The Rhinoceros and the Megatherium

An Essay in Natural History

Juan Pimentel, Peter Mason

• Publisher: Harvard University Press
• Year: 2017
• Print ISBN: 9780674737129
• eBook ISBN: 9780674974425
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: European History
• Index: History

One animal left India in 1515, caged in the hold of a Portuguese ship, and sailed around Africa to Lisbon—the first of its species to see Europe for more than a thousand years. The other crossed the Atlantic from South America to Madrid in 1789, its huge fossilized bones packed in crates, its species unknown. How did Europeans three centuries apart respond to these two mysterious beasts—a rhinoceros, known only from ancient texts, and a nameless monster? As Juan Pimentel explains, the reactions reflect deep intellectual changes but also the enduring power of image and imagination to shape our understanding of the natural world.

We know the rhinoceros today as "Dürer's Rhinoceros," after the German artist's iconic woodcut. His portrait was inaccurate—Dürer never saw the beast and relied on conjecture, aided by a sketch from Lisbon. But the influence of his extraordinary work reflected a steady move away from ancient authority to the dissemination in print of new ideas and images. By the time the megatherium arrived in Spain, that movement had transformed science. When published drawings found their way to Paris, the great zoologist Georges Cuvier correctly deduced that the massive bones must have belonged to an extinct giant sloth. It was a pivotal moment in the discovery of the prehistoric world.

The Rhinoceros and the Megatherium offers a penetrating account of two remarkable episodes in the cultural history of science and is itself a vivid example of the scientific imagination at work.

PART ONE

The Armored Pachyderm

CHAPTER ONE

Itinerary

On land too there are routes through which water runs, and others through which the wind passes.

Leonardo da Vinci

He must have arrived exhausted after spending more than four months caged in the hold of a ship. He had been captured on the other side of the world and was now—May 20, 1515—being led through the Tagus estuary. The vessel was called Nossa Senhora da Ajuda (Our Lady of Succor), the virgin to whom mariners entrust their safety before going to sea.

According to the medieval bestiaries, the unicorn too could be caught by a virgin, its sensuality overcome in the maiden’s presence. Captivated in her lap, it was easy prey for hunters. Right from the start, the story of the rhinoceros evokes that of the unicorn and other fantasies of the flesh: desires that need to be assuaged. The members of the crew would have been grateful to their Lady of Succor for bringing them home safely. They had just completed the return journey of the Carreira da Índia, the famous trade route from Portugal to India. But the rhinoceros had been wrenched from his home.

A monastery dedicated to the same Lady of Succor rises on one of the tall hills that dominate the river mouth. Below, in the water, stands the Tower of Belém, under construction at the time to serve military and fiscal purposes and, according to some accounts or legends, to commemorate the voyage of Vasco da Gama. It is a fine example of why states and empires are built: to remember or to imagine traditions, to make war, and to collect taxes.

He would have disembarked there at the fortress, which doubled as a customs office, controlling traffic and merchandise. His effigy can still be seen today in one of the limestone arabesques that grace the base of the Manueline turret. Beside the armillary spheres, knots of the House of Avis, crosses of the Order of Christ, and other ornamental decorations of this singular Mozarabic structure that seems to issue forth from the very waters of the Tagus, a gargoyle recalls his neck and round head surmounted by his legendary appendix, a prodigious natural feature, shaped like a figurehead at the prow of a ship but made to charge at something more substantial than the wind—the flesh of an enemy, a powerful bulwark like himself, a rival of his own size (Figure 1).

Figure 1. Belém Tower and its gargoyle. Pen and ink drawings by Jorrín Montañés.

He had come a long way. In his own country they called him Ganda, the name for rhinoceros in most North Indian languages. Weight: around two tons. Size: almost two meters high and more than three long. He must have felt dizzy and confused. His eyesight was bad; it had never been good, and was certainly not now. But his sense of hearing was acute—so much the worse, as there is nothing more disturbing than to hear strange noises without being able to spot the danger, without even being able to make out what they mean. During those months aboard, Ganda must have heard many unfamiliar sounds. Now everything, human and nonhuman, seemed to belong to an alien world of strangeness, novelty, curiosity. For his captors it must have been a game, the game of the hunt and the gift, the interminable game of court society (which is nothing but the society of war, symbol, and art). For him the uprooting must have been a calvary. Our story has to start with this zoological Via Crucis, this memorable day in the life of the hoofed pachyderm.¹

HE WAS USED to the element of water—the river—but Ganda had been obliged to cross oceans. He was entrusted to the Portuguese near the riverine port of Surat, in the Gulf of Cambay, in the kingdom of Gujarat (or Cambay, as it was called by the Portuguese), Northwest India. From there he was taken to Goa, the center of Portuguese operations, over a distance of more than five hundred kilometers. Soon afterwards he was conducted a similar distance farther south to the port of Cochin on the Malabar Coast (where Vasco da Gama was to die in December 1524). From Cochin, Ganda embarked with the Portugal-bound flotilla of three vessels aboard Nossa Senhora da Ajuda, captained by Francisco Pereira Countinho, at the beginning of January 1515. The rhinoceros was accompanied by Jaime Teixeira, one of the ambassadors of Afonso de Albuquerque, the governor responsible for his transport to Lisbon and who was to die at the end of the year. Also on board was an Indian called Oçem, his handler and guide, though the fame of the pachyderm has overshadowed any further details about this man’s life.

They crossed the Indian Ocean and probably took the “inside” route between Madagascar and Africa, what would later be known as the “old line.” They doubled around the Cape of Good Hope to make a landing at St. Helena, a further one on Terceira in the Azores, and finally reached Lisbon in May. Three ports of call on a 120-day voyage—just enough to maintain enough fresh water for drinking and to replenish Ganda’s supply of grass.

He came from remote Goa in confinement, wearing chains and adorned with a costume. He was now a precious object. The cargo included other precious commodities: cinnamon, pepper, myrrh, sandalwood, aniseed, cloves, and aloe. The spices were to conserve foodstuffs and to improve their flavor; the others—perfumes and colorants to produce scents and colors, knowledge—affected other senses. Like them, the rhinoceros was a natural product, an object of exchange, and a highly valued item because of his connection with the senses, especially those of sight and touch. As an exotic fetish, Ganda represented the sensuality of the East in opposition to the rationality of the West.

We might also consider him a prisoner, or rather an exile, a degredado, one of those deported criminals whose death penalty had been commuted in exchange for the performance of certain functions in the colonies.² Ganda was a wild animal who had been domesticated and degraded to a status somewhere between human and nonhuman—a sentient being and an object at the same time, one more victim of war and sport. And like all the products of the acquisitive mentality of the West, he was experiencing what traffic means, because all travel, and especially a journey like this one, entails hardship; it is not a coincidence that the etymology of the word “travel” links it with travail, torture, and labor.³

Ganda had learned this lesson the hard way. There is no getting from A to B without effort and distress. His body really was made to resist, to resist and invest, to give and receive. In this respect he resembles his captors, fascinated by the possibilities and jingling coins of commerce. Ganda, however, did not know the tricks of the symbolic trade. He was alien to the idols of the market and of sociability, those gods in the ascendancy after the Europeans had brushed with the New World and doubled the Cape of Good Hope. Who or what was Ganda? A suit of armor and a horn, made to resist and to attack. Only a body as capable of resistance as his could withstand such a brutal estrangement (Figure 2).

Figure 2. Detail of Rhinocerus 1515. Woodcut by Albrecht Dürer.

His arrival in Europe forms part of the gift economy. Ganda was a gift too. Uprooted from the jungle, he had just entered the circuit of symbolic exchange: give, receive, give in return.⁴ In the year before he disembarked in Lisbon, he had been given by the Sultan of Cambay to Diogo Fernandes de Beja and Jaime Teixeira, the emissaries of the all-powerful governor of the Portuguese Indies, Afonso de Albuquerque.⁵

Was the Sultan of Cambay his first owner? As far as we know he was, but it would not be surprising if one of his vassals had previously presented it to him. The gift economy was globalized before the spice trade. The sultan is variously known as Modofar or Muzafar II or V, but all the Portuguese chroniclers (João de Barros, Diogo do Couto) agree in describing him as a slave to base passions at table and in bed, always surrounded by women (he had more than five hundred) and drugged with opium. This luxury and excess, however, are part of the stereotypical Western image of the Orient. So we can establish neither whether Muzafar / Modofar was the first captor of Ganda nor whether he was the second or the fifth of his dynasty nor whether he was licentious. But he needed to be so for the story, in which desire, prefiguration, and exoticism are recurring elements.

What is it exactly that is desired? We covet what is at hand, within view, but always desire what is remote. Omnia nova placet: everything new gives pleasure. Isabella d’Este, Marquise of Mantua, a serious collector and patron of the arts at the time, explained this better than anyone else when she defined her passion as “an unquenchable thirst for ancient things.” She desired antiquity because it was newly discovered and remote in time. We desire what is new in time and remote in space in the same way. A Roman cameo, an Etruscan inscription, a rhinoceros—all that matters is that it is unfamiliar; opposites are attracted to one another, we are attracted to what is different. The West needs the Orient just as dying presupposes being born. Nothing could be more natural: the Orient plays a geographical role for humanism analogous to that played by Antiquity—a remote fascination finally recovered from the past.

The Renaissance searches for the Orient and even creates it. The East continues to be created and recreated through the whole early modern era down to the Enlightenment and the age of Romanticism, by which time it is consecrated as one of the great cultural artifacts generated by the West in its entire history.

The Orient does not exist as such. Decades ago Edward Said studied the mechanisms and interests of that motley disciplinary mosaic called orientalism.⁶ How could Europeans be so unsophisticated as to include Pharaonic Egypt, Meiji Japan, and the Sassanid Empire in the same category? Only an obstinate and determined desire to find a cultural adversary, a reverse image, can have generated such a pronounced and violently condensed alterity.

The Orient does not exist, but we need it to exist. Europe needs it to such an extent that it even provokes the emergence of the other, fourth, unknown, and unexpected continent, America. But as soon as Europe has ensnared the Orient by the African route, it captures it, transports it, and puts it on display. Leaving metaphors aside, this is exactly what it did with Ganda.

However, what used to arrive by land, at least partly, now began to arrive by sea. Lisbon was supplanting Venice. The connection between the Mediterranean and the Indian Ocean is one of the landmarks of any history of the West, whether the old one of the age of discovery or the more modern one of globalization. Adam Smith stated that, together with the discovery of America, the doubling of the Cape of Good Hope had been the most important event in the history of humankind, and it was even more important for Voltaire. At the beginning of the sixteenth century, Venice was toying with the idea of opening up a maritime passage near the Suez. It was too early—or too late: Bartolomeu Dias and Vasco da Gama had already discovered a route around Africa.⁷ The Portuguese had been marauding the Atlantic coast for around a century as they trafficked in gold and slaves in Guinea, making do with malagueta pepper until they finally discovered the route leading to genuine black pepper from Asia.

In a little less than fifteen years they pounced on the principal ports of the Sea of Arabia and the Gulf of Bengal. Afonso de Albuquerque (1453–1515), the official responsible for the deportation of our pachyderm and the intermediary between the Gujarat sultan and the Portuguese king, was one of the builders of the Portuguese colonial empire. He also directed the occupation of the island of Ormuz, turned Mozambique into the main landing stage on the Carreira da Índia, and even seized Malacca, thereby opening up the route to China.⁸

The Gulf of Cambay, Ganda’s natural habitat, was impregnable. The Portuguese were hoping to establish two feitorias (trading posts) on the diminutive islands of Daman and Diu. In fact, the gift of the rhinoceros was connected with the operations on Diu. Albuquerque wanted to secure permission to erect a fortress on the island and sent his two emissaries, Beja and Teixeira, to Muzafar for that purpose. The gifts they were to present to the sultan included a gold dagger set with rubies, silver cups, and Persian brocades and collars. The sultan, however, refused to accede to Albuquerque’s demands; in fact, when the emissaries returned to Goa with the negative reply, Albuquerque considered making war on him in retaliation. Fortunately, Muzafar knew that meekness was not among the qualities of the Portuguese governor. To palliate the wrath that he foresaw, he hit upon the happy idea of sending him a chest inlaid with mother-of-pearl with balustrades and ornaments for the king and a monstrous animal for Albuquerque himself. In the words of Gaspar Correia, whose Legends of India written some fifty years after the event is one of the earliest accounts of Portuguese rule in Asia, the creature in question was low in stature and had the hide and feet of an elephant, a long head like that of a pig, eyes near the muzzle, and a thick, stumpy, pointed horn on its nose. It lived on grasses, straw, and boiled rice. He also describes it as having a docile character.⁹ Ganda was indeed tame, a suitable present to pacify a governor.

South of Cambay, on the Malabar coast, Albuquerque had directed the seizure of Goa, from then on the principal platform in India. Cochin, from where Ganda embarked, was much further south, near hostile Calicut. Without actually occupying India (something that only the British managed to achieve to a certain extent in the second half of the nineteenth century), the Portuguese monarchs considered themselves lords of the sea. Their thalassocracy had been established.

Statistics, however, deflate the imperial rhetoric. Almost three hundred vessels sailed the ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Frontispiece
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• Prologue: Analogy and Essay
• Part One: The Armored Pachyderm
• Part Two: A Strange Cadaver
• Epilogue: Circular Lives
• Notes
• Acknowledgments
• Credits
• Index