Portugal and After

See Frances Gardiner Davenport, European Treaties Bearing on the History of the United States and Its Dependencies to 1648 (4 vols. Washington, D.C., 1917), I, 1, 9–10.Google Scholar

See Felipe Fernández-Armesto, Before Columbus: Exploration and Colonisation from theMediterranean to the Atlantic 1229–1402 (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1987), 248, 250–51. Columbus’s desire for gold in the service of God was textual and practical, for such dreams were also fed in his reading of Polo. The Four Voyages of Columbus, trans. and ed. Cecil Jane (2 vols., London, 1930, 1933; rpt. New York, 1988), 2 vols. in 1 vol., I, 11 n. 3; II, 3 n. 4, 5. See also Jane’s Introduction, II, lvii.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

Marcel Trudel, “New France, 1524–1713,” Dictionary of Canadian Biography, gen. ed. George W. Brown, vol. 1, 1000–1700 (Toronto and Québec, 1966), I, 26; see also 27–37. Fernández-Armesto, Before Columbus, 5–6, 218. His book concentrates mainly on the expansion of Portugal, Genoa and Castile.Google Scholar

Bailey W. Diffie, “Christopher Columbus: a Genoese Who Made a ‘Potuguese’ Voyage for Spain,” in Bailey W. Diffie and George D. Winius, Foundations of the Portuguese Empire, 1415–1580 (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1977), 167;Google Scholar

see Samuel Eliot Morison, Christopher Columbus, Mariner (Boston: Little Brown, 1955) 6–10Google Scholar

and T. O. Marcondes de Souza, O descobriemento da América (1912; São Paolo: Editoria Brasiliense, 1944), 102–11. As I mentioned in chapter 2 of Columbus, Shakespeare and the Interpretation of the New World (New York and London: Palgrave, 2002), Cecil Jane takes a contrary view that Columbus was illiterate or barely literate; see note 3 of this chapter for a reference to Jane’s edition of Columbus. In 1552 Joao de Barros called Columbus “a good Latinist”; Barros, Da Asia, Dec. I, bk. 3, chap. 11 (1552; Lisbon, 1777–88), 24 vols.; see Diffie 171 who discusses this and other aspects of Barros). Diffie does not think that Columbus made a voyage to Bristol in 1477 and thence to Iceland (167).Google Scholar

William D. PhillipsJr., and Carla Rahn Phillips, The Worlds of Christopher Columbus (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992), 110–24.Google Scholar

A. J. R. Russell-Wood, The Portuguese Empire, 1415–1808: A World on the Move (1992; Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1998), 9.Google Scholar

See A. H. de Oliveira Marques, History of Portugal. Vol. 1. From Lusitania to Empire (New York: Columbia University Press, 1972)Google Scholar

and Bailey W. Diffie and George D. Winius, Foundations of the Portuguese Empire, 1415–1580 (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1977).Google Scholar

This is Green’s legal view in L. C. Green and Olive P. Dickason, The Law of Nations and the New World (Edmonton: University of Alberta Press, 1989), 7. This book provides a good discussion of the bulls and of the legal aspects of the colonization of the Americas; see esp. 4–6.Google Scholar

Whereas Biggar thinks the dispatch was the first from Raimondo di Soncino to the duke of Milan, Williamson provides convincing evidence that if the date is correct, it would have to be from someone else because the ambassador was still at Dover on August 24. Dispatch to the duke of Milan, August 24, 1497 in H. P. Biggar, The Precursors of Jacques Cartier, 1497–1534 (Ottawa: Government Printing Bureau, 1911), Biggar, 15 (translation 15–16),Google Scholar

translation also in J. A. Williamson, The Cabot Voyages and Bristol Discovery Under Henry VII, Hakluyt Society, 2nd series, no. 120 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1962), 29–30; and in Calendar of State Papers, Milan, vol. 1, ed. Allen B. Hinds (London, 1912), no. 535.Google Scholar

Ibid., 16; see Duane Pacheco Pereira’s, Esmeraldo de Situ Orbis, trans. and ed. George H. T. Kimble, 2nd series, vol. 79 (London: Hakluyt Society, 1937).Google Scholar

A. Da Silva Rego, Portuguese Colonization in the Sixteenth Century: A Study of The Royal Ordinances (Regimentos) (Johannesburg: Witwatersrand University Press, 1965), 2–8, 13–14.Google Scholar

Colin Heywood, A History of Childhood: Children and Childhood in the West from Medieval to Modern Times (Cambridge: Polity, 2001), 170.Google Scholar

Arnold Van Gennep, Manuel de folklore français contemporain, vol. 1 (Paris: Picard, 1972), 166–67; see Heywood, 37–38, 103–04. On sexuality in children and youths,Google Scholar

see André Burgière, “Repression and Change in the Sexual Life of Young People in Medieval and Early Modern Times,” Journal of Family History 2 (1977), 196–210CrossRefGoogle Scholar

and Stephen Kern, “Freud and the Discovery of Child Sexuality,” History of Childhood Quarterly 1 (1973), 117–41.Google Scholar

On the varying definitions of what constituted a legal minor across times, class, nations, roles and cultures, see Jerome Kroll, “The Concept of Childhood in the Middle Ages,” Journal of the History of Behavioural Sciences 13 (1977), 388, see 384–93.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

On childhood, see Danièle Alexandre-Bidon and Didier Lett, Les Enfants au Moyen Ages: Ve-Xve siècles (Paris: Hachette, 1997),Google Scholar

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and Keith Thomas, “Children in Early Modern England,” in Children and Their Books: A Celebration of the Work of Iona and Peter Opie, ed. Gillian Avery and Julia Briggs (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1989), 45–77.Google Scholar

Ibid., 23. The Portuguese is from the original manuscript and a transcription appear in Jaime Cortes ão, ed., “A Carta De Pero Vaz De Caminha (Rio de Janeiro: Livros de Janiero, 1943), Fol. 7v. and Fol. 8. The translation “timid” for “esqujvos” does not convey the sense of someone who is firm in not wanting to be approached. “Standoffish” would be better. The phrase “como monteses” might imply “wild” but is really someone or some beast that climbs or lives in the mountains and “em alguûa parte amansasem” suggests more or less tamed. My thanks to Magali Sperling for her advice on the Portugese. In checking the original manuscript and a transmission, I am using the original spelling. The manuscript states: “pareçeme jemte de tal jnoçenta que se os homẽ emtendese e eles anos. que seriam logo xpaãos por que des nõ teem nem emtendem em nhuña creemça seg^o pareçe” (Cortesão, ed., A Carta, Fol. 11). For the convenience of the reader, I have been using the Greenlee translation. This passage I translate as “It appears to me that these people are of such innocence that if we could comprehend them and they us, then they would soon be Christians because they neither understood nor have any belief, so it appears.”Google Scholar

Ibid., 30. On comparative matters of possession, see Patricia Seed, Ceremonies of Possession in Europe’s Conquest of the New World, 1492–1640 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995)Google Scholar

and Jonathan Hart, “Rediscovering Alternative Critique of Europe in the New World,” Bulletin of Hispanic Studies (Liverpool) 76: 4 (October 1999), 533–541.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

Lorenzo Pasqualigo to his Brothers at Venice, August 23, 1497, in Biggar, Precursors, 13 (translation 14); the translation of this letter is also found in James A. Williamson, The Voyages of the Cabots and the Discovery of North America under Henry VII and Henry VIII (London, 1929), 29. Whereas Biggar thinks the dispatch was the first from Raimondo di Soncino to the duke of Milan, Williamson provided convincing evidence that if the date is correct, it would have to be from someone else because the ambassador was still in Dover on August 24. Dispatch to the Duke of Milan, August 24, 1497, in Biggar, Precursors, 15 (translation 15–16), translation also in Williamson, Voyages, 29–30;Google Scholar

and in Calendar of State Papers, Milan, vol. 1, ed. Allen B. Hinds (London, 1912), no. 535. Raimondo de Soncino to the Duke of Milan, December 18, 1497,Google Scholar

in H. P. Biggar, The Precursors of Jacques Cartier 1497–1534 (Ottawa: Government Printing Bureau, 1911), 17 (translation 19).Google Scholar

A less grandiose translation appears in Calendar of State Papers, Milan, vol. 1, ed. Allen B. Hinds (London, 1912), no. 552; for reproduction of the English translation in Hinds, see Williamson, 30–32. Raimondo di Soncino to the Duke of Milan, December 18, 1497, in Precursors, 17 (translation 21); for another translation, see De Socino in Calendar, ed. Hinds, I, no. 552; and in Williamson, Voyages, 30–32. Cabot claimed the New World with a banner of St. Mark (Venice) and another for England. On this point,Google Scholar

see Jeffrey Knapp, An Empire Nowhere: England, America, and Literature from Utopia to The Tempest (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1992), 28.Google Scholar

Greenlee, 145–47. See Giuseppe Conestrini, “Relazioni commerciali di Fiorentini co’ Portoghesi” in Arch. Stor. Ital., 1846, appendix 3;Google Scholar

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André Thevet, La Cosmographie vniverselle, vol. 2, book 1, cap. 11, f. 498 verso; see A. C. de C. M. Saunders, A Social History of Black Slaves and Freedmen in Portugal 1441–1555 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1982), 11–12, 33.Google Scholar

Savelle, 21–22. See Frances Gardiner Davenport, European Treaties Bearing on the History of the United States and its Dependencies to 1648 (Washington, D.C., Carnegie Institution of Washington, 1917): I: 213.Google Scholar

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and A. H. Oliveira Marques, History of Portugal, Volume 1: From Lusitania to Empire (New York: Columbia University Press, 1972), 306–22.Google Scholar

A. H. Oliveira Marques, History of Portugal, I: 302. For a useful and lively general and popular account of the censorship and the difficult career of Camões, see John Dos Passos, The Portugal Story: Three Centuries of Exploration and Discovery (1969; London: Robert Hale & Company, 1970), 344–51.Google Scholar

David Beers Quinn, England and the Discovery of America, 1481–1620 (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1974), 51–52.Google Scholar

Quoted in ibid., 9; see Calendar of State Papers, Spanish, 1485–1509 (London, 1862), 177; H. P. Biggar, The Precursors of Jacques Cartier, 1497–1534 (Ottawa, 1911), 27–29;Google Scholar

J. A. Williamson, The Cabot Voyages and Bristol Discovery Under Henry VII, Hakluyt Society, 2nd series, no. 120 (Cambridge, 1962), 228–29.Google Scholar

My contention is that the European contact with America soon revealed that this translation of empire and this assimilation of new peoples into a successor to the Greek and Roman empires would be a difficult if not new balancing act. The Amerindians represented new peoples whom the Europeans knew nothing about. Even though the American experience was novel, many of the Europeans tried, for obvious reasons, to fit the Amerindians and their lands into the framework of European experience. I have talked about Columbus elsewhere, and so much has been said about Columbus to mark the five hundredth year since he first saw the new lands to the west, that I shall move on to other figures. In 1519 Charles of Spain became Emperor Charles the Fifth of the Holy Roman Empire. In 1521 Magellan’s voyage around the globe uncovered a world of diverse peoples that the classical chronicler, Eusebius (ca. 263–339), and his successors did not know. Still the idea of a universal Spanish monarchy persisted into the 1700s, a rule in which universal meant European. The universality of the past was not the same as the universality of the future, and this was a problem that the Spanish and Europeans generally had a hard time facing. Peter Martyr (ca. 1455–1526), an Italian humanist, wondered whether the Amerindians were inhabitants of the Golden Age who had escaped corruption as their land had long ago been severed from Europe. Gonzalo Fernández de Oviedo wrote his universal history with an understanding of “empire” in its traditional Mediterranean and Western European meaning and spoke of Charles as being part of a direct line of emperors from Caesar. But Oviedo and colonial administrators and missionaries came to see that the Amerindians had their own traditions. See Ernst Breisach, Historiography: Ancient, Medieval & Modern (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1983), 178–79. Throughout I draw heavily on his references to the translation of empire.Google Scholar

The debate between Bartolomé de Las Casas and Juan Ginés de Septilveda over the treatment of the Amerindians represented two ways of incorporating America into European history. Las Casas saw the contact as fulfiling Christian universal history in the conversion of the Indians, who were human and had souls to be saved. Sepúveda argued for the growth of the Spanish monarchy and empire and did not consider important the conversion of the Indians, whom he thought were not completely human. See Anthony Pagden, The Fall of Natural Man: The American Indian and the Origins of Comparative Ethnography (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1982, rev. 1986), 10, see 11–26;Google Scholar

see also Jonathan Hart “Images of the Native in Renaissance Encounter Narratives,” ARIEL 25 (October 1994), 55–76. This topic also appeared in my lecture, “Some Theoretical ‘Dilemmas’ in Post-Colonial Studies,” Centre for Critical and Cultural Theory, University of Wales, Cardiff, January 31, 1994.Google Scholar

Loren E. Pennington, “The Amerindian in English Promotional Literature, 1575–1625,” The Western Enterprise: English Activities in Ireland, the Atlantic, and America 1480–1650, ed. K. R. Andrews, N. P. Canny and P. E. H. Hair (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 1978), 179; see Hart, “Images”, 55 f.Google Scholar

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see Anonymous foreword, Virginia Richly Valued, March of America Facsimile Series, No. 12 (Ann Arbor: University Microfilms, 1966), no pagination.Google Scholar

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See Walter Ralegh, The discoverie of the large and bewtiful empire of Guiana, ed. V. T. Harlow (London, 1928), 138–49, 71, see Pennington, 185–87.Google Scholar

Luís de Camões, Os Lusiadas, ed. Frank Pierce (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1973). Canto X 143: 1–2; The Lusiads, trans. Richard Fanshawe, ed. Geoffrey Bullough (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1963), 334.Google Scholar

Livermore, 64–66. See also P. E. Russell, The English Intervention in Spain and Portugal in the Time of Edward III and Richard II (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1955).Google Scholar

Fanshawe uses this description of Portuguese in the first sentence of his dedication to the earl of Strafford; see The Luciad, trans. Fanshawe, 1655. On context, see Walker, 581–82; see also Madonna Letzring, “The Influence of Camões in English Literature,” Revista Camoniana 1 (1964), 158–80. Roger M. Walker argues that Fanshawe knew Manuel de Faria e Sousa’s Lusiadas de Luis de Camoens, principe de los poetas de España (Madrid, 1639), the Spanish scholarly edition in which a prose translation and notes and commentary follow each stanza in Portuguese [Walker, “Sir Richarde Fanshawe’s Luciad and Manuel de Faria e Sousa’s Lusíadas Comentadas: New Documentary Evidence,” Portuguese Studies 10 (1994), 44–64] .Google Scholar

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Jonathan Swift, Gulliver’s Travels, ed. Philip Pinkus (Toronto: Macmillan, 1968), 126. I discuss Swift in more detail in Columbus, Shakespeare and the New World, ch. 2.Google Scholar

Walker, “Commentary,” 584–85. The Latin is “Testis adsit Poetarum Princeps Camoenus, qui licet patria Lusitanus, sermone tament perite admodum a te edoctus modulari Anglo\;” for a full text and translation, see Roger M. Walker and W. H. Liddell, “‘Mercurius Anglus’: Sir Richard Fanshawe’s Reception as Ambassador in Lisbon,” Portuguese Studies 6 (1990), 126–37. For Melo’s sentiments, see Walker, 586 and for a full Spanish text,Google Scholar

see Roger M. Walker, “A Rediscovered Seventeenth-Century Literary Friendship: Sir Richard Fanshawe and Dom Francisco Manuel de Melo,” The Seventeenth Century 7 (1992), 15–25.Google Scholar

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See Ibid., 120–27; in 1659, Governor General Johan Maetsuyker and his council at Batavia and, at the end of the seventeenth century, Pieter van Dam, stated such views in works prepared for the directors of the Dutch East India Company. For more on Brazil, see C. R. Boxer, The Dutch in Brazil, 1624–1654 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1957).Google Scholar