Bodies of Water / Bodies at Work (JCB Digital Catalogue)

When early modern French writers encountered American waters, they marveled at their scale: many early accounts insisted on the enormity of American rivers and lakes, and although they sometimes suggest that the bodies of water they encountered in the Americas could be understood in relation to ones they knew at home – the Seine was frequently used as a comparative unit of measurement – they also found that their narratives floundered as they encountered these new bodies of water. To find their way through this new waterworld, French writers came to observe indigenous techniques and vocabularies with particular care.

Where some French accounts suggested the commercial and pleasurable potential of American waters, others worried over their disastrous potential for European projects in the New World, returning constantly to the difficulty of navigating in dangerous new conditions. This concern led to a real admiration for the indigenous construction and navigation of canoes and pirogues; even writers who scorned other indigenous practices regarded indigenous waterway techniques in a different light. The observation of this local, technical knowledge called for new water vocabularies, central to the cartographic and other projects of French explorers.

From the sustenance provided by cod fished off the shores of Newfoundland, to the devastation wrought by seas during catastrophic weather events, such as the hurricane and tsunami that devastated Port Royal Jamaica in 1692, to the rivers running through the Americas that taught observers of maps and readers of chronicles about the world beyond their familiar borders, water created, destroyed, and explained the world. Atlases, tracts and treatises document water’s continued utility, both for early modern thinkers as they made sense of the metaphorical nature of humankind and for the people whose work involved traversing a new world.

This exhibition was curated by Ivonne del Valle (University of California, Berkeley), Katherine Ibbett (Trinity College, University of Oxford), and Molly Warsh (University of Pittsburgh).