put monsters there.
Once they had more information the
monsters were apparently removed
from maps.
They were, in other
words, mere decoration.
One of the arguments of my book as
a whole is that this popular view
of maps in the age of
exploration is wrong.
What these claims failed to
take into account is decades
of rigorous scholarship
on the Middle Ages
and on the early modern period say
between 800 and 1800 in the history
of science, in art history, cultural
history and literary studies.
Scholars in these disciplines
have developed rigorous analytical
methods and tools that we can use
to analyze monstrous
peoples on Renaissance maps.
My talk today is a brief
illumination of some of the ways
that this can be done and
it's divided into three parts.
First, I'll talk about better
approaches for thinking
about illustrations on maps.
Second, I'll analyze
the wondrous ethnography
of late 16th Century
Guiana in the travel account
of Sir Walter Raleigh,
the explorer and courtier.
Finally, I shall analyze the ways
in which map makers process two
elements of Guiana's ethnography;
a headless tribe and
a tribe of amazons.
On to the first part.
A common conception in the
popular imagination is decoration
and the term is often used to mean
that which has no purpose
other than to please the eye.
This pejorative use of the word
decoration blinds us to the insights
that the analytical study
of visual artifacts offers.
Art historians by contrast
have shown us
that artifacts do not have
a single practical function
with every other element being
decorative or worse imaginary.
Anyone who has been on the DC Metro
knows that it is uniformly gray
and not all colors of the rainbow
as the DC Metro map
would have you believe
and if you caught the
red line on a Sunday,
you know that trains can
be as rare as unicorns.
The historical circumstances
in which an image
or more precisely a diagram is
made, shape its contents and form.
By analyzing them, we
can arrive at insights
into the cultures that produce them.
There's nothing mere about
decoration meaning inheres
in the aesthetic and
other details of artifacts
and there is a reason why academics
don't give conference papers
in their pajamas; appearances
matter.
Maps then are best thought of as
diagrams rather than decorations.
My second point on
method concerns monsters.
As the medievalist [inaudible]
recently put it monsters do a great
deal of cultural work but
they do not do it nicely.
Monsters signal to us the fracture
points of a culture's categories
that which is neither this nor
that is by definition a monster.
The one constance to the
definition across space and time is
that a monster doesn't fit
existing categories of physique,
of behavior or perhaps of ethics.
We know monsters in the
way they conjure up a sense
of ruptured ontological categories
the dashing of tidy expectations.
If a monster is that
which creates an effect,
all monsters are, by
definition, real.
They are subjective
contested constructs defined
with respect to the self.
As Catherine [inaudible] has shown
in the apprehension of monsters
and wonders, emotion and cognition
are intricately intertwined.
The notion that monsters are
by definition imaginary is a very
recent perhaps 20th Century notion
and its appearance tell us
something about the myth
of modernity [phonetic] and
its link to various myths
about the objectivity of modern
science and we can talk about this
in the questions if you like.
My argument by contrast is
that writing about monsters
in distant places elucidates
part of a long history
that of human attempts to
map the historical geography
of intelligent life and
the order of living beings.
Indeed, today the languages
of gender, class, cast,
race and religion frequently
monsterfy and dehumanize groups.
If you are reminded of
[inaudible] wonderful talk
at the library yesterday,
you are on the right track.
Just as new fossil evidence
regularly shapes current notions
of human and animal evolution and
the classification of species,
Renaissance Europeans encounters
with new peoples and animals
and their attempts to shape them to
understand them reshape the concept
of the human, the geniality
of humanity and the boundaries
between human, monster and animal.
In order to understand
the cultures and context
in which these notions
were important,
one must historicize Renaissance
ideas about human diversity
that appear to our eyes to be false.
My final subsection on
method is some background
on how illustrative maps were
viewed and used in the Renaissance.
Several features made 16th
Century maps different
from other ethnographic
genres of their era.
They allowed one to graze
at once at the peoples
of different places on one surface.
Maps also showed you
where people who looked
and behaved differently lived
in relation to one another.
World maps and other small-scale
maps covering large areas looked
very different in the 16th Century
to the way they looked
in the Middle Ages.
Let me show you now again the
Solter [phonetic] world map,
which is as small as
the palm of my hand.
You can see the rim of the
world has monstrous peoples
in the south and the east.
So at the very top of the
map is east, sorry, south,
you can see monstrous
peoples whereas
in the 16th Century we see a new
special turn where large scale,
the introduction of a latitudinal
and longitudinal coordinate system
from the Greco mathematician
Ptolemy at the Second Century AD
into these large world maps
in the 16th Century meant
world maps looked rather more
like this mimicking a view
from above all the earth rather
than the view of space from a
standing position in Jerusalem.
In the 16th Century, map makers
began to claim explicitly authority
for their own summations
of the globe by reference
to both eyewitness
experience of travel
and their own textural exegesis.
They did this despite the fact
that they did not have first-hand
knowledge of the whole world
and quite often had
not traveled at all.
What is more while late Medieval
maps had fore grounded trade
and commodities early
modern world maps and maps
of the Americas concentrated
on peoples.
What we see in the era of oceanic
expansion is a distinct shift
in how map makers choose
to use the space of a map.
For early modern European
readers familiar
with Ancient Greek humoral therapy
or with its vernacular iterations
human customs, temperaments
and physiques were understood
to be affected by geography.
Strength in latitude were thought
to generate physical
deformities, for example.
If this sounds silly,
you might bear in mind
that today's astrobiologists study
extremeophiles, plants and animals
that live in the harshest of
climates and through this they think
about what life on other
planets might be like.
The placement then of
ethnographic images within a grid
of spatial system was tantamount to
providing viewers with a shortcut
for extrapolating a
peoples' levels of civility.
The relationship between maps
and ethnography became
more precisely intertwined.
Let's look at some details now.
Many early modern illustrative
atlases and maps were very large,
two and a half meters
across for a map
or 60 centimeters high for an atlas.
Here is a detail from a sheet of
a manuscript atlas showing Brazil.
This kind of artifact was very bulky
and rarely intended for direction
of finding on navigation.
Rather they were visual grammars
summarizing key information
about the world's peoples,
natural history and geography.
Richly decorated manuscript
maps producing Spain, Portugal
and Normandy were intended for
royalty, for nobility and scholars.
They sometimes functioned
as diplomatic gifts.
Printed maps and atlases
from the German lands
and the low countries were produced
in larger numbers for
the open market.
World maps like this one
were built and displayed
by wealthy townsfolk,
merchants and scholars.
By the 1660s, for example, each
office of the Dutch East India
and West India Companies might
have had 10 to 60 world maps
and landscape paintings on display.
Maps were used for teaching
geography, history and scripture
and functioned as political
and military aids.
The English mathematician John Dee
observed that maps were used by
and they quote, "some to beautify
their homes, parlors, chambers,
galleries, studies
or libraries with.
Others saw them for things
past as battles fought.
Some other presently to view
the large dominion of the Turk,
the wide empire of the Muscovite
and the little morsel of ground
where Christendom by
profession is certainly known.
Some for one purpose and some
for another liketh, loveth,
get it and useth maps, charts
and geographical globes.
Dee observed that it
would take an entire book
to list the uses of maps.
Unfortunately, for me he
didn't bother writing one.
In short, the descriptive
captions and illustrations
of these maps were
integral to their use.
In the context of voyages
of exploration,
they offered readers a handy
guide to the latest discoveries.
Here are some examples of details
from the iconography
of the Americas.
The top left you see
giants of Patagonia,
the top right you see
man-eating practices,
in Brazil the bottom right are
a headless person and an amazon
from Guiana who we will meet
in more detail in a minute.
At the bottom right
is an image of one
of the cities of the Inca Empire.
Maps constructed and
disseminated iconic stereotypes.
Indeed, their very
reductive powers was one
of the reasons they were consulted.
They invited comparisons
between people, thus,
stimulating comparative ethnology.
Maps made the link
between human diversity
and geography explicit and visual.
Renaissance maps of the Americas
contained prominent iconic images
and descriptions of peoples
ranging from noble warriors
in Virginia to giants in Patagonia.
They regularly trumpeted
their works with claims
like most accurate and most recent.
These images presented
map makers as synthesizers
with the necessary perspective to
evaluate traveler's observations,
incorporate them into
existing knowledge
and disseminate the
result in a useful format.
Now onto the second part of my
talk, the wondrous ethnography
in Walter Raleigh's
discovery of Guiana.
Of all the New World peoples on
early modern maps, perhaps not had
as mixed a reception as
the inhabitance of Guiana.
In 1596, the travel narrative
of the English courtier Sir
Walter Raleigh entitled,
The Discovery of the Large,
Rich and Beautiful Empire
of Guiana, appeared in print.
For the next two decades
headless men
and to a lesser extent amazons
inspired illustrations and captions
on maps and in translations
of Raleigh's discovery.
Their makers like Raleigh
needed to tap definitely
between general expectations
of monsters in distant regions
and the widespread awareness that
traveler's testimony was problematic
to verify and could
even be fabricated.
Since Raleigh, map
makers and printers wished
to sustain their credibility why
did they include these beings?
What work did monstrous peoples
perform for these cultural arbiters?
Selling colonial ventures
in Renaissance England
was far from simple.
While the sun never sat
on the Spanish Empire the English
crown court investors remained
largely unconvinced that imperial
activities were good investments.
When Raleigh set out in search of a
gold-rich empire of Guiana in 1595,
he hoped to facilitate his
return to court and the favor
of his Queen Elizabeth I.
The courtiers of Robert Cecil
sponsored the expedition
which the court had
refused to support.
I want to stress here
that Raleigh's claim
that Guiana contained rich
veins of gold and the land
of El Dorado were perfectly
reasonable ones.
According to prevailing
traditions of climatic theory
since gold had been found in
the hot, equatorial regions
of West Africa it could equally be
expected to be abundant in Guiana.
Raleigh's El Dorado was a city made
of gold ruled by one El Dorado,
or the Golden One, who anointed
annually with gold dust,
paddled to the center
of an enormous lake
where he would make the votive
offerings of gold figures
and figures with this iconography
of a man sailing to the middle
of a lake have indeed
been recovered from lakes
in Columbia in recent years.
European understandings of El Dorado
were a collage of indigenous beliefs
and gold [phonetic]
working practices
for which abundant
evidence survives.
If you have visited the Dumbarton
Oaks Museum in Georgetown,
you will have seen tangible evidence
of indigenous Indian gold working.
Modern anthropologists,
notably the late Neil Whitehead,
have interrogated Raleigh's
text alongside ethnohistorical,
archeological and all
historical sources
and found collaborating evidence for
the key wonders of Raleigh's text,
gold, amazons and headless people.
So indigenous practices,
local folklore
and real historical
interactions are visible
through the rhetorical forest
of Raleigh's prose [phonetic].
Raleigh could well have gleaned
the idea of a headless tribe
from his local [inaudible],
for example,
but why include descriptions of
headless folk in a text written
to bolster your credibility?
Here are a few Renaissance
images of headless folk
and actually a Medieval
one at the top.
In the middle, is the detail
from the 13th Century Solter map.
You can see some folks with
their heads in their chests.
The bottom left is a late
16th Century Dutch map.
The detail from Guiana at the bottom
right is a late 16th Century image
of a monstrous birth in Europe.
A single individual
whose head was not
where it usually is seen
from front and back.
Raleigh returned from
Guiana with little gold.
His detractors claimed he had
never even left England while he
circulated a manuscript report
in an effort to raise funds
for a second trip and to prove that
he had, indeed, made the first one.
He sent a copy to Sir Robert Cecil,
his chief backer, and this survives
in Lambeth Palace Library in London.
Cecil annotated the manuscript
returning it to Raleigh,
who revised his text
accordingly for publication.
Cecil crossed out certain references
to spleen [phonetic] stones
to the [inaudible] distractions of
[inaudible] drunkards, womanizers
and tobacco smokers and to a
mysterious beast called [inaudible].
By contrast headless beings
called Ewaipanoma [phonetic]
and fierce women called
amazons remained and are
in the printed editions
of Raleigh's discovery.
These peoples conjured
up a memorable distinct slant not
one resembling any the Spaniards
had claimed.
This land was, therefore,
available for the English.
A land that Shakespeare could
expect his audience to bring to mind
when he had a fellow boast to
Desdemona about his adventures
in lands with men whose heads
do grow beneath their shoulders.
I want to move now to how Raleigh
set up the presence in Guiana
of a people called Ewaipanoma.
He says they were a nation of
people whose heads appear not
above their shoulders, which though
it may be thought a mere fable,
yet for my own part I am resolved
it is true because every child
in the provinces of
Aramia [phonetic]
and Cariri [phonetic]
affirm the same.
Raleigh's information comes
from indigenous informants.
This made it potentially
less credible
to his audience on two fronts.
Not only did his readers not
have the precise identities
of these weaknesses but
they were not English.
As such, they did not share his
reader's modes of civility, religion
or sociocultural credentials,
but Andrea [inaudible] termed
a witnesses' ethical status.
Nevertheless, Raleigh
goes to great lengths
to bolster each witnesses'
credibility.
The consistency of the children's
statements every child affirms the
same elevated the whole
community of child witnesses.
Raleigh noted that he had
brought with him to England one
of these very children, the sign
of [inaudible], the king of Aramia.
[Inaudible] son's noble birth
thus potentially enhanced
his credibility.
Furthermore, Raleigh
introduces here the possibility
of his English witnesses, readers
whether, questioning a witness.
This is a strategy he also
used to bolster another witness
of the headless people a
reliable Spaniard known
to two Flemish merchants in London.
Raleigh then observes that
the book of John Blundeville,
a fictitious 14th Century travel
account that wove together elements
from earlier narratives
by actual travelers,
also contained headless people.
Raleigh asserted that recent voyages
to the East Indies found
Blundeville's relations true
of such things that were
hither to held incredible.
While it is difficult to assess
the voracity of individual
or [inaudible] travelers,
Raleigh was, I quote,
"resolved that so many
people did not all combine
or fore think to make the report."
So he's presented here a
lot of independent witnesses
who are saying the same thing.
All of Raleigh's rhetorical
efforts were aimed
at bolstering what the [inaudible]
Catherine [inaudible] called the
extrinsic credibility
of a phenomenon.
The nature of the witness and the
circumstances of the witnessing.
What Raleigh does not do is engage
with whether headless beings
were intrinsically credible.
For the early modern reader
it was theoretically possible
that distant regions with different
climates might have distinct even
monstrous peoples.
I want to move now to
the final part of my talk
to headless beings on maps.
Map makers produced the
earliest known illustrations
of Guiana, Ewaipanoma and amazons.
Their challenge was
relaying information
that viewers would
accept as reliable.
At the same time illuminating
the most distinct memorable
and unprecedented information
about Guiana.
In this way, map makers could
demonstrate their access
to new information and
enable their viewers
to distinguish Guiana
from other places.
The maps' commentaries, iconography
and formal elements of style
and design reveal the
multiple strategies
through which their maker sought
to [inaudible] their
works with authority.
While Raleigh's truth telling
strategies involved multiple
collaboratoring witnesses map makers
deployed rather different strategies
in order to make convincing claims
in a predominately visual format.
Here is an example.
Around 1600 Guiana's ethnography
charged the imaginations
of the influential Dutch map
maker Jodocus Hondius the Elder
and his close associates.
Hondius had resided in
London between 1584 and 1593.
He may well have known of
Blundeville's printed description
of Plancius' map that I quoted at
the beginning which was skeptical
of tribes of monstrous peoples.
While Hondius and Blundeville moved
in the same mathematical circles
as Raleigh nevertheless
Hondius chose the Ewaipanoma
to [inaudible] Guiana.
The potential benefits to him
evidently outweighed the risks
of overplaying the monster card.
The layout of Hondius's
single sheet map of Guiana,
his staging if you will
of Guiana's peoples is
in many ways highly original.
Single sheet maps of other New World
regions had not contained this much
writing before.
The interplay between
various elements, title,
ethnographic caption, et
cetera, build a pathless set
of collaborations for
the wondrous elements.
The map makers frequent references
to its derivation from the testimony
of individuals on Raleigh's
expeditions.
For example, the title
announces that this is a map
of the wondrous land full of gold
called Guiana, recently visited
by Sir Walter Raleigh in
the years 1594, '95 and '96.
The cost of this map have been drawn
diligently by certain ship's mate
who has sailed along
them and visited them
in the years noted previously.
The interior provinces had been
[inaudible] with great difficulty
for both booklets that have
been published by and on order
of the aforementioned Raleigh.
While Hondius has not drawn
Guiana or its peoples from life,
he's arguably done
something just as useful.
He has synthesized the
experience of several witnesses.
Not only did map makers embed
the authority of eye witnesses
into their maps but they
also constructed an authority
of the workshop.
Two large figures appear in
the center identified as a man
from the province of
Ewaipanoma without a head
and a figure of an amazon woman.
In the map's description of
headless men, there's no mention
of Raleigh's indigenous informants
who have effectively been rendered
invisible or perhaps inaudible.
The caption reads,
"Ewaipanoma in this province
as Raleigh writers
they have no heads
and are very strong and cruel."
Steven Chapin [phonetic]
noticed a similar phenomenon
in English experimental
philosophy at the 17th Century,
experiments sometimes
dependent on the activities
of invisible technicians
as Chapin puts it.
Yet they were rarely credited
in subsequent reports.
Hondius's excision of indigenous
informants presumably for brevity
and credibility is a
variant of this phenomenon.
In the caption about amazons,
the indigenous peoples are similarly
missing even though they appear
in Raleigh's text.
Hondius surely raced for
his readers to believe
that he had reliable
information and chose his witness,
a European nobleman, accordingly.
Readers would no doubt have assumed
that Raleigh had described
what he had seen.
He had, after all, visited Guiana.
Some readers were unconvinced of
the existence of Ewaipanoma but not
because they thought they
were physically impossible.
A roughly contemporary annotation
in Dutch below the Ewaipanoma
on the British Library's exemplar
reads, this I think is fabricated
because -- wait for it --
no Dutchman ever saw it.
A similar skepticism is evident
in the annotations to the right
of the amazon, thus Raleigh.
While this is only
one reader's view,
it does bear out the continuing
importance of the ethical status
of a witness in relation to the
judges of his or her testimony.
The closer the ethical
status of witness
and judge the more likely it was
that the testimony
would be believed.
This 17th Century reader
was perhaps aware
that subsequent Dutch voyages had
not collaborated Raleigh's claims
and it was on that basis
rather than any notion
of Ewaipanoma being impossible in
nature that prompted his skepticism.
The headless folk of Guiana had
a brief problematic afterlife
on four Dutch wall maps of
the Americas and of the world.
Here [inaudible] images about the
Ewaipanoma appear alongside other
peoples facilitating
comparative study.
These representations allow
us to trace the rise of doubt
about these beings among Hondius's
circle and the gradual loss
of faith in Raleigh as a source.
Raleigh's 1598 map of the Americas
illustrates the headless man as part
of a freeze [phonetic]
of New World peoples.
This innovation enabled Hondius
to contextualize the Ewaipanoma
and these sources in
relation to peoples
with whom the reader
might already be familiar.
Now, in order for map makers to
add imagery about Guiana's people
to the actual body of South America
on a map, they needed to deal
with the problem of space.
Brazil's cannibals, which you
see on the left, and Peru City's
on the right, were
already jostling for space
on the main body of the map.
By designing a freeze by
contrast Hondius drew attention
to human diversity and provided
more room in which to articulate it.
While this move of
ethnographic information
out of the main land masses
has traditionally been termed a
banishment to the margins,
such margins borders and stand
out illustrative sections, in fact,
give this material
a greater emphasis.
It is these areas that
the viewers' eyes turn.
From left to right the figures
present a decreasing degree
of difference in monstrosity.
The physical aberration of the
headless man is visible to all.
This is a headless man in the
province of Guiana called Ewaipanoma
as Walter Raleigh testifies
goes the caption.
Again, it is Raleigh himself
who is implicitly credited
as a witness rather than
his indigenous observers.
The behavioral aberration
of the next two figures,
the cannibals [inaudible] and
Terezakis [phonetic] is not visible
but would have been known
to those are familiar
with 16th Century travel writing
about the Tupi people of Brazil.
The next two figures, the
inhabitants of Florida,
were less other and monstrous again,
but illustrating distinct people
as in different regions Hondius
indicated that he had, indeed,
consulted a multitude of sources
including the newest ones.
The rhetorical arrangement
of the freeze reduces the
ethnographic difference
and the skepticism that might
follow from too much difference
between the European
and the Ewaipanoma.
Reading from right to left the
steps between civilized humanity
and monstrosity are
rendered more credible.
Other details, the shadows caused
by the figures, for example,
are elements of a visual
rhetoric of eye witnessing.
Subsequent appearances
of the Ewaipanoma show map makers
experimenting with their anatomy.
On [inaudible]1602 map of America,
which Hondius is probably engraved,
the Guianan still lacks a neck.
See he met the extreme right there,
but now has a head that is distinct
from his chest as opposed to
a face below his shoulders.
Other borrowed figures
are unchanged.
So, at the top the freeze shows
people from the north of America
and the bottom are the
South American peoples.
Join them together here the
top detail is from the 1598 map
and the bottom two details are
from the 1602 map and you can see
that they are 1602 map has copied
all the figures faithfully except
for the headless man, who
has now sprouted a head.
The accompanying caption for
the Ewaipanoma is also equivocal
and we learn that he is a man
who is said to be without a head
in the province of Guiana.
Not only have we lost the statement
of authority [phonetic]
testimony relating to Raleigh
but the illustration leads us
to doubt the man's headlessness.
When Hondius published an
illustrated world map in 1608,
he chose not to include images of
headless peoples or amazons at all.
The reasons do not
emerge from the archive
but two factors may have
contributed to this decision.
First by this point Raleigh's
own fortunes has nose dived.
After the death of the queen in
1603, he was imprisoned in the Tower
and tried for treason
suspected of involvement
in a plot against King James I.
Secondly, through his English
contacts Hondius might well have
been aware that Raleigh's words
on Guiana were now worth little
and that Dutch voyages had failed
to corroborate the Ewaipanoma.
Finally, Hondius was probably
aware that -- sorry --
secondly the Dutch voyages had
failed to corroborate his report.
A caption on this map notes that
Raleigh also affirms from the report
of the indigenous inhabitants
that in some places the people
are vigorous but with an unheard
of appearance, that is
some are without heads
or even had dog's heads, brackets,
which however, I think
are farfetched.
This shift of witness is crucial.
Hondius had previously quoted a
passage about amazons on a map
and referred to Raleigh's
writing about Ewaipanoma while
in both cases a missing
mention of indigenous witnesses.
Now, as he expresses doubts
that these beings exist,
rather than sticking with Raleigh,
the source had used before,
Hondius deploys the hearsay
of unnamed indigenous,
ethically uncertain witnesses,
thereby, justifying his own doubt.
Some conclusions then.
Raleigh's inclusion of
distinctive memorable ethnographies
of Guiana created a
geographical region
that was both previously
undiscovered and capable
of being location of El Dorado.
The headless man made
Guiana distinctive
from other New World
regions those emblematized
by these motifs, for example.
Crucially the headless man suggested
that Raleigh had not nearly
read accounts of other regions
but had actually been somewhere new.
Underlying map makers
iconographic decisions was designed
to show human difference
across geographical space.
Thus we see across the Americas
the selection of iconography
to have been partly
shaped by which motifs
from the travel accounts had
not already been used elsewhere.
Once Brazil was associated
with cannibals, for example,
other regions with other climate
had to be represented differently
in order to bolster the map
maker's claims to authenticity.
When map illustrators reduced
the diverse inhabitants
of particular regions such as Guiana
or Virginia to distinct motifs,
they contributed to the emergence
of a topology of distant peoples.
Map makers paid careful attention
to the traveler's accounts
of particular areas when
they derived their images.
By selecting those that had not
been used before those that were new
to each region they could claim
for themselves the authority
of their eyewitness sources.
Paradoxically this meant that
cultural stereotypes contributed
to a sense of diversity
across America's populations.
The headless beings were
intrinsically credible.
It was a quality and quantity of the
witnesses that was under scrutiny.
The Ewaipanoma eliminate two
co-existing epistemologies;
that of the epistemic
eyewitness and that
of the ethical eyewitness whose
authority rests in the relationship
between and the shared values
of eyewitness and audience.
Raleigh wanted readers to believe
that he really had been to Guiana.
Simultaneously he offered
eye witnesses
for something he himself had
not seen just as map makers did.
Map makers latched onto these
most distinctive elements
and trumpeted the night's [phonetic]
authority as far as they wish
to portray this as
unproblematic knowledge.
The ethnographic parade
format, a fleeting experiment,
allowed them to contextualize
elements at the edge of credibility.
Hondius by choosing just the
headless folk and not the amazons
for his larger maps brought the
iconography of Guiana's' peoples
in line with cartographic
practices to other regions.
One place, one people.
The way in which Hondius and
his associates gradually phase
out the Ewaipanoma reveals
a continuing importance
for ethnographic knowledge
of ethnical witnessing
where authorities established
through social and moral values.
In an era in which as Anna
Blair [phonetic] put it,
there was too much to know.
There was a decentering of the
eyewitness by cultural arbiters
who at the same time sought
to basic in their glow.
The implicit and spoken anxieties
of various commentators shows is
that map makers, the authors
of their sources and the uses
of their maps explored multiple
avenues for analyzing information
about phenomena at the
boundaries of credibility.
About places where
things were different,
that were different were
necessarily plausible.
Finally, looking at the illustrated
maps offers historians new locales,
actors and sources with which
to think about Renaissance
and early modern science
as a visual pursuit.
One should not simply stick with
the usual settings and actuals
like the Royal Society in London,
for example, and just add images
and stir, but rather what you
think about what media, context
and practitioners are likely to
have made knowledge visually.
Renaissance maps were a
medium of visual communication
with a distinctive
epistemological power.
The coordinate system together with
ancient theories of how geography
and climate affected human bodies,
temperaments and behaviors meant
that the placement of
people in a particular place
on a map had ontological
implications.
Map makers through
their illustrations
and textual commentaries made
arguments about human societies,
cultures and bodies
across the globe.
By doing so they engaged
with the challenges
of evaluating observations made in
distant places by multiple agents
and synthesizing them in such a way
that their own audiences
would consider them
to be both reliable
and suitably wondrous.
Thank you.
[ Applause ]
Well, we have a certain
amount of time
for questions of which I welcome.
Yes?
[ Inaudible ]
There was an ancient fable that
people who are very old or people
who have traveled very far
could lie within punity
because no one could
test what they said.
So, it was, folktale
is the wrong word,
but it was a commonly
held issue and, of course,
something that popular books from
the present often say is, oh,
everybody was very
gullible in the past.
It's an old adage, oh, yeah, well,
that lot like we can
test what they say.
So, you do see discussions of
credibility all over the place
and sometimes travelers
in their prefaces
to their books will
talk very explicitly
about why they're credible.
So it was something
they needed to work on.
[ Inaudible ]
The ships do a number of things
and there's a recent book
by someone called Richard Unger that
is actually called Ships and Maps
and talks to some of this.
One of the things that
ships do in this context is
that they remind the viewer that
people are actually going places.
So, it's a rhetorical
device for authenticity.
Sometimes on some maps
they do track routes
so that's another thing they do.
There are cases where you can
see the precise flags of ships.
So you can celebrate
which nations were going
where especially the nations
sponsoring your mapping.
Peter?
[ Inaudible ]
When I say that the word decoration
is misleading, the word decoration
in the modern sense is
misleading because there's a word
that comes before it
which is meaningless.
It's like an implicit in it is
that it's only about beauty,
but if you have very distinct
imagery for different places
that has been taken out of
travel writing that the viewers
of your map would actually
have in front of you
as they consulted your map, if it
was, if the details didn't matter,
they wouldn't need to go and
read the books and choose things,
they wouldn't need to write captions
about how carefully
they've done the work.
So it's different from
a world paper motif.
It's more like a diagram,
which is not to say
that everything is
perfect and right,
but the way these things functioned
was as scientific diagrams,
which is not to say that they
weren't pleasing to the eye,
but the idea that decoration
has nothing else there
but a wallpaper stamp so that's
what I would disagree with.
John?
[ Inaudible ]
Okay, thank you.
So let's start with how many
maps might look like this.
So, at the start of this research
project I got special permission
to go eight floors down into the
bowels, eight floors underground
into the British Library's basement
and pulled out all the trays.
So what I said to them is you
can deliver it to me the two
and a half thousand maps
that fall into my timeframe,
and I will send most of them back
saying no pictures, no pictures,
no pictures, no pictures, or
you can let me in the basement.
So the bedrock of the research
starts with the eight floors
down in the basement pulling
out trays and then supplementing
that with other printed
manuscript maps from libraries
like the Newberry, the Huntington,
BNF in Paris, et cetera, et cetera,
Munich and, you know,
I've been to the Library
of Congress before,
et cetera, et cetera.
So when I started, I didn't
know what proportion was going
to have images, but what I
focused on was world maps
and maps of large continents.
So what I'm not looking at in
this book is maps of one village,
manuscript maps of one
village that got sent
to one person [inaudible],
for example.
So, of all of these
examples that I looked just
to see how many there are going
to be and build the database,
out of 3,000 maps 1 in 10
has illustrations of people
that goes beyond a
completely plain stick figure.
So, in the period say 1500 to
1602, 1 in 10 has some kind
of distinctive imagery of peoples,
but is it all, are
they all the same?
Well, what I do by
actually analyzing each one
in detail is what I've shown
is how much variation there is,
how many different ways there
were of representing, for example,
cannibalism on maps
and I may have, okay,
shut your eyes I have some
extras saved up somewhere.
Okay, there are many
different images of cannibalism
and by actually taking the
trouble to look at each element.
On the right, for example,
the wonderful,
extraordinary my favorite
thing on earth [inaudible] map
in the Early Americas Galley of
the Kislak Collection you see,
for example, limbs hanging
from a tree and a spit roasting
and there's writing that shows
that viewers of these maps
in 1602 [phonetic]
were actually looking
at these details and
thinking about them.
For example, I mean on
the left is an image
from a 16th Century travel account
that doesn't show you spit roasting
and [inaudible], a traveler
to Brazil, talks about maps
that show you Brazil with man-eating
imagery and he says something
like on those maps of the Americas
they show you limbs being hung
from trees and limbs being roasted
on spits and people chopping figures
on great iron benches
and he complains saying these map
makers don't know what they're
talking about because
what they actually do
in Brazil is they cook
on a barbecue.
He then describes this all
American cooking method.
So what is this fight about?
Well, the map makers took
the material from writing
about the Caribbean
Islands but on a map,
even a map that's four times
the size of this sheet,
the Caribbean Islands
aren't really very big.
So, I 1516 when the
[inaudible] map was put together,
the images were placed in the
newest bit of land that had any kind
of space, which is Brazil, but for
a later viewer looking at them,
they read this icon as meaning
this is the thing that everybody
in this place shared and they were
looking right down to the detail
of it's supposed to be limbs,
you know, on barbecues.
It's not supposed to be spit roast,
it's not supposed to
be whole bodies.
So when I look down, drill down
into those details and look
at the travel accounts and see that
you actually have captions that are
on say the [inaudible] map that
come from the writings of Columbus
and [inaudible] talking
about limbs hanging
from above the map makers have gone
to this great amount of precision.
Sorry to cut the long story
short by actually analyzing one
after the other after
the other after the other
and visitation even more of them
you see them, it's surprising
that they should bother
making changes.
I think each time they're going
back and chewing over the material
and for something like the Patagonia
giants, whew, the earliest images
of Patagonia giants are all on maps.
So they had to start with quite
short descriptions in text
that say things like I saw
some people who were very tall,
these giants did a dance, you
know, they painted their faces
but when you input giants on the
map, they have to kind of fill
in some of those blanks and
extrapolate them, you know,
it's the kind of thing
that scientists always do.
You don't have complete
information so you try to think
about the new information in the
light of your old information
and sometimes there
will be paradigm shift.
I'm sorry, the last thing about maps
as a scientific instrument a
large world map can't be used
to do anything.
So the accuracy of
the coastlines, well,
you're still not going
to do anything with it.
So, for a map that
was meant to be used
in a study say it didn't actually
serve a direct practical purpose
beyond the rhetorical.
I mean clearly there were
lots of maps that were used
for very practical purposes
where the politics of empire
or planning voyages,
trying to figure
out whether there was a northwest
passage to China over North America.
Some of those kinds of
maps wouldn't survive.
You've only got to be a tourist for
a week with a map and, you know,
by the end of it it's fallen apart.
So the survival of maps is such
that it's the maps that were used
for contemplation that were
more likely to survive anyway.
>> Could you offer a word
on the economics of it?
How many maps were sold?
I was thinking in modern times
they have a map of Russia
with a bare-chested leader
and you say these are
the types that you find.
So this was mostly a
money making proposition?
Has printing changed?
>> A money making proposition
as opposed to?
>> Just scientific.
>> Well, I would say that
science is money today.
Nobody, you know, scientists
has to eat, somebody has got
to pay for their training.
They don't separate into that's
for science and that's for money.
[ Inaudible ]
Yeah, something interesting
happens in the late 16th Century,
which is you have access to a
lot more high-quality engravings
in books with lots of illustrations
and suddenly map makers
are competing
to sell their wares alongside things
like the debris collection
of [inaudible].
So they start experimenting with
actually taking images from some
of these more popular sources and
one of the ways in which the modes
of representation changes
is as they respond to things
like illustrated map and if
you are making a printed map,
they weren't extremely
expensive to make and you did,
indeed, need to sell them.
So on one level, they certainly
needed to be able to sell the things
to keep in business, but it
was the rhetoric of knowledge
that they were using to
sell it, sell printed maps
in the 16th Century that's what
they wanted you to think about.
They wanted the rich
[inaudible] in the cities
to celebrate their investments,
to also demonstrate
how smart they were.
>> One more question.
[ Inaudible ]
Yes, indeed.
There's, well, you can't see
it here there's a deer here
on the extreme right
and, of course, the dog.
These extremely mundane animals,
which I think you help ground
everything else and there's a ground
where they're being sit it
all contributes to a sense
of naturalness even though as
you say they weren't exotic
and wild and crazy animals.
You think it's part of diluting
the increasing credibility
by diluting the number of
things that are difficult.
[Inaudible] difficult
things before breakfast.
[ Inaudible ]
Yeah, there's an opossum.
>> There's an image of the roasted
spit sits the first image --
>> -- of an opossum, yeah.
There are a few, yeah.
The opossum is one, but it's
surprising how few New World animals
get this kind of treatment.
There's another mythical animal
called a high [phonetic],
probably a sloth [phonetic]
that makes a few appearances,
but you might expect more
animals and more commodities.
[ Inaudible ]
>> Is it a quick question, John?
>> Yeah, a quick question.
I was just wondering
[inaudible] were you able
to pinpoint the location
of El Dorado?
>> I can't possibly tell you where.
>> I think on that secret
we can leave it there.
[ Applause ]
Once again I just want to also
thank the Geography and Map Division
and John for allowing
us to use the space.
[ Applause ]
We are back at it again tomorrow
at noon where our Jameson Fellow
from this past year, Kevin Kim,
will return to give a lecture
on Cold War America and
particularly Henry Wallace
and Herbert Hoover's
role in Cold War America.
So that will be in LJ119
in the Jefferson Building
and please do sign up for our
list if you're not already on it
to receive notification
about such events.
So thanks very much.
[ Applause ]
>> This has been a presentation
of the Library of Congress.
Visit us at loc.gov.