The Literature of the Encounter (Published Catalogue, 1991)

Toward the end of the fifteenth century, European explorers encountered islands and a great land mass hitherto unknown to their geographers. At the same time, they met peoples whose customs and way of life confounded many of the precepts they held concerning "civilization." They also began to notice new forms of plant and animal life they could not identify. These "discoveries" all required integration into the Europeans' long-fixed world views, which were themselves ultimately compelled to change.

For the natives of the New World, the arrival of the Europeans was likewise a challenge to attitudes and ways of life carried on, in many cases, with little change for thousands of years. What we know of their reactions to the explorers, who arrived with woven clothing, technologically superior weapons, and great ships, has been preserved almost solely through the perceptions of Europeans. Even so, the manuscript and printed accounts of the Europeans are among our best—and in many cases, our only—resources for understanding the encounter that took place, in its many forms.

Access to this literature, however, has been haphazard; often, the most revealing material has been virtually unknown to potential readers. When the information has been of an incidental nature, buried in a book that did not advertise its American content, it has sometimes gone simply unrecognized for centuries. Even books that are well-documented bibliographically have often been described only by subject bibliographers who have published for specialized interest groups, with the result that such works have never received the wider dissemination merited by the material. It has been the aim of European Americana to bring together in one listing these disparate printed records of the encounter between the New World and the Old. While the discoveries eventually had an impact on nearly every discipline, it is the early historical and geographical accounts that form the basis for much other writing.

The early history of organized missions is, with few exceptions, a Roman Catholic history. Groups of Protestants abroad, in many cases, sought to bring their religion to the indigenous peoples neighboring their settlements, but their efforts did not in any way compare with the projects of the Catholic Church and its various orders. For Protestants, serious missionary activity did not begin until the seventeenth century. The ecclesiastical decentralization and autonomy brought on by the Reformation left little room for the spread of the Gospel abroad. The focus of Protestant theologians' attention was the establishment of new doctrines and the settling of church conflicts. For a time, there was little awareness of, or even interest in, the needs of the distant heathen. The Puritans at first rejected the very idea of missions; for them, the church was a covenant of but a few select believers. In time, however, the New World became a battleground of competing religious ideologies, each offering the Native Americans its own unique gift. The propensity for purification led to persecution of some Protestants by others, and some ardent religionists looked to new settlements for a more peaceful development of their theological perceptions and practices.

The requirement that new knowledge conform to the traditions of Biblical myth and legend was as much a problem for interpreters of the New World as it had been for the proponents of a heliocentric cosmography. All life went on "under the sun," but there had been no Biblical explanation of America, its people, or the creatures and plant life that abounded there. In the course of a generation, the awareness gradually formed among Europeans that America was neither a part of Asia, nor anywhere near it, and questions began to be raised of who the Indians actually were and where they had come from. Early writers like Pietro Martire d'Anghiera began to point to the Biblical story of Ophir and cite supposed cultural links such as a custom of circumcision reported in Yucatan. In the course of the seventeenth century, Spanish thinkers investigated every conceivable link America might have to the stories of the Old Testament and to the myths and histories carried down by the writers of ancient Greece and Rome. Late in the century, theologically-based interpretations began haltingly to yield to less sweeping assertions produced by experience and observation. As the debate spread to northern Europe, where new colonial involvement awakened cultural and scientific interest, many writers continued in traditions of thought already well-established by the Spaniards. While some made cultural comparisons and sought confirmation in texts of old, others increasingly turned to the methods of modern science.

The pursuit of science, based on careful observation of nature, had flourished among the ancients, to the extent permitted by their technology. The principles of biology founded by Aristotle in the fourth century B.C., with additions by Theophrastus and Galen, formed the basis of the classification of plant and animal life for more than a millennium. It was only at the time of the Italian Renaissance that the original work of botanists resumed, as plants were carefully compared with ancient descriptions. With the growth of printing, new images and descriptions of plants were disseminated across Europe, fostering local comparisons with vegetation that varied by region. The invention of the microscope near the end of the sixteenth century allowed biologists to make observations on an unprecedented level of detail.

Vital contributions and stimuli to the new, developing sciences came to Europe from New World observers. Among the first explorers, a necessarily vital curiosity about American geology and climatic features found its beginning. They also noted unfamiliar flora and fauna in passing, using Old World frames of reference, but their greater interest lay in the mineral riches that promised vast wealth. It was the succeeding generations of visitors who increasingly made New World plants and animals the subject of specific study. European scientists were above all interested in the medical applications of these new biological gifts and focused their works upon them. Those who studied the plants and animals also explored their value as foods, carefully recording the ways they were used by the indigenous populations; as time went by, and the disciplines of science developed, they were studied as ends in themselves.

Indians and explorers alike were unaware of another means of biological exchange they carried within their bodies. The exchange of microorganisms not even recognized by the science of the time brought illness and death to those without the antibodies to resist them. The whole social fabric of Europe was threatened by the advance of syphilis—the "French" disease—associated with the return to Europe of Columbus's crew and passengers. For the American populations, even more ruinous were smallpox and other diseases borne by the European visitors. Medical scientists combed the American pharmacopoeia in search of treatments for syphilis, and inoculation against smallpox was finally introduced into New England in the 1720s, following its discovery in Europe.

One of Columbus's early letters to the Spanish court dwells at length on accounting and security procedures for the vast wealth in gold he expected to send home. His trips were founded, for Spain, on economic motives, and its financial risk in supporting them was richly rewarded. So huge were the amounts of gold and silver shipped to Spain that a rampant inflation spread from there to the rest of Europe in the sixteenth century. Precious metals from America found their way to many countries, establishing an especially visible presence in the opulently decorated churches of the baroque and rococo periods. Ironically, much of the metal had come to Europe in the form of unique pre-Columbian artworks that were soon melted down.

Even greater than the riches of gold and silver and precious stones, however, were the riches of American biology, unique forms of life that would be fished and farmed and harvested, stocking European pots with new foods and spices, with salt cod and tomato paste. The search for spices, vital as flavorings and preservatives, yielded a host of new ingredients. Sugar, chocolate, maize, potatoes, tomatoes, sweet potatoes, and many kinds of peppers revolutionized the way Europeans ate and so fundamentally altered nutritional patterns that illnesses common in medieval times eventually disappeared, and the lessened mortality contributed to a boom in population.

These achievements were not, however, without negative implications. Choosing the most economical means to raise the new products, Europeans founded the plantation system, importing labor from Africa. The organized commerce in human beings, conducted by Spanish, Portuguese, Dutch, French, and British business interests, developed the ancient practice of slavery to unprecedented levels. Moreover, the natural products themselves were not entirely positive in their impact. Tobacco quickly became popular, used as a medicine and for recreation, but its impact on health was viewed with increasing distrust; there was also early recognition of the dangerous potential of coca, a plant vital to life in the Andes. Whatever their effects on those who consumed them, the plant products of America created huge profits for those able to cultivate them on a grand scale.

The story of commerce in the era of European Americana is one of close government involvement in business activity. States pursued commercial goals directly through corporations and trading companies; they carefully regulated imports and exports, collected duties, enacted laws, and secured treaties, all with the aim of effectively guiding national economic life. Among the nations, new concepts in international law came forward in the interest of commercial imperatives. In the colonies, new governmental forms, greatly varying in their social objectives, were established in Spanish America, Massachusetts, Rhode Island, Pennsylvania, and Georgia.

The universe of trade and business extended far beyond the plantations, encompassing those who fished or trapped for furs and the network of entrepreneurs that developed on the European side. The world of maritime and colonial commerce helped fuel the growth of the middle class and changed the life of the worker. The purveyors of naval stores and provisions, the tobacconists and cafe owners, the engravers of charts, and the printers of navigational guides and manuals were all participants in the business life that grew out of the discoveries.

While literature in the widest possible sense is the subject of this entire catalogue, literature in a more narrow sense—poetry, drama, and fiction—merits separate consideration. Such an examination should also include the more ephemeral formats by which news was spread: broadsides and newsbooks. Broadsides, nominally folio items, but a term sometimes applicable to single-sheet quarto imprints, often included an illustration of the event reported. The newsbook, commonly a thin quarto pamphlet, conveyed about the same amount of information as the folio broadside. These publications often reported on distant discoveries, naval battles, and other events; an example is the anonymous Copia der Neuen Zeytung auss Presillg Landt, [Nuremberg, 1514?], reporting on the return from Brazil of a Portuguese ship of exploration.

America and its phenomena made their earliest appearances in formal literature (aside from an early versification of the Columbus letter) simply as incidental topics in poetic works aimed at popular entertainment and edification. Poems by Sebastian Brant and Pico della Mirandola are among the earliest books in this category. Even the first work of fiction actually set in the New World, Sir Thomas More’s Utopia, did not really concern the character of life there; a reference to Vespucci’s voyages in More’s [Louvain] 1516 original is the single anchor to American fact. With greater familiarity, and with the publication of historical narratives that served as source material, whole plays and novels and epic poems on real or imagined American events conveyed new literary images to the European public. By the eighteenth century, American subjects even found their way into musical theater and the ballet, in Les Indes galantes, by Fuzelier and Rameau, published in 1735. American motifs and topics, from the fabled mines of Potosí and the treatment of Indians to the smoking of tobacco, appear again and again as elements in the literary writing of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.

Dennis Channing Landis.

During the migration of our legacy catalogs and past exhibitions into Americana, there are occasionally items that cannot be immediately included in our new environment. This may happen for two reasons: the item in question is not yet cataloged, or it was lent by another institution.
Any items that are not integrated into Americana are included in this section and added to our processing queue.

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Manasseh Ben Joseph Ben Israel
Esperança de Israel
Amsterdam: Semuel ben Israel Soreiro, 5410
[i.e., 1650]
The idea that the Indians descended from the Ten Lost Tribes of Israel seems to have been discussed early in the sixteenth century, but was not proposed in print until 1567. Joannes Fredericus Lumnius's De Extremo Dei judicio et Indorum vocatione (Antwerp, 1587) was apparently the first book to set forth the thoughts associated with this concept. Several Spanish writers, some of whom worked in sixteenth-century Mexico, also circulated in manuscript form the idea of a Hebrew origin. Aztec legends of great migrations helped to inspire this view, but for the Spanish, it was just one of several competing theories.
The Hebrew origin theory gained new vitality in 1644, when a Portuguese Jew named Antonio Montesinos arrived in Amsterdam from South America. Montesinos spoke of a mysterious "Holy People" hidden in the mountains of the Spanish colonies. The people had disclosed themselves to Montesinos as Jews, he said, but had kept their religion hidden from the Spaniards, though they had long ago converted the natives in their midst to Judaism. It was their intention to come forth, rid themselves of the Spaniards, and reunite with Israel. Montesinos's account created a stir among the Amsterdam Jews and interested many gentiles.
The story was disseminated in print by Rabbi Manasseh ben Israel, who was also of Portuguese background. Manasseh was a brilliant scholar and writer and the book was but one of several successful publications. The work was published the same year in Latin (Spes Israelis) and in English (The Hope of Israel), and numerous other editions were printed. In addition to presenting the story of Montesinos, Esperanga de Israel also related Manasseh's own views on the subject, drawing comparisons between American Indian customs and Jewish tradition, and predicting a return to Jerusalem. In this complex relation, drawing on much existing thought, Manasseh even refers to the first Hebrew Americanum, Abraham Farissol's [Iggereth orhoth 'olam], (Venice, 1586).
The most famous of all books on the subject, Manasseh's work appeared at about the same time as several others, including Thomas Thorowgood's Jews in America, or Probabilities that the Americans are of that Race (London, 1650). Thorowgood's millennialist sentiment corresponded well to Manasseh's. Thorowgood wanted to hasten the final Christianization of the Jews, fulfilling the Biblical prophecies, while Manasseh saw full dispersal of the Jews as a necessary step leading to the coming of the Messiah. The worldly objective of both men was the readmission of the Jews to England, from which they had been banned since 1290. Despite efforts made in Parliament, however, the naturalization of Jews in Great Britain was still a century away.

37
Robert Boyle
Some Considerations Touching the Usefulnesse of Experimental Natural Philosophy
Oxford: H. Hall, for R. Davis, 1664-71
American subjects often appear in the copious writings of Robert Boyle, the great English chemist and natural philosopher. He had various links to the English colonies, whether through his governorship of the Corporation for the Propagation of the Gospel in New England or his role on a council managing the colonies. He sometimes became directly involved, as when he provided John Eliot with financial assistance for an edition of the famous Indian-language Bible printed in Cambridge, Massachusetts.
Boyle’s Some Considerations Touching . . . Natural Philosophy (originally published in Oxford in 1663), contains numerous references to American phenomena and natural resources, especially its food, drink, and medicines.
"For almost every day either discloses new Creatures, or makes new Discoveries of the usefulness of things; almost each of which hath yet a kind of Terra incognita, or undetected part in it. How many new Concretes, rich in Medicinal virtues, does the New World present the inquisitive Physicians of the Old?"
Maize, which grows where wheat will not, is just one of the many natural treasures that excite and amaze him. As shown in the exhibition, Boyle’s “Appendix,” page 34, discusses tobacco, indigo, and the wonderful way Indians use the cassava plant. In other writings, he explored still other facets of the natural world of America, from hurricanes and Andean winds to Indian mining techniques.
Another side of Boyle’s consciousness, informed by his religious convictions, emerges in his book, The Excellency of Theology, Compar’d with Natural Philosophy (London, 1674), a work later translated into Latin and German. There he discusses what he perceived as the relative uselessness to human civilization of the Spaniards’ monumental mining operations in America. Boyle rejected, on the whole, the pervasive materialism inherent in the advancement of commerce that was brought on by the new discoveries in geography. For Boyle, the true value of the New World lay not in its rich veins of mercury, gold, and silver, but in the new forms of life that excite the intellect and the new foods and medicines that would improve the lives of all humans.