New Worlds Reflected

Travel and Utopia in the Early Modern Period

Chloë Houston, Chloë Houston

• Editorial: Routledge
• Año: 2016
• ISBN:
  9781317087755
• Edición: 1
• Categoría: Geschichte
• Categoría: Frühneuzeitliche Geschichte

Utopias have long interested scholars of the intellectual and literary history of the early modern period. From the time of Thomas More's Utopia (1516), fictional utopias were indebted to contemporary travel narratives, with which they shared interests in physical and metaphorical journeys, processes of exploration and discovery, encounters with new peoples, and exchange between cultures. Travel writers, too, turned to utopian discourses to describe the new worlds and societies they encountered. Both utopia and travel writing came to involve a process of reflection upon their authors' societies and cultures, as well as representations of new and different worlds. As awareness of early modern encounters with new worlds moves beyond the Atlantic World to consider exploration and travel, piracy and cultural exchange throughout the globe, an assessment of the mutual indebtedness of these genres, as well as an introduction to their development, is needed. New Worlds Reflected provides a significant contribution both to the history of utopian literature and travel, and to the wider cultural and intellectual history of the time, assembling original essays from scholars interested in representations of the globe and new and ideal worlds in the period from the sixteenth to eighteenth centuries, and in the imaginative reciprocal responsiveness of utopian and travel writing. Together these essays underline the mutual indebtedness of travel and utopia in the early modern period, and highlight the rich variety of ways in which writers made use of the prospect of new and ideal worlds. New Worlds Reflected showcases new work in the fields of early modern utopian and global studies and will appeal to all scholars interested in such questions.

Part 1
Utopia and Knowledge

Chapter 1
Rebuilding Solomon’s Temple: Richard Hakluyt’s Great Instauration

David Harris Sacks

24 God that made the worlde and all things that are therein, seeing that hee is Lord of heauen and earth, dwelleth not in temples made with hands; 25 Neither is worshipped with mens hands, as though hee needed any thing, seeing he giueth to all, life and breath, and all things; 26 And hath made of one blood all mankind for to dwel on all the face of the earth, and hath^l assigned the times which were ordained before, and the bounds of their^mhabitation …

St Paul to the Athenians, Acts 17:24–26¹

Introduction: The Voyage to Ophir

I begin with Ben Jonson’s The Alchemist, where at the start of Act II we meet Sir Epicure Mammon, that fine seeker for the philosopher’s stone and the sovereign cures for ills and the boundless worldly riches it would bring. Approaching the house where the cunning Subtle has promised to provide him ‘the magisterium… the stone,’² Mammon says to Surly, the gamester who accompanies him:

Come on sir. Now you set your foot on shore
In novo orbe; here’s the rich Peru:
Great Solomon’s Ophir! He was sailing to’t
Three years, but we have reached it in ten months.
This is the day wherein to all my friends,
I will pronounce the happy word, ‘be rich’.³

Mammon imagines turning all the metal in his house to gold, then buying up all the tin and lead from the plumbers and pewterers, and all the copper in London’s Lothbury Street, and transforming them in turn. With the proceeds; he says, ‘I’ll purchase Devonshire and Cornwall,/ And make them perfect Indies!’⁴ Nor will his newfound powers end there, since ‘[h]e that has once the flower of the sun’ – he is referring once again to the philosopher’s stone –

Not only can do that, but by its virtue,
Can confer honour, love, respect, long life,
Give safety, value: yea, and victory,
To whom he will. In eight and twenty days,
I’ll make an old man of fourscore a child.
…
Restore his years, renew him, like an eagle,
To the fifth age … .⁵

The final reference alludes to the Fifth Monarchy in the apocalyptic reading of Nebuchanezzer’s dream in the Book of Daniel.⁶

In this scene, Mammon associates Solomon not just with the fabled voyage to Ophir, but with the authorship of alchemical works.⁷ As readers of the Bible would have known, Solomon’s ships returned from Ophir not only with great quantities of gold to adorn his Temple, but also with ‘Almug wood’ to provide supports for it and for lyres and harps for the singers.⁸ For practitioners of magic or alchemy, or initiates into Hebrew or Christian Kabbalism, this association with the Temple had occult significance, for it was believed that the holy site, whose measurements are so carefully laid out in Scripture, encrypted a model of the God’s creation in numerological form. The voyage to Ophir, therefore, became a figure not just for acquisition of material riches, but for the discovery of transcendental treasures of the kind found in the Wisdom of Solomon in the Apocrypha. In consequence some writers construed the Song of Solomon as an alchemical allegory, and took one of the greatest textbooks of magic circulating in sixteenth-century Europe, the Clavicula Salmonis – The Key of Solomon the King – to be Solomon’s own writing.⁹

In mocking Mammon’s hope to discover his own Ophir, Jonson, of course, was calling attention to the corrupting presence of greed tainting the actions of the practitioners of alchemy and magic. In the Middle Ages, however, the association of the expedition to Ophir with the building of the First Temple had occupied the eschatological or millenarian aspirations of generations of writers.¹⁰ It continued to do so in the early modern period. In 1605, Joseph Hall identified five theories of its possible location, which placed it anywhere from the Spice Islands in the East Indies to locations in the Americas.¹¹ Continental writers such as Jan Huyghen van Lindschoten, Antonio Galvão, as well as José de Acosta and his Jesuit colleagues also located it in Asia. Leo Africanus put it in Portuguese East Africa.¹² But from the time of Columbus, great apocalyptic hopes became connected with the voyages of discovery, and many, including Columbus himself, considered his discoveries to fulfill prophecies predicting the restoration of the world in the Endtime.¹³ Columbus was convinced that Ophir lay in the Kingdom of Cathay or in Imperial China and used this analysis to make his case for his first voyage. When later, believing he was in the Indies, he found himself in the Antilles, he thought the newly discovered island of Hispaniola was the place.¹⁴ Abraham Ortelius agreed.¹⁵ However, once the Americas were known to be distinct from Asia, a number of others opted for a continental American site. For example, Benito Arias Montano, member of the Military Order of St. James, scholar of ancient oriental languages, Bible interpreter, and editor of the Polyglot Bible published in Antwerp by Christophel Plantin in 1572, put the place and its fabled mines where Mammon did, in Peru.¹⁶ So did the anonymous author of an early seventeenth-century manuscript entitled ‘Of Salomon’s Ophir, or the land of Peru’.¹⁷

Sir Walter Ralegh shared in the imperial messianism that drove Columbus and many others in their quests for new discoveries, although he believed that Ophir was to be found in the Spice Islands rather than China or Peru.¹⁸ As we shall see, Richard Hakluyt also had his own apocalyptical vision regarding what he called the ‘golden voyadge to Ophir … by Salomon’.¹⁹

Visiting the Temple²⁰

Despite the fact that Hakluyt was a prolific publisher, he has left us remarkably little in his own words.²¹ The vast majority of his bibliography – including his monumental Principal Navigations of the English Nation – consists of editions of the works of others, preserving their words, most often exactly as they wrote them.²² He adopted this practice, Hakluyt tells his readers ‘to the ende that those men that were paynefull and personall travelers might reape that good opinion and iust commendation which they have deserued, and further, that euery man answere for himselfe, iustifie his reports, and stand accountable for his owne doings’.²³ Answering for one’s self, standing accountable for one’s doings, represents the very essence of Hakluyt’s view of empire, of liberty, and of the purpose of historical writing. Grounded on Aristotle’s ethical theory,²⁴ Hakluyt’s method puts individual agency in the service of the common good at the center of the story, not the ‘nation’ as ‘ultimate actor’ as Richard Helgerson has argued.²⁵ By creating the incentives necessary to prompt free persons to act, the method also links each tale of discovery with God’s providential plan for restoring the world to the unity it had lost with the arrival of sin after the Fall of Adam and Eve.

Hakluyt’s purposes, emphasizing the vital role of the English in the process, were patriotic to be sure, but ‘the cheife subiect’ of his ‘labour,’ as he tells us, was ‘the certayne and full discouerie of the world’.²⁶ ‘[T]o celebrate English navigation and to promote English expansion abroad’ – singled out by Helgerson²⁷ – was a secondary goal. Nevertheless, the effects on England of contemporary religious and political affairs in Europe provided a key impetus to his work. Let’s start with the historical context for the first edition of Principal Navigations on which Hakluyt had already begun work before 1580, during the time he was a Fellow of Christ Church, Oxford, and which he published in 1589, only a year after the Armada. This period was fraught with the passions and terrors of religious war and the threat of global domination by Spain after its king, Philip II, succeed to the crown of Portugal, giving it a worldwide empire. It was marked by the brutality of confessional warfare in the Netherlands and France; the assassination of William the Silent at his headquarters in Delft; Catholic conspiracies to assassinate Queen Elizabeth in England and the execution of Mary, Queen of Scots; the rise of the Holy League in France; Sir Francis Drake’s raid against the Spanish in West Indies; and most notably the abortive attack on England by Spain’s Invincible Armada. This also is the period in which the English, under Sir Walter Ralegh, made their first attempt at colonial settlement in North America – in the failed Roanoke Colony. Hakluyt was centrally placed to observe all this at close hand, having begun his career as a government consultant around 1580 by presenting a memorandum, probably written at the behest of Sir Francis Walsingham, on how to respond to the impending union of the Spanish and Portuguese crowns.²⁸ Hakluyt spent much of this period in Paris where he served from 1583 to 1588 as chaplain to Sir Edward Stafford, Elizabeth I’s ambassador, just as religious war was reignited in France and events in the Netherlands took an ugly turn with the death of William the Silent. As a beneficiary of the patronage of Sir Francis Walsingham, to whom he dedicated the first edition of Principal Navigations,²⁹ and as a major advocate for Ralegh’s project in Virginia, Hakluyt was also well tuned to the hopes and fears for the Protestant cause that motivated these two figures.³⁰

But in explaining the origins of his project, Hakluyt connects these immediate political and religious concerns with a much larger apocalyptic theme. A year or two before entering Christ Church, Hakluyt tells us, he had occasion to visit the Middle Temple chambers of his older cousin Richard, ‘at a time when I found lying upon his boord certeine bookes of Cosmographie with an universall Mappe’.³¹ Being ‘somewhat curious in the view therof’, the young man became the pupil of his kinsman, who observing his curiosity ‘began to instruct my ignorance’. His cousin, Hakluyt says, first showed ‘me the division of the earth into three parts after the olde account and then according to the latter, & better distribution, into more’. Hakluyt refers in the first instance to the tripartite worldview as shown in a medieval mappa mundi or in a stylized T-O form.³² The new worldview took into account discoveries in the Americas and elsewhere. Reviewing this modern map – E.G.R. Taylor argues that it probably was Abraham Ortelius’s cordiform projection of 1564³³ – the elder Hakluyt emphasized that the discoveries in America and elsewhere revealed ‘their speciall commodities, & particular wants, which by the benefit of traffike, & entercourse of merchants, are plentifully supplied’. These facts demonstrated that God had so disposed the world to balance scarcities in one place with abundance in another and to promote exchange between regions, a point that Erasmus earlier had made in his Complaint of Peace.³⁴ The course of history, therefore, was now unveiling more and more of the truths of God’s creation and bringing the dispersed peoples of the world into communication with one another.

The instruction did not s...