Production to Publication: European Printed Material and the Colonial Project

The history of printing and printed material about the early modern Americas is one which is fundamentally intertwined with both the enforcement and expansion of the European colonial project. Viewed as a powerful tool in administrating distant colonial governments and converting Indigenous communities to Christianity, access to print — and therefore the dissemination of knowledge — was heavily regulated. While printing presses were present in Mexico starting in 1539, it was not until 1740 that a paper mill was successfully established in the Americas, forcing a reliance on Europe for the tools required to locally produce literature on the same scale (Arnold, 54).

The material presented below was printed and published in Europe in the 17th-18th centuries. While completed under unique circumstances, each book utilizes information from existing literature alongside first-hand accounts as they construct arguments about and images of the Americas for a European knowledge market. Dictated largely by an economy of and interest in exotic, foreign goods (and people), new information about the Americas was eagerly received, translated, and reused by scholars — many of whom would never travel to the Americas themselves. This resulted in an intellectual environment which bred racist and farfetched depictions of Indigenous peoples and their customs, as well as exoticized views of the natural world.

It is important to note that, despite the strict regulation of print in the Americas under colonial systems, Indigenous communities were still producing their own textual materials, sometimes using traditional techniques. An example of this is the Coyoacan Codex, also known as the Codex Santa Maria Tetelpan, held in the collection at the JCB. Produced in the late 17th or early 18th century, this codex documents the boundaries of the pueblo of Tetelpan, serving as a statement of indigenous land-rights and ownership in the face of viceregal governance. Featuring Nahuatl writing and hand painted watercolor illustrations on amate (a fig bark paper that had its production banned by the Spanish viceroyalty due to associations with pagan ritual) rather than imported European paper, the Coyoacan codex utilizes artistic and scribal traditions that draw upon pre-Columbian and early colonial Mexican pictorial styles. The scribes of the codex took unusual care to write and paint on and with traditional materials, seemingly hoping to convey a sense of the antiquity of the information contained within in addition to the native traditions of legal negotiation and knowledge. The Coyoacan codex shares this stylistic choice with a variety of other codices from the Mexican Toluca Valley, most notably a collection known today as the Techialoyan codices — made in workshops that sold them to central Mexican highland communities in need of "official" documentation of land ownership legible to the Spanish government. This is just one example of the how books, and more specifically the circumstances of their production, have shaped the history of Indigenous communities and therefore the discipline of Latin American History — oftentimes in the the favor of European colonizing authorities.

While each book referenced below was prompted by and written in a unique context, they were all published in 18th-century Europe and distributed in a period of expanding intellectual markets, particularly related to materials dealing with the Americas. Therefore, these books and the information that they contain were all in some way shaped by an appeal to a European reader, despite potential claims of objectivity. Indeed, those claims to objectivity were important in the marketing to that European reader, as they functioned as claims to authority and expertise. It is important to consider both the explicit and more subtle ways that information could have been adapted and — in the process, altered — to be more palatable to a European audience in their struggle for continued colonial rule over American lands, resources, and Indigenous communities.

The wealthy and well-educated Jesuit Joseph-François Lafitau was sent to New France (modern-day Canada) as a missionary to join a pre-established mission to the Haudenosaunee people on the banks of what is now the St. Lawrence River. His book, Mœurs des Sauvages Ameriquains, comparées aux mœurs des premiers temps (1724), was, therefore, only published with Jesuit approval and funding. As such, a major stakeholder in Lafitau’s writing was the Catholic Church, and the audience of the book was likely a mix of prominent members of Jesuit circles and other educated men of science (a common overlapping demographic). Most of it was written while Lafitau was serving as as procurator of French missions to the Americas, an administrative role in the Jesuit order. As such, the intent of his writing was likely to further incentivize more Jesuit missions like the one that he went on, and given his ethnographic interests, likely also to contribute to that burgeoning European science. Further, his text sought to argue that all human religions were of the same holy seed — this seed being Christianity — but had been perverted in other societies. Ultimately, his book served this purpose by arguing that while Indigenous peoples, particularly the Haudenosaunee, were primitive, they were similar to ancient Greco-Roman societies. Therefore Indigenous communities followed the same linear evolution as the rest of humanity in moving toward the true Christian faith, only thousands of years behind Europeans, and were therefore not beyond redemption through conversion.

His illustrations, too, depicted Indigenous societies as similar to their Greco-Roman counterparts, which was different from how a lot of his peers chose to show Indigenous people. This angle — which is at the heart of Lafitau's book — suggested that it was justified for members of the Church to make efforts to lead them to God with missions to the Americas. Because the Jesuit community stood directly to benefit from Lafitau’s position and he was happy to abide by the norms of most Jesuit-produced scholarship, there was probably less pressure for him to cite specific, non-Jesuit sources; no one was fighting, standing against, or dissecting the points he was making anyway.

A fellow Jesuit scholar, born in New Spain (Mexico), Francisco Saverio Clavigero, also published a historically-oriented ethnography of North American Indigenous groups, in this case the Nahua peoples. Originally published in Italian, but soon translated into English, German, and Spanish, La storia antica del Messico (1781) was conceptualized and written in a tense and highly competitive European intellectual market. Having been expelled from Mexico in 1767 during the Bourbon reforms which suppressed Jesuit activity, Clavigero relocated to Italy with the intention of continuing his studies on Mexican history. But in this shift, he was met with an insular and polarized body of European writings on the Americas. Often written by authors who themselves had never traveled to Spanish colonial provinces, these books and philosophical papers often reworked existing material — or simply fabricated information — for the sake of painting a more intense and exotic image of the Americas. This image, in entertaining an ignorant audience, reinforced a perceived inferiority (yet, sometimes contradictorily, also an exceptionalism) of the geography, plants, animals, and people of the New World. Cornelius de Pauw, a Dutch philosopher, was a primary advocate of this American Degeneracy Theory and it was his popularity in Europe, particularly after publishing his book Recherches philosophiques sur les américains, which partially prompted Clavigero's own writing (Winterer, 84). Born in Mexico and having spent the most formative part of his life amongst Indigenous communities of the Anahuac (central Mexican plateau), Clavigero set about writing his own history of Mexico "to restore to its splendor the truth, obfuscated by an incredible mob of modern writers on America." He wrote to introduce a more personal (yet still colonial in nature) account of central Mexico, its Indigenous peoples, and its pre-Columbian histories into a festering European intellectual community which was beginning to form more comprehensive standards for citations and therefore the "legitimacy" of knowledge.

Taking a turn from the Jesuit scholarship above (and going back about 50 years), another Frenchman, Amédée-François Frézier, was tapped by King Louis XIV in the early 18th century for his military expertise, to scope out the geography of Spanish and Indigenous coastal Latin America. He came out with his Voyage to the South Sea (Relation du voyage de la mer du Sud) in 1716. While the original text is in French, the researched version is an English translation of Frézier's original work, published in 1717. Jonah Bowyer, for whom the English print was made, had the book printed for sale in his book shop, the Rose, on Ludgate Street, London. In the postscript of the translated edition, Frézier's peer Edmond Halley commends Jonah Bowyer for undertaking the English translation of the book as he believed that English readers would want to acquaint themselves with the seas and the peoples in the Americas and further inquire “what may be of use.” The English edition is also illustrated with 37 copperplate engravings of the coasts, harbors, cities, plants, and other curiosities printed from Frézier’s original plates (hence their inscriptions are in French). It is specifically noted that Frézier lent his permission for the English publication and that procuring the original plates for the book was rather costly.

When observing the sources that each book above draws upon, it is clear that the balance between clearly attributed information versus speculation varied. Moreover, the types of sources reveal something about specific authors' motivations and the larger context of the colonial era in terms of the amount of information that was even publicly available for authors to consult. Especially with regards to visual images of Indigenous knowledge, there was a frequent reuse of specific cornerstone sources (amplified within certain communities such as the Jesuits) and this perpetuated a depiction of those societies as fixed and static.

Much of Lafitau’s writing about the practices of Indigenous societies, particularly the Haudenosaunee, came from his own firsthand experiences with them after living amongst them for six years in New France. However, much of this information comes from his outside observations of them rather than their own descriptions of themselves. Thus, while he includes substantial discourse about specific Indigenous practices in different realms of life, he offers little in the way of explanations about why these practices are conducted — he may have never sought out this knowledge to begin with. Lafitau’s arguments about classical European societies, on the other hand, were rooted in his studies conducted under the tutelage of the Jesuit Order, where he would have read many texts from ancient Greco-Roman writers. As such, Lafitau's sources of knowledge are clearly very much tied to and motivated by the Jesuit order. Because his work — by design — fit into the Jesuit worldview, it became part of the insular set of Jesuit-approved sources of information. Thus, Lafitau's text was used as an important source for future Jesuit missionaries and church members who also wrote about, and visited, Indigenous populations in the Americas.

La Storia Antica del Messico was written at a critical time in the evolution of contemporary encyclopedic form, which no doubt directly influenced Clavigero's method of referencing and acknowledging his numerous sources. Denis Diderot's famous Encyclopédie, ou dictionnaire raisonné des sciences, des arts et des métiers, better known simply as Encyclopédie, was published between 1751-1772 with the goal of codifying all the knowledge of the world. In attempting this, it was also the first encyclopedia to individually name its many contributors. This would have been a relevant discussion while Clavigero was writing La storia around the same time, particularly because Cornelius de Pauw himself was asked to contribute to the volume following the success of his writings. Working to counter the writings of de Pauw and his contemporaries, Clavigero had to be comprehensive in compiling and listing his literary sources and informants/contributors. The first 19 pages following the preface are dedicated to "An Account of the Writers on the Ancient History of Mexico", forming a historiography of sorts which lists both colonial and Indigenous historians (almost exclusively nobility) organized by the century in which they were active. There is also a second component titled "of paintings" which contains a non-exhaustive list of pre-Columbian codices and their location in both Europe and the Americas. He clarifies that he was not able to consult all of these in his history, but they increase his legitimacy and open the door for further scholarship on codices which were largely dismissed and ignored by European scholars.

While not formally acknowledged in the introduction, it is important to note that the oral histories of Indigenous communities that he encountered while living in Mexico were also a critical source for Clavigero's writing. These sources will be further discussed in the following section.

In contrast to Clavigero's claims to historical authority, much of Frézier's writing is anecdotal in tone and source, as he captures — aside from military information and information pertaining to Spanish and Indigenous relations — only that which he personally found to be interesting. The text, published as a travel diary yet ulteriorly serving as an information-gathering mission to the Spanish ports and fortifications of South America for the French crown, when not meeting the informational needs of his monarch and of sailors and explorers, intended to satiate the curiosities of an ill-informed European public with descriptions of the inhabitants and customs of the Americas. Despite Freziér's efforts to objectively capture information for his diary, he subjectively shapes the dynamics of coloniality and imperial conflict by his codifications. Frézier writes of the practices and customs of the Spaniards throughout Chile and Peru, making pointed comparisons between the people he encountered to those who resided in Europe.

That being said, his information was considered reliable (save for Frézier's map dispute with his peer, Edmond Halley, over the locations of the islands of Ascension and Trinidad.) A Voyage to the South Sea consists mostly of Frézier's findings as he travels from location to location describing whatever seems to be most on his mind, whether it is the flora and fauna, Indigenous culture, colonial structure, or logistical mishaps. Unlike many of the other objects, this book well documents the sources it does use, with a table of contents, numbered plates, and signatures from the original artists throughout. Because of this, many of the plates' sources may be similar for some of the outlined copies below.

The first image below, of a Native South American paddling on a raft, originally comes from Frézier's Voyage to the South Sea. The second image, from Lafitau's Moeurs des sauvages americains, reuses the very same image in the bottom segment of the folio, with some differences. Both books were published within ten years of each other in France, and, indeed, Lafitau uses Frézier's image to contrast with the kayaks used by the Inuit peoples, whom he would have either encountered or learned about during his time Canada.

The third page of images below appears in Clavigero's Storia antica del Messico and includes, in the third row on the right, an image of an iguana that first appears in Francisco Hernández's Nova plantarum, or the Tesoro Messicano, another book explored in this project that presented an encyclopedia of flora and fauna that Hernández gathered over years in Mexico in the late 16th century (though the book was not published in full until 1651). The Nova plantarum incorrectly identifies the animal as an axolotl, and over 100 years later, La storia antica del Messico and the English translation, The History of Mexico, do the same. While they have different publication times and locations (1651 Rome vs. 1781 London), the reuse of this image has interesting implications here when contrasted to the previous French publications, which were issued in similar publishing contexts. Given the very different publishing circumstances of these three books, this plate or copies of it must have been widely used and reused across European countries for at least 130 years, indicating the continuing authority granted to Hernández's book (and perhaps a gap in knowledge regarding South American reptiles and amphibians). It should be noted that the Nova plantarum plate is woodcut, whereas the higher detail in the plate from La storia antica del Messico suggests that it was produced via engraving. Regardless, it is clear that Clavigero is using Hernández as one of his many sources to tell the history of pre-conquest Mexico.

In the fourth and fifth images below, we see two very similar depictions of Indigenous people making a canoe. While the plumes of smoke vary between images, the hairstyles of the people in the image as well as their relative position to each other are the same. A Briefe and True Report by Thomas Harriot and printed by Theodor de Bry (1588), and Naaukeurige versameling der gedenk-waardigste zee en land-reysen na Oost en West-Indiën (1707) were published in Germany and the Netherlands 119 years apart. The 1707 publication, a massive collection of various voyages to the East and West Indies, clearly derives this depiction of Powhatan canoe-making from the de Bry print. However, the text appearing with the image references Antonio de Herrera y Tordesillas' description of boatmaking practices in the Caribbean. Once again, the reprinting of images and mashing-up of Native practices, even after a considerable amount of time has passed, emphasizes how popular printed material on the Americas was across the 17th and 18th centuries in Europe, and how often authors and printers resorted to knowledge already gathered, rather than generating their own.

One of the later works that drew most heavily upon Lafitau's Mœurs des sauvages ameriquains was Algemeine Geschichte de Länder und Völker von America (1752) by Johann Friedrich Schröter, a German local official who also served as a missionary to New France. He followed much of Lafitau's precedent: using illustrations as well as prose to highlight similarities between Indigenous people and Greco-Roman societies as a way to justify Christian missions to the Americas. The entire first volume of the book is a translation of Lafitau from French to German, while the second is a compilation of parts of several other travelogues by Europeans in the Americas. The Lafitau translation includes reproductions of the accompanying images as well: as seen in the 6th image below coming from Lafitau, and the 7th being Schröter's reprint. This act of translation and reproduction reflects the ever-growing market for literature, travelogues, and scientific writing on the Americas in 18th century central and western Europe, and the proliferation of the materials of these men who experienced the Americas firsthand.

Furthermore, Lafitau relied on previous circulating images of Native North Americans to inform his depictions of them. For example, the 8th image below comes from a French-language compilation of letters written by Jesuit missionaries in New France, and depicts Kateri Tekakwitha (1656-1680), a Haudenosaunee/Algonquin woman who was the first Native American to be canonized by the Catholic Church. This images was printed in 1717.
The clothing of the woman depicted in the top right of the 9th image below, from Lafitau's book (1724), almost directly resembles that of Tekakwitha. Showing a generic Haudenosaunee woman in the image of Tekakwitha furthered Lafitau's argument that it was only superficial and amendable characteristics of Indigenous peoples that separated them from devout Jesuits and Christians, a fact emphasized by the invocation of Tekakwitha and her canonization.

Aside from quotations in passing and consistencies within individual texts, the ways the books studied below attribute their sources and prints to authors and artisans do not at all match contemporary printing and publication conventions for cited works and image use. Even when plates are recycled or reused in texts, they are often attributed differently due to the variety of publication styles reflected in each book — this is seen in variations in print presentation and image keys throughout different volumes and translations. Despite publication differences, there remain identifiable patterns between these objects. For example, A Briefe and True Report, as well as A Voyage to the South Sea, consist of anecdotal accounts that rarely reference other authors or explorers. Both sources also source their prints from European artisans who never ventured to the Americas; however, this is more true for A Briefe and True Report, as de Bry had modified the prints based upon the paintings provided by John White, who had ventured to the colony with Harriot.

In Mœurs des Sauvages Ameriquains, Lafitau’s citations were extensive with regard to the civilizations of the past, yet few with regard to the Indigenous communities his volume set out to report upon. Though Lafitau was far from the first Jesuit priest to visit New France and write about its peoples, the absence of an abundance of citations of other sources on the Indigenous peoples was not surprising. Lafitau's work, though it represented the culmination of a century of Jesuit descriptions of the native peoples of New France, was not a narrative that need draw from other sources; rather, it was a speculative work aiming to tie Haudenosaunee religious practices he himself had witnessed to those of antiquity. Nevertheless, Lafitau still commonly draws from the accounts of his fellow Jesuits — most prominently those of Le Jeune and Brébeuf.

Though Mœurs des Sauvages Ameriquains' attribution system is unrecognizable when compared to the bibliographies of the modern era, the text contains a type of proto-footnoting common among early modern works. Lafitau's references litter the margins of numerous folios, consisting either of name alone of sources he drew from, or extensive information on volumes drawn from with precise information regarding their contents.

While the format of Clavigero's introduction and list of sources is a citation of sorts, there is much to be revealed in his in-text citations and footnotes. As noted previously, the Indigenous rituals, traditions, and oral histories which he encountered were not referenced in the historiography. Instead, they are often times offered as anecdotal footnotes in the text itself using language such as "I've heard it said" or "they say" to distinguish its origins as spoken. In these footnote citations, alongside appeals to classical texts as well as contemporary literature (pg. 28), Clavigero also actively combats what he claims are false or exaggerated claims on the Americas (pg. 14). These implicate the book in a much broader European scholarly conversation — one which for many years had been circulating the same few colonial sources, reinterpreted at a severe distance by arm-chair scholars. Clavigero was also implicated in this chain of translations, as seen in the reuse of illustrated plates throughout the book which themselves represent skewed/classicized interpretations of Indigenous people, ritual, and the natural world.

All of the information recorded by Frézier within A Voyage to the South Sea was acquired firsthand, both regarding his observation of the South Sea and the American Coast, as well as the practices and knowledge of the Indigenous and Creole Spanish communities he encountered as he traveled. As a result, Frézier only employs a few citations within the text itself. These references consist of occasional attributions for texts Frézier draws from in his musings, for the authors of prior maps he draws from as he charts his journey, and for works that would supply further information in support of his claims (including the shameless self promotion of his own publication on artificial fireworks found on page 204.)

The prints Frézier provides throughout the text, however, largely consist of his own maps and observations or outsourced copperplate images produced by the consistently credited late 17th-early 18th-century French printer Nicholas Geurard. These prints are accompanied by image keys found in the surrounding folios; each key provides succinct descriptions for the facets of the images contents beyond what the text alone provides for the print. While each print has an accompanying image key, the text itself does not possess a table of contents for the prints therein in the style that the other texts discussed here (e.g. Mœurs des Sauvages Ameriquains) do. Frézier's original maps from his voyage, among the first non-Spanish records of the south sea, were considered the most reliable of the Chilean and Peruvian coasts and were later used by varieties of other 18th century explorers. Added in the book's English edition postscript is a direct response from Edmond Halley regarding a map he had made which had been critiqued by Frézier. In Halley's rebuttal, he references several other voyagers and their findings in the same region to refute Frézier' geographical claims, though in the text itself Frézier only makes reference to Halley's own claim.

The manner in which these books were published — in addition to the fact that they circulated in print — was hugely influential in the way that Europeans of the time understood Indigenous societies and their knowledge systems. Because publishing infrastructure that allowed for scalable printing and distribution of books wasn't established in the Americas until much later, Indigenous people were given minimal opportunities to change the way that they were presented to the greater European public. As such, the way that the authors of Mœurs des sauvages ameriquains, La Storia Antica del Messico, and A Voyage to the South Sea treated Indigenous societies in their writing was often more influenced by their audiences and what might sell well than by their actual subjects themselves.

Each book balances firsthand accounts, personal speculations from the author, and Indigenous input to communicate Indigenous knowledge, but the way this balance is struck and treated varies. Outside forces including expectations from the books' audiences, the scarcity of primary sources representing Indigenous knowledge, and the importance given to attributing outside information shaped the way that each book was constructed. Ultimately, even over hundreds of years, European ideas and voices shaped the transmission of Indigenous knowledge in print, bringing with them European biases and imperial ulterior motives.

de Alba-Koch, B. (2005). Providence, Indigenous Protagonism, and Enlightenment: Clavijero's Rendition of the Conquest of México. Lumen, 24, 49–63. https://doi.org/10.7202/1012174ar

Feest, C. F. (2001). Father Lafitau as Ethnographer of the Iroquois. History of Anthropology.

Harvey, D. A. (2008). Living Antiquity: Lafitau's Moeurs des sauvages amériquains and the Religious Roots of the Enlightenment Science of Man. Journal of Western Society for French History, 36.

Launay, R. (2010). Lafitau Revisited: American "Savages" and Universal History. Anthropologica, 52(2).

Lyons, M. (2013). Books: a living history. London: Thames & Hudson.

Winterer, Caroline. "The Civilization of the Aztecs." American Enlightenments : Pursuing Happiness in the Age of Reason, Yale University Press, 2016. ProQuest Ebook Central, https://ebookcentral-proquest-com.revproxy.brown.edu/lib/brown/detail.action?docID=4699848.

Edited and Adapted for Americana by Michal Loren and Rachel Moss.

This essay and the related annotations belong to the student-led project Illustrating Knowledge of the Americas in European Print, 1590–1781. Learn more at the project homepage: https://americana.jcblibrary.org/Illustrating_Knowledge/