In Amazonia (40 page)

16
. Kenneth R. Andrews,
Elizabethan Privateering: English Privateering During the Spanish War 1585–1603
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1964); idem, ed.,
English Privateering Voyages to the West Indies, 1588–1595
(Hakluyt Society Second Series No. 111. London: Hakluyt Society, 1956); Joyce Lorimer, “The English Contraband Tobacco Trade in Trinidad and Guiana 1590–1617,” in
The Westward Enterprise: English Activities in Ireland, the Atlantic, and America 1480–1650
, ed. Kenneth R. Andrews, Nicholas P. Canny, and Paul E. H. Hair (Liverpool: University of Liverpool Press, 1978), 124–50.

17
. Richard Hakluyt,
A Particular Discourse Concerning the Greate Necessitie and Manifolde Commodyties That Are Like to Growe to this Realme of Englande by the Westerne Discoueries Lately Attempted, Written in the Yere 1584 by Richard Hakluyt of Oxforde Known as Discourse of Western Planting
,
ed. David B. Quinn and Alison M. Quinn (Hakluyt Society Extra Series No. 45. London: Hakluyt Society, 1993), 51. The Quinns, ibid., 161, take the “River of Saint Augustine” to be the Amazon.

18
. For descriptions of the Ralegh circle, see Hill,
Intellectual Origins
, 125–30, and Shannon Miller,
Invested With Meaning: The Raleigh Circle in the New World
(Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1998).

19
. Lorimer, “Contraband Tobacco,” 126; idem, “The Location of Ralegh's Guiana Gold Mine,”
Terrae Incognitae
14 (1982): 77–95.

20
. For the drama, see Robert Lacey,
Sir Walter Ralegh
(London: Weidenfeld and Nicholson, 1973), 369–82; and Edmund Gosse,
Raleigh
(New York: D. Appleton, 1886), 202ff. For a text of Ralegh's final speech, see Vincent T. Harlow, ed.,
Ralegh's Last Voyage
(London: The Argonaut Press, 1932), 305–11. For a smart survey of Ralegh's shifting reputation, see Robert Lawson-Peebles, “The Many Faces of Sir Walter Ralegh,”
History Today
48, no. 3 (1998): 17–24.

21
. A challenge of historical writing is to resist the certainty of hindsight when reimagining the possibilities of the lived moment. This point is elegantly elaborated in relation to the conquest of America by Jonathan Goldberg, “The History That Will Be,” in
Premodern Sexualities
, ed. Louise Fradenberg and Carla Freccero (New York: Routledge, 1996), 3–21.

22
. Whitehead,
Discoverie
, 138. All emphases in this and other quotations from
The Discoverie
are present in the original text.

23
. Even when this strategy met with its greatest success—the capture and looting of the treasure-laden Portuguese carrack, the
Madre de Dios
, in 1592—most of the profit scattered with the sailors on their return to Dorset. See Edwards,
The Life
, vol. 1, 155–58.

24
. Cited in Murdo J. Macloed, “Spain and America: The Atlantic Trade, 1492–1720,” in
The Cambridge History of Latin America
, vol. I:
Colonial Latin America
, ed. Leslie Bethell (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984), 314–88, 387. Also, see John H. Elliott,
The Old World and the New, 1492–1650
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1970), 54–78.

25
. Helgerson,
Forms of Nationhood
, 151–91; Taylor,
Late Tudor
, 1–38; Rabb,
Enterprise and Empire
, 19–92; William R. Scott,
The Constitution and Finance of English, Scottish and Irish Joint-Stock Companies to 1720
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1910–12), vol. 2.

26
. David B. Quinn,
Explorers and Colonies: America, 1500–1625
(London: The Hambledon Press, 1990); Helgerson,
Forms of Nationhood
.

27
. “The Letters Patents, Granted by the Queenes Majestie to M. Walter Ralegh, now Knight, for the Discovering and Planting of New Lands and Countries, to Continue the Space of 6. Yeeres and No More,” in
The Portable Hakluyt's Voyages
, ed. Irwin R. Blacker (New York: Viking, 1965), 279–85, 279.

28
. See Lacey,
Ralegh
, 15–17. John Aubrey, in his
Brief Lives
ed. Oliver Lawson Dick (London: Secker & Warburg, 1949) informs us both that Ralegh “spake broad Devonshire to his dying day” (255) and that “In his youth for several yeares he was under streights for want of money. I remember that Mr. Thomas Child, of Worcestershire, told me that Sir Walter borrowed a Gowne of
him when he was at Oxford (they were both of the same College) which he never restored, nor money for it” (253).

29
. “Epistle Dedicatorie,” in Whitehead,
Discoverie
, 121.

30
. William H. Sherman,
John Dee: The Politics of Reading and Writing in the English Renaissance
(Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1995), 182–92.

31
. Whitehead,
Discoverie
, 135.

32
. Ibid., 156.

33
. Ibid., 158, 179, 148.

34
. Antonello Gerbi,
Nature in the New World: From Christopher Columbus to Gonzalo Fernández de Oviedo
, trans. Jeremy Moyle (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1985), 93. Also, Jonathan Goldberg,
Sodometries: Renaissance Texts, Modern Sexualities
(Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1992), 179–222.

35
. Joyce Lorimer, “Ralegh's First Reconnaissance of Guiana? An English Survey of the Orinoco in 1587,”
Terra Incognitae
9 (1977): 7–21. Dom Antonio was the aggrieved king-in-exile whose accession in 1580 had been preempted by his cousin, Philip II, thus cementing a Spanish control of the Iberian peninsula that lasted until 1640.

36
. Andrews,
Elizabethan Privateering
, 173.

37
. On Spanish concerns about such vulnerabilities, see Ojer,
La formación
, 353–96.

38
. See Eva G. R. Taylor, “Introduction,” in
The Original Writings and Correspondence of the Two Richard Hakluyts
, ed. Eva G. R. Taylor, vol. 1 (Hakluyt Society Second Series No. 76. London: Hakluyt Society, 1935), 47; and Charles Nicholl,
The Creature in the Map: A Journey to El Dorado
(New York: Morrow, 1995), 32–37.

39
. This was the pre-existing narrative context within which Ralegh interpreted Topiawari's tales of crimson-hatted foreigners attacking from the west (see below,
n. 53
). It is worth noting the correspondence between this story of Andean invasion and the diffusionary models of cultural development in the Americas that came to dominate Amazonian studies in the early and mid-twentieth century. As we know, scholars such as Julian Steward and Betty Meggers explained the presence of “complex” societies in Amazonia by positing an early migration from the Andes. Burdened with a developmentalist theory of culture that rested on a close causative relationship between the ecological potential of an area and the societies that could emerge there, Steward, Meggers, and others fell back on speculation about Andean migration to account for “anomalous” evidence of large-scale settlements. These scholars were extremely cautious about regarding narratives such as
The Discoverie
as historical sources and thereby giving credence to accounts of substantial floodplain chiefdoms. Nevertheless, it is in Ralegh's account that we find the first explicit statement of what would become a hegemonic Andean diffusionary hypothesis.

40
. José Toribio Medina, ed.,
The Discovery of the Amazon According to the Account of Friar Gaspar de Carvajal and Other Documents
, trans. Bertram T. Lee (New York: Dover, 1988).

41
.
Pedro Simón,
The Expedition of Pedro de Ursua and Lope de Aguirre in Search of El Dorado and Omagua in 1560–1
, trans. William Bollaert (Works issued by the Hakluyt Society, No. 28. London: Hakluyt Society, 1861), 194.

42
. Whitehead,
Discoverie
, 141.

43
. Simón, “
The Expedition
,” xi—xii.

44
. Lorimer,
Settlement
, 10. For broad El Dorado histories, see John Hemming,
The Search for El Dorado
(New York: E. P. Dutton, 1978); and Robert Silverberg,
The Golden Dream: Seekers of El Dorado
(Athens: University of Ohio Press, 1996).

45
. A preliminary to Ralegh's own voyage was his sponsorship of John Burgh's belligerent voyage to La Margarita, Cumaná, and probably Guiana in 1593. See Andrews,
English Privateering
, 225–35.

46
. Shirley, “Raleigh's Guiana Finances.” Rabb,
Enterprise and Empire
, 35–92, delineates distinct agenda within the coalition of merchant and gentry investors in the colonial voyages. His data on the Guiana campaign are in Table 5, 66.

47
. Alfred L. Rowse,
Sir Walter Ralegh, His Family and Private Life
(New York: Harper & Brothers, 1962), 183. More detail is offered by Ojer,
La formación
, 539–63.

48
. Patricia Seed, “Taking Possession and Reading Texts: Establishing the Authority of Overseas Empires,”
The William and Mary Quarterly
49, no. 2 (1992): 183–209, 186.

49
. See John Hemming,
Red Gold: The Conquest of the Brazilian Indians
(London: Macmillan, 1978).

50
. Whitehead,
Discoverie
, 165–66.

51
. See Hakluyt,
Discourse of Western Planting
, 52–61.

52
. Campbell,
The Witness
, 242.

53
. Whitehead,
Discoverie
, 173.

54
. This was not an unprecedented sentiment, but it does situate Ralegh in a particular New World tradition. Las Casas, for example, “stated explicitly in the very last work he wrote,
On Royal Power
, [that] the ‘kings' and ‘princes' of the Americas enjoyed the same status as the nobility in Naples and Milan.” Anthony Pagden, “Introduction,” in Bartolomé de Las Casas,
A Short Account of the Destruction of the Indies
, ed. and trans. Nigel Griffin (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1992), xiii–li, xvi.

55
. For a brilliantly sustained discussion of this tension in the texts of New World discovery, see Anthony Pagden,
European Encounters with the New World: From Renaissance to Romanticism
(New Haven: Yale University Press, 1993), 17–49.

56
. Whitehead,
Discoverie
, 174.

57
. Ibid., 181.

58
. Ibid., 185.

59
. And, of course, with each other. Ralegh avoids homogenizing Americans into undifferentiated “Indianness.” The political affiliations of particular groups are of paramount importance to him.

60
. Harcourt,
Relation
, 73; Whitehead, “Introduction,” 30–31.

61
.
Lawrence Keymis, “A Relation of the Second Voyage to Guiana, Performed and Written in the Yeere 1696. by Lawrence Keymis Gent.,” in Richard Hakluyt,
The Principal Navigations, Voyages, Traffiques & Discoveries of the English Nation Made by Sea or Over-land to the Remote and Farthest Distant Quarters of the Earth at Any Time Within the Compasse of These 1600 Yeeres
, vol. 10 (Glasgow: James MacLehose, 1903–5), 462–67.

62
. Stephen Greenblatt,
Marvelous Possessions: The Wonder of the New World
(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1991), 12–13.

63
. Michel de Certeau,
The Writing of History
, trans. Tom Conley (New York: Columbia University Press, 1988), xxv; emphasis in original.

64
. Whitehead,
Discoverie
, 196.

65
. George Chapman, “De Guiana carmen Epicum,” in Hakluyt,
Principal Navigations
, vol. 10, 451.

66
. Keymis, “Relation,” 487.

67
. Carolyn Merchant,
The Death of Nature: Women, Ecology, and the Scientific Revolution
(New York: Harper & Row, 1980). Seamus Heaney has written powerfully on this tripartite connection in direct relation to Ralegh. In his poem “Ocean's Love to Ireland,” Heaney revisits the famous “Sweet Sir Walter” episode from Aubrey's
Brief Lives
, an episode Aubrey narrates in a comic register. Taking his cue from Ralegh's “The Ocean to Cynthia,” Heaney writes water as the medium that fuses Ralegh's rape of a maid of honor with the colonial violence of the Irish campaigns. He ties the material historicity of bodies, rivers, puddles, swamps, and oceans, bringing into view hierarchies of sex, race, and nation, and holding Raleigh to account as the agent through whom Ireland is “possessed and repossessed.” Heaney's Ralegh is cynical and brutal, far removed from the national-heroic rogue of Aubrey's gossip, and the retold story is bitter and deadening: “Ralegh has backed the maid to a tree / As Ireland is backed to England / And drives inland / Till her strands are all breathless / ‘Sweesir, Swatter! Sweesir, Swatter!'” Seamus Heaney,
North
(London: Faber, 1975), 41. This, of course, is a radically different metaphorics of water from that of Gaston Bachelard, which I consider in
Chapter 7
.

68
. For a perceptive discussion of
The Discoverie
in these terms, see Montrose, “The Work of Gender.”

69
. Whitehead,
Discoverie
, 199.

70
. Keymis, “Relation,” 487.

71
. As the Brazilian military would put it in the 1970s when encouraging migration to Amazonia from the hardscrabble northeast: “a land without people for a people without land.”

72
. See Anthony Pagden,
The Fall of Natural Man: The American Indian and the Origins of Comparative Ethnology
(New York: Cambridge University Press, 1982); and, more generally, Manuela Carneiro da Cunha, “Introdução a uma história indígena,” in
História dos índios no Brasil
, org. Manuela Carneiro da Cunha (São Paulo: Companhia das Letras, 1992), 9–24. On nature, see Antonello Gerbi,
The Dispute of the New World: The History of a Polemic, 1750–1900
, trans. Jeremy Moyle (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1973); idem,
Nature in the New World
; and Clarence J. Glacken,
Traces on the Rhodian
Shore: Nature and Culture in Western Thought from Ancient Times to the End of the Eighteenth Century
(Berkeley: University of California Press, 1967).